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Coming up on the get lean clean podcast.
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That's why when we sit down to eat, it is we literally use all of our senses. We use all of our senses to help decide what to eat when to start eating, when to stop eating and all this. Now, the problem is we have companies with lots of money with people in lab coats, working there that are tweaking aromas and flavors and textures to hit. Those buttons is evolutionary buttons. The fullest, they eat more and more and more of this food. If we are in tune with our bodies and are presented with real food, we do not need all these guides to tell us how to eat. We could make those decisions for ourselves.
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Hello, and welcome to the get clean, eat clean podcast. I'm Brian grin, and I'm here to give you actionable tips to get your body back to what it wants to was five, 10, even 15 years ago. Each week. I'll give you an in-depth interview with a health expert from around the world to cut through the fluff and get you to long-term sustainable results. This week I interviewed Dr. Bill Schindler, he's the owner of D like a human.com. He's also an archeologists professor, chef, father, and husband. He's traveled the globe researching ancestral diets and reclaiming the power to feed himself and his family nutritious foods. We discussed Dr. Bill's health journey of overcoming metabolic syndrome and GI disease.
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Also what we can learn from all the tribes and how we can apply it today, like detoxifying plants, how to make healthy French fries and how cooking can really regain your health. So I really think you're going to enjoy this episode ton of great info and thanks so much for listening. All right, here we are Brian grin here with Dr. Bill Schindler, the get lean eat clean podcast. And Dr. Bill is the director of the Eastern shore food lab at Washington college. Him and his wife also own the eat like a human.com website with a bunch of great things on there. We're going to talk about today. And he has a book coming out next year called eat like a human book.
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So, and a bunch of on-demand classes, which I took a look at as well. So welcome to the show.
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Thank you, Brian. Pleasure to be here.
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Awesome. And I was taking a look at all the things that you have out there, and I figured we'd start with, let's start with maybe what's what's the book gonna be about, and maybe before we even get into the book, why don't you sort of tell your journey into getting into, you know, optimizing health and things?
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Sure. I'd be happy to, and it's a, it's a roundabout journey, but I think I know for sure, for me and incredibly powerful one, that gives me a unique insight into this whole dilemma of human diet and health and nutrition. And, and just as importantly, that the place that we as humans fit in to the larger context of the environment and our resources and those sorts of things. So I, you know, I grew up in, in New Jersey and I'm in the suburbs of New York city and not, not too far from the beach of five miles from the beach. And I grew up in the seventies and the eighties at a time when, if you, you know, if you were going to be healthy and listened to exactly what the FDA and USDA said, and it was all the things we know about replacing saturated fats with margarines and nutting seed oils, and low fat diets and lean meats and high carbohydrates, and these sorts of things.
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And I had this incredibly, I still do have this infatuation with food, not so much eating it as much as just being around it. And, and, and, and I, and I realized the central role that it plays in, in my family's lives and in my life and all this and human's lives in general. But I had an incredibly unhealthy relationship with food. I was a pudgy, overweight kid. I was a kid, everybody made fun of him play us. I was the kid that wore the t-shirts or the beach or the pool like it, like for, so even when it was wet, I felt like it was the shield that stopped other people from seeing my love handles and my roles, even though it was clinging to me like, you know, cling wrap.
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And that was me and I, even though food was such an important part of my life. I was in the kitchen cooking with my mother and my grandmothers. And I was out in the woods with my father hunting and fishing and trapping. I, it was an incredibly unhealthy relationship with food. It was, you know, when I ate, when I looked at food on a plate, I didn't see something that nourished me or had the potential to nourish me. I saw that very thing that was responsible for making me fat or make other kids make fun of me or making me not feel well or whatever. And it was very problematic and I had very poor body image, and it just was not a healthy way to be associated with food.
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And then when I, and I wasn't an athlete, I was an awkward kid when I hit high school. And I don't exactly know exactly how it all came together, but I fell in love with wrestling and found wrestling. I had an incredible coach that had just graduated college and came. He was young dynamic guy, and I just, I fell in love with it. And I actually was fairly decent at it. And the harder I worked, the better I got and the harder I work, the leaner I got, and I looked, I started to, you know, be that athlete and athletic body that I always dreamed of having I wasn't helping, but I looked the part and I act in the park because I was winning all these matches. Right.
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And then I ended up wrestling for Ohio state, with division one program. And later on in division three program at the college in New Jersey. And that entire time my weight was in check, sort of in check. I looked again, that part I wasn't healthy. And my relationship with food went from one unhealthy relationship to another. And I didn't see food now as this thing that made me ugly. I still have food as this thing that was preventing me from making weight something I was scared of now, because it was cutting so much weight. And then when I was done wrestling in college, as you could imagine all the way, just because my diet had, had really had never changed this entire time. All the weight just, just flooded back on, but now it wasn't flooding on a 17 year old or a 16 year old.
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It was flooding on a 20 something year old, a 30 year old. And I just, I had all sorts of issues. I had irritable bowel syndrome. I had, I had restless leg syndrome. I had inflammation. I just felt like hell, my skin was bad. It was just horrible. And again, now food resisting that made me sick, made me, made me look a way that I didn't want to look and feel the way that I didn't want to feel, but you know, to really cut to the chase this entire time, I've been searching for this answer. You know, what should I eat? What do I eat? I want to look healthy. I want to be healthy. I want to feel healthy. I want to, what do I eat to make that happen? And it's this, this quest I've been on my entire life. And I dove down rabbit holes. I, you know, I went to doctors and nutritionist and I read everything I could read book-wise.
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And I used to devour men's fitness and muscle and fitness magazine. And all of these things, I would sit every day, every week in high school, and with a piece of graph paper and a calculator, and be able to toxicology carbohydrate, macro and micronutrient percentages in that massive food chart out my, what I was supposed to eat, all the, I would build down that and know none of these things answered this question. And at the same time and sort of wrap up this, this part of the conversation I had, I had been in the woods with my dad, my entire life. Like even though I lived in the suburbs of New York city, he worked really hard to get me outside. We would, you know, we'd go to a place in another part of town where this Creek was and trapped every morning in the winter, he would drive me all over the place in Northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania to go hunting.
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I was outside all the time and I loved that connection with him. I loved that connected with nature. I loved all of it, and I just wanted that connection to be closer. So I was always trying to again, make that connection closer. So I went from gun hunting to bow hunting and from bow hunting, I wanted to learn to make all the things myself. So I started to learn to make those and learn to make arrows. And finally, when I got to the end of the arrow, you know, the tip the most important part, I couldn't find much information information I could was very vague. How do you make an Arrowhead out of stone? Well, here's a way to make an Arrowhead at a stone, but I wanted to, I wanted that connection to be so real and visceral and powerful that I want to throw in how to make that same Arrowhead, that somebody in that part of New Jersey was hunting a deer with 1500 years ago.
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And that's what drove me to archeology and drove me to become an archeologist because I realized that's where the answers to those questions were. And as I dove deeper and deeper, deeper into archeology, I started to learn more about our ancestral past our evolutionary past the role diet played in our evolution. And just as importantly, perhaps most important to this entire conversation, I learned the role that technology played in our diets over three and a half million years. And the role that it played was so powerful that it literally built us as a species, both biologically and culturally, and the, the final, like ending to this entire segment of my story is, and I hope we can dive much deeper into pieces of it over the, over the next hour.
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The what are the powerful thing that I realized when I really understood the role that technology played in, in accessing food and processing food and all the things that we do as humans before we even eat the food is that I realized that the question I was asking my entire life for decades, the question I kept failing at answering and trying to get healthy, that question, what should I eat was the wrong question. There's no, that, that, that's not the right question to ask. The right question to ask is how should I eat? In other words, you know, the humans are not, and we can talk much more about this, but humans are not designed biologically to eat almost every single thing we put into our mouth.
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We don't have the same equipment inside that cow does the process tough vegetable materials or a goose does to process grains, but what we can, what we do and we have done for millions of years is take a food, using develop a technology, to transform it into its safest and most nursing form possible, and then consume it. And that's a part of the equation that most people are missing in this, in this quest for health it's it's that you need, we need to do something to almost every single resource that we have, the transformative. It would save us the most nursing form possible for our human bodies before we eat it. So, and that was a real turning point for me.
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I'm 47 years old. Now I've never been healthier in my entire life. I, you know, and that includes even the time I spent as a division one athlete, I haven't counted the calorie. We'll step on the scale and almost a decade.
