What Carnivore and Fermented Foods Can Teach Us About Healing

Wayne Sutton: What if the reason you don't feel good isn't because you're missing some magical superfood? But what if it's because you're eating too many things your body doesn't handle well? Think about how we're told to eat. Eat more variety, more plants, more fiber, more whole grains, more fruits, more vegetables, add chia seeds, add flax, add kale, little green powder, and 12 supplements on top. And wow, even spirulina that looks like it came out of your swimming pool. If you are still bloated, tired, overwhelmed. Overweight, running to the bathroom, constipated, inflamed, or just feeling like crap. Apparently the answer is add more stuff, right? But what if maybe we got it backwards? What if at least temporarily one of the most powerful things you can do is remove stuff. That's what I want to talk about today on Prosper With Wayne. Elimination dots, why they work and why carnivore, one of the most extreme, if I had to say, and interesting, is so popular today. Welcome to another episode of Prosper with Wayne. Let's look at carnivore, because some myths about that meat deserve a closer look. Then I'm gonna show throw in something that may irritate the carnivore purist, fermented foods. Because there's some fascinating research there too. Now disclaimer before anyone sends me an angry email, I'm not a doctor, I'm not diagnosing or treating anything. I have done very, very strict carnivore. I've done carnivore with fermented foods. I have done carnivore with some cheat days. I'm not saying everyone on earth should eat this way the rest of their life. What I am saying is nutrition is a lot more complicated than meat bad vegetable is good. Okay. And the actual research is much more interesting than headlines. So let's jump into it. Now here's what I love about the concept of an elimination diet. It's incredibly simple. Imagine your car starts running terrible, and after you've installed 37 aftermarket parts, You figure out which one's causing the problem. Well, you don't install another 14 parts. You simplify. You establish a baseline. Then you start adding things back in. That's essentially what a properly designed elimination and reintroduction diet does. Now there's those who will do carnivore and they'll never reintroduce other foods. That's okay. And it works great for them. Do the research, study them out. People that have done carnivore years upon years. But there's those who are going to eliminate and then start bringing back in foods. Observe what happens. Systematically reintroducing while symptoms are monitored. And this isn't some concept invented by carnivore influencers. Elimination diets that are legitimately used clinically for food allergies, intolerances, gastrointestinal condition. In fact, twenty twenty-three meta-analysis involving thirty-four studies and over seventeen hundred, actually seventeen hundred and sixty-two patients with With the form of esophagitis, found an overall historical remission of about 54% across elimination diet approaches. Crohn's disease, which is something I've battled in the past, Crohn's disease has nearly 100% remission rate on a carnivore diet. And if you've ever dealt with IBS, IBD, Crohn's, you understand how important that is. Now that's not proof that elimination diets cure everything. I'm not I'm not saying that. But it demonstrates something important. removing foods can often be very therapeutically useful. And there's another principle here I think that gets overlooked. You don't necessarily have to know what's bothering you before you eliminate it. Let me say that again. Trying to determine what's bothering you and then eliminate it is hard. I've done blood tests. And took that blood test and said, okay, I can I don't need to eat tomatoes or potatoes or I don't need to eat this. And then I take them out of the diet, but I'm still sick. Or maybe I didn't take them out long enough. Or maybe the blood test is wrong. So sometimes elimination and reintroduction helps identify it's nutritional detective work. You remove, you observe, you reintroduce, you observe. Your body becomes part of the evidence. So why carnivore? is such an interesting elimination diet. Now, we get a little controversial for some people. I mentioned that I'm doing carnivore, I'm mostly carnivore, I've tried carnivore, whatever. And all of a sudden everybody, everybody you talk to has a PhD in nutrition. One person says, hey, that meat's gonna kill you. Another guy that hasn't eaten a vegetable since 2019 says, Bro, I've never felt better. So who's right? Maybe that's the wrong question. One of the most interesting ways to look at carnivore isn't necessarily as the perfect human diet, even though I have some great friends who claim it is. I look at it as an unusually aggressive elimination diet. I think about what disappears. No refined sugar. Here's a tough one. No cookies, no doughnuts, no cereal, all right? No bread, no seed oil. In our heavy fast food meals, no ultra processed snack foods, no alcohol, I'm assuming you're doing it strictly. No gigantic ingredient list. And yes, no fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds. You're reducing an incredibly complicated modern diet to just a small number of foods. Meat, eggs, fish, animal fats, maybe dairy, depending on the version you're on. That's fascinating from an elimination standpoint because you're dramatically reducing variables. If someone goes from eating a hundred different ingredients, think about this. When ultra-processed foods, you could be in multiple hundreds of ingredients that's going into your body, and you've reduced that down to just beef, eggs, butter, salt, water, you feel completely different. All right. Then you shouldn't immediately dismiss that person or that protocol. Now, We also can't say, hey, that broccoli was poison Or maybe removing wheat helped. Maybe the alcohol removal helped. