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Coming up on the get lean, eat clean podcast.
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You grew spinach in the ground outside, not the hoop house, not the greenhouse, but on the ground outside. You'd have, I don't know what two weeks of spinach that you could eat. And if you ate spinach for two weeks out of the year, no big deal. But now we've listened to a cartoon in the 1960s and seventies about this being a health food, and we're growing it all over the world and we're freezing it and shipping it. Now we considered it a super food and you could eat it every single day of the year. And we've created a problem that was never a problem before. And the other, you know, you mentioned almonds, almond milk is become quite a problem in many parts of the world as well. There was just a study that came out. I believe it was in Chicago for the first time ever children under the age of 10 years old are presenting with kidney stones and it's happening in families that are raising their kids.
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Vegan and kids are drinking the same amount of almond milk as they normally would be drinking from cow's milk and creating again, a situation we've never before seen our species.
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Hello and welcome to the get lean eat clean podcast. I'm Brian grin, and I'm here to give you actionable tips to get your body back to what it once was in 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 long-term sustainable results. This week, I interviewed author, chef anthropologists and founder of the Eastern shore food lab. Dr. Bill shimmer, we discussed how cooking can revolutionize your health, the importance of fermentation all about almonds and raw dairy along with what oils to avoid, what he learned from the tribes, his cornerstones of a healthy diet and much, much more.
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This was my second time around with Dr. Bill and I really enjoyed the interview. I hope you do too. And thanks so much for listening. All right. Welcome to the Gatling, eat clean podcast. My name is Brian grin and I'm with Dr. Bill Schindler. Welcome to the show.
1 (2m 5s):
Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here.
0 (2m 7s):
Great to have you on. And second time around. It was about a year ago we talked last and I think you were discussing, you were in the midst of writing up your book and now it's come to tuition. So congrats on that.
1 (2m 20s):
Thank you. Thank you. It's been a long time coming. I am super excited.
0 (2m 24s):
Yeah. And we're definitely gonna dive all into that book. And before we get into that, why don't we discuss, I know we did a year ago, but why don't we sort of discuss like your journey into health and, you know, sort of ancestral eating and cooking for yourself and things like that. So I know you had some health struggles early on when you were younger. Yeah,
1 (2m 46s):
Absolutely. Yeah. I, I, I know we've talked about this a little bit in the past, but I had the majority of my life. I'm 48 years old for the majority of my life. I've had an incredibly unhealthy relationship with food and it's so interesting to me, my perspective now on food and the way I think we all should be looking at food as it's food is something that nourishes us and nourishes our body and nurses are mine and nurses are. So it makes us healthy. Biologically, it makes us healthy emotionally when we view it the right way to use it the right way. But here I am at 48 and almost all of my life I've had this it's something that scared me and something that I viewed made me sick or, or made me ugly or made me it made other kids make fun of me.
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And it was a very unhealthy way to live. So I spent, you know, as a kid, I was, I was an overweight, unhealthy kid for most of my teen and early adult years. I was an athlete. And even though from the outside, I looked healthy. You know, I was, I was muscular. I was lean. I still was not healthy on the inside, especially my guts. And especially my relationship with food. I was a division one wrestler. And that certainly has, has it comes with its own weird ways of thinking about food, diet and health. And then as a, as an, as an adult, I've very stopped becoming an athlete. All of the weight came back on and I suffered from all sort of metabolic disorders until I, I stopped asking this, this question, you know, what should I be eating my entire life had been asking me, what should I eat?
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What should I eat to be healthy? If you only, if somebody just told me exactly what I should eat, I would be healthy. And I would look like this. I want to feel like this any longer. And what I realized through this ancestral lens, you know, as, as an archeologist and anthropologist, what I've learned is that even though that question is important, you're never going to get a complete answer. That's the only question you're asking that the, what should I be eating should always be paired with, how should I be eating? And I don't mean necessarily your portion size or what times of the day to be eating all of those things are important, but how should we be processing our food to make it a safe and nurturing as possible for our human bodies? And that is really the, the central focus of all the work that I'm doing.
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Yeah. I feel like we've lost our relationship with food a lot, and obviously that can be attributed to just the almighty dollar and how it's on every corner. And it's so easy to, it's so accessible and easy to get. And I think it just test taking people away from, oh, let's actually cook. And I know that's something that you're passionate about and hopefully maybe through the whole quarantine and things like this, people maybe started cooking for themselves more. I don't know if you saw this. I know my wife and I have always cooked a lot for ourselves, but I mean, literally in the quarantine, I think every night we were making something different, just being at home and not going out to restaurants, you know, can be a blessing.
1 (5m 46s):
Sure. And it was great. And my family and I, we own what's now called the modern stone age kitchen, but it started as a, as a sourdough bakery, but we do it much more in sourdough now. But what I love to see during, especially in this country, but not only this country, other countries as well at the beginning of, of COVID, it was a huge shortage. So people who were baking bread at home with their, with yeasted breads and their, and their bread makers and all realized that they couldn't make bread any longer with commercial yeast. So they started making sourdough, which I loved. I like the way that it rolled out was it gave people that freedom, that freedom, that understanding that if I make, if I step back and make it one more step from scratch, I don't have to be so reliant on the industrial, you know, modern food system as much.
1 (6m 36s):
What I thought got missed in that, in that trend was all the health benefits of sourdough. Because as soon as yeast started coming back onto the shelves and everybody, not everybody, but many of the people that were making sourdough bread then turned back to the east of breads and missed a little bit of that. But yeah, that, and I also saw a huge, at least around here with some of the shortages that came in the meat industry because of, you know, the meat packing and all that. There were a lot of people around me that were asking, you know, I was doing a lot of online butchering classes and even believe it or not even during COVID. So then person butchering classes, which helped people become less reliant on the packaged meat from the grocery spirits was difficult to get and more reliant on local laboratories and local butchers.