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Wow. Yeah. And it's interesting, you bring that up because that is like the number one question. I think a lot of people ask is, well, what should you eat? But I like how you come at it from a different approach as to, you know, how you eat and the way our food is processed is, is just pretty much it's, it's killing people per se. W what is it, how long is the learning process? As far as like learning, you know, how to cook things a certain way? Like, I know you have classes and you do all that, is it a steep curve for someone just to pick that up and just start, you know, changing the way of how they eat? You know,
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No, no, no, no, not at all. In fact, if you think about it, remember we're talking about millions of years worth of, of invention. And I say, and I know it's not strange, like millions of years, they're really making technologies millions of years. Absolutely. The very first technology ever created that we have found in the archeological record is a stolen tool that dates the 3.3 million years ago. And it may not sound like that's a very big deal, like who cares? Somebody struck two rocks together and created an edge that was a little bit sharp. So let's just raise your shirt, but, you know, what's, what's the big deal. Well, think about this, take a really good look at your own body.
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And I don't care how fit you are. I don't care how strong you are. I don't care. You know, how chiseled you are, you compared to, you know, I don't mean you, anybody, you compared to other humans, you might say, you know, you're in the top five, 10, 20% of fitness and strength is speed or whatever, and that's super cool. But when you compare humans as a species to other animals, we've really, you know, we're really incredibly weak. We're not that fast. We were not that strong. We don't have razor sharp canines to rip carcasses apart in the African Savannah. We can't dig into the ground very well. We can't fly. We can't swim that fast. And that equates to when we really think about it, if we stripped ourselves of all of our technologies and I mean, everything from a whisk and a Vitamix, blender to a plow, our ability to access resources and our environment is incredibly limited if we're only left with our bodies, but more importantly, and really, really more importantly, this entire conversation is that for as weak as we are in our, in how that impacts us to be able to access resources, our digestive track is one of the most inefficient of any animal on the planet.
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So even when we can get resources, we put them into our mouths. We can't safely and efficiently derive nutrition from most of that. Like other animals can. So, you know, we are omnivores as humans. We are, but not by design. We're omnivores by technology. We, we, we can act, we can derive nutrition from so many different things in the environment, not because we're designed to do it, but because we've created technologies that allow us to do it, and we'll get to some of that in a second, but let's go back to that stone tool. We think this is what it was like. This is how, this is how I picture what was going on when that stone tool was, was first invented and why it was so powerful prior to that invention, our ancestors were eating a limited amount and there were very, very small.
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They were about three and a half feet tall, full grown adult brains about the size of my fist, very, very low nutritional requirements compared to our modern bodies and our modern brains. So they were frugivores herbivores and insectivores. So they were eating a limited amount, limited amount of wild vegetables, wild fruits, and insects. And of those three things. The most nutrient dense was by far the insects. And when you think in, if you're trying to put a little picture in your mind of what that might've looked like, don't equate it to going into the produce section of the app, near the grocery store, the wild vegetables and fruits have nothing like that.
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The fruits were nowhere near as sweet, nowhere near as big. And most of them were incredibly better with huge kits or seeds or whatever. So that's what people reading our ancestors reading, but meanwhile, on the Savannah, right? And we're talking about equity, Loreal and Eastern Africa, mostly of the Southern Africa, predators were taking down other animals, bylaws, you have to do this. They would rip them apart, dive inside, eat the most nutrient dense and bioavailable parts of that animal, which is the blood, the fat in the organs, Gorge themselves, go off and sleep to digest that food, leave that, and quite often leave that carcass on the Savannah and all the other scavengers that are biologically equipped to take advantage of that carcass would fly around in the ancestors to modern day hygienists and socialists and modern modern-day buzzers.
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Those sorts of things. I'm ripping apart. All this flesh, meanwhile, our three and a half foot tall, incredibly weak ancestors were sitting there looking at their nails, which are used to send their teeth, which are useless. Salivating watching this whole thing unfold, knowing that they don't have an invitation to the party because they can't do anything. They might be able to run up and know a little bit of meat, but that's it. They strike that tool. They strike those two rocks together, create in less than a second. He raised your sharp heads that sharper than any predators came on on the Savannah, it's incredibly durable. And even when it gets duller breaks, you can make another one in less than a second. And now they can run out. They can hack off incredibly huge pieces of that animal, large pieces of meat, bring it back, share it with the elderly, the young, or the sick and their communities and safety.
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That is a game changer. It's the first time our ancestors created a technology that allowed them to overcome their own physical limitations and access something that they could couldn't access earlier. And then that just continues. We, we, we, we then develop fire technology, develop hunting, technology, develop trapping and fishing, or whatever technologies fermentation Ms. and the list goes on. And on of all these technologies, our ancestors invented to allow them to access resources, and then most importantly, to unlock those nutrients and those resources for our bodies. But to directly answer your question, what is the learning curve? How does this work? I mean, we're talking about powerful technologies that were created literally with sticks and rocks and clay pots and fire and caves, every single person listening to this.
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I don't care if you're in a mansion or in a little flat in the city with a tiny little kitchen, you all have better equipped kitchens than our ancestors did. These things are not that hard to do. And this small little steps towards you, don't turn around tomorrow and start butchering all your own animals and, you know, making patties. And for a minute you do this in steps, but every one of those steps, I would say isn't not only very accessible, but incredibly rewarding nutritionally, incredibly rewarding from a sustainability level, incredibly rewarding from a financial level and incredibly rewarding from a sustainability and ethical level as well.
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And the thing about is, you know, with
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The whole corn team going on, I mean more people, and I think it's a positive, more people are cooking at home and, you know, not going out, which I liked to eat and make my own food. So, you know, now it's just about educating and getting the resources to make that happen. And I noticed, you know, you traveled all over the world. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that. Sure. Thailand, Germany, Kenya, I'm sure other places. What are some of the biggest takeaways you want, you got from going all over?
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That's a great question. Yeah. So I've been very fortunate. My research has taken me all over the world and off quite often, and most of the times with my entire family. So I have a wife and I have three kids, a daughter, 17, a son that's 15 and another daughter, that's 13. And they've been with me, which is been rewarding because I just love to share these things with them. But I also, it's very helpful to me. As, as, as a teacher, a professor, someone who wants to share their work with, with others to see how, what we're experiencing gets filtered through their different eyes and their different experiences. It it's it's, it helps a lot. So the point of that traveling and the point of that research was to spend time with prepare food, with share food, with live with indigenous and traditional cultures around the world that are still engaging in some sort of food production or food processing.
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That does exactly what I'm talking about. Using ancestral techniques, traditional techniques, to make the food as safe and nursing as possible. And it all sorts of things we've learned about it. I'll give you a few, a few huge takeaways. The first one is people are amazing. People were living in an unfair channel world. Now we're, we're, we're scared of one another for something different reasons, but you know, real people. And, and I know we're talking about people that are living in the middle of nowhere or incredibly impoverished areas in some cases, and these people. And I know the old adage and cliche that people stayed all the time, but it's true. In some cases, the less or less people have, the more they're willing to give.
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I mean, we've walked into places where it's literally the one day a month that they're eating meat and we're in there and they actually are sharing it with us. And we're sitting because it's a one room, little thing we're sitting on their bed, where they sleep, you know, eating this meat that they should. It amazing people. So a couple of big takeaways. One is, and I'll start with this. We went to Kenya to do a bunch of different things. The main actually the main thrust or the main reason we went was to spend time with groups of people out in Westville, cut that make something called , which is an Ash yogurt, which has been sort of described as the superfood.
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That is why it would be this description is ridiculous, but it's, it's one of the main reasons why Kenyans are such great marathon runners because they eat this food. If you still would even put a food on that. And it's incredibly problematic, even say those things on 15 different levels, but I wanted, I wanted, there was no real good description of how this is made, what it is. So we went and actually made an and drank and consumed the people there. But while we were there, we got the highlights of the trips is we went to Northern Kenya and this took, it took several plane flights days, look at driving, you know, one day without roads, camping, staying overnight. And we ended up with some borough warriors who drink blood from their cows every day and briefly say something about it, but then tell you where some of the biggest takeaways were.
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We drove the last part of that journey. There were no they're all, even the dirt roads had ended. And we had to go down into this. You can only get there during the dry season because the river was in dry river bed. At this point, we drove down the dry river bed for about an hour and pulled up to where this village was. And there were three young, a warrior standing on the edge of this, the bank of this Wadi, the driver of her bed to greet us. And I remember seeing them and it looked like a movie and it partly was because the light was perfect and the way they were dressing up. But I remember looking at their, their bodies and literally every single thing about them just screamed health.
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They were in my mind to be a pit, me of the human figure. They were lean, but not in a starving long way. And if you ever been to certain parts of the world where, you know, Africa, some parts in certain areas, sometimes where there is, there are deficiency of nutrients and there's sometimes different diseases that, you know, eyes, aren't white teeth, aren't straight and white. You know, these sorts of, I mean, white eyes, ear to your smiles, incredibly straight teeth, the way they stood, the way they look, the way they spoke, everything spoke of health. And I know none of that was done with, with calipers or blood tests, but I'm telling you, there's so much, you can, you can get from just being near somebody that understands that.
