[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy recently unveiled a new food pyramid and dietary guidelines for Americans that emphasize high-quality protein, dairy, healthy fats, vegetables, and fruits. Whole grains are downgraded, and processed foods and added sugars are discouraged.

“We’ve been consuming this ultra-processed food, which I call human pet food,” says Dr. Shawn Baker. A former orthopedic surgeon and world champion athlete, he’s the author of “The Carnivore Diet” and co-founder of the online clinic Revero.

“A lot of our food has become very similar to recreational drugs in the way we use and abuse them,” he says.

Eating a lot of addictive, ultra-processed food—high in carbs, sugars, and seed oils—drives inflammation and can lead to obesity, diabetes, arthritis, cardiovascular problems, gut malfunction, depression, and cancers, he explains.

In our in-depth interview, he explains how and why the adoption of low-carb, high-fat diets reduces inflammation and can even reverse chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiometabolic disease.

There is even significant evidence that such diets can be used therapeutically for neurological and mental health issues, he says.

One of those low-carb, high-fat diets is the ketogenic diet. But what happens when you take keto one step further and go on the carnivore diet?

“Carnivore is basically a diet consisting primarily of animal products. So it would be meat. It would be fish. It would be eggs. It would be dairy products,” he says. This means no plant products at all.

The carnivore diet is not for everyone, but many people suffering from debilitating autoimmune diseases have healed themselves with such a diet, he says. Mikhaila Peterson has famously documented her transformative experience on an even more restricted version of this diet called the “lion diet.”

In our in-depth interview, we discuss many more questions regarding food as medicine and the benefits of a protein-heavy diet, including:

- Why people on ketogenic or carnivore diets experience something called ‘keto calm’ or ‘zero carb zen.’
- Why going on the carnivore diet does not harm your nutritional intake, contrary to what many may think.
- Why such diets can help reverse inflammatory bowel disease, Tourette syndrome, and hypermobility, also known as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

It’s time for Americans to stop simply relying on America’s “disease management system” of drugs and pharmaceuticals, he argues, and instead take their health into their own hands.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Shawn Baker, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Shawn Baker:

Hey, it’s a wonderful, wonderful opportunity. Thanks for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

And it’s an amazing time, actually. The food pyramid and the dietary guidelines have been updated for the first time in, really, almost a long time, perhaps a little bit too long. But they’ve changed, and I think they’ve changed in a way that might actually work for you. Why don’t you tell me about that?

Mr. Baker:

Yes, as you guys know, RFK Jr. came in and he said he’s going to flip the food pyramid upside down. And you know, it’s interesting when you look at the graphic that they submitted; you see that upside-down pyramid that was done very intentionally. I believe RFK Jr. has said he has been on a carnivore diet more or less for quite a while now. He’s really happy with that.

And as you read that, you know, in English we read left to right, top to bottom. The first thing you come to on that food pyramid now is a big old ribeye steak. And it’s not just any steak; it’s actually a ribeye steak, which I thought was quite intentional. And, you know, the main focus was to shift the greater emphasis on protein, and you know, we’ve demonized red meat in particular over the last really half century. And so I think we’ve kind of shifted away from that.

Mr. Jekielek:

But why ribeye? Why is that intentional?

Mr. Baker:

Because it’s an acknowledgment that animal fat is actually not what’s killing us, as we’ve been told for many, many years. We hear this sort of relationship between saturated fat and cholesterol and heart disease. And there are a couple of leaps that are being made that don’t actually show endpoints. When we look at randomized control trials on red meat, reducing red meat, increasing red meat, those don’t show any real increase in cardiovascular disease.

So it’s all these sort of intermediary biomarkers that they sort of make this argument on or epidemiologic data, which is unfortunately what most of nutrition science is composed of, which is just weak data, unfortunately. As someone who has a science background, you know, there’s pure sciences: math, physics, and so on and so forth. And then there’s more of the social science and nutrition science, which some people would say is almost a pseudoscience in many ways.

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell me a little bit about this; you know, I take it you’ve looked through the dietary guidelines in some detail, and of course, we know that meats and saturated fats are up. But the biggest deal is, as they say, “eat real food” is the slogan, right? How does that grab you?

Mr. Baker:

I had commented several years ago because every five years we update the nutritional guidelines, and there are hundreds of page-long documents, and they have these really sort of somewhat arbitrary rules that they go by. It’s based on the science they think they have. And no one really goes to the grocery store carrying a, you know, dietary guidelines pack with them, and no one’s going to continue to do that. I had commented several years ago that I think we should probably align our dietary guidelines with something like what Brazil had.

If you look at Brazil’s dietary guidelines, it’s very similar to what we have now. It says cook at home, avoid, you know, hyper-processed, ultra-processed food, surround yourself with people you love, you know, cook in a family environment, you know, don’t eat at restaurants as much, and avoid some of the marketing. And I think that it’s very basic. It’s very generalized. It’s not very specific, but I think that’s all we really need. I don’t think we need these rigid, you know, rules, which, unfortunately, drive our policy, you know, policy in the school systems; anything that takes federal money that feeds people has to abide by. And so I think the overall message of let’s just stop eating the, as I like to call it, human pet food. So much of the grocery store really just reminds me of that.

Remember when all these fake meats came out, like Beyond Meat? If you’ve seen their stock price, it went from $2.50 down to below $1 now. And if you look at the ingredients, it’s hard to distinguish that from dog food. It really is when you put the ingredients side by side. And so we’ve been consuming, you know, this ultra-processed food, which, again, I call human pet food; it acts kind of like a recreational drug. And I think that’s really what it is.

A lot of our food has become very similar to recreational drugs in the way we use them. And that’s something that I think getting away from that is undoubtedly going to, you know, assuming people will do it. Now, again, the guidelines out there, now the execution—that’s the hard part. How do we execute this? And you probably know here in D.C. there’s a lot of stuff that slows the process down.

Mr. Jekielek:

Sure. And you know, well, that something you mentioned is really interesting because it’s one thing, you know, you can have this food pyramid, and you can look at it and say, roughly, I know what I should do according to these guidelines. That’s one thing. But the letter, the small details all impact, you know, for example, the massive amounts of funding that go towards school lunches, and so forth, and what that will be. To me, in a way, I wonder, like, that almost feels like the biggest game changer.

Because I remember looking at, you know, maybe years ago, looking at some of the hospital food. I was like, I can’t believe they give this to people. I mean, I didn’t even think about this stuff in detail. But I was like, really? This is what they give at a hospital? Shouldn’t it be like good food? You know, because it’s probably like nutrition, to have nutrition in it or something like that, you know. So there’s this seemingly profound shift that should happen, right? Or like, you tell me what you think.

Mr. Baker:

Again, that food upside-down food pyramid is a consumer-facing document. The 10-page letter that was, you know, signed by Secretary Rollins and Secretary Kennedy basically said this is how we think you should eat in general terms, and that’s what hopefully the average American will do, and they'll feed their family that way. Now, the details of the guidelines, you know, really reduced added sugar. They cut back on the grain recommendations. They still leave a 10 percent saturated fat cap, which a lot of people in the low carb keto sort of stratosphere are kind of grumbling about a little bit.

But overall, I think, you know, the changes are good if, again, the consumer population will actually adopt those. That’s always a challenge, you know. Will people actually eat that? Because people argued before, hey, the guidelines before were reasonable, but no one would eat that way.