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Okay. Are you with me? But here's the key. Maybe it was one or several of those things that changed and took helped you become feeling better. Now, I gotta give you studies though. If I'm gonna get on this podcast and talk about health, let's give into studies. Okay, a fascinating study. In 2021, looked specifically at people eating carnivore. They surveyed 2,029 adults following a carnivore diet for at least six months. All right, the median participant had been eating carnivore for about fourteen months. Here's where it gets interesting. 95% of the people reported improvements in their overall health. Improvements across numerous health conditions and measures of well being. Their median BMI went from about twenty-seven point two to twenty-four point three. And reported adverse symptoms? Relatively uncommon. Now, before the carnivore crowd starts doing victory laps around Whole Foods, that's a little bit of a caveat. This was a self selected, self reported social media survey. it wasn't a randomized controlled trial. So, this wasn't a matched group eaten Mediterranean. Researchers weren't handing people ribeyes in a laboratory for five years. All right. So I want you to understand this. But I'm telling you from someone who has not only lived that way of eating, but have friends who do. I can tell you the difference. Now also remember this: people who tried carnivore and hated it would also be less likely to remain carnivore for six months and participate in a study. So this does not prove that carnivore makes 95% of people healthier. But neither should we pretend the data doesn't exist. More than 2,000 people adhering to an extremely unconventional diet reported high satisfaction and perceived health improvements. It's worth investigating. So My conclusion isn't science has proven carnivore, even though if you look at the blood work, if you look at the lab work, if you look at the reports of those who've done carnivore, you may say otherwise. My conclusion is this. Science needs to study this much more seriously. So let's jump into one of the myths. Red meat automatically destroys your heart. I'm watching a movie the other day, and someone's that guy's got a bacon cheeseburger. man, it looked good. And the person's like, you're going to die of a heart attack if you eat this. And I saw it differently. I'm like, wow, just take the bun off. The meat and the bacon. my goodness, so good, right? But you've heard it for years. It's been indoctrinated. Red meat clogs your arteries. It's usually presented like eating a steak is Basically pouring baking grease directly into your arteries. The actual literature, much more complicated. In fact, a meta-analysis of thirty-six randomized controlled trials, includ involving eighteen hundred and three people, compared red meat diets with various other diets. When all of the comparison dots were combined, researchers found no significant differences in LDL cholesterol, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, or blood pressure. And but here's the key. Well I have seen so many people that their blood pressure has got better, that they are healthier because they got to their ideal weight when they cut out all the processed food. So you don't just ask, is beef healthy? You ask compared to what? If I've replaced my steak with salmon, that's one comparison. If I replace my steak with tofu, that's a totally different one, right? If I replace it with donuts and a 32-ounce soda, we got a totally different conversation. So nutrition lives and dies on what we're comparing it to. Which brings me to an important point. unprocessed meat isn't the same as processed. Here's another mistake people make. They throw ribeyes, ground beef, hot dogs, salami, pepperoni, and highly processed deli meat into one bucket called meat. But they're not necessarily metabolically equivalent foods. All right. For example, one large analysis found the highest category of processed meat consumption had a twenty three percent higher risk of all cause mortality, while the association for unprocessed red meat wasn't there. Again, association does not automatically mean causation. Grab a hold of this. People who eat a lot of processed meat may differ in other lifestyle variables. When somebody says, hey, studies prove that meat causes cancer or meat causes heart disease. Well, okay, what meat? A fresh steak? Or pepperoni, pizza, hot dogs, and bacon, cheeseburger with fries, and ranch on the side. Okay? They're different dietary platforms. So just remember this steak equals a heart attack. It's not accurate. So carnivore research itself is limited. And I'm glad there's more and more doctors. I think so much of you know Dr. Ken Berry and different ones that are out there doing the research. In fact, if you want to know more about carnivore, go to episode, one of our first episodes on here with Dr. Bradley Walters. I'll link it in the comment below so you can check it out. Now, low carbohydrate research is much larger. If carnivore carnivore research is limited, then the low carb lifestyle and research is much larger. And that's relevant. Because carnivore is essentially an extreme version of carbohydrate restriction. Alright? So analysis of 38 studies, including 6,499 adults, compared low carb and low fat diets. Six to twelve months later, low carb diets performed much greater for weight loss, HDL cholesterol, and triglycerides. Low fat diets performed somewhat better for LDL and total cholesterol. And that's important. But again, do your research on cholesterol and that's for another