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So then we followed them and they grabbed the cow and they, and this is something that they do literally every day, they are nomadic pastoralists, which means that they, they keep animals. They're not Hunter gatherers, they're pastoralists. They keep animals. But during the dry season, the forage, the food for the wa you know, the plants that are out for the animals is of such poor quality is of such, you know, hard and free of nutrients that the animals have the massive quantities of the grass and the sticks and the things that they're eating. So in order to provide that much food for them, the men and the boys just leave for half of the year, they follow the animals and the animals is room.
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And when they leave, they go with a gourd, a little tiny bow and arrow, which I'll explain in a minute and that's about it. They don't bring a container for water. They don't bring things to hunt with. They literally break that and these animals, and every single day, they take one of their calves. And I remember they only do this with like one of the cows at a time that every, not every cow gets this done every day, take one of the cows. And they tie a rope around its neck, almost like an entire thing is like us getting blood. So when they put the rubber thing around our arm to make the, the veins get bigger, they put this rope around the couch neck to make the jugglers get bigger and more prominent. And they walk right up to it with his little tiny, it looks like a toy, bow and arrow, and they shoot this little bow and arrow.
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She just sort of our end of the end of the neck, into the juggler. And it goes in and bounces out and it just makes this little tiny cut. And they capture the blood, starts flowing out like a faucet and in the stream. And they captured in a, in a gourd, or if he had an, a scored. And once they get as much as they want, usually about a leader, they take the rope off the knots, pick up some dirt from the ground, throw it in this wound. And I mean, the wound is tiny and the cow, and subsequently the cow walks away. Then they go and milk another cow. And it's about 50, 50 half blood, half milk. They, they stir the blood. Would they just pick up a stick and stir the blood and coagulates around the stick. And they take that and feed it through the dog.
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They mix the raw milk in this fresh blood, still warm, both of them together, back and forth. And then they drink it and they do this twice a day. And that's all that the men and the boys eat for half the year. Now, back home in the village, they're still doing this regular. The women are supplementing their diets with some other things as well, but that's the mainstay of their diet. And if they're, if, if the woman is pregnant or she's lactating, or somebody's sick, they get extra doses of this and that's their food. Now they do sometimes kill their animals. And when they do, they eat literally the entire thing, they eat very, very little plants at all. That's their diet, most healthy people I've ever seen.
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And, but here's the biggest takeaway. Come when we came back here, we in Maryland, you know, we're sitting here that experience and I'll tell you, first of all, that it tasted great. I mean, it did, it tasted like this, this thick irony, chocolate milkshake. And I don't know, that sounds crazy, but that's what it tasted like and what it felt like was even more important. I mean, it, you knew when you drank it, you got this sense of fulfillment, this, this sense of satiation, like your body knew. It just got a whole lot of something that it, that it needed. And I come back here to Maryland and, you know, people I I'm here, I'm the director of the Eastern shore food lab.
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We discuss, you know, one of the things that we do here is we do research and teaching about food, food ways, all the stuff that I've been talking about, but we have conversations all the time about, and people are always coming in and engaging conversations about feeding, you know, feeding a growing population and how we have enough resources to feed everybody and health and diet and all these sorts of things. And, and I started thinking about, Oh my God, wait a minute. The two things that are the staple for the healthiest people in the entire world that I've ever been around, have those two things. One is illegal in Maryland and in about half the States in the country, which is raw milk. And the other one is incredibly difficult to get.
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And if you can get it, it's almost impossible to get fresh and that's blood. So here we are. So many people are trying to answer the question how, what, and how we should eat, trying to answer the question about how we're going to feed a growing population and all these big high-level questions that are incredibly important, but we're not even exploring all the different possibilities that can help address that. And I'm not suggesting that all of us need to be drinking raw milk and blood every single day, although it's probably healthier than most, most of us are eating. But the fact that it's not even a part of the conversation means that we're not going to find any answers to those questions anytime soon. So I just, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I just want to give you one other very quick example.
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So that's a sort of a visceral
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The simplicity of it, right? Like you visit a tribe and it's just amazing what you can learn when you, people like that have, you know, they don't have a ton of resources and they just find ways to nourish themselves. You know, I don't know how you would think they came about that. I'm not sure, but,
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Well, it's not uncommon. So the summer on the Maasai do the same thing, or they're very, they're very similar, a lot of different ways. And they practice very similar dietary habits. In fact, I'm a PSI, some Messiah, and I don't want to, I haven't done direct work with them on this, and this is all secondhand information. But I spoke with a doc, a guy who grew up in a Maasai village, his parents were doctors and he remembers every morning he would get up, wake up to the sound of pink thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, thing thing. And it was, as soon as the cows started peeing, the women would get up with pots and collect all the urine. And they would actually mix, this is recording, meaning at least the urine and the blood and the milk together, which is, which is interesting.
1 (29m 11s):
But it's funny. You say they don't have a lot of resources because, you know, from our perspective, they don't from, from what I can get going to the health food store across the street or acne, you know, the perception of hundreds of different ingredients and all that. But most of that should go into our bodies anyhow. And I would suggest they're incredibly, incredibly rich, but here's the other example I wanted to give you real quickly because I think it's another, another powerful one. And we'll take a step away from animals for just a minute, because I'm not an anti vegetable anti plant, sorta sorta person at all. But I do understand the dangers, the inherent dangers with eating plants, if we do it the wrong way. So the one thing to remember across the board is that all plants are toxic.
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All plants have some level of toxin in them. Some of these toxins are pretty much benign. Some of these toxins actually carry with them medicinal or flavor, or even have believe it or not even health benefits. Some of them will build up on our bodies over time. And cause havoc later on, some of them will kill us outright. Some of them will make us sick. There's a lot of different levels of this, but the fact that plants don't move means that they by default engage in chemical where a warfare in order to survive and interact with the outside world, the way they need to propagate their own species. So we need to understand this when we eat plants and some of the most common plants, even plants that we think are in, or have been tattered as being incredibly healthy, have all sorts of toxins that can cause problems.
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If we go about eating them the wrong way, spinach is a great example. Spinach is full box elites and, you know, eating spinach when spinach would grow in your area, not a very big deal, eating spinach in the grocery store because the grocery store has makes it available literally every single day of the entire year. And now it's added as an incredible health food. People are putting it in their shakes. Every single morning can create all sorts of issues. But I went down a potato is a, is another great example of, of a plant that has all sorts of toxins toxins in the, not that we shouldn't eat potatoes, but we should eat potatoes with a cautious eye and process them in a certain way.
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So potatoes were first domesticated around 10,000 years ago. The wild ancestor to potatoes is incredibly like will kill you toxic. And a lot of the early varieties of the domesticated versions are also incredibly toxic and can kill you and make you sick. By the time Columbus makes you to the new world. There's somewhere around 500 to 600 different types of potatoes already under domestication. And again, many of those incredibly toxic, the ones that we get in the grocery store today have a much reduced level of toxin in them, but they're still toxic. And if we eat massive quantities of them, which especially, or many of our kids do and potato chips and French fries and baked potatoes and all this, it can, it can be problematic.
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So what I wanted to do is I went to Bolivia and Peru to the very areas where the potato was first domesticated to work with indigenous cultures there, the I Mara and the Catchoua who still grow and consume some of these incredibly toxic varieties of potatoes. Cause I wanted to, if it's the same toxins, just a little bit reduced in the modern American grocery store versions, I want them to see what they did. You know, how did they detoxify these plans in order to prepare them for consumption? Because you know what, they eat massive quantities of potatoes every day. I mean, I live in Ireland and I thought we had a lot of potatoes though. These kids eat massive quantities potatoes. So there were several ways they did it.
1 (32m 48s):
And, and I'll just give you three one in the IMR. We made something called Chino, Blanca and Chyna Negro, which is a, a potatoes that have been slowly fermented and niched in a river, and then freeze dried out on the Onfi plant in Bolivia, before they're stored for long-term storage and then consumed, we ate, we prefaced something called Passau, which is or Passat where they actually take the potato cooking in an earthen oven and then eat it with clay. So they eat the clay and the potato at the same time.
1 (33m 29s):
And this special clay binds with the toxins in the potato and passes. It puts it in a state that our bodies can't recognize and doesn't, you know, it doesn't absorb and it passes right through our bodies. Meanwhile, they're getting the nutrition from the potatoes. And the final way we did it was we were in as improved. We were, we were fermenting potatoes in the ground six months, years. And again, all of these things were done to, to prepare the potatoes, to get them safe and ready for consumption. But here's the quick takeaway on this. And then we can move on the biggest thing that every single person did when we prepared potatoes, except in one case.