But I think folks like Nina Teicholz have shown that the food industry has sort of tailored their products to meet the old guidelines. Back in 1990, we had 11 servings of grain at the bottom. That’s the old food pyramid that everybody is talking about. It obviously shifted into MyPlate over the intervening years. But there has been a real de-emphasis of grain and a re-emphasis of meat, milk, eggs, and so on and so forth, seafood. So I think that’s an overall good, a very good shift.

Mr. Jekielek:

And there’s something you mentioned about food being like a recreational drug. Do you mean by that that food has been intentionally made addictive? And what do you know about that? Actually, I’ve heard about this, but I’ve never really talked about it with anyone.

Mr. Baker:

A lot of people know that, for instance, when the tobacco companies were broken up, back you know R.J. Reynolds and some of the other big companies, you know, when we started to push back on cigarettes, a lot of those companies ended up buying some of these food companies. Nabisco and some of the other ones were bought by these big tobacco companies, and I actually had a woman who worked for one of those companies as a food scientist.

She was a chemist, and she said her job was literally to design food to be as addictive as possible, and she had a tremendous amount of guilt about that. She wanted to come work for our company because she just felt so guilty about the fact that she was in part responsible for addicting millions of us to this hyperpalatable damaging food, which is what it’s done.

Mr. Jekielek:

It just sounds so unbelievable. But the bottom line is it has to be processed for you to be able to create that scenario, right, to make it addictive.

Mr. Baker:

Yes, there was a fellow by the name of Moskowitz back in the, I think, late 70s, early 80s, who described something called the bliss point of food. And so it was a special combination of salt, sugar, and fat that, if you mix it together to a certain degree, was irresistible for people.

Mr. Jekielek:

Maybe you can make a steak addictive then.

Mr. Baker:

It’s hard to get the sweet, sweet aspect in a steak. But yes, I would say I probably suffer from a steak addiction. I would admit that.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, and you know, you mentioned ketosis. Why don’t you explain to me how a keto diet works? Like how is that, and what’s actually happening, and how that’s different from normal?

Mr. Baker:

Keto diets have been used therapeutically since the 1920s. They were first shown to have significant impacts on epileptics, and so you may be familiar with some of the origins of that story. There’s something called the Charlie Foundation that was talking about that significantly.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, fat, diabetes, autism, I mean a whole range of impacts.

Mr. Baker:

Yes, and this is some of the great work that’s being done by the Baszucki Group, funding a lot of the scientific research around this. We’re showing that ketogenic diets have been shown to significantly help with depression, significantly help with anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, obviously epilepsy, ADHD, and we’re seeing some benefits in patients with dementia, so it has tremendous beneficial cognitive effects.

Five years ago if you said that, people thought you were nuts because how can a diet impact my childhood trauma or whatever, whatever the issue might’ve been. But our brain is an organ just like our liver is, just like our heart is, and it is clearly influenced by what we put in, what we feed it.

Babies are born in a ketogenic state. This is sort of our natural state when we’re born. You know, obviously, humans are omnivores. I write in my book, The Carnivore Diet, humans are carnivores. There are other people out there making the argument that humans are carnivores. I approach it as this is a therapeutic tool that is incredibly beneficial, and it helps for resetting things.But as far as what being in ketosis does, it regulates; we have a more steady sense of energy.

You may have noticed that on a ketogenic diet, you don’t have these ups and downs and the crashes. And I think that impacts our mood ability. If we’re more stable when we’re kind of evened out, it’s kind of a lot of people call it a keto calm or some people call it zero carb zen, where they’re just kind of happy and chilled out; they’re not like, you know, bouncing around so much. There are impacts on fat metabolism. We know that being in ketosis sort of interacts with something called hormone-sensitive lipase to promote fat metabolism. So there are clear benefits to ketosis for many, many people.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, and I mean, the bottom line is you’re burning fat because there’s no carbs to burn, and that’s the next thing that’s burning.

Mr. Baker:

Basically, that’s kind of the hierarchy. When we start to get low on stored sugar in the form of glycogen or blood glucose, ketones become more useful. So we always have some glucose in our body. We always have some ketones. We always have some free fatty acids. We always have some lactate floating around as different sorts of energy substrates that we can metabolize. And that just shifts in one direction or the other.

And the question is, what is optimal for humans? I think that’s a debate that many people have. There are a lot of people that like carbohydrates. And for a lot of people, and I’m not here to tell you that everybody needs to be on a carnivore diet, because I don’t, I don’t, I don’t agree with that. But I do think that many people, more people than you think, would benefit from it. And it’s educational. If you do it for three months, you will learn a heck of a lot about your body. You'll learn about how your body interacts with what foods cause problems. You know, my background is in orthopedic surgery.

So I spent years, you know, replacing people’s knees and doing trauma surgery and hips and shoulder scopes, knee scopes. And one thing that I remember a few people telling me is that, you know, hey, doc, whenever I eat bread, my knee hurts. And I thought they were nuts. I just thought they were some crazy person, whatever. Well, let me look at your MRI, right? But then years after years of doing this, one of the most common things I see, and you know, as I’m about to turn 60, and so I’m running, jumping, doing all these athletic activities because my knees don’t hurt anymore. My back doesn’t hurt. And that is in large part impacted by the foods I eat.

So the foods we consume, you know, a lot of people, they‘ll wake up the next morning with a sore shoulder or a sore neck and they’ll think they slept on it wrong. But maybe it was the chocolate cake you had last night. So if you start thinking about it that way, you'll start to discover that food impacts you in ways you would never even attribute to that. And most physicians are unaware because we have no training on that.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, the thing that I know you for and probably millions of people know you for is the carnivore diet. And I’m quite interested. I myself generally do keto. I had a few years recently where I stopped doing keto. I can tell you that was a bad idea. I’m back to doing keto again. And I’m pretty, when I do it, it’s great. It’s simple. It’s not a lot of rules. You just keep the carbs down, whatever you do. And once in a while, you can get some carbs. That’s fine. But mostly keep them down, you know, at a very, very low level. Now, but carnivore seems to be like a whole, like another step up. And I, so in a way, I want you to convince me, I want you to convince me here that I should try carnivore.

Mr. Baker:

As I said, you know, my background as a physician, my goal is to take people who are unhealthy and make them healthier. And I think that is something that we’re able to do through diets like a carnivore diet. We use ketogenic diets as well, but certainly for people who struggle with following routines, who struggle with complexity, counting macros, and trying to figure out if something hits the right ratios.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, that’s me, that’s me to the teeth.

Mr. Baker:

So very much it simplifies it, and you mentioned, as your background in evolutionary biology, that a lot of people argue that a ketogenic state was essential to survival for a long period of time while humans were dealing with ice age conditions, particularly throughout southern Europe and other parts. The only way to really reach a ketogenic state, given the resources they had at that time, would probably be from hunting animals. I don’t think there are a lot of mangoes and things like that growing in Europe during the ice age; I think most people would agree with that.

So it is something that a lot of people, like I said, people who have struggled with food addiction—probably some people estimate about 14 percent of the population, which kind of runs parallel to alcoholism—struggle with what we would consider food addiction. And I think it’s a real, real issue. A lot of people would readily admit that they have problems with addiction to types of food.

Mr. Jekielek:

How do you define that entirely? Like, because obviously, you have to eat, right? And so how much liking of eating makes it addiction?

Mr. Baker:

If we look at just addiction in general, what defines an addiction? It’s like, are we addicted to breathing? Well, yes, we have to do it. But I think if we knowingly are harming ourselves—and I think most of us know that if I sit down and eat chocolate chip cookies all day, it’s not going to do anything good for me—but I can’t stop it. I’m compelled to do it because the flavor is so overwhelmingly rewarding, you know, it gives me this sort of reward system. So I think in the face of the fact that you are gaining weight, becoming inflamed, developing chronic diseases, and you continue to do that, to me, that represents, you know, an addiction. So I think that’s how we define it with food.