1 (7m 25s):
Yeah.
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Yeah. And, and let's actually talk a little bit about sourdough bread, something that now that I'm interviewing you again, I want to make this with my wife. I don't, we don't eat a lot of, we don't really eat commercial bread at all, but let's talk about the difference between like just commercial bread and, and how would you prepare like a sourdough?
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Sure. And let me, and let me start off by saying too, I would never, I would never tell anyone who's not eating bread, that they should start eating bread. Yeah. But the message, and I think that message gets lost. Cause we, we make a massive quantity of sourdough bread here at the, at the modest age kitchen, and, and truly nourish our community with it. But it's not a, Hey, you should be eating bread. If you're not, it's a, Hey, if you're going to eat bread, this is the healthiest, safest, most nourishing version possible oven. This is the kind you should eating this to the kind you should be feeding your kids. So here here's the difference if anybody's ever made bread or even if you've just made pancakes or muffins or cupcakes in order you take that flour and your finished product needs to not be this dense brick, it needs to have some kind of air on the inside of it for pleasure and for the mouth feel.
1 (8m 38s):
And for all of that. So we can live in bread or raise the bread in a number of different ways. And that's been done on a number of different ways throughout history. One way is through yeast. So you have the yeast arrow, you know, trillions, billions and trillions of these microorganisms that eat the carbohydrates. Obviously the flour and the sugars that are in the dough and produces carbon dioxide. And alcohol is a by-product. So the same yeast that you would use to make beer and wine, you know, because it's making the alcohol in bread making we're, we're allowing that yeah, it's producing alcohol that gets cooked off during the baking process. But the, the carbon dioxide that it produces, which is also in really good beer making it's the same apartment oxide it's used to carbonate the beer also Eleven's the bread and makes it rise.
1 (9m 28s):
We can also use other Lemnos like chemical level, like baking soda and baking powder and something original gingerbread was made with something called heart shorn, which was made from ground up red deer antler in Germany and made these what we call ammonia cookies. Cause they smell like ammonia, but they were, it was a chemical leverage leavening process. And then the other way to 11 dough is mechanically. So there are some breads and there's some commercial brands that are 11 because they pump air into it. Or around here on the Eastern shore, this hysteric type of biscuit called a beat biscuit where you just mix up flour, water, and salt, you put it in a bag and you literally swing it over your shoulder and you hit a stump.
1 (10m 9s):
You hit a stump repeatedly, you put it on a slump, you hit it with a sledgehammer. And what you're doing through that process is actually getting air into it. I've never made it, but I understand my old timers around here that have, when you hit it and it makes a certain sound, you realize that you've pumped enough air into it. And then you can bake these things off and they're, they're sort of loving, but for everything I just mentioned, whether it's yeast or chemical , or even if it's a heart showing, or even if it's beaten the air into it, the gluten that you start with is the gluten that you end with in the final product, right? And, and, and gluten and nuts and seeds in the beans. All of those things have wreck havoc in our bodies.
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None of there's no grain on the planet. There's no nut on the planet. There is no bean on the planet. There is none of that that is designed for us to get nutrition out of it. Those grains and nuts and seeds and the games are all designed to actually they're designed chemically and physically to pass through the digestive tracks of animals, unharmed and land in a pile of newer on the other side, and then grow and scrap any life. That's what they're designed for. There are some animals that have biologically figured out how to overcome those limitations, right? Or overcome those situations like rivers, birds, like ducks and geese that have specialized mechanisms in their bodies to detoxify and break down physically and chemically those brains to make them safe for nursing, for them to eat.
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We don't have that taking a grain of wheat with all the lectins and anti-nutrients phytates and all the issues that it has with it, drying it and grinding it and leavening it and then eating it. Isn't the safest way for the human body to consume that bread. What w what we need to do is do something to it, to get, you know, sort of neutralize or lessen the chemical warfare that they're engaging with to, to survive and produce new life and make it safe for our bodies and the way that we do that several ways, but by tricking it and thinking that it can let us defenses down and support in your life and, and spread is one way.
1 (12m 18s):
So soaking, sprouting and fermenting are the ways that we can take and make those grains nuts and legumes safer for the human body to digest. Now, the earliest example of bread in the world is something like 12 to 14,000 years old. And for the entirety of time that there's been any pipe or bread being made it all by default has been a sourdough type of bread and not many Spanish sourdough and a regular yeasted bread that could get at the grocery store. Yeasted bread relies upon yeast to produce carbon dioxide and alcohol 11 to bread. Sourdough bread relies upon yeast to do that, but also has a second fermentation at the same time that's happening at the same time.
1 (13m 3s):
It's just a lactic fermentation. It's the same. It's it's may uses lactobacillus bacteria that chemically and physically transforms the grains into their safest and those nursing for impossible for our bodies. So at the same time that the yeast is, is eating and, and, and spitting out carbon dioxide and alcohol. The lack of bacillus bacteria are also operating and they are chemically and physically transforming the gluten or whatever other kind of grain you have in there. Partially digesting them, breaking them down, helping neutralize some of the toxins that are in it and transforming it into something completely different. If you only have the lactic fermentation, the bread doesn't rise. If you only have the yeast fermentation, the bread does becomes safe enough for us to eat.
1 (13m 46s):
The cool thing is the bacteria and yeast that we need for Serato bread is literally in the air around us. It's on our skin, it's on those grains. We just have to harness them and allow them to do the work for us. And it's incredibly easy, incredibly safe to do. And the sourdough process, like I said, take something that has no business being in our bodies and transforms it into something that I would very easily make the argument to say that that can be a part of a healthy human diet. If you're processing those grains in the proper way, the problem is to do it right. You either have to go to a real bakery or do it yourself at home, because there is no FDA regulation that defines what we call sourdough and almost all of the bread you would find in a, in a major grocery store or a big box store that says sourdough on it is actually not sourdough.