1 (34m 14s):
And I mean, I'm talking about potatoes. They were always peeled, always peel every single time. And I know it's suggested that the, you know, the big, best nutrients in a potato or in its skin and don't get me wrong. The skin has nutrients, but the cost of eating that skin outweighs the benefits from the nutrients, those skin and when they were in that's where most of the toxins are. Remember the toxins are got to protect this plant. And if that roots in the grant, it's protecting that root from a cuber, from insects or fungus or whatever else, it makes sense that the toxins are on the outside. Most of those are on the outside. So if you do nothing else with the potato, peel it, and this is how important it was to them.
1 (34m 57s):
Their potatoes were, did not look like russet potatoes. They take like a second to peel the peeler, their potatoes look like this gnarly lipoma. It looked more like a droop of grapes than it did a potato. So, and they were appealed to me with a knife. And so it was so important to them and it didn't matter how long it took them to peel these potatoes. They peeled the potatoes.
0 (35m 18s):
Yeah. I watched you make French fries and you did. And I was like, wow, that looks really good. And you, I noticed you detox, you know, you, well, you do, toxify the potato by fermenting it. Right. And then you, you fried it in animal fat,
1 (35m 38s):
Right? Absolutely. So there's a couple of benefits of fermenting potatoes. And this is, I know we're diving down the rabbit hole with some of these things and I'm hopefully not scaring anyone because the idea is that there are things you can do to every food that you eat to make it more nutritious eating that food, eating those of the foods that you're eating, deliver some nutrition, doing something to almost every one of those increases the safety of that food and also the nutritional value of that food for your bodies. So I'm going to give you an example of something that you can do with the potato. But again, I don't want it to seem overwhelming cause small steps, like just for making something on your counter, starting to cook animal fat.
1 (36m 20s):
Oh. But what small steps like that will make an incredible difference in, in, in your diet and in your health. So here's the thing with the potatoes potatoes have these toxins, like I mentioned in the glyco alkaloids, they have oxalates, they have a bunch of other things in them. Most of them are in the skin of the potatoes. So the very first thing I always do is always peel the potato. I don't care what I'm doing with a potato. I peel it, peel it and put it right into water. So it doesn't, it doesn't start to turn Brown. And then when I make French fries or potato chips, I take a lesson that we learned making, again, this thing called Topaz, which is this fermented potato in Peru and Bolivia, I take the potato, cut it into whatever, I'm cutting it into French fries, potato chips, whatever, stick it in a brine, you know, salt water brine and allow it to ferment.
1 (37m 6s):
And it, and it's so full of, of, of starches carbohydrates that it will, which is the food for the, the, the lack of bacillus bacteria, which does the fermentation. They'll ferment very, very quickly. So at room temperature, I ferment them for usually about four or five days, four or five days. Okay. Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't require much, most, most of the convergence that you need to, to transform, to detoxify and transform. It happens then. So in that amount of time, then I, you know, I wrench them several times and then throw them into hot animal fats. And let me tell you why just those small steps are so beneficial now, it's not a huge amount of work because most of the time, if somebody is making French fries and potato chips, they're there, or they may or may not peel them.
1 (37m 53s):
But once they cut them, they're almost always putting them in water until they cook them because they don't want them to oxidize kind of like, you know, how Apple oxidizes it and when it gets exposed to the air. So if all you're doing is adding some salt, right? And then you're allowing it to sit for a few days and then rinsing it. We're not talking about a huge amount of work, but a completely different food in the end of it. Right? So what's happened during those several days is transformative. The lack of bacillus bacteria have eaten a lot of the starch, a lot of the carbohydrates and chemical chemically and physically worked to not only detoxify that potato, but make the nutrients in it or pre digest.
1 (38m 35s):
It, make the nutrients in it even more accessible to our box. So that's powerful then if we take them the finished product and throw, or, you know, when you're done with the fermentation and throw that into hot animal fats, we're doing something completely different than we would if we were related to, you know, a net or a CAO, which we're all used to. Animal fats have been on diets. We know for 3.4 million years, we have examples of domes that were intentionally crushed to extract the marrow animal fats, high quality saturated animal fats have been in their diets forever. And in fact, there's some people, some anthropologists believe that it is actually fat that really made us human fat, that fueled our brains and our brain growth and all this, whether you believe that or not.
1 (39m 19s):
It's true. That, and, and I, I do, I believe that is that fat saturated fats in our diets for millions of years, not in seed oils have been in our diets for about a hundred little over a hundred years. And by the time we have access to them, not only are they created with incredible pressure, quite often, chemicals they're often ranted by the time we touch them, by the time we've access to them. But even if none of that was the importance and its incredible importance, if we heat it to the temperatures that you would fry in the breaks down and creates all sorts of issues. And it's just, we don't use any other shuttles in our house at all, but heating up animal fats is a complete different thing.
1 (40m 1s):
They have a lot higher smoke point and they don't break down the same way. And in fact, sack high quality saturated animal fats I want in my body, I want in my kid's body. So we don't shy away from frying and animal fats and even deep frying in animal fat. So the quality of the animal fat tablet it'll be tallow or lard or, or duck fat, whatever is of upmost importance to this process as well. So we have these four minute potatoes that have been detoxified and we put them in high quality animal fat, which I believe is an incredible food. And we're creating these French fries with additives, but here's the, here's the other added benefit of the process.
1 (40m 42s):
Not only do the potatoes inherently have toxins in them, but the cooking process of making French fries and making potato chips creates another toxin called or suite of toxins called acrylamides. So when the starches hit hot fat, they produce this toxin called the cradle mind. And if you're in places like say California, where they label everything really, really well, if you turn over the back of a bag of potato chips, you'll see, it says morning contains acrylamides cancer causing compounds or whatever. These acrylamides weren't there in the potato they're created by the way that we cook the potatoes hot and starches hitting the hot fat.
1 (41m 22s):
The benefit of what I'm talking about is, you know, making these lacto fries or that good chips is that they go into the fat with a lot less starch in them. It doesn't produce the same level of acrylamides your amount of acrylamides because the bacteria has eaten so much of those starches already. The only drawback to this process, there's so many benefits, there's health benefits, right? There's also paced benefits because of the, the fermentation. You get a little bit of a, of a salt vinegar tastes to them. There's a little bit of inheritance sourness and the lactic acid, they taste great. They're amazing. They digest better.
1 (42m 2s):
The only thing is that because we don't have all those starches, they don't get as Brown because it's a it's that now yard reaction that produces the accrual acrylamides so they don't get as Brown, but they are just as Chris and again, an amazing food.
0 (42m 17s):
Well, they looked great. Just don't tip them and catch up, right?
1 (42m 20s):
No, unless you make the catch up and do it for a minute, catch it as you make the catcher. But that's a great example. I I'm glad you brought that up. That's a great example. Incredibly simple. You can do it in your kitchen with the tools that you have and it's a different food in the end.
0 (42m 35s):
Yeah, no, I agree. I, I think you want to take one, it's like anything else, take one step at a time, but I've always been wanting to do some fermentation. So that is something that I'm definitely gonna look into more. What is your opinion around like, you know, especially visiting tribes and stuff, what's the role that like fruit plays and a lot of these tribes. Cause that's a question I get.
1 (42m 56s):
It's a great question. And I'll tell you what I am speaking on to somebody else the other day about this very thing. When we were on that trip in Kenya, we went to a Westcott and to get the Westbrook copy of that asks you over thing. We had taken a plane, a little tiny plane that, you know, just had a few seats. So it was us. And we just two people that we didn't know was on the plane as well. And we started talking to these two gentlemen and it turns out they were archeologists and they were going to this mountain that had all these caves underneath it with cave paintings and these sorts of things. And then we had the day off and we landed and they said, do you want to join us?
1 (43m 39s):
We said, absolutely. So we loaded up all these land rovers and went and it had just rained. It was mud everywhere on these dirt roads coming up this mountain and we got stuck. So we get out of there. And as we're putting logs and things under the tires, the one woman or with who knows her plants really, really well, she lives in Kenya, looked up and she goes, Oh, that's a wild orange like, Oh cool. She just want to try one. I said, absolutely. And I look up in the trees and I've been a fortune for 37 years and I'm looking and I can't find them. And I'm looking at, I'm looking at, I can't find them. And she finally goes up and comes down with this thing. That's literally the size of the tip of my pinky.
1 (44m 21s):
And it looked, it was an orange and it looked like an orange. I mean, it looked like somebody took an orange and shrunk it down to the size of a marble, smaller than a marble. And she was like, here it is, come on. Yeah. And I ate it. I'm telling you I can still taste. It does. It was that incredibly bitter. It tasted like an orange. It tasted like, like a bitter kumquat sort of thing. But that, I remember that is a perfect example of looking at the difference between yeah. We've had fruits in our diets for millions of years, period. Hunter-gatherer groups. I've spent time with vague fruits, but the fruits that they're, it's not licensed to go grab all the bananas and grapes and strawberries from the grocery store and come home and eat as much as you want because they're completely different foods under the same name, as fruit wild fruits that have been a part of our diet for millions of years are small.