And there are people that will literally say, well, it’s not like they’re, you know, they’re out in the back alley, prostituting themselves out for a hit of sugar. It doesn’t happen. But I will tell you, what do you think, if we made sugar illegal and we made it exorbitantly expensive, and if we made it, you know, shunned by society like we do with heroin or something else like that, or cocaine, you probably would have people that would do that, I am sure.

Mr. Jekielek:

No, I mean, I know because I think I have a bit of that kind of reaction to sugar and frankly other things. As you’re telling me about this, I’m kind of wondering myself, am I a food addict? I’m not sure. Maybe with something like those really nicely roasted almonds, I can do some serious damage to a bag of those. And not in a good way. I mean, too much, right?

Mr. Baker:

Yes. Like I said, we’ve designed food to be very addictive. That was done expressly, intently, and it’s been very effective. I read a study a few years ago about the fact that, you know, a lot of it was, I think it was, it might have been millennials, might have been Gen Z folks, were eating less and less breakfast cereals. And we’re thinking, well, that’s probably a good thing because it’s just a bunch of sugary garbage most of the time.

But the reason was not because they were concerned about their health. The reason was that it was too much work because they had to actually rinse a bowl and, you know, pour it in a dish where they, what they want is something they can rip a package open, shove it in their mouth, and throw it away. And so we’ve gotten to the point where the convenience of food has also become such a problem for us.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. Absolutely. I think, and I, you know, that’s one reason why I like meat sticks so much, because I can just have them in my bag, right? When I’m, I’m one of these people that gets focused, works, you know, and then eight hours can pass and, you know, the meat sticks are what does it?

Mr. Baker:

Essentially, the meat sticks are actually becoming one of the more popular snack food items. They’re growing in one of the most rapidly growing markets right now for that. So that’s good news in my view.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, good to hear that. And I always try to get the grass-fed, you know, sort of, I don’t know if it’s organic every time. But listen, so, okay, carnivore diet. It’s not just red meat. Can you just give me a picture of how it works broadly? I know that people should, you know, do this in consultation with a professional and all this stuff, but how does it look like?

Mr. Baker:

Prior to the carnivore diet being called the carnivore diet, I was a guy that popularized that name when I wrote the book back, you know, seven or eight years ago. Before it was called a zero-carb diet, it was basically people avoiding all carbohydrates. It kind of was a sort of a heretical outcast from the keto group. They were kind of kicked out of keto because they were too extreme, right? I ended up listening to some of these people on social media, and I thought they were absolutely crazy. I said, you guys are crazy, this is nuts! They said, aren’t you going to get scurvy? What about  fiber?

So basically, it is a diet consisting primarily of just animal products. It would be meat, it would be fish, it would be eggs, it would be dairy products, it would be, you know, anything that sort of comes from an animal for the most part. Most people tend to gravitate towards red meat, probably because it tends to have a little more fat. So when you remove all the carbohydrates from your diet, you need energy. You need a source of energy. If you just try to eat lean protein, like if you had a diet where it was just pure chicken breast and things like that, you would last about a week on that, and then you would be starving. So the red meat seems to fill that niche for getting enough fat.

I think if we go back again into sort of an evolutionary look at hunters and gatherers, if it’s like, if you have a spear—and I think there’s good data that humans hunted with spears initially—where are you going to get your most calories from? Birds are going to be hard. It’s going to be hard to kill a bunch of birds with a spear. So we were hunting these big animals, and these big woolly mammoths, mastodons, and elephants. And so we were eating a lot of fat-based meat for a long period of time.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, and just a lot of gazelles, deer, all this stuff.

Mr. Baker:

Yes, the gazelles and the deer are a little leaner, and so that’s when we developed the range technology, bow-and-arrow technology, and those types of things. But we started out, I think, eating a lot of fat, and I think that was our default setting. As the animals got leaner, we had to incorporate more carbohydrates into our diet, and there’s some interesting research.

I know some people have different perspectives on evolution in human beings. Some are sort of a creationist model, but I think there’s some compelling data from that regard. Meat is interesting in that, and maybe you’ve experienced it, it’s very satiating. You know, we now live in a time where we have all these weight loss drugs, which are based on making you feel full, these GLP-1 [glucagon-like peptide-1] drugs and the various different incretin hormones. And meat does a very good job of doing that.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but steak and eggs used to be a very popular breakfast, you know, in the 1950s and 1940s. And again, NASA astronauts, when they went to the moon, what did they eat for breakfast? They had steak and eggs before they went to the moon. That kind of tells you something interesting.

But that provides a tremendous level of not only satiation, which is the acute feeling of being full, but also satiety, which is long-term. You know, you’re not hungry for a while. So a lot of people find that when they go on this type of diet, they might have a big breakfast and they don’t feel like lunch. And then, they may not be hungry until dinner. So it really simplifies nutrition for a lot of people.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s fascinating. I mean, I do tend to naturally gravitate more towards red meat in terms of what I like, and I think the fat is a part of that. I don’t like the gristle, though. I’m like really against that.

Mr. Baker:

That’s why I invented cooking; it’s tough to chew.

Mr. Jekielek:

But yes, so okay, so I have a picture now, and you know, it sounds actually pretty simple, because you just eat the amount that you want.

Mr. Baker:

As far as the amounts go, I can give you sort of rough estimates. You know, most, say someone your size, probably would eat about two pounds of meat a day. That would probably supply all your caloric needs, all your energy needs, and all your protein needs. You would probably be satiated, full, and probably pretty happy, quite honestly, with that.

Now, what most people end up doing is, as I said, eating about twice a day. There are some things to be cognizant of. As we go from a higher carb state, and you mentioned you went from keto to a higher carb back to keto, you probably see shifts in fluid. And we see changes in our physiology as our insulin levels come down, which most people would argue is generally a good thing. We see less retention of salt, less retention of water. We lose a lot of water weight initially.

So you have to just be cognizant of the fact that you might have to stay on top of your hydration. Your bowel frequency is going to change. It’s just kind of, I, you know, whenever I see some people talking about these whole food, plant-based diets, which include lots and lots of organic fruits and vegetables, honestly, much of that nutrition just ends up going in the toilet, so you’re basically just spending a lot of money to feed your toilet. You know, when you go on a carnivore diet, you end up having, you know, fewer bowel movements. I know it’s kind of an interesting topic to talk about.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re saying more of the things that you’re putting into you go into your body and less of it gets passed.

Mr. Baker:

You basically absorb just about everything you consume when you consume. That’s fascinating. That’s our anatomy setup, our anatomy and physiology. We have a very, you know, robustly acidic environment in our stomach, and that was done for a reason. It’s very expensive energetically to maintain that gastric acid pH of about 1.5 at rest. And because of that, you know, there’s a purpose behind it. As an evolutionary biologist, I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that, you know, things are there for a reason.

And the, you know, the consequence of that is, you know, meat is largely what we’re well designed to deal with. And so all the extra fiber that we consume, we can’t absorb it. You know, we have a microbiome that will, and there’s been a lot of emphasis on healthy microbiomes and feeding our gut prebiotics and probiotics and dialing that in. And with meat, that’s a non-issue. It’s because you’re getting the nutrition. You don’t have to rely on a microbiome to be dialed in perfectly so that the plants you feed can maybe get absorbed better. As you probably are aware, fiber, we can’t absorb. We have no capacity for that.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, let’s talk about that because that’s one of the, I mean, you know, I went and looked at the things that people say, you know, the criticisms, right? Like, how are you going to hurt yourself? I’ve heard fiber is necessary. I’ve never heard anyone argue it’s not really, but you don’t get any fiber in this model.