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It is not going through that process. And if you look at the label, all they've done is taken that idea, which is a false idea, but that idea that a sourdough should taste a little bit sour. It doesn't to, but they've taken that idea and they've taken a yeasted bread. They've added an acid to it, like a citric acid or a lactic acid or scenic acid, which is vinegar and a little bit to a regular yeasted bread to give it a little Tang and then called it sourdough. And health-wise, it is the same as eating a loaf of wonder bread.
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Yeah. Yeah. So the commercial sourdough bread, and it's probably not what you want to get. You got to make it yourself
1 (15m 21s):
And you got to make it yourself. Or if you have a local bakery where you trust the baker and they're doing it the right way, that's the way to do it. Same thing goes at a restaurant. If you go a restaurant and say, Hey, you know, it's a, it's a burger restaurant. And they say, Hey, we have sourdough rolls. Most of them are getting the sourdough rolls from a food supplier somewhere. That's also doing the same exact thing. So if you have to be, you have to do it yourself and it's credibly easy and rewarding to new.
0 (15m 44s):
And what about, let's talk a little bit about sprouting and soaking. Like I buy this high quality almond butter and with that's completely sprouted, and I think it's high quality. And, and, and, you know, like, like we talked about better for your, for your gut and digestion. Wha what would you say some of the reasons of sprouting and soaking and fermenting that, that, you know, I'm sure you saw when you visited the tribes and things like that, that they did as well. Is that just to help with digestion or try to get more nutrients out of that?
1 (16m 18s):
It's a, it's a little bit of both, right? So if you see, and this, this is across the board, right? I have never found a group, an ancestral traditional group that I've worked with, or even looked at historical references of using nuts, strings lagoons, those sorts of things, which are, which are literally all the same thing for a plant right there, they're there, they're there to do the same thing, support new life, and remember to reiterate plants don't move. So they have to protect themselves. And through predation may protect themselves from insects, from fungus, from disease, from predation, through chemical warfare.
1 (16m 58s):
So they produce chemicals that allow those seeds, the most important part of that plant. I mean, that's their young, that's their babies to stay dormant until they're in the right environment to then sprout and become new life. And all these, these anti-nutrients these, these toxins that are there in and around those seeds and the goons and nuts are there for that reason. And when you trick it into, when it's in the right environment of support your life, it lets down those defenses, there are chemical reactions that happen that make them a lot safer for us to consume at that point. So if you think about it, the right environment for a seat in that room is a warm, moist environment.
1 (17m 39s):
That's when it's going to sprout, that's when it's going to support your life. So fermentation, soaking, sprouting are all different ways of getting at it. Now, sprouting is fantastic. Sprouting helps with many of those toxins, many of those anti-nutrients, none of them totally get rid of all of it. Right? So for an example, a toxin that, that I am always thinking about, and there's some experts, people like Sally Norton that have spent their entire career working on are things like oxalates, oxalates are plant toxins that we, I haven't found a good strategy to completely get rid of them yet, even soaking and sprouting doesn't do it.
1 (18m 21s):
And unfortunately, nuts are very, very, very high in oxalates, including almonds. So while soaking an almond can help with a lot of the issues soaking it, doesn't get rid of the oxalate. So in cases where you have a high oxalate food, like almond, spinach are two great examples. That's something that you would want to pay attention to. How much of it you're eating again, not that you shouldn't eat any of it, but it, isn't the kind of thing that an almond and almond shake in an almond milk, spinach shape is not the kind of people wanted everyday for breakfast. You can go to those sorts of issues, right?
0 (18m 57s):
And a lot of people think that's healthy, right. And throw some kale in there. Two kales high in oxalates as well.
1 (19m 4s):
Absolutely. So it's rhubarb, Sesame seeds are incredibly high, you know, some, and again, these things that we, we sprinkle them on rural, none of those things by themselves are a huge issue as even spinach it, but we changed. We've modified. We talked about connection earlier. We, we are so disconnected from our food today. Many of us are, you know, we're not growing our food or raising our animals or, or, you know, being forced through those mechanisms to eat seasonally and, and, and understand the life cycle of plants and animals. And these sorts of things that are, are the cues. The things that would normally teach us how we should be eating or restricting us to eating in a certain way are no longer in place.
1 (19m 47s):
And, you know, spinach is if you grew spinach in the ground outside, not the who pals, not the greenhouse, but on the ground outside, you'd have, I don't know what two weeks of spinach that you could eat. And if you ate spinach for two weeks out of the year, no big deal. But now we've listened to a cartoon in the 1960s and seventies about this being a health food, and we're growing it all over the world and we're freezing it and shipping it. Now we considered it a super food and you can eat it every single day of the year. And we've created a problem that was never a problem before. And the other, you know, you mentioned almonds, almond milk is become quite a problem in many parts of the world as well. There was just a study that came out.
1 (20m 27s):
I believe it was in Chicago for the first time ever children under the age of 10 years old, they're presenting with kidney stones and it's happening in families that are raising their kids, vegan and kids are drinking the same amount of almond milk as it normally would be drinking from cow's milk and creating again, a situation we've never before seen our species.
0 (20m 49s):
Yeah. And what about the problem with almonds and the amount of water that they, that they use? I I've, I remember reading about that. I think, I think it was something, something crazy. I don't know. And I don't know if you know the stats on like how much water it takes to just make one almond it's, it's quite, it's amazing. And most of them are grown, I think, in California for the most part. Yeah. No, I mean, I think you're right. Like there, like spinach, like you mentioned, we actually have a little bit a garden and my wife likes tomatoes and tomatoes again, a night shade and high end, probably some anti-nutrients. Right. But if, again, if you're having them for just a seasonal part of the year and making it and growing it yourself, no harm for the most part, unless you're really sensitive to them.