1 (45m 15s):
Most of them are not that sweet. Most of them take a lot of work to access. So instead of extending a calorie to pick up and peel a banana, we're talking about expanding a ton of energy and effort to go get, you know, the wild versions of these things. And quite often the pitch of the seeds are really, really large. So even where I was foraging with the Hodson once in Tanzania and we were, I forget the name of the fruit little tiny fruits, the saw half the size of a blueberry. He put them in your mouth and it turns out the flesh was like the thickness of your fingernail because the, the, the pit on the inside was almost the, you know, 95% of this fruit. So you sat there with three of these things in your mouth and chewed on them for three minutes.
1 (45m 55s):
You got just a little bit, so
0 (45m 60s):
No, go ahead. I was just going to say, so the fruit that you're getting at whatever whole foods, it doesn't even look or compare to what you saw when you visited these tribes. Right?
1 (46m 10s):
Nothing like it. So no, this isn't to say don't eat fruit. This is to say, yeah, fruit has nutrients in it. And fruit has, in some cases, depending on the fruit, especially berries and things, incredible nutrients in it. Just realize that when you're consuming the fruit with those nutrients, you're getting a whole lot of other stuff with it. And then the most problematic thing is sugar, massive quantities of sugar. And the fact that it's from fruit makes no difference. Your body recognizes it as sugar, right. So just realize it, eat these things, but realize that you're taking in massive quantities of sugar at the same time.
0 (46m 53s):
So how, how do you go about, I'm just thinking for the individuals listening, how should they go about putting their plate together on a daily basis? I mean, obviously you've learned a lot from people that, you know, are, you know, been doing this for so many years and you know, how do you take that and sort of put it into the modern day and sculpt your plate on a daily basis to, you know, for yourself. You've, you've had a lot of great, you know, health changes yourself. There's a lot of people who are looking for that. What would you say to them?
1 (47m 23s):
Well, I would say the very, I'm going to give you a sort of 40,000 foot view answer first and then a little bit more, more specifics. So the answer to that question, I think, is something that people can understand for themselves and learn for themselves by reconnecting with their food and whatever way possible, but they, they, they can do it. So in other words, you know, I'm going to give a few suggestions in a minute and I'm sure you would. And the guests you've had have incredible suggestions and there's great books and documentaries and all this information out there that can certainly help. But the more powerful way to answer that question is to understand it for yourself, because I can tell you some things that I believe, and I truly believe them and not to be completely honest with you, but for it to be truly meaningful to the core and make a difference in your life.
1 (48m 19s):
It's something that best experience yourself. And the best way to get that education is to get back into the kitchen. It's just one reason why I advocate so strongly to get back into the kitchen and make the food as much as possible yourself. And I realized there's time constraints and resource constraints and skill level constraints for, for a lot of us. And I get that for just bear with me for a minute. I'm going to say something absurd, but I wholeheartedly believe in it because this one I'm going to suggest has made all the difference in my life. The most important thing you can do to transform your health is to take a real. And the health of your family is to take a real honest look at the foods and the ingredients that you eat every single day or every day, or, you know, several times a week, it's not the, you know, what are you going to do and have this incredible healthy, locally sourced meal on a Sunday night, it's going to be nothing, right?
1 (49m 9s):
You feel good about it, but it doesn't do anything to your health. It's the food you eat. And honestly look every single day. And the best thing you can do to make the most of that. And you can try to take this out of your kids' diet and this out of your diet and do that. And that's fine quite often, that doesn't last very long. And, and those things flood back in, look at the foods you eat every day, an honest evaluation of are you eating sandwiches every day? Are you eating? Manet's your kids getting Manet's at every single meal and all these things and find whatever it is, then make that whatever those things are from scratch entirely from scratch at least once. And I know that sounds daunting. And I mean, this should be your goal.
1 (49m 51s):
I just did it with a bunch of students in Washington college. And then for Thanksgiving, the goal should be no two ingredients get put together by somebody other than you and make that meal. I don't care if it's grilled cheese and tomato soup or hot dogs and hamburgers or pizza, I don't care what it is, make it entirely from scratch. And I don't care. I hope it comes out great. And I hope everybody loves it. There's a really good chance. It's going to be a disaster, but that even if it's a disaster and even if you never make it again, even if it's completely inedible, you know, more about the food that you eat every single day that you feed your families with every single day than you did before. And even if you never make it again, when you go into the grocery store, you go in there literally as a completely different person with a new set of eyes that all the money and the marketing and the advertising that that goes into helping you to stab it.
1 (50m 41s):
You see it at the grocery store, you can see right through it, and you can not only get the healthiest versions of those foods for you and your family. But just as importantly, you're using your paycheck to support the people that are making food the right way, and that's powerful and it starts with something simple and it can go on. Ideally you make all the food yourself and that's great, but, but that is powerful. Take links out of your food chain and get closer and closer to the source of the food. And I say that with animals, I say that with plants across the board, remember all of my research has revealed that the most important thing in our, in our dietary paths, over millions of years, that has resulted in literally us sitting here, these bodies, these brains, these cultures are the technological developments and innovations that have allowed us to access food in the safest and most nourishing form possible.
1 (51m 42s):
In other words, the way that we cook food, and I don't mean cooking because of heat. I mean the prepare food, that's the most powerful thing possible. So that's what happens in your kitchen. When you go into your kitchen and you pick up a whisk or use your blender, or use your stove, you're doing the same thing that your ancestors did with stone tools and fire and clay pots, right? And by understanding those processes and it doesn't have to be all at once a little, at a time, you will literally know more about your diet, your food, your health, your relationship with yourself, your family, your community, your environment than you ever dreamed possible. And it literally is that simple.
0 (52m 19s):
Yeah, that's a great tip. And my wife does that a ton. Like she started making her own ice cream and just, you just need a few ingredients and the simplicity of it, once you do it, you realize, God, I don't need to go out and spend all this money on, you know, these brand names and things like that. Or like dips and things like that. You just, but I, I agree. I think you take that first small step and just start making little things yourself and you, and, and yeah, you might screw it up, but it w you look at it, it, it, it can become like a simple thing to do and sort of put things in perspective, like you mentioned.
1 (52m 56s):
Yeah. And I mean, just thinking about it this way as well. And again, these are simple. These are eight. They don't seem simple to us because many of us weren't drawn up doing them every single day, or even seeing our parents doing them every single day. But they are incredibly simple, our ancestors for doing most of these things with the most basic of tools. But here's, here's the thing. If it's, and I believe this, you don't have to make all your food from scratch. Although again, also, if you can to know to helps you be an informed consumer, at least, but just importantly, if there's a food that you can't make in your kitchen, I don't mean you because of a skill.
1 (53m 36s):
So I mean that it can't be made in your kitchen by somebody with basic schools, right. Then I would suggest that the food that you probably should need, right. That's and it literally is that simple, but what's really incredibly powerful is that when you start in little tiny things, start by making something as simple as sauerkraut and learning the process of fermentation, or start to make yogurt or make sourdough bread or whatever start to. And I'm a strong advocate of the ethical and approach to eating animals from a complete nose to tail approach for a lot of different reasons, from health to sustainability and ethics, but in order to accomplish that, I'm a strong advocate of home butchering.
1 (54m 21s):
And I know that sounds, I don't think, I mean, we regularly put a pig, half a pig on our counter, in our kitchen and butcher the entire thing. And I know that sounds like a little bit more than you might want to do, but you know, what do it with the chicken, bring a chicken, a whole chicken. I mean, it sounds kind of short idea, but it was the only way he used to be done, put a whole chicken on your counter butcher that chicken start to finish. And not only do you get to make the most of that animal and get the most nutritional benefits from it and, and actually save money because that one chicken that's done the right way can make three meals instead of one. But the other powerful benefit of that is that your kids, whether they're helping you, or just sitting in the other room, watching TV, seeing you out of the corner of their eye, see the shape of an animal.
1 (55m 6s):
They see skin may heat. They hear the knife go against bone. And all of those things remind them that an animal live, an animal died and animals now nourishing them that entire cycle. And it's something that we need to bring back into our houses and bring it back into our conscious it's cooking, cooking at home is one of the most powerful ways to regain your health. Truly.