Mr. Baker:

Correct. In my view, in my experience, and I’ve taken care of thousands of patients doing these types of diets, many, many, if not most of those people will notice better gastrointestinal function without the fiber. I know it’s kind of sort of heretical to talk about that, but that’s the reality. Now, the benefits of fiber, and there are some, I think it’s a conditionally beneficial thing.

If you’re going to eat a standard Western mixed diet, fiber makes a lot of sense because it’s going to mitigate some of the glycemic excursions. Because when you eat, let’s say, let’s compare drinking a glass of apple juice to eating an apple; the fiber in the apple is going to slow down that release of glucose, right? In my scenario, I don’t eat any carbohydrates—it’s a non-issue.

The other big issue that people talk about is the impact of fiber on the microbiome. So we have these bacteria—these symbiotic, some people consider parasitic, but symbiotic organisms—that will take fiber and convert it into something called a short-chain fatty acid. The short-chain fatty acid is protective to the gut lining. It thickens the mucus, particularly in the colon.

However, you can get the same effect with protein. You can get the same effect by consuming short-chain fatty acids. For instance, butter has something called butyric acid or butyrate, which was named because they discovered it in butter. That provides the same level of effect.

But more importantly, being in a state of ketosis, which you’re familiar with, the principal ketone body is beta-hydroxybutyrate, which sounds very similar to butyrate because it’s got a hydroxyl molecule on the end of that. That freely reverses. So when you have a lot of ketones and ketone bodies in your bloodstream, you get the same effect as you would if you were consuming fiber.

And there’s a nice paper that was written a few years ago by Lucy Mailing and Tommy Wood looking at the metabolic flexibility of the gut. They basically say, look, fiber does all these good things, but you can get those same benefits from a higher fat, animal-based diet.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, when it comes to the microbiome, I’ve had a number of people on the show talking about the microbiome. There’s one particular specialist in this area; she does fecal transplants for people and things like that. What she noticed during COVID was that people who had basically advanced COVID had their gut biomes wiped out, and there are no bifidus and things like that.

Mr. Baker:

It’s probably Dr. Simone Gold.

Mr. Jekielek:

Sabine Hazan.

Mr. Baker:

Sabine Hazan. Yes, that’s right. I’ve met her.

Mr. Jekielek:

And no, but the really interesting thing about this, as you’re talking about this, I suspect that as you change here, because this is like what’s going on in there is just an ever-changing wonderland or something like this. That’s how I view it, right? So I imagine as you’re going to meet, there’s just going to be other stuff that is in there that likes that type of setup more than the stuff that likes sugar and whatever else.

Mr. Baker:

Yes, for sure. There was a study done in Croatia last year, looking at microbiomes on a bunch of long-term studies, when they looked at a couple of people on a long-term carnivore diet, one particular fellow had been on the diet for six years, and his gut microbiome diversity was in the top 10 percent. It had a lot of these fiber-loving bacteria despite not consuming fiber. So it’s kind of an interesting observation.

They’ve looked at alpha diversity in Inuit Eskimos, who used to consume a primarily animal-based diet very low in fiber, and they also showed tremendous diversity. So, as you mentioned, the microbiome is so complicated; it’s so complex, and it’s changing every 10 to 15 minutes. These microorganisms can rapidly divide, multiply, and shift around, and so many things impact it: the temperature, the weather, the time of the year, what you eat—all these things affect us.

I pose the question: does a healthy person have a healthy microbiome rather than the other way around? Are we putting the cart before the horse when we try to optimize for a particular microbiome, saying this is what healthy people have? I think it’s more that healthy people have a healthy microbiome. Then how do you assess health? I think that’s a real question here. How do we define health? Is it a collection of biomarkers and microscopic things? Are we missing the forest for the trees?

As my friend Robb Wolf, who was author of The Paleo Solution, used to say, how do you look, how do you feel, how do you perform? I think that’s what most of us care about. Honestly, I could care less what my potassium is right now; I care that I feel good, I care that I can perform reasonably well, and hopefully look halfway decent.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, the first time I talked about the carnivore diet on this show, it kind of came up a little bit here and there, but it was with Mikhaila Peterson, one of the kind of famous adopters, right, who literally transformed her life in this foundational way with this diet. So inflammation massively went down for her; that’s what I understand. And so why does that happen?

Mr. Baker:

A lot of inflammatory issues, a lot of autoimmune issues for that matter, seem to start in the gut. You know, there are some people who say all disease starts in the gut, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that because our gut, as you may or may not know, is our largest interface with the outside environment. You know, from our mouth, esophagus, stomach, intestines, all that is external to the body. So we’re like a giant donut wrapped around this little hole, which is our digestive tract, right? And that area with all the villi and microvilli equates to about the size of a tennis court. So that is a surface area external to our body that our digestive tract represents.

Not only that, our digestive tract, unlike our skin, is designed to bring things in, right? And so what happens is by eating certain foods, drugs, alcohol, and things like that, we disrupt the integrity of that selectively semipermeable membrane. And so when that membrane is disturbed and we have this, you know, hyperpermeability, or some people call it a leaky gut, we start to absorb all these, you know, things that aren’t supposed to be there, you know, bacterial lipopolysaccharides and other things get in there, and that leads to an inflammatory immune response. And so we see this chronic inflammation occurring. And so when you fix that, amazing things happen. So, you know, if you think about...

Mr. Jekielek:

But like your knee, because you mentioned the knees, I remember she had some like, there’s juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, right? She had an ankle and a hip replacement and an ankle replacement.

Mr. Baker:

Yes. When I first appeared on Rogan’s podcast back in 2017, I think she saw me on there and started looking at some of this, and then she adopted some things six months later or something like that. And then she got in there and got her dad to do it, and the rest is kind of history in that regard. As an orthopedic surgeon, I was trained particularly for things like osteoarthritis, which is the most common arthritis. We have these inflammatory arthropathies like rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis, which are kind of a little bit different. We recognize that as largely a biological inflammatory process.

But the reality is even osteoarthritis is largely inflammatory. It’s largely biological. It’s less mechanical. You know, yes, you can have knee trauma. Yes, you can weigh too much. And yes, those things will have a mechanical effect upon the knee joint or the ankle or the hip or whatever it might be. But the reality is excess adiposity, like having extra belly fat, liberates these inflammatory adipokines or cytokines, which will then in turn lead to inflammation in the affected joints.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wait, explain this to me. So because you’re fatter, you somehow have more inflammatory...

Mr. Baker:

Absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek:

Really? How does that work?

Mr. Baker:

Well, because there’s something called adipokines, which are liberated from these fat cells, and many of them are inflammatory.

Mr. Jekielek:

So just when you have more of it, you get more of those?

Mr. Baker:

Correct. That’s part of it. So a couple of studies came out. The University of Alabama a few years ago did a study looking specifically at knee osteoarthritis. And they found that they compared a low-fat vs. low-carb group. And by far, the low-carb group was much better for osteoarthritis. They said there was better symptomatic relief. There was also another study looking at insulin levels. People that have high circulating insulin levels activate something called fibroblast-like synoviocytes. So synoviocytes are the cells that make the synovial fluid.