0 (21m 39s):
But if you're, like you said, commercially, if you're having them all year round, that's when the issue can come
1 (21m 45s):
And thinking about this with nuts as well. If, if we've taken those mechanisms away in what we call convenience, right? We've taken the mechanisms that helped us eat incredibly healthy diets away, something as simple as shelling nuts for us. If I remember as a kid, I'd go to my grandparent's house and there'd be a little bowl of mixed nuts and a little Nutcracker, and you'd sit there and I could spend 20 minutes cracking a Walnut and an almond and a Brazil mutt. And I would eat seven nuts or six nuts into a bag and grab handfuls of nuts.
1 (22m 25s):
And we can get at a BJ's for a really good price. And that mechanism that restricted the amount of nuts that we were eating nuts at a, at a low level, especially if they're soaked or sprouted, no big deal. They do certainly deliver nutrition. They certainly deliver some bad things as well, but those bad things are limited when we ha I mean, imagine if you had to collect them, that's driving practice, roasted nuts, cracked in that, and then eat the nuts. And now we can drink a quarter of almond milk for $2 at BJ's. And all of a sudden we have all these problems we've never had before, but it's all about that connection. You mentioned earlier, we were, we're getting so far removed that those mechanisms are no longer there. So we have to think about some of these things more than ever.
0 (23m 7s):
Yeah. Yeah, no. And I always say like, sometimes my wife likes to stash CEO's we never buy the ones that are not in the shell. Right. Like we buy the ones in the challis, organic, you know, even though, you know, you gotta work for it a little bit. Right. Got to work for sure. So let's also talk, I know that you you've traveled all over and we touched on it the first time we, we spoke backpack, but it's been a year ago is I love touching back on the tribals and the tribes. And what'd you learn from like, you know, like the Subaru warriors are, you know, the, the Highlanders, what were some of the things that you learned?
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I know, I know you drank blood. I'd just be curious to know, is there anything else that, that sort of stuck out when you, when you visited those tribes?
1 (24m 0s):
Look, the couple of things fermentation was at any, any, like mentioning any traditional or ancestral group that I've, I've went and spent time with her lived with learned from eight, with cooked, with shared food, with fermentation was at the core of all of their diets. And it wasn't just fermented vegetables like sauerkraut. And all those sorts of things certainly do exist. Fermentation was, was always present the sombrero and the Maasai are the only these nomadic pastoralists are the only two traditional groups. I know that fermented that had dairy in their diets that fermented dairy isn't the core of it.
1 (24m 43s):
Right? So a great example is in Mongolia, I spent a lot of pounding on Golia dairy is at central core of their food. And it's everything from camel milk to yak milk, to horse milk, to sheet milk across the board, goat milk, but it's always fermented. And it's fascinating because we tend, when you think about something like lactose intolerance, many of us view lactose intolerance as this weird things that ha where you think that happens to some humans. In fact, it's the exact opposite. 60% of modern humans right now are lactose-intolerant 40, 40% are lactose tolerant.
1 (25m 25s):
It is common for mammals to become lactose-intolerant after we're weaned off our mothers. And that goes for, for a cow to a human. And what happens is when we get weaned off our mothers, we, we stop or slow the production of lactase. The enzyme that breaks down the sugars, lactose with them. Lactose-intolerant we as mammals don't need it anymore in the world, but humans have this interesting thing that we as adults consume dairy from, from other animals. And what's happened is that there's been a few independent genetic mutations, mostly African in Europe, where populations subsisted on dairy for a long period of time into adulthood, where they continue to produce lactose that enzyme as adults.
1 (26m 8s):
That's the weird thing. The weird thing is that we've been able to produce lactose into adulthood and consume milk as adults safely. So those of us, but it depends on where you live and your, you know, sort of your genetic past would help determine whether or not your lack of tone or intolerance. So for example, in north America, native Americans have almost a hundred percent lactose intolerance. They've never throughout time been in a situation where they were consuming dairy from other animals into adulthood, never, you know, created that, that genetic mutation that allowed them as adults to continue to produce that enzyme lactose we're. Whereas in Ireland, it's the exact opposite in Ireland.
1 (26m 49s):
There's almost a hundred percent lactose tolerance into adults. And that really speaks to the long history or they've had with dairy. But here's the crazy thing with Mongolia in Mongolia, where dairy is central to their diets. They still, they have a very low lactose tolerance in adults. And the reason is because they always fermenting their dairy. And when you ferment the dairy, just like when you're from, I think sourdough bread and the lactobacillus bacteria, eating the sugars, needing the carbohydrates, the lactobacillus bacteria, and a dairy ferment. And I mean, dairy ferment, things like yogurt or kefir or cheese, real traditional cheese, the lactobacillus bacteria eats the sugars in the milk, the lactose, right?
1 (27m 33s):
And, and I'm sorry, when I was saying the enzyme like Facebook, it eats, eats the lactose sugar. So a fully fermented dairy product or dairy food has very little or zero lactose in it. So since you're, it doesn't matter if your body's not producing the enzyme lactase, you don't need it because the final product doesn't have it in it. Plus in, in real live fermented dairy products, you are actually getting some of that enzyme when, when you're, when you're consuming it. So you're getting some of that lactase that enzyme into your body, and it can help you digest any, any of the stuff that that's left. And that really speaks to the, to the role of, of feed processing.
1 (28m 14s):
Cause if you just looked at it from that side of you and said, oh, they're eating dairy there. And they're eating dairy here and they're eating dairy here and they have problems here and don't have problems there. You're not really getting at the root of the problem. It's not dairy. That's not the what, it's the, how it's fermenting the dairy to make. It makes the big difference.