0 (55m 30s):
Yeah. And we could probably talk about this for a while. I saw you made cheese use. What if you don't have access, do you have raw milk? Do you get, have access to it? I know you said it's, I've been, I would like to get it. I just, yeah,
1 (55m 44s):
I have. It's illegal in Maryland. So other than when I lived in Ohio, when I was in college, and then I lived in Ireland for a year, a couple of years ago, other than that, we've lived in New Jersey and Maryland. And in both States, raw milk is incredibly illegal. My kids up until we went to Ireland, which was just a little over two years ago, their entire lives, all they've had was, you know, breast milk is infants and then raw milk their entire lives, which meant I was driving to Pennsylvania every week, every other weekend. And we would get eight, 10 gallons of milk at a time and make all the yogurt and the butter and every cheese, whatever we were having. So now I'll tell you, and there's a couple of reasons for this, but my family, our kids don't drink milk the way that they did when they were younger, right.
1 (56m 35s):
They, if they're consuming dairy, it's in the form of yogurt or cheese or kefir or whatever collab or whatever, fermented butter. So part of it's time constraints. Part of it is a lot of the reasons when I have access to raw milk, I take advantage of it, but we have incredible dairy, not far from here, a nice family farms, it's called last name of the family is nice. And they do a low temperature, pasteurized milk. Non-homogenized low temperature pasteurized, and it works great for all the cheese and everything else that I make. So we're using that right now, but if I had really good access to real milk, fresh, good, raw milk, that's what we'd be using for sure.
0 (57m 19s):
Yeah. Yeah. And what are your thoughts, especially visiting the tribes and stuff around, you know, fasting and things like that. Cause that's a big part of my life. And a lot of my clients have implemented that into their lives. I'm sure for them, they don't even think about fasting per se. Right? Like it's just becoming sort of this hot thing, but w w w what are your thoughts around that?
1 (57m 45s):
Yeah. Again, I don't, I don't, I don't think they think about it in terms of fasting, but I will say this almost every single group I've ever spent time with by default practice engages in some sort of intermittent fasting, because this is, this is how it almost always works. And I don't care if they're Hunter gatherers or if they're farmers or pastoralists, they get up in the morning and go, do they go, they go hunting. They go foraging. They go take care of animals. They go, whatever they're doing, they go and work. They come back around usually early afternoon or so come back and have a little bit of whatever was left over from the night before.
1 (58m 25s):
Right. And then somebody, and, and it depends on who they are, somebody or somebody who's from the family or from the group spend most of the day preparing the meal that they eat in the evening, like this much larger meal. So they've come back. They had a little snack of something. Again, usually it's something leftover from the night before, go back out to do what ever it is they're doing. And then everybody comes in together. They share communally, share this much larger meal that again, took the day, or at least the afternoon to prepare. And then they visit with one another and then go to sleep. And that's it. I mean, they're literally intermittent fasting by default.
1 (59m 6s):
So, you know, they're not eating from say seven o'clock, eight o'clock at night, or maybe even earlier all the way through to noon or one o'clock the next day they have something small and then have something larger, you know, probably around four or five, six o'clock. And that's that's the cycle.
0 (59m 22s):
Yeah. That makes sense. Is that how you, is that how you eat?
1 (59m 26s):
That is exactly an alley. Didn't answer your other question, but yeah, so my, my that's how we, I have, I have coffee in the morning. We usually don't eat anything till about one or two o'clock depending. And usually it's something light and the larger meal, both we for nutritional health reasons, but also for just important cultural, emotional reasons for the family, the larger, we always come together and have a large meal at the end of the day together.
0 (59m 54s):
Yeah. That makes sense. And it makes sense for the tribes because, you know, they're, they're hunting and doing a lot of the things that take a lot of effort and, you know, mental acuity and sharpness, and they don't want to be there. They're not getting up and eating the first thing they do, you know, in the beginning of the day. And I always advise that with people is, you know, even if you got to wait a few hours, wait a few hours after you get up to have that first meal. But I always find for me, is, is that first meal of the day, like you mentioned, is something lighter. You know, even if it's around one, two, o'clock something lighter, it doesn't weigh you down, you know, perhaps maybe more protein based and then maybe some fat.
0 (1h 0m 35s):
And then, you know, at the end of the day, if you want to have a little bit of the carbs and things like that, you know, go, go about doing that towards the end of your day when you don't need to do as much.
1 (1h 0m 47s):
Absolutely. And I, and also the other thing that permeates all the cultures I've been with is the importance of fat, high quality, amazing fat in their diets. And they will go out of their way for, in some cases, I know we don't have time to go into it, but even in South America, there's even folklore and, and, and myth mythology surrounding fat in the diet. And they're very powerful and the importance of fat just permeates everything. And it's really interesting because then we come back, I, you know, then I come back to the modern Western year old and the it's the exact opposite message. That's hitting us from all directions all the time
0 (1h 1m 26s):
And cooking. And, and, and I know you mentioned cooking in, in, in animal fats like tallow, you're not cooking, you don't cook an olive oil, do you? Or what's your thought around that? I was just curious.
1 (1h 1m 37s):
We do. So my daughter started a sourdough bread business last year called rise rise by Brianna. And it's doing really, really well. We do one of the, all the food, the power of sourdough that, that bacterial fermentation that is also there with these fermentation to transform grains. And they would, their safest, the most nourishing form possible is incredible. We don't eat a lot of carbohydrates in our house. We don't need a lot of bread in our house, but when we do, it's always sourdough by default. So anyhow, she started this business and we have a, our, our, we do a focaccia sourdough focaccia that has some olive oil, and it does get cooked in that we don't, I rarely cook an olive oil as far as so, and I know I started this whole thing with the, what is as, as the how, but sometimes the, what is is important.
1 (1h 2m 22s):
And I think with fat, it is, so this is the rules in our house as far as fat is concerned, but what part of it, there are no nut and seed oils at all in our house. They're not allowed. So when I say nut and seed oils, I mean everything from, from peanut to canola to corn oil, like none of it, it's not allowed in our house. As far as plant-based fats are concerned, we do do olive oil, avocado oil and coconut oil, but they're almost always used for cold applications, things we aren't cooking. So things like dressings Manet's and those sorts of things, if we're cooking 99% of the time that we're cooking, whether it's frying in a pan or deep fat frying, it is with animal fats.
1 (1h 3m 3s):
So high quality lard, tallow schmaltz, which is poultry fat and, and obviously butter. The butter we make and use is fermented butter. But that, that is that's the rules period. We don't count calories with this. We don't sit there and restrict the amount that they're eating. I mean, this is the fat in my mind is an incredibly essential part of their diet, but it's not fat. It's the right fats. So high quality animal fats we eat without restriction and we only heat animal fats.
0 (1h 3m 37s):
Okay. So the main portion of your meal is some type of protein, would you say? Okay.
1 (1h 3m 44s):
Oh, so some type of protein with a good amount of fat and like, I, and I know you asked this earlier that I didn't directly answer and I apologize meat and animals I'll say animals. I mean, here's the thing. When we, when we think animals, our mind automatically goes to meat, right? So we eat animals, make the main up the main part of our plate. It's not just flesh. We do a lot of work. Again, we do a lot of books. You're in our house, a lot of nose to tail. So it could be Patay, it could be organ meats. It could be something fat-based, it could be bone broth, meat. Oh, so animals make up the majority of the plate.
1 (1h 4m 27s):
And the, and is the, is the central role of whatever food we're eating. There's always a fat component at some level. And when we eat vegetables, which is fairly often, we don't restrict vegetables, but when we eat vegetables, we do restrict there's certain things that we don't eat a lot of because of certain toxins, like spinach, Swiss, chard, and kale, which are full of oxalates. We don't need a lot of those. We keep an eye out for sugar. So we don't eat a lot of like carrots, just cutting it up and eating them. They're incredibly high in sugar, but we do. And at the same time, we processed the vegetables as much as possible to make them a safe and nursing as they can be.
1 (1h 5m 9s):
So, and I say, safe and nourishing, number one, things like certain forms of cooking, certain forms of fermentation helps be pacified. They also help eat a lot of the sugar. So a fermented carrot carrots are a great thing. The great place to start fermenting cut up carrots, put them in a 2% drawing, ferment them for three or four days, pull them out as carrot sticks. Not only is the paste enhanced, but the sugar content is completely dropped because a lot of the sugar has been eaten by the bacteria during the fermentation. So they were completely different food, right? And then it also releases the nutrient, even though a vegetable might have nutrients in it, it doesn't mean that those nutrients are easily accessible to our bodies.
1 (1h 5m 51s):
The fermentation cooking even chopping or grinding or whatever, different things, depending on the vegetable helps release the nutrients that are in there for our bodies as well. So when we put vegetables on our plates, they are selected for specifically and usually cooked or prepared in a way to make them a safe and nourishing as they can be. I hope that answers.
0 (1h 6m 15s):
Yeah. I mean like fermenting or even I use an instant pot and, and that'll help take out a lot of the, the anti-nutrients that you mentioned, maybe like obviously beans and things like that, which could be problematic for a lot of people.