Synovial fluid is the liquid that’s inside our joints that lubricates. It’s a lubricant. And so when those cells are exposed to high levels of insulin, the biggest driver of insulin in the body is largely carbohydrates, particularly refined carbohydrates, right? So when you’re eating sugars, starches, and refined grains, things like that, that drive high levels of insulin, high levels of insulin then lead to an increase in these synoviocytes secreting inflammatory cytokines, which will then damage the joints that they live in. So we get this acceleration of arthritis.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, that’s truly interesting. So it’s almost like there’s this compounding effect because you weigh more, joints are impacted more, and there’s more of these cytokines.

Mr. Baker:

Proinflammatory cytokines. Yes, it’s one of the most impactful things you can do, and I’m a fairly simplistic guy. I mean, my job was to hit joints with hammers and saws, right, as a doctor, right? But I think when it comes to how we assess our health, you know, one of the most impactful things you can do is lose the excess central fat. You know, if you have extra belly fat, man or woman, that is driving inflammation. It’s driving, you know, all kinds of metabolic problems for you. It’s associated with dementia, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, inflammatory issues, depression, everything associated with that. So that’s of critical importance to lose that extra body fat.

Mr. Jekielek:

Now, so let’s talk about carnivore or extreme keto, really, which is what it is. So now, let’s say you convert to that, but you still eat a lot; you’re still going to get fat.

Mr. Baker:

Yes, for sure. There’s a mythology, and again, carnivore has turned into this almost cult-like following around it, and there’s a lot of just information that’s out there where people say, well, you can just eat as much you know, ribeye steaks as you want; you'll never gain an ounce. That’s patently false. I’ve proven it to myself. I mean, you still have to dial things in with reason, but the nice thing is it’s almost very easy to do so because I find that

Remember the actor that played the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz from the 1930s? Anyway, in 1967 there’s a commercial with him saying, you know, Lay’s potatoes, just bet you can’t eat just one, you know. He’s dressed up as a devil, right? But you can’t eat just one, and he’s right; you can’t. So I know that anytime I start eating certain foods, I just can’t stop. I probably have this sort of food addiction. There are some people that can moderate things. I’m not that guy.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, no, I’m like you, that’s why I’m thinking I’m a food addict, because I kind of get compulsive with it.

Mr. Baker:

There’s only ten of them left. You might as well finish. There’s only ten Oreos left. You count them. Okay, I ate an extra one. Now there are only two left. I might as well finish the whole bag.

Mr. Jekielek:

Come to think of it, I never overeat meat sticks. I don’t think I do, anyway.

Mr. Baker:

Yes they are uniquely satisfying. You know, when we start talking about some of these new drugs, the GLP-1 drugs, that a lot of people are using right now. And they’re the next, you know, trillion-dollar drug. I’m sure you’re aware of everybody on the Ozempic and other drugs. And so they work on hormones. You know, it’s not like, because when people say it’s all about calories, but yet these drugs really don’t have much to do with calories directly.

Yes, ultimately they impact how much we eat, but it’s a hormonal effect. So we are stimulating these hormones that suppress our appetite, the GLP-1, GIP [gastric inhibitory peptide], and some of the other medications are being used, and food does that to a degree as well. Not to the extent; I mean, these are 100x, but I mean, again, you’re getting, obviously, side effects; you’re getting issues.

Mr. Baker:

Well, exactly, because you’re, none of this is worry-free, entirely. Whenever you take one of these drugs, there’s some portion of people that react to them.

Mr. Baker:

Yes, some people will have significantly negative outcomes. Most people will do okay. I think the data on that shows that most people don’t tolerate it long-term. Most people end up stopping, I think about 70 percent, at least in some of the studies that I’ve shown. And the unfortunate thing is most people will rapidly regain most of the weight back. So it is not a cure.

It’s one of these drugs, and this is a whole, you know, raison d'être of the pharmaceutical industry: create drugs that people have to take for the rest of their life. So it’s a never-ending profit model. And it’s not like anything on there. And they’re very open about that.

They said, look, if you have hypertension, you’re going to take your beta blocker, your diuretic for the rest of your life, whatever it might be. That’s just like that. So they’re posing this as just another market that says obesity is a disease; you have it for the rest of your life, and the only solution is to continuously inject yourself with these medications ad infinitum. I, you know, contend there’s other ways and there’s probably better ways and there’s ways that are probably, unfortunately, not as profitable, but that’s the reality.

Mr. Jekielek:

But, you know, you just mentioned something. I think as a general rule, right, let me throw this out there as an idea. Whenever you’re thinking about some sort of intervention, ask yourself, is there a massive profit potential for a company in this thing? And if there is, look at it a little more closely. Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb.

Mr. Baker:

Unfortunately, the incentives for the American health care system are really kind of perverse, quite honestly. And I think that the first question you ask is if you go to the doctor and you get diagnosed with, say, some autoimmune disease, you’ve got Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, you ask, Doc, why? Why do I have this? You’re not going to get a good answer.

You’re going to get something like, maybe it’s genetic, we don’t really know, you know, it’s unlucky, or something like that. You don’t get these good answers of why. And because we don’t ask why anymore, we just sort of outsource everything to the pharmaceutical companies. They'll tell us how to treat it, and how to manage those symptoms.

Initially, medicine was about curing disease; it was about creating health, to disease management, which I think was adopted somewhere in the 1990s or something like that. We started talking about disease management. I remember hearing that term for the first time at some point in my career. What does disease management mean? What does that mean to manage some disease? It means that I’m supposed to put them on meds for the rest of their life. That’s what disease management is.

I believe that you can cure a lot of these diseases. I think you can. If you treat the root cause, if you remove the insult, the problem, then the disease is not a problem. As long as you continue not to indulge in that, you know, it’s just like, if I have a patient there that’s hitting himself over the head every day with a hammer, he comes in complaining of headaches, and I just keep giving him aspirin. It’s like, hey man, why don’t you just quit hitting your head with a hammer? That might work too.

Mr. Jekielek:

And then you just have to figure out what the hammer is, because sometimes that’s not obvious.

Mr. Baker:

It isn’t. And because we don’t study this stuff, one of the things you know people will talk about, well, you know, most physicians will say, yeah, I talked to my patients about disease and lifestyle. They'll say, hey, you know, you really should lose a few pounds, hey, maybe you should clean up your diet, stop eating all the garbage, and maybe, you know, walk a little more, right?

So they'll tell them to do this, and then the patient will come back six months later, they haven’t lost any weight, they’re still complaining. So after a few rounds of this, or maybe a few thousand patients they try this with and without success, they just say people are never gonna change, just give them the drugs. So they’ve been sort of beaten down into this.

Now, the reality is, as an orthopedic surgeon, if I said, you know, I need to replace your knee, right? I have literally millions of dollars of resources at my disposal to get that outcome. I can, you know, send you to a lab, I can send you therapy, MRI imaging, X-ray imaging, I’ve got, you know, pre-op or our suite, $200 a minute that I’m spending in the operating room, and I can get your knee done and then all the post-care, right? So I’ve got millions of dollars of resources.

But if I say, you know, it'd be a good idea if you were to change your diet, walk a little more, work on your sleep, I get effectively zero resources for that. So I tell you to do it on your own, right? So I don’t provide you anything, and it’s not a surprise you’re not successful at it because I didn’t really do anything for you.

So that’s why, with our company, we’re providing those resources so people actually can be successful with their lifestyle. And I think if we change our healthcare system to allow for incentivizing physicians to actually get people healthy, to actually help them make those lifestyle changes, we'll have a much better outcome.