0 (28m 30s):
So is that something that you incorporate in your diet? Do you ferment your dairy?
1 (28m 34s):
Absolutely. Now I will say my kids are entire life. My oldest 18 years old, they have gone straight from breast milk to raw dairy. There they've been on the road there, their entire lives, which was a huge, huge struggle for me because in, we lived in New Jersey and we lived in Maryland and both states raw dairy is, is very illegal. So we had to travel quite a bit to get, or get it from local sources that we shouldn't have legally, but we've, they've been on raw dairy, their whole lives, but more importantly, so high quality, raw dairy, but more importantly, drinking a glass of milk. Wasn't a common thing in our house.
1 (29m 15s):
And it's not a common thing historically or prehistorically as well. That's a really weird thing. All the dairy that almost all the dairy we consumed in our house always and still continue to has been fermented. So cultured butter, kefir, yogurt, real cheeses, those sorts of things.
0 (29m 32s):
So the fermented dairy that's on the market. Like if you go to whole foods, you would say that would be something that would be okay to eat
1 (29m 41s):
Much. So again, we get back to this. It's like the sourdough thing. If you have the time, if you have the time or the inkling to do it, it'd be much better to do it in your own home because you have control over what the source of that theory and that you're actually doing a really good job of the fermentation, but high quality yogurts, high quality craft beers, high quality, real cheeses, high quality, cultured butter, those foods you can buy. And the commercial versions of them is a lot better than drinking a glass of milk. 100%.
0 (30m 11s):
Now, when you get your raw dairy, you're w you're just drinking it straight, right? Or you, you don't need to, are you fermenting it?
1 (30m 17s):
No, we're still fermenting it. Let me tell you why. When we humans don't have a very efficient digestive track whatsoever, and we have to work very hard to take these foods that were not designed to eat, whether it's a grain or whether it's dairy or a whole host of other things, I can mention that we're not designed to eat, and we have to process it properly to get it ready for our bodies so that we can safely and fully get all the nutrition it has to, to provide to us most of the time we're mimicking what happens in another animal's digestive tract. So if we're fermenting or soaking grains or spreads, that's happening inside of things like ducks and geese that are naturally designed to consume grains, right?
1 (31m 1s):
Dairy, we have to mimic, I fully believe the only way back of I'm sorry, the only food, the only perfect food for humans, the only food that were highly perfectly designed to consume as a species is, is what is dairy. And, and only, only that's the only perfect that's the only perfect food for humans, but that's only for a short period of our, of our life, right? We're only designed to consume infants when we get weaned off of that dairy. I mean, that's what defines us. I mean, we're mammals, that's what we do. But when we start to, when we get weaned off of milk, are we biologically change and we're not producing the same enzymes things like lactase that allow us to safely consume that dairy any longer, what we need to do.
1 (31m 52s):
I'm convinced what we need to do as adult humans. If we want to consume dairy is to consume it, it to process it outside of our bodies, the way that it was processed inside of our bodies to get it ready for the rest of our digestive tract. So when we drank milk as an infant, this is how it works. We drink from our mothers that is raw, completely alive milk, full of beneficial bacteria already in the process of fermenting, when it's going into our mouth, it goes into our, into our stomachs, into our guts, and it gets hit with several different enzymes that we naturally produce. The Pacers breaks down fat, China's singlets, coagulates, or Thompson, like enzymes, coagulates, and milk and lactase, which breaks down the sugars.
1 (32m 36s):
And we calculate the milk in order to slow it down and our digestive tract. So it can chemically and physically break down fully and ferment before it goes into our snow tests. That's where that, where we absorb all the nutrients from it. So what we're essentially doing as infants at Jamieson, like enzyme in the cheese-making world is known as Reddit. And that's exactly where we get rented to make cheese. We get it from the unwaged stomachs of the stomachs of unweaned animals, like cabs, for example, where they're naturally still producing this enzyme. That's where we create Kurds and, and the by-product way. So if you're taking, if we're fermenting that dairy before we consume it, and especially if we're fermenting it and then isolating it, and we're making real high quality cheeses, that's exactly what we did as infants, as humans.
1 (33m 23s):
So we are not designed. We never have been designed to drink glasses of milk. We'll put it in our cereal and eat it like this, but we can mimic that original process when we're infants by fermenting the milk and then consuming it. And for most adult humans, if it's from a high quality source and it's been fermented, we can get a high quality nutrition from that note.
0 (33m 47s):
So the question is, so we can, I live in Illinois, right? I can, there's a farm, maybe 45 minutes away. And I, I definitely want to get some raw dairy. So in, in sort of a short version, how would, how would we ferment that?
1 (34m 1s):
Okay, if you, so remember this, if the, the, the bacteria that allow the back, this is all the, all these fermentation relationships, these biological symbiotic relationships that have these have formed over millions of years, right? The bacteria that's in that milk, the beneficial bacteria are designed. They had been designed through selective pressures over billions of years, the operated body temperature, right? That's, that's where they operate best, because it makes sense it's in your mother's breasts. It's going into you as a baby, whether you're a cow or a calf or a human, it, that's where they operate.
1 (34m 43s):
The bad stuff operates outside of those outside of those temperature ranges. So the best way to ferment high quality, and I will say raw milk Is bad bedroom, right? So high quality, fresh, raw milk there, the best way to ferment it is to get it directly from the animal and never let it cool down it already in the process of fermenting, keep it at room temperature. And it will actually by itself, turn into something called clever, clever. It's a European term for just milk that's fermented for 24 or 48 hours. It is actually it'll turn into like a yogurt like substance. The problem is, and it's great. It's full of bacteria, good bacteria, full of enzymes.