1 (1h 6m 31s):
That's a great point. Soaking is another soaking overnight for nuts, for lagoons, for grains in general are really helpful here. Here's another great little tip. We don't really eat that many oats, but you know, there was this big kick for the past couple years on overnight hosts. You'd mix them the night before, you know, you'd mix the oats with either milk or yogurt, just stick it in the fridge. And the next morning you can eat it right away, like a password, the power, the way we do overnight notes, when we do them is you take those oats and you mix them in something slightly acidic and alive. So yogurt could fear raw milk, any of those things and sit it on the counter overnight, right?
1 (1h 7m 14s):
Don't put it in the fridge. It slows it all down. The power comes in the not only the, the acid being there, which is naturally there in those foods, but also the, the, the microflora, the bacteria that are there will help be codified and pre digest those drains. So the next morning either eat them or then throw them in the fridge. That's a completely different overnight notes. And the only difference is temperature, right? One's on the counter and one's that? One's in the refrigerator.
0 (1h 7m 38s):
Hmm. What about cottage cheese? I can go on forever. What about like normal cut cottage, cheese, or even goat milk? Any thoughts behind that?
1 (1h 7m 49s):
Well, yeah, we're talking about two different things quickly. So the first is the type of milk and, and it's how digestible it is for humans. And certainly goat milk is more easily digested by humans than, than other animals milk. And a two milk is cow's milk is better for you than, than other than other milks. That's one thing the other, and I'll give you the quick version of this. It's a much larger. And I laid out, you know, very, very plainly in the book. But so when we, as infants, infant, infant humans, we're mammals, and we're designed to consume milk.
1 (1h 8m 29s):
That's, that's why we're called families because we had members of our species that have mammary glands that produce milk, right? That's what happens. That's what's supposed to happen. We are, that is the one food that our body at a certain time in our life, when we're in infants is physically designed to consume and it's safest and most nourishing form possible. And when we consume the milk, this is, this is exactly what happened. The milk comes out of our mothers, whether we're humans or cows or sheep or whatever the milk comes out of microflora, it is completely alive. In fact, it is fermenting as it comes into our mouth, we consume it. It goes into our stomach and it gets hit with several different enzymes.
1 (1h 9m 12s):
It gets split with an enzyme called lipase, which helps break down the fat. It gets hit with an enzyme called lactase, with something break down the sugars. It gets hit with an Amazon called well, it's a Chad Unasyn like enzyme in humans, but a champion and other animals that actually COAG it. It hits the proteins and coagulates the milk and turns it into a semi-solid. You said cottage cheese. It's like cheese, like substance. And those enzymes are there. And our bodies produce them in order to do the best thing possible we can do with the milk. And the reason that coagulates is because if all we're doing is consuming liquids, which is what infants do, liquids pass through our stomachs and through our intestines way too quickly to get broken down fully and for the nutrients to be absorbed fully.
1 (1h 9m 59s):
So matrix has figured out a way to slow it down and that's by coagulating it turning it into sort of a semi-solid and when it coagulates, it slows it down. It gives it more time to ferment, more time to chemically and physically break down, and then more time for those nutrients to be absorbed when they're in the right state, by our intestines, and then pass them through. So that's it that enzyme China's Sandra Thompson like enzyme and the cheesemaking world is known as rennet. And to make cheese, you need three things, raw milk to make real cheese, you need raw milk, rent it and salt, and that's it. And the art of cheesemaking is in, you know, the cheese maker will put that cheese in different situations, different humidities, different time, different, different, all sorts of things.
1 (1h 10m 50s):
If I'm pressure different heat and produce hundreds of different cheeses from those three ingredients. Well, all they're doing when they're making cheese is replicating the natural biological processes that happen in our bodies, all infant mammals, we actually make cheese and our stomachs when we're entrance, that's what we do. And I always say, when a baby spits up on you, and it looks like cottage cheese and smells like provolone that's because that's exactly what it is. So then now fast forward into adulthood, humans, 60 to 70% of humans lose the ability to produce lactase as we grow older. So in other words, by default, most humans become some level of lactose intolerance when they get older, all humans and mammals in general, when they start eating solid foods, cease the production of China's or the Chama sin, like enzyme, the coagulates, the milk, and all of a sudden, now here we are, as adults drinking past, ultra-pasteurized some modularized milk from the grocery store, putting it into our, into our mouths.
1 (1h 11m 53s):
We're not biologically equipped to deal with that and asking the question, should we be, you know, and then we have diarrhea and we're asking the question, should we be consuming dairy? Well, we're asking the wrong question. It's not, should we it's? How should we, if we're going to safely and efficiently consume dairy as adults, we need to mimic the same thing that happened in our bodies when we were infants and we designed to do it, and that is literally fermenting the milk before we consume it. That's what happened inside of our bodies. So we get high quality dairy fermented. And by the way, if we coagulate it and go through that whole process, we're literally replicating everything that happened in our bodies as infants outside of our bodies, because that's what we do as humans before we consume it.
1 (1h 12m 35s):
So if the question is, you know, can we safely consume dairy as adults? If it's high quality, fermented dairy, like for fear, real yogurt or a real traditional cheese, 100%. And all we're doing is effectively replicating what we did as infants. If you know, if the question is, should we be drinking ultra-pasteurized and marginalized skim milk? Absolutely not. That has no business in our bodies. And here's, here's a quick little takeaway. This is a good example. She's making, it's not difficult. I mean, don't get me wrong. She's makers who do their job well are incredible artisans. Don't get me wrong. I don't want to take anything. What they do is, is a work of art.
1 (1h 13m 16s):
Making basic cheese in your house is not difficult. It's in fact, I only have some really good videos on it. It's incredibly, incredibly easy to do once, you know, the basics of it, you can do it with , here's the thing. This is what I'm getting at. So that the power of doing it and allowing you to see the world of dairy through a new set of eyes is transformative and understanding its role or its role in our diets, healthy diets. So this is it. If the, if the cheese making process is replicating, the biological processes that are essential in all mammals, including us as infants to safely and efficiently derive nutrition from milk, then that there's something to that.
1 (1h 14m 5s):
You cannot make cheese and multi pasteurized milk like ultra pasteurized milk cannot. Now, when you pasteurize milk, you certainly kill off the microorganisms minutes. So the bacteria that are in that milk that is responsible for, for that fermentation die. If you kill them, there is the potential, most cheese makers do this today. You reintroduce bacteria into the dead milk, and there's a famous cheesemaker named David Asher and it calls it unpasteurized. So you start that fermentation process and they can go on. And there's something to be said for that. But when you take so for pasteurized milk, low temperature, pasteurized milk, you can do that. And so everybody in this country can find a place, whether your state is a raw milk state or not, you can find just straight pasteurized milk and you can make from pasteurized milk, you can make cheese from your ice cream.
1 (1h 14m 57s):
You could make good butter, but ultra pasteurized milk is a completely different thing. You cannot make cheese from it. So here's the, here's the line of thinking that, that, that I usually go down, I ask myself a question, should I eat this? How should I disc? And this will be part of a healthy diet or not could be, how can we use traditional ancestral approaches to that ingredient to transform it into it's saved as the most nourishing form possible. And that's how I answered it. But if there's not a way to do that, then it's a red flag and online saying, well, maybe I shouldn't be consuming this. So ultra pasteurized milk, it doesn't matter how much good bacteria you put into it.
1 (1h 15m 38s):
It doesn't matter how much rent you put into it. You can't make cheese from it. It will not go through the biological process that we put dairy through. When we were infants to turn it into a safest and most nursing for Basel, it doesn't matter what we do to it. So in my mind that food has absolutely no business going into my body at all. Like my body can't deal with it effectively. And most of them note that most of us are drinking is ultra pasteurized and unfortunately skim milk. It's it's, it's absurd. And the last piece of the milk, and I get off the milk, but you know, again, milk coming from a human, a goat, a cow sheep, whatever, raw, putting it through a fermentation process, they're putting it into our bodies, I think can be an incredibly nutritious and safe way to nourish myself.
1 (1h 16m 32s):
And also I love cheese. I love it. I love the flavor. I love the smell. I love the way it makes me feel. So there's that sort of cultural aspect of it too. I love to put it on a plate. I love to make it and serve it to people. There's all of that. But most of us, when we talk about dairy are talking about something pretty different than I just described. So most of the modern dairy industry takes, you know, tons of cows living in the conditions that those cows are, that are going to get milked by machines. That's all going into one vet. Then that note gets put with milk from other places. And there's a huge Vita milk from thousands of different cows together. They fraction off the pieces of it, right?