Mr. Jekielek:

What about, I don’t know, I take magnesium? For example, there’s kind of a few things like that. Do you get, and you just assume you’re going to get enough of everything you need? Maybe vitamin D is another thing people popularly take. I don’t know. Or is this something you need to consider, supplements?

Mr. Baker:

The supplement industry is obviously a huge industry. I think it’s a hundred billion dollar industry or something like that. I think most supplements over time have been proven to be ineffective, you know, worthless. In some cases, it is harmful for many people. I do think there are some supplements that actually have sort of shown that they’re beneficial, magnesium probably being one of them.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and I mean, you know, vitamin D levels, you know, would do a lot for you not to get COVID. And this is one of the, there are papers showing this.

Mr. Baker:

The question about that is, you know, is it the underlying health that results in the higher vitamin D levels, or is it just a pure deficiency? And I think it’s probably a little combination of both, or maybe more so of the underlying health. Looking at outcomes, we saw a lot of times that supplementing vitamin D didn’t change the outcomes, and didn’t change cardiovascular outcomes. They played with the amounts and got different results a little bit, but in many cases, these are really signs of an underlying problem rather than the problem itself.

There’s an interesting anecdote back from the 1920s when they looked at vitamin D. They studied these Inuit folks up in Greenland or up in Labrador, somewhere in Canada. And they found there were two groups, and this is the 1920s. They had very low vitamin D levels because up there in the polar regions, not a lot of sunlight, particularly in the wintertime. So they all were low in vitamin D.

One group developed what was called rickets, which is a childhood disease of low vitamin D, and one did not, even though they had the same vitamin D levels. What turned out was that this group was eating their natural native, pure marine mammal seafood diet. These guys had incorporated flour, sugar, and canned goods back in the 1920s. So even with the same vitamin D levels, one group was symptomatic, and the other was not. So it’s probably more than just a level itself, so that’s why…

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re saying these processed foods somehow made the vitamin D less impactful, fascinating.

Mr. Baker:

Probably so, yes. Probably either drove up the requirement. So like, for instance, you know, even the USDA already formally recognizes, so like we know that there’s a zinc requirement, and I can’t remember the numbers, but there’s a number for zinc, and if your diet includes x amount of phytic acid, where do you get phytic acid? You get it from things like grains and legumes. So if you have a lot of phytic acid in your diet, that zinc requirement basically doubles or triples. All right, so you got to eat more zinc. So again, depending on what your baseline diet is, these nutrients may have differential requirements.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, there’s this—I’m just remembering something years ago that I think my parents were into. Now we’re talking about the 80s, basically, right? Dr. D’ Adamo. Does this ring a bell? I don’t know.

Mr. Baker:

The name sounds familiar. I think it’s about blood type.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, well, no, exactly. A blood type guy. And his argument was, if I recall, thinking back to the 80s, that certain blood types require dramatically different diets as ideal diets for that blood type. So these types of people should actually eat a lot of meat and a lot of fat, and these types of people actually are better off eating plant-based or something like that, or a mix. Is there anything like that? Because there’s, of course, quite considerable variation among people.

Mr. Baker:

I think people’s capacity to tolerate a variety of food is, you know, certainly impacted by their heritage, by their genetics. I think that’s true. I think that, you know, again, I can talk to data on people that have pursued a carnivore diet, and I’ve asked them specifically this question: how many of you guys are type O? How many of you guys are A, B, AB, and O negative, and so on and so forth?

And I saw no pattern. I mean, it was basically the general population. I’m an O negative guy, so I’m about 8 percent of the population. I’m the universal donor. So we have a trauma right now; I'll give you some blood right now. But yes, I haven’t seen that in carnivore.

However, what I would say is, you know, probably much of the world has problems with dairy. I think some estimates say that like 60 percent of the population is lactose intolerant. And so we have—and probably certain people handle grains better and certain people handle other things better. I think meat is one of those universal things. I think that if you take a human being, a normal, healthy, young human being that hasn’t been exposed to any kind of diseases, they will probably do fine on meat. Again, I’ve not seen anything to indicate that there’s a blood type specific for a meat-based diet.

Mr. Jekielek:

So maybe you can tell me about this because I’ve been learning in the last few years that a lot of what I’ve known about cholesterol has been wrong. I’ve kind of known that a lot of eggs aren’t a problem, for example.Where do things stand with that? And of course, this is highly relevant to a carnivore diet.

Mr. Baker:

Yes. So when we talk about heart disease, and this is what a lot of people are concerned about regarding carnivore diets, and we see that people who are critical of it, we don’t know what the long-term effects are. I think it’s interesting to see how this has evolved. When I first started talking about this 10 years ago, people were absolutely sure that you would drop dead within two or three months from scurvy or something. Now that didn’t happen. Then they were convinced there was no benefit.

Then we started to see thousands and thousands of people putting disease into remission. So then they’re like, okay, now we'll accept that it can be useful as a therapeutic intervention, which I think is great. But they’re like, but if you do this long-term, you’re definitely going to die of heart disease too early. You’re going to get colon cancer, all these types of things. And again, these are all very speculative.

At the beginning of our conversation, we started talking about the food guide, more and more people are starting to realize that the data, the outcome data looking at things like red meat and heart disease and cancer have not been shown in high-level studies, particularly randomized control trials, to increase it in any way, shape, or form, any meaningful way or form. So, for instance, there’s a fellow by the name of Professor Gordon Gu who is at McMaster University up in Canada. He is considered the father of evidence-based medicine.

In fact, he coined that term back in 1991 in a single-author paper about evidence-based medicine. In 2019, he was a senior author on a panel called NutriRECS. They did the largest extensive review on red meat ever done with like 15 scientists from around the world, and they concluded that there is no strong evidence to say that red meat is linked to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or anything else and just continue to eat it as you will. Now that, of course, was met with extreme, you know, just anger and frustration; they actually sued the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] to try to get the journal, the Annals of Internal Medicine, to retract those studies. They never did, but this is the outrage itself.

Mr. Jekielek:

But why would that be?

Mr. Baker:

I mean, what is wrong with these people? Obviously, there are some financial interests involved in this.

Mr. Jekielek:

But so it’s all astroturfing, or are people actually outraged?

Mr. Baker:

Probably a little combination of both. I mean, I think there are some people that have actually bought into it. There are people that take it to heart that I’ve been told my grandmother told me I should eat lots of vegetables and eat low fat, and that’s what I believe, and this offends my sensibilities on that. So we don’t have high-level evidence, direct evidence, saying that red meat consumption leads to heart disease or really anything else. It’s all kind of circumstantial and weak at best. So now what it comes to—

Mr. Jekielek:

But this study, bottom line, is there’s no particular relationship to any of these problems with red meat. Basically, that was the conclusion.

Mr. Baker:

Basically, the outcome, and again, Gordon Guyatt, who founded something called the Grade, which is used to evaluate the strength of evidence-based. He says any evidence that would point to red meat being problematic is extremely weak. So there’s, at best, a very, very weak effect. Not enough even to change anyone’s recommendations.

But more to the point is that we do know that certain people on low-carb diets will see their cholesterol go up. That is an absolute phenomenon that occurs. It happens particularly as people get lean, and it’s kind of an interesting phenomenon. Because if you take, like, there’s the first randomized control trial, and this is going to happen in Canada.