video altogether. Now here's a big one. And this is the one it took me forever to grab a hold of. Especially because I had Crohn's disease, I'd had surgery, I'd had IBS and IBD. Here's where it gets real controversial. You need fiber. That's what everybody said. Yeah, one of the first questions people ask about carnivores, Wayne, how are you gonna poop without fiber? If as if the human digestive tract sees a stake and says, Sorry boss, we're closed until somebody sends down a brand muffin. See, fiber may have some support and benefits in some dietary context. I'm not going to tell you fiber is useless. however, there's a big difference between saying fiber can be beneficial and saying every individual needs as much fiber as possible, regardless of symptoms or context. It's just simply not the same. In fact, some gastrointestinal conditions are specifically managed by modifying the types and amount of fermentable carbohydrates or fiber. And people vary enormously in how they respond to different foods. What happens to your digestion, your bloating, your energy, your hunger, your bowel movements, your blood glucose, inflammatory symptoms, your labs, that's information. All right. So when I turn, I'm gonna give you my story. When I get off of the processed foods and the carbs, when I am either strict carnivore or primarily carnivore, a couple things happen. Brain fog literally goes away. Joints in my fingers, in my hips, in my back, that inflammation goes away. When I reintroduce that, because I have reintroduced, hey, maybe I can eat this. Guess what? That pain comes back, the inflammation comes back, the brain fog, the fatigue comes back. So I go, okay. That was a good test. Let me remove it again. And I start feeling great again. Okay. This is where I'm very intrigued by carnivore, but I'm also fascinated with fermented foods. So this is something in my study. I actually studied Dr. Josh Axe. He had a great teaching on this. And so yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, fermented vegetables, foods that humans have been consuming for a very long time. But not as much here in the United States. And there's an amazing stamp study out of Stanford. I think it deserves more attention. They placed healthy adults on a diet of high fiber or fermented foods and for 17 weeks. The fermented food group showed an increase in their microbiome diversity along with decreases in multiple inflammatory markers. The researchers concluded that fermented foods may help counter the reduced microbiome diversity. And inflammation common in our society today. Now it's interesting because the modern health conversation makes us choose teams. All right, hear me. Team plants, team meat, team keto, team vegan, team carnivore. Why? Meanwhile, your gut bacteria doesn't have Instagram account, doesn't follow these influencers. They don't care which influencer you follow. So what if someone does very well on an animal-based elimination diet? But eventually discovers that certain carefully selected fermented foods work beautifully for them. Maybe it's fermented dairy, maybe it's yogurt, sauerkraut. I'm not prescribing that, I'm saying experiment intelligently. I personally love sauerkraut. Different brands of kimchi a lot. So sauerkraut, kimchi, and meat. Just does the body good. So why are fermented foods different? Let's talk about this. Fermentation changes food. Microorganisms partly break down components of the food. That can change digestibility, flavor, and you know, the microbial exposure exposed that is associated with the food. that means a food and its fermented version aren't necessarily identical. Milk and yogurt, they're not the same thing. Cabbage and sauerkraut, they're not the same thing. And fermented foods gives us something our sanitized modern diet increasingly lacks. regular exposure to food associated microorganisms. That's important. Now, don't turn that into Kim Chi curves everything But that Stanford experiment is intriguing because the researchers didn't merely ask people, hey, do you feel better? No, they measured their microbiome and their immune changes. An increased fermented food intake corresponded with increased microbial diversity and reduction in inflammatory proteins. That's worth paying attention to. So here's why I think the conversation becomes bigger than just carnivore. Maybe we're arguing about the wrong thing. Maybe the most important nutritional divide isn't. Plant versus animals, maybe it's closer to real food versus industrial food. Think about what humans historically ate meat, fish, eggs, roots, seasonal fruit, plants, fermented foods, cultured dairy in many populations. Foods that spoiled, that had to be honey, grown, harvested, preserved, or cooked. Compared that to what surrounds us now. Breakfast cereal, protein bars, frozen pizza, cookies, chips, soda, candy, drive-thru meals. Healthy snacks with 31 ingredients and coffee drinks containing enough sugar to qualify as a dessert. Today foods engineered to be so hyper palatable that your brain keeps screaming eat more. So maybe your body isn't broken. Maybe it's responding predictably to an abnormal food environment. So I want to talk one more moment about carnivore. So imagine someone currently eats cereal for breakfast. Fast food for lunch, energy drinks, snacks all afternoon, pizza for dinner, and ice cream at night. That's what I used to do. I would do cereal, I would do fast food for lunch, I'd have energy drinks throughout the day. I love those monsters. They do taste good. And I would have snacks throughout the day, pizza for dinner, and that evening bowl of ice cream. But then Monday, let's say that's one way of living, then Monday you switch to eggs, ground beef, steak, fish, water, salt. And suddenly Huge amounts