1 (1h 17m 13s):
So that the fat goes over here, the milk salads go over here. This was, and then they'll get separated into all bunch of different parts. It gets pasteurized ultra-pasteurized. It gets homogenized, which means the fat molecules, which rise to the surface of the milk. If it sits too long, because they're larger get exploded. They get forced through a steel plate with microscopic holes and the fat molecules literally explode. And they do that so that they can sit in suspension and you don't have to shake the milk anymore. There's no other benefit to a modularization other than making it easier for you to not have to shake the milk, to make the cream, go back into it. And then it's put back together to meet the minimum standards, the minimum numbers that you need.
1 (1h 17m 60s):
So like skim milk or fat-free milk has zero fat. 1% milk is 1% fat, 2% milk. I think whole milk has 3.2, 5% or whatever to even whole milk has some of the milk taken or has some of the fat taken out of it. And then it serves to you and it, and it's been marketed or advertised as the healthiest form of this milk is the ultra pasteurized skim milk. Meanwhile, they're selling the fat off as butter and ice cream and everything else and making the, you know, value in that. But here's the crazy thing. During the, during the pasteurization process, the vitamin a, all the enzymes, the beneficial bacteria, the vitamin, a divided, they have all been completely destroyed.
1 (1h 18m 41s):
And then they artificially put the vitamin a vitamin B back in and say, it's vitamin a and B fortified, which makes you feel like they've done something for you. But really all they're doing is artificial replacing something that they killed off in the last place. And then they serve you. They tell you, you should be drinking. Ultra-pasteurized skim milk with vitamin a and vitamin D.
0 (1h 18m 60s):
All right, we're back. We had a little bit of technical difficulty back with Dr. Bill Schindler. We've talked a lot. We were, we were touching on a lot on dairy and we've hit a bunch of great topics, but I figured we would end with this way. And you've probably already mentioned it, but a lot of my audience, I talk about getting your body back to what it once was. You know, you get to this middle age part of your life and you look back and you're like, wow, 10 years went by. And I don't like the way I look or feel what would be one tip. I know you've probably already said it, but maybe, maybe even something a little different than what we've talked about. What would be one tip you'd give to that person to sort of, you know, get their body back to what it once was maybe 10 years ago.
1 (1h 19m 43s):
That's a really good question. There's so many things went through my head. I'll tell you this. This is what I think it is a tip to give. And, and I know these tips are not probably the typical tips that people give, like start eating this, or don't eat this, this, this is my tip, eat an incredibly nourishing meal. And, and I, and I say that because there a great food lab in Denmark Copenhagen called the Nordic food lab used to be associated with Noma, which is, has been for years, one of the best restaurants in the world. And one of the things that it does is these very simple activities with the public.
1 (1h 20m 24s):
Like for example, one of the things that we'll do is it'll have a tasting of apples. Like it'll literally take every single Apple from the grocery store and they'll cut them up and have them all out. And the person comes up and you know, you come up and you try a piece of every single app. I mean, how many of you go to the grocery store and buy an Apple and make a selection about an Apple, but you've never had all the apples that are in front of you. Like you literally, aren't informed enough to know whether or not that's the Apple you really want to have, right? So they do these very simple things that empowers people to make more informed decisions. It's something as simple as an Apple tasting. I say, it's the same sort of thing with a, with a nourishing meal.
1 (1h 21m 6s):
Unfortunately, I think so many of us have never even had one truly nourishing meal in their life. In other words, every single time, I'm convinced that you sit down to eat, you should get up feeling better than when you sat down, right? You should get up from that meal feeling better, the point and both biologically and emotionally, I mean, the point of eating food is to fulfill and exceed our, our biological and emotional needs of that meal. So we should get up every time feeling better than when we sat down. And that has, and that should be, that should be a goal. And it sounds so strange, right?
1 (1h 21m 46s):
It sounds so strange to say that, but that's because we've been normalized feeling crappy, crappy, because we've been eating crap, food, eat, and incredibly nourishing meal. And one in which, you know, you help repair and loved ones around you help repair. They are, you know, where the food came from all of this. So you're, you're, you're hitting all of those buttons and you get up and you're feeling better because that activity, you know, that did the same thing as that Apple activity did in, in, in Copenhagen, it provided you with the experience to know what that feels like. And then that's your goal. Like that's your gold standard, every meal that you have from that point forward? I don't care if it's, you know, a small thing in the morning or it's just in the afternoon, or it's a Christmas dinner.
1 (1h 22m 30s):
You should get up feeling that way every single time. And if you come close, everything else will fall into play. I mean, you will not only, and I'm convinced of this. You will not only be living in that body that you want to live in, but you will also be living in a state of mind. That is, is, is the state of mind you want to live and you know, where your nutrients came from, you know, that they were harvested or, or whatever ethical, you know, that you've done everything you can to prepare that as best as you've done to your loved ones. And it nourishes you here's, here's what the takeaway that I want to relay with this. And there are three things that I'm convinced we are hard wired to do through evolutionary processes, right?
1 (1h 23m 16s):
Because they're the most three most important things that allow us to continue to our species to survive. And every animal is hard-wired to do this, be safe, procreate and nurse one another. And that's it. And if we do those things, if we, if we, if we stay safe and if we have babies that are healthy, and then we can feed our babies, healthy food and nourish yourself so they can have healthy babies and the whole thing, then it works. The whole process works. And because those are the three most important parts of our life in order, you know, by, you know, through, through evolutionary terms, those are the three parts of our life that elicit such visceral and sensual responses.
1 (1h 24m 8s):
In other words, when we do them, right, they feel incredibly good, our entire body. I mean, all of our senses are being used at the same time when we do them wrong, it's the completely complete opposite, right? So the, one of the things we started with that question of whether or not we should be asking what, or how should we eat? I don't think we need to ask that question. What very often, no other animal asks that question. No other animal asks that question. And all the other animals are doing really good because they're listening, they're in tune with their bodies are listening to their senses. They're being presented with real food and they can make those decisions on their own. When do I eat? When do I stop eating? What do I avoid? What do I consume more of? Right? That's, it's a biological response with all the, so that's why when we sit down to eat, it is we literally use all of our senses.
1 (1h 24m 57s):
We use all of our senses to help decide what to eat when to start eating, when to stop eating and all this. Now, the problem is we have companies with lots of money with people in lab coats, working there that are tweaking aromas and flavors and textures to, you know, the hit, those buttons is evolutionary buttons, the fullest, the eat more and more and more of this food. If we are in tune with our bodies and are presented with real food, we do not need all these guides to tell us how to eat. We could make those decisions for ourselves. The things that we as humans do need help with, and the things that make us different from other animals is how we prepare that food to get it ready for our bodies. So if we, if we stop asking what so much and started asking how a little bit more than we would answer those, answer those questions and nourish ourselves better.
0 (1h 25m 44s):
I love that. I love that. I don't think I need to add anything to that. And we've made it really we've come up with some good examples. Like you mentioned, the cheese and, and the sourdough bread and things like that. And I would definitely check out your website, eat like a human.com. Right? Where else can we find you? You're going to have that book coming out, which will be, there'll be, I'm sure there'll be some recipes and you have on, on demand. Right? Do you have on demand? So if someone wants to learn how to make cheese or whatever, it's a, it's on your website, right?
1 (1h 26m 12s):
Yeah. So my wife and I are focused on, on three different things, inspiring, empowering, and nourishing. And we, we, we do that in a number of different ways, but those are our classes are really the core of a lot of what we do. And we do in-person classes as much as COVID roll out. We do on demand downloadable classes, we've paired with an Emmy award winning director, Brandon ghoulish, to produce these videos. And we're in the midst of filming a bunch more. We have several up already. We have sourdough bread introduction, a fermented dairy introduction to cheese-making, but we're coming with a bunch of we're in the midst of filming fermentation, all sorts of home, butchering nose to tail approaches. Those sorts of things are in the midst. We also do live virtual classes as well.
1 (1h 26m 54s):
So, and so, whatever in whatever form that you learn best we can, we can meet your needs. Absolutely. The book is coming out with little Brown publishers in the pre-orders in March. And so you can look for you. Look for that. There is a ton of information, blogs, blog posts, all sorts of information on our website and on social media, on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter at Dr. Bush. And so at Dr. Bill shimmer.
0 (1h 27m 23s):
Awesome. All right, Dr. Bell, this was a great episode. I was looking forward to this one and it, it definitely hit the spot. So thanks so much for coming on.
1 (1h 27m 31s):
Awesome. Truly my pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity. Yeah.
0 (1h 27m 36s):
Thanks for listening to the get lean, eat clean podcast. I understand there are millions of other podcasts out there, and you've chosen to listen to mine. And I appreciate that. Check out the show notes@briangrin.com for everything that was mentioned in this episode, feel free to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend or family member. That's looking to get their body back to what it once was. Thanks again, and have a great day.