Again, I’m talking a lot about Canadian things they’re doing. So Canadians are doing some good things around this stuff lately. And they’re going to look at these obese patients that are pre-diabetic and put them on basically a beef-based diet with a small amount of carbohydrate. But it’s mostly a carnivore diet. And I suspect we'll see them lose weight. Their glycemic numbers will improve. Probably their cholesterol will go down in that group.

And the reason we say that is because in January 2025, Adrian Soto-Mota, who’s a PhD from Oxford and also an MD, did a meta-analysis on 41 randomized controlled trials on low-carb diets. And he found that the amount of saturated fat had minimal impact on cholesterol levels. What really drove cholesterol levels high was when patients got lean. So there is this concept called the lipid energy model that was put out by an engineer, surprisingly, named Dave Feldman, and now several PhDs and other MDs have now sort of co-opted that and have published several studies on this.

And what this says is as we draw down our carbohydrate storage areas like our glycogen liver glycogen muscle glycogen, our body becomes increasingly reliant on fat traffic, so we traffic more lipids in our bloodstream to meet those energy demands. That is a different situation than if we just overconsume and we’ve got all this energy, like, you know, sitting in our bloodstream. And so the question is, are they identical?

If you just eat a bunch and you’re overeating, and you’re obese, and you have these high cholesterol levels, is that the same thing as a lean person eating a low-carb diet at high cholesterol levels? And the data thus far seems to indicate that, no, it’s not the same situation. These people that are lean with higher cholesterol seem to—and again, I don’t want to be too definitive here because it’s still evolving—seem to have less tendency towards developing heart disease.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because really, the issue is the plaque, right, in the arteries and so forth, because the cholesterol is supposed to lead to that.

Mr. Baker:

Well, the cholesterol, I mean, again, the classic lipid model is that high cholesterol levels, you know, the more particles you have, the more likely you are to have plaque basically building up in the vessels. It’s a direct cause-and-effect situation.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re saying this cholesterol might be different somehow. So we do know that the cholesterol might be different somehow.

Mr. Baker:

So we do know that types of cholesterol can differ qualitatively. We can have oxidized cholesterol, we can have cholesterol that’s sort of big and less atherogenic, and there are different subtypes. There’s a lot of emphasis on what’s called ApoB [Apolipoprotein B] now.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because they say there’s good cholesterol and bad cholesterol.

Mr. Baker:

That’s the HDL [high-density lipoprotein] and LDL [low-density lipoprotein] dichotomy, which is really kind of old. That’s kind of 1980s stuff. The thinking has evolved quite a bit on that. But the overall thing is that we know, and there’s more data coming out all the time, that shows that people who are metabolically healthy, who don’t have diabetes, don’t have hypertension, are not obese, who are not inflamed, and who have high levels of cholesterol, may be protected against heart disease in that situation. I’m putting the “may” in quotes because I can’t say it definitively, but it’s looking like more and more data is pointing in that direction.

So it’s something that I tell people: if you are on a low-carb diet and it’s doing you well, let’s say you feel good, you’ve put a disease into remission, or you’re on a carnivore diet and your Crohn’s disease is in remission, and it’s helping you, that’s the benefit. Now, if the cholesterol goes up in that situation, that is a potential risk, and so you still need to be cognizant of that. Now, whether you need to do anything with this or not is unclear in my view. I think we need more data on that.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you just swap it, but it’s something you might want to watch out for.

Mr. Baker:

You can get imaging. You can get what’s called a cardiac CAC [coronary artery calcium] scan. You can do some advanced imaging. So you can kind of watch what’s going on. Because we have the technology right now. We can actually see disease in real time and we can watch, is it progressing? Is it regressing?

I'll just share this one study that was put out last year where they took a hundred people with ridiculously high cholesterol. I’m talking about, you know, they want your LDL cholesterol below 100, right? These people had LDL cholesterol of 500, five times the upper limit of normal for at least half a decade. And they did CTA [computed tomography angiography] high-level precise scanning of their arteries. And they found that at baseline, they had less disease than some people with low cholesterol.

And it was like, well, that’s an interesting finding. And then they followed them for a year. And this is a really controversial study. And they tracked them three or four different ways. And most of the ways showed that there was very little or no progression. There was one subset of that population where they had some increased progression.

But it’s an evolving science. And I think it’s one of those things where we'll know more in a couple of years. Hopefully, the new administration will be more open to doing this type of research. Because in the past, people say, well, it’s unethical. We’re not going to study it. How dare you?

I remember Chris Gardner, who was at Stanford. He’s a plant-based guy. His lab is funded by Beyond Meat. He was on the last iteration of the dietary guidelines, which, had Trump not been elected, we probably would have gotten the dietary guidelines that say everybody needs to eat basically a plant-based diet, or something similar to that, which would be, in my view, a disaster.

Mr. Jekielek:

I think we’ve covered the common things I’ve heard people talk about as being concerning when it comes to carnivore, carnivore-like things, right? We’ve covered fiber, we’ve covered supplements, we’ve covered cholesterol.

Mr. Baker:

The initial one was everybody’s going to get scurvy. It’s like you’re going to get scurvy without-

Mr. Jekielek:

Oh, no vitamin C.

Mr. Baker:

No vitamin C. And there’s not a lot of vitamin C in the diet, clearly. I mean, you can get it from, if you eat a lot of certain organs, you can get more vitamin C.

Mr. Jekielek:

But are you suggesting you just shouldn’t, couldn’t you just do it and just do your supplements?

Mr. Baker:

Of course you could. Yes, of course you could.

Mr. Jekielek:

And that should work just as well, right?

Mr. Baker:

Any deficiency that you feel might be there, you could certainly take a multivitamin.

Mr. Jekielek:

But that’s not going to hurt the carnivore diet?

Mr. Baker:

Probably not for most people. For most people, probably not. So you can always add to it. And again, I’m not dogmatic about it. Again, as a physician, I just like seeing people get healthy. And I tell people constantly, let’s try this for a while, see how it goes, and then we'll make adjustments as we need to.

And again, most of my patients don’t do a carnivore diet. It’s the ones that struggle with keto, the ones that still don’t get the benefits, say they have ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease or IBS [irritable bowel syndrome] or some autoimmune condition, or ankylosing spondylitis. Then we put them on carnivore, and that’s where some of the magic seems to happen, which is kind of fun to see. It’s just really interesting to see that.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because I remember back in the day when I first started doing keto, I got these ketone strips, right? Like you kind of test your urine and it changes color, right? It’s very simple. I don’t do that now, but I found that the effect was significant when the ketone color was coming up, and not when you were, so you really had to kind of stick with it. It would tell you if you were being a little bit too flexible, right?

Mr. Baker:

Yes, it will certainly show up in your ketone levels. And again, that, to me, I always try to talk to my patients about keeping the goal of the goal. The goal isn’t necessarily a deep level of ketosis, although I will say that in certain instances, there are a lot of people advocating for ketogenic diets in conjunction with cancer therapy. You know, they use it as an adjunct. I’ve heard that. And they use something called a Glucose Ketone Index [GKI], where they drive their glucose down low, they have their ketones very high, and that seems to be beneficial.

There was a study published last year on brain tumors. They had, I think, it was a small study, it was about 20 patients, and half of them did a ketogenic diet, half of them did not. Over three years, 8 percent of the people that did not do the ketogenic diet survived, and 68 percent survived in the keto group. So it was about an eight-fold increase in survival.

Mr. Jekielek:

And you’re kind of starving the cancer. They like those carbohydrates, right?