1 (35m 26s):
So amazing nutrition. The problem is it's almost impossible unless you own your own cow or go to, to get that. So what you're going to do is you're going to get milk was in a process of fermenting that they've chilled down rapidly to meet all the laws and regulations on the first thing you have to do is to warm it back up to the temperature range that the good bacteria will operate it, the problem, and this is going to sound . This is going to sound like the exact opposite of what everybody thinks about milk. When you take that milk full of beneficial bacteria, it's designed to operate at body temperature and ferment do its job and pull it down below 42 degrees, which is where our refrigerators operate.
1 (36m 9s):
We've slowed down the, any, any the life of all of the good bacteria. And now we're in a situation where all, yeah, everything's slowed down and that milk will last longer, but bacteria that operated other temperatures like lower temperatures now start to dominate the kind of pool of all the bacteria that's in there. So even though again, that milk would last for awhile, you're changing the populations of, of good and bad bacteria. So if that, no, cause if that milk has come out of a healthiest cow ever on an amazing farm and it's raw it's to chill. Ben had sat in the fridge for three days, and then now you bring it up the room temperature you've changed the populations of those bacteria while it may work.
1 (36m 53s):
The best thing you can do at that point is add some back, some really good, powerful bacteria into it to make sure your fermentation is going to happen, operate properly. So that's where you would add maybe yogurt into it. Cause you know, that that the yogurt bacteria is full of full, of really good stuff. Or you could add fresh kefir, or if you have access to cheesemaking cultures that are full of those bacteria, you can add those in. But really the only thing you have to do, the short version of this is get your milk to the right temperature, which is room temperature with body temperature, you know, somewhere in that range and make sure either the bacteria that are in there or thriving. And if not, you add some bacteria to it.
1 (37m 34s):
Clabber yogurt, kefir, a cheesemaking culture. Any of these things w w would allow it to start from nothing.
0 (37m 42s):
Okay. I think I got that, but that does make sense that with the raw deer that you want to have it at, you know, like you're your own temperature, your body temperature. Once you get it cold or too hot, then you're obviously killing some of that good bacteria off, or you're sort of changing the way of its natural state.
1 (38m 1s):
And again, I know there was a long answer to a simple seemingly simple question, but, and it may scare people off. The reality is we have been fermenting dairy for at least 8,000 years, at least 8,000 years with no thermometer with no stainless steel pots with no refrigeration, very easy. It's very easy to safely do it. As long as you understand some of the basic mechanics of it to make your own yogurt for fear cheese. Oh,
0 (38m 27s):
Okay. Yeah. I got to give that a go. I'll give that a one. I want to go first before I do the sourdough bread, because more nutrition and dairy, but yeah, it's funny. Dairy is like one of those topics. I have so many people on my podcast and we talk, you got certain people are so against it. Some people are, you know, more for it, you know, depending on where, you know, what type of diet they have. I mean, like you said, I mean, I think it depends on where you're getting it from, but mainly commercial dairy is a no-no unless, you know, you're getting a really high quality, like you meant like a deer that's fermented. So to move on from that, why don't we talk about some cornerstones of a healthy diet, maybe some things that individuals could get here that maybe they could change in their diet right away, or ways that they can prepare foods that will make them better off coming into the new year since we are getting to the end of the year.
1 (39m 22s):
Absolutely. So the first thing, I think one of the most important things that we can do and the easiest thing that we can do and make a, make a change like within the next 15 minutes is go directly to your cupboard or your cabinet or wherever you keep your food supplies and get rid of every single industrial nut and seed oil in your house, period, bar, none. So corn oil, soybean oil, any of those, they still
0 (39m 48s):
Buy
1 (39m 49s):
Anything that says vegetable oil, Sesame, that all those roles should go. The only oils that we have in our house and here at the Montessori Nate's kitchen are. And when I say oil, and I know this is one of those terms we use all the time, but many of you might not understand where the distinction is. The distinction between what we call oil. And we would call say, fat is oil is liquid at room temperature and fat like butter lard. Tallow is usually solid at room temperature. So the only oils that we have at all are avocado and olive oil, which are not nut oils, they're both fruit oils. And the reason we have those is first of all, they have a much longer history, especially the olive oil in our, in our diets than any industrial cottonseed oil or any of the other things.
1 (40m 37s):
But they give up their fat, their lipids incredibly easy. They don't need a lot of pressure. They don't need chemicals. They don't need any of those things to give up their fat. So it's not a huge industrial process. That's already screwed it all up before we have access to it. And the other, the only nut oil that we use is coconut oil and the same thing. It, even though it's considered a nut, it gives up its fat. So incredibly easy that we don't need any of the high dollar machines and all this to do it. And, and the chemical processes. However, in all of those cases, we should be very careful about heating them up. You know, cooking with a little bit of olive oil may not be a very big deal, but I would never fry in olive oil.
1 (41m 19s):
I would never heat it up to a very high temperature. It'll break down way too easy. So get rid of all your industrial nut and seed oils. Maybe keep some olive oils and avocado oil, coconut oil around for cold applications like dressings and man ages and those sorts of things, and rely almost solely on high-quality animal fats like butter lard, tallow schmaltz, which is poultry fat. Those, those are the fats. That's the first time I've heard of that. Really. So, you know, anybody who has a Jewish grandmother talked to her, she knows what small is. They've usually had some next to the stove.
1 (41m 59s):
I understand it is. I understand that all cakes, the best cakes in the murals were the fact that you were put into the cake is, is chicken fat or small, but whether it's from a duck or a Turkey, keep it. It's amazing. And in fact, if you, if you were frying eggs, frying, egg, and chicken fat, I know it sounds a little bit strange, but it's amazing. All of our, all of our high temperature cooking is done with high quality animal fats. Save it. I mean, whether it comes off the bacon or it comes off of your roast, or whether you skim it off and you're making bone broth and it's, it's the marrow and the bone grease and the fat that's all together there, that stuff is amazing. So number one, change in fats, especially if you have kids or young children at home, you know, they, their brains are starving for high quality fat.