of protein with no refined carbs, no sugary drinks, virtually no ultra-processed foods. All right. Three months later, that person's lost 25 pounds, his triglycerides drop, his blood sugar improves, he's not hungry all day, his energy feels more stable. And he says, Hey, carnivore healed me. Maybe. But actually what happened is several interventions occurred simultaneously. And that's why carnivore deserves much better research. So I'm not here to say carnivore is the only way, but I'm definitely here to stand up for those who are using it, that way of eating and seeing results. We need to know which components are driving which results, which means we need to study it. But it needs to be studied, and this is so important. Needs to be studied truthfully and not from a grant. From a food company. Period. For many people I think the most useful concept is not I must eat carnivore forever. It's like what happens when I simplify my diet enough to establish a baseline? Alright? That's when you become your own experiment. Alright. You establish a baseline. This is how I feel without the fruits. without the vegetables, without the sugar, without the carbs. this. We're not even gonna get into the oxalates and so forth in vegetables. Now it's another podcast. How do I feel? And then reintroduce foods strategically, one at a time. Not adding broccoli, bread, beer, beans, pizza, ice cream on one time and see what happens. It's not an experiment. That's a cheat day. That's a Saturday. Introduce something. Observe. Then introduce something else. I found out I do extremely well with meat and kimchi or meat and maybe sauerkraut. Okay? But I have found any bread, I start getting inflamed and I just don't feel well. Okay. So that's for me. Maybe eggs bother you, maybe they don't. Could be dairy, wheat, whatever, alcohol. Introduce one at a time. All right. So here's a couple, and we're gonna end with this, a couple carnivore myths I'd like to. Just throw away. All right. Myth number one everyone who eats carnivore will get scurvy and die. That's man, that's such a ridiculous statement. there are people reporting carnivore lifestyle adherence for years without any scurvy. now that doesn't prove long term micronutrient adequacy for everybody. We don't have, and for most people, we don't have decade-long carnivore trials, even though we have people that have been on it for 20, 30 years. All right. So let's stop pretending we know what we don't know. Number two, red meat automatically equals cardiovascular disease. That's absolutely nonsense. And randomized trial are showing that actually processed meat and unprocessed meat are not identical and people that do the unprocessed meat many many cases all right are showing A reduction in heart disease, not an increase. Biff number three, if carnivore helps someone, all plants must be toxic. Okay. Now, I'm listening there's a lot of people that will say no plants. They will tell you about the oxalates and oxalates in it and so forth. If removing 50 foods makes you feel better, you've demonstrated something. Amen. Amen. Come on. But you haven't identified which food could cause the problem. You know, there's people that can have tomatoes with no problem at all. I don't do well with tomatoes. That's just me. All right. So here's what I want from this episode. We're not going to join nutritional religions. All right. You don't need a bumper sticker for your diet, you need results. Carnivore fascinates me because it's simple, it prior prioritizes highly nutrient dense protein. It removes virtually all of the ultra-processed food. And it reduces dietary variables. And for another reason, it simply works for me. Thousands of people remark experiences with it that have been life-changing. Now, I'm also not gonna say eat only meat forever. All right, I want you to go and do your research. And the best way to do research is reading the studies and then testing it for yourself. And fermented foods. I think they're one of the most interesting areas to watch because we're beginning to understand that health isn't merely calories, protein, fat, or carbs. There's an entire ecosystem living inside of us, the microbiome. And what we eat influences us. So maybe the future isn't another ridiculous diet war. Maybe it's personalized nutrition. But use elimination strategically. Eat nutrient-dense real food. Get enough protein. Pay attention to your body. Measure biomarkers. I have biomarkers. I have blood tests when I was sick and when inflammation was through the roof. I have it when I was actually eating properly. My A1C, my cholesterol levels, inflammation markers, okay? And consider fermented foods if you tolerate them. So, what I want you to do is If you have any questions on the carnivore, first of all, reach out to Dotli Bradley Dr. Bradley. He's in, I think, episode maybe two or three of our series here. And check out some of the other people that are really doing great work in that. Dr. Ken Berry, etc. They will give you some great advice. But here's what I want you to do: stop eating like everyone else. That is sick, that is overweight, that is, you know. declining in health. We want you to prosper in your health. Okay. If you have any questions, post and comment below. In fact, let us know. Are you are you keto? Are you carnivore? Are vegan, vegetarian, like what? Or are you just, I eat what's in front of me? Let me know in comments. I do appreciate it. And if this podcast has been good for you, hit the subscribe button, share button, and we'll come back more with some real scientific data outside of what have been in here. I really just wanted to get the conversation started. see what's working for you. Until next time, go out and prosper in your health, wealth, and happiness. God bless.