Mr. Baker:

This goes back to Otto Warburg’s data that he showed that cancer cells preferentially absorb a lot of glucose. There are some other compounds like glutamate, which he'll also use. There’s a guy at Boston College, Dr. Thomas Seyfried, a cancer researcher, who’s been a huge advocate for what he calls metabolic therapy for cancer. And it’s given me some traction for sure.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, well, and so, I mean, there’s this general sort of shift right now, right, towards thinking about a lot of diseases, metabolic disease, right? I mean, in general.

Mr. Baker:

Yes, we’re seeing a lot of funding for mental health, thanks to folks like Jan and David Baszucki. They’re the founders of the company Roblox, the big video game. So they’ve put in millions and millions of dollars to see some of this metabolic therapy for mental health because their son was suffering from bipolar disorder. And it was devastating to his life, but he cured it with a ketogenic diet.

Fortunately, if we look at the current stats in the United States, it’s something like one out of every four or five people has a mental health disorder. And then when you see all those people coming together, there’s a lot of strife. So I think if we’re going to heal this nation, I think we will have to start with feeding ourselves correctly.

Mr. Jekielek:

Look, I mean, with that pyramid shift, right? The dietary guideline shift, I mean, I can’t, I think it’s, I mean, this is very rough, but I think it’s like an order of magnitude more consequential than anything else they’ve done. I mean, this is, like to me, it’s like a sea change, because of the impact on, you know, all the purchasing contracts, all this, of all the, basically, all the government money now has to use these guidelines as the...

Mr. Baker:

Yes, certainly. The biggest impact would be in the school systems because you know this is you know where people develop these habits, you know, you kind of lay down your adult patterns in early adolescence and that’s what you kind of do the rest of your life unless something happens. And so yes, that’s the correct place to start.

Now obviously, hopefully the consumers will adopt this and again I think the Make America Healthy Again movement, which I’m all in favor of, has to start with Americans actually adopting this and doing this, and so I mean the government can only do so much but we’ve got to do it as individuals.

Mr. Jekielek:

But food as medicine, what do you think when I say that?

Mr. Baker:

I think that’s spot on. I think of food as poison in many ways. I refer to these recreational drug, human pet food type things that are in the grocery store. So we have to eat a lot less of that and a lot more whole foods, whether it’s carnivore or some other whole food-based diet. I think that’s going to help many, many people. We have to get back to cooking and all the home economics and all that stuff that we did in the 1950s and 60s and, you know, teach those skills. You know, it’s like if you’ve got children, I mean, don’t saddle them with chronic disease, you know, just from feeding them. It’s definitely avoidable.

Mr. Jekielek:

What conditions have you found that a carnivore diet has helped people with?

Mr. Baker:

Quite a few. I will tell you the ones that I think that, if I were to say, there are a lot of ways to treat things with food. The ketogenic diet can be fine for diabetes, right? Carnivore specific, I think that number one, inflammatory bowel disease has been incredibly beneficial. So that would be Crohn’s disease and also colitis. I think, in general, autoimmune diseases like psoriasis, like rheumatoid arthritis, like multiple sclerosis, like ankylosing spondylitis, those conditions seem to do quite well with carnivore.

Additionally, again, food addiction. I think that’s a real issue for people. I think the simplicity, the abstinence, rather than the moderation, is like treating alcoholism with, you know, I just want a shot of tequila on the weekend. You know, that doesn’t work too well. So I think those are really the big ones. I do think that mental health is also dramatically impacted by this. Now, it impacts, you know, cardiometabolic disease, diabetes, weight loss—all those things are also beneficial, but you don’t need a carnivore diet for those things.

I think carnivore is particularly useful for autoimmunity. The research has done a lot of work on gut hyperpermeability and autoimmunity and shows a really nice, clear relationship with that. So I think that that would be my strong perspective. In fact, the studies I'd like to see done, you know, there’s not a lot of money for this because nobody wants to fund food studies. I would really like to see an inflammatory bowel disease study done because we’ve had case reports. We’ve got lots of case report write-ups in the literature on this stuff, but that’s probably the main ones.

Now, again, it helps with—I mean, I’ve seen it help with, you know, some weird things. I mean, some things that you would never believe. There’s a condition you may, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, something called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. So this is a, the first time I saw this, it really kind of blew my mind a little bit. There was a physician; she was a 57-year-old ER physician.

She had this disease called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. And Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is a genetic connective tissue disorder. So these people tend to show up with really stretchy skin, and their joints are dislocating all the time. It was kind of the bane of orthopedic surgery because you couldn’t do anything. You couldn’t stabilize them because as soon as you did surgery, it just fell apart.

So she was 57 years of age, and she would wake up every morning with three or four joints completely dislocated because she was tossing and turning at night. So she had to wake up, put her shoulder in, and put her ankle back in place. Then she‘d go to work. She’d go to the ER, and about every other shift, one of her joints would pop out of place. She’s like, hey guys, hang on a second. My shoulder is dislocated. Years and years of this stuff, right? And it was pretty much missed when her joints were getting beat up because they were constantly dislocating and relocating.

Then she went on a carnivore diet, and within one month, she stopped having dislocations after decades of this stuff. I have no idea why this is occurring; I just don’t understand. I still, to this day, can’t fully understand that. And, you know, she started, you know, she again lost weight because she felt better, started exercising, and started going to the gym, and she stopped having joint dislocations. I’ve seen that duplicated hundreds of times now with that particular disease. And it’s just this weird, like, genetic. I’ve seen Tourette’s syndrome. I’m sure you’re probably familiar with Tourette’s syndrome.

I had this 15 or 16-year-old little vegan girl. She was raised in a vegan family, wanted to do track and field, but just felt like she wanted to eat meat. She told her parents, hey, let me eat meat so I can do track and field. I feel like I’m not strong enough. So they agreed. They said, okay, but we’re not going to support you. We’re not going to buy it. We’re not going to cook it for you. You’ve got to do it yourself. She ended up becoming a carnivore.

And, you know, she got a little stronger, but her Tourette’s went into full remission. And I was just like, that is really weird because there’s not really any kind of, like, talks about curing Tourette’s syndrome. Literally, if you go to my website, carnivore.diet, I have over 1,000 testimonials, interviews that I’ve done, all kinds. And it’s searchable. You can type in diabetes. You can type in bipolar disorder. You can type in Crohn’s disease. And you'll just bring up 10, 20, 30 testimonials on these things.

I hate to say it’s a panacea because you get looked at funny when you say it. But certainly, obviously, common things—obesity, diabetes, joint pain, gut issues—those are probably the most common things just because they’re so prevalent. But, you know, if I were to say, you know, where should we really, really push for this, it would be autoimmunity. And that’s what Mikhaila Peterson had, by the way, autoimmune disease.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. And that was, of course, connected with the joint.

Mr. Baker:

Absolutely, correct,

Mr. Jekielek:

So this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Perhaps you have a final thought as we finish?

Mr. Baker:

If you are out there and suffering with some form of chronic disease, number one, don’t outsource your health to anyone else. You know, the healthcare system tends to be very disempowering for patients because they’re told they have this weird disease and they don’t know why. You’re not told why you have it. And the solution is often just, you know, take these drugs for the rest of your life.

That doesn’t need to be the outcome for most people, and I think you can empower yourself to heal. It’s possible through lifestyle. I think food is critically important. I think sleep is important. I think exercise and activity are important. I think the sun is incredibly important, how it mitigates stress. Then I think also having a purpose and a community around you. I think if you put those things together and you emphasize those, and particularly dialing in your food, more often than not you can significantly improve your quality of life and often put diseases into remission.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Shawn Baker, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Baker:

Thanks again.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.