1 (42m 49s):
And at the only thing we're feeding them is these industrial nutters seed oils. Then we're wrecking havoc on the young bodies. That's number one, number two, you take a strong stance. We have in our house up at the monitor stone-age kitchen against refined sugars. I realized I was very dogmatic as, as a father, as a husband several years ago. And we got rid of every, every sweetener in the house. There was an entire year that we made every food that we ate entirely from scratch. Most of the vegetables we eat were forged, almost all the food we ate. All the meat we ate was wild and killed by us and butchered at home. And while it was an amazing year for me to learn my and biologically, my family, I believe is incredibly healthy that year, emotionally, we were a wreck.
1 (43m 37s):
I mean the amount of stress that was in that house around food and what we're going to eat, it was, it was crazy. I've backed off a lot on, on certain things and where I think I should have. And one of them is an understanding that in our modern world, true health comes from both a combination of biological health, through food and emotional cultural health, through food and they're, and they're really intertwined. And there can be a place in a healthy human diet. I fully believe this where sweeteners are used in moderation, but here's, here's, here's the way we pictured in our house. There is no biological need for sugar in a human there's none, there's an emotional need, but there's not a biological need.
1 (44m 24s):
So if we're going to include sugar at all in our diet, we might as well. This is what I believe. We might as well get something else with it, whether it's minerals or enzymes or something, and high-quality raw, honey, high quality maple syrup, unrefined sugar is like muscovado, which is one. We, we rely on Ken deliver, not only the sweetness we want and some flavors that we really like, but also some other things that do provide some, some health benefits. So again, we shouldn't be drinking a half a cup of maple syrup a day, but if we include it in something it's much better alternative than, than refined white sugar. And, and if you're going to use sugar itself, do a little bit of research.
1 (45m 5s):
You know, brown sugar is junk brown sugar to domino grandchildren. The grocery store is not an unrefined version of white sugar. In fact, it's even more processed than the white sugar, because in almost all cases for brown sugar, they've completely refined it down to white sugar and then added back a little bit of molasses into it to turn it into what we call brown sugar and then put it onto a shelf. So, number one is the fats. Number two is the sweeteners and number three, and this is kind of a, catch-all a friend it's going to sound a little bit daunting, but I fully believe that
0 (45m 36s):
Wait, before I was, before you say this, my one question was you see a lot now with Stevia. What are your thoughts? Yeah. What are your thoughts on Stevia? Or, you know, even some of 'em like xylitol, things like that.
1 (45m 51s):
I have a little bit of an apprehension about it because, and listen, I will be completely honest. I don't know enough about Stevia xylitol, any of those, any of those sorts of things, too, you know, the monks fruit,
0 (46m 5s):
Some of these things,
1 (46m 6s):
Fruit extract, it could, some of that could be absolutely fine. I am, this is just goes into the third and a little bit, but I tend to believe that if it's something that I don't have the ability to make myself in my house with the base, most basic of tools, then it shouldn't go into our bodies now, not like processing sugar, but did the kind of process that you would go through to get maple we've made maple syrup. We've actually, you know, collected honey from beehives. We could get sugar cane and get down to the state that muscovado sugar is in our house with basic equipment, getting Stevia, getting some of these other things.
1 (46m 49s):
It just seems so foreign and so disconnected that I have a little bit of apprehension about it. And again, that comes from an uninformed place. But if I don't, if it's something that I can't do,
0 (47m 1s):
Yeah. That makes sense. And honey, honey, something I'm seeing get talked about a little bit in like the carnival world. I know like Paul said, you know, it was talking about adding that back into his diet, cause it's not toxic. And obviously some tribes did use honey a lot. Is that correct? Or not allowed, but you know, from time to time.
1 (47m 20s):
Absolutely. And there's, there's some suggestion that honey has been in our diet for between two and two and a half million years. There's a little, there's some archeological evidence that suggested. And Paul was just with the hots. I was with the same group years ago. And we both collected honey with the Hobbs. It's something that they th th the hots are the oldest hunter-gatherer group in the world still in existence. And they love honey. They don't get it that often, but when they get it, they absolutely love it. And when they eat it, they're eating, it only collected, luckily in Tanzania where the Hadza live there's stingless bees. So they can collect this honey from the stimulus bees and not get stung at all when they collected.
1 (48m 4s):
It's not like they're taking honey and squeezing it out of the plastic, bear on the other thing, they're getting the honey, they're getting the propolis, they're getting the honey comb. They're getting all of these things together at the same time, which is a much different food than refined honey coming from the grocery store.
0 (48m 20s):
Okay. Yeah. And that could be a good alternative for a lot of people. Cause there's some good quality honeys you can get out there.
1 (48m 27s):
Absolutely. And the nice thing to remember, if you're going to start substituting some of your normal baking or cooking with some of these more unrefined versions, if it's something like a muscovado sugar or even maple syrup, it has, that has the same sweetness as an, as a refined sugar. So you can substitute it. One-to-one honey is actually sweeter than white tables, you know, white, regular domino sugar. So if you're going to substitute honey, actually back off a little bit on it, it may make things a little bit too sweet. And I know that's a little bit almost God says honey, but no, it's actually sweeter than sugar.
0 (49m 5s):
Yeah. And so what was your third?
1 (49m 9s):
The third one is basically it's connect and I connect with your food and by doing so you will give yourself the best education about food and your diet and your health, and you, you could ever get from a podcast or a book or a, or a documentary or anything. So this is here's some suggestions. So number one, from that connection levels to where your food comes from, some of these may sound so foreign, but do them, they're more accessible. Anything forage, fish, if you have access to. And I don't mean you have to all of a sudden go out and spend $4,000 on camouflage and buy a gun and go hunting every day, go hunting with somebody, just sit in a stand with them for a day and see what it's like for the woods to come alive.
1 (49m 55s):
And, you know, to, to understand what a ho a real ethical hunter actually does or go listen, I have run foraging tours all over the world. I have forged through Mascoutah through Dublin, through New York city, through Washington, DC. You don't have to live in the middle of the woods to forage and get that, you know, understand where you can pick maybe some dandelions forage, go fishing, collect some shellfish. If you, any of those sorts of things, you know, are ways that we accessed food for millions of years, that most of us don't believe we have access to, but what we do, and even if you do it once a season or even once a year, it, it, it reminds you of that connection that seasonality that localness of food.
1 (50m 41s):
That's incredibly important. Farmer's markets go, and this may sound incredibly strange, but go, if you have access to a local butcher, go to the butcher shop and bring your kids right. The, we don't have in our, in our kitchens any longer, we don't have bones. We don't have skin. We don't have feathers. We don't have hair, we don't have feet. We don't have any of those things. We have packaged chicken breasts, and we wonder why our kids can't make the connections between that animal. That's running around and what's on their plate. And w w w when we miss that, we're missing respect and, and, and, and, and, and control over our food system that we really need to get back to.
1 (51m 25s):
I am an, I truly believe that the healthiest human diet includes animals, completely nose to tail approaches to animals, but I reject the modern industrial meat industry, which you can easily do both of those things at the same time. So connect yourself and your kids back with where their animals are coming from, shop and buy by the largest, not the largest cut of meat, the largest part of an animal. You can get, get a whole chicken, get a shoulder of, of, of a pig and break that down. And, and, and it sounds again strange, but even that sound, even if your kids are watching TV in the other room and you're, and you've brought something home that resembles an arm, and they hear your knife scraping against the bone.
1 (52m 10s):
I mean, these are sands. And most modern American kitchens don't have in them any longer its sites. They don't have them any longer. And most of us again, think that this is some sort of convenience, and we don't have to bother ourselves with these things anymore, but it comes at a huge cost and bring that stuff back into the kitchen. And then really a huge, a huge thing that I recommend a lot is take the foods that you and your family eat all the time, not your Thanksgiving dinner, not your Christmas dinner, not your Sunday dinner, the foods that you guys eat every day and pick one of those meals and cook it entirely from scratch one time. And by doing so, even if you screw it up and it's inedible and the dog won't even eat it, you have learned more about that food than you'll ever learn from a book or anywhere else.
1 (52m 58s):
And even if you always buy it from that point forward, you can go to the grocery store and, and, and look through all the marketing and all the advertising find the right version of that food, the best version possible for you, your family, the environment for the animals, for all of it. And not only are you bringing that food home and serving it to your family, but you're also using your money to support those food producers that are doing the best job possible. That's the of connection that we need. And that is, I think we'll, we'll, we'll will catapult you light years ahead and trying to nourish your family.
0 (53m 35s):
Yeah. I love that. And to summarize a void of refined sugar and industrial seed oils, right. And then connect with your food.
1 (53m 44s):
Perfect.
0 (53m 46s):
And before we finish up here, I know, you know, maybe let people know where they can find your book. I'm assuming Amazon, but eat like a human nourishing foods and ancient ways of cooking to revolutionize your health.
1 (54m 1s):
Absolutely. So I'm staying excited. I literally last night, the box of books came. This has been 10 years of, of writing on the entire family involved in producing this book. And what we've done in this book is I realized that the way I've learned to feed my family has been incredibly valuable to our family. And we just wanted to share it with the world, our approach to food, our outlook on our relationship between humans and the world around us. And most importantly, how to take those messages and make them work into something. What are the takeaways from that recipes and tips and tricks? So the beginning of the book is sort of a cursory, but in depth at the same time, look at our ancestral dietary paths over millions of years.
1 (54m 47s):
And then the book is broken down into sections, plants, animals, grains, Mays, dairy, and so on. And there's a little bit of history and stories in each one of these chapters stories about groups that we've, we've lived with and learned from around the world. And then there's takeaways in every single chapter recipes and tips and real-world takeaways that you can apply in your kitchen. It teaches you how to make sourdough bread. It teaches you how to make cheese. It teaches you how to maze, how to do basic butchering and those sorts of things, how to use the entire animal, the book it launched or releases on November 16th. And it's available in all major book outlets, Amazon Barnes and noble, those sorts of things.
0 (55m 30s):
Yeah, this is great. And I think this is something that the world needs, because like you mentioned, you know, when you, we've just like we talked about in the beginning, we've just lost our connection with how important food is and how food can, you know, you hear it all the time, but food can heal. And when you really get to the root of it and you learn some of the basic techniques that you teach, I'm sure in the book, it's a great, great way to just take those small steps to, you know, put you ahead of where you, you know, how you've done things in the past and, and can, like you mentioned revolutionize your health.
1 (56m 3s):
Yep. So again, I'm so excited because it is, it is accessible. It is recipes and tips that you can do in your own kitchen, whether you're in a flat in New York city or in a house in the middle of Kansas, right. It's it's across the board kind of accessible. Yeah.
0 (56m 19s):
Well, I'm looking forward to, I, I'm definitely gonna order it and read it because I wanna, I want some of those recipes and yeah, I think the more, the more we cook at home, I think that's such like a, like, you can bring your health back just from that avoid going out to restaurants where they're using these seed oils and cook for yourself. And that can be, make, take a big step to get your health back 100%. All right, bill. Well, this was great. A lot of great different topics and I'm looking forward to the book, so I appreciate you coming on. Hey, great. Great to talk to you again. Thanks for having me again.
0 (56m 60s):
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.
