Ah. Gwyneth Paltrow's butthole is what Kava and I are talking about right now. Cava, hooda doctor, you were just interviewed by BuzzFeed about said butthole. How did that go? You know, it's interesting I have been spending a lot more time talking about Gwyneth Paltrow's rectum than I ever thought I would. I assumed going into medicine I would a little. I just didn't think this much a lot. I actually feel like a startling number of doctors have a similar story. A Cava, Welcome back to the show for you and I. It's been weeks for the people listening. They have been jerked as if through time travel from the live show that we did earlier this year at sketch Fest into this conversation right now about Gwyneth Paltrow's butthole, which could cause psychological damage. We may have destroyed some people. I think people will be very disappointed to realize how little growth there's been personally between us in the weeks from the show to now. There's been like maybe you'll notice you can like track it. You can just like pay attention to what we said then and now, and you could see a downward trajectory of our emotional growth. Oh yeah, no, I think definitely we have like regressed in a number of ways. For example, I no longer know how to drive. I'm still driving. I'm still driving, don't worry, but I've lost the ability to determine what the signs mean. Thankfully, my vehicle is very large, so it's been okay so far. You know, I just kind of americad my way through that problem like everyone else on the road in a truck. Yeah. No, that's good. It's healthy, and it's American, and it's here, it's now. I love it. I love it too. Speaking of American, nothing could be more American than adopting unhinged and dangerous diets that you stick to like a religion for a series of farcical health benefits that are in no way real. That is maybe the most American thing that there is. It's the driving a truck without knowing how to drive. Of healthcare. We are the best at it. We are. Other people have tried. I've seen the Germans give a good shot at it, but no one does it like we know. Know, you think the Mongolians could do nonsense like this, Absolutely not they're fad diets are trash. No, they're fad diets are probably actually okay for you. But ours are the good old fashioned, nonsense fad diets. Yes, photos in this script are so gross, Oh, Sophie, I haven't even put all of the grossest photos in there. I'm waiting on those because I want I want you to be surprised by them too, Sophie. So I felt like, oh, oh, first off, you know, a live show, we kind of have to be a little leaner than we do in our normal shows. We don't have as much room to kind because you know, you get a heart out. Usually the venues only open so long. So there's stuff that we kind of left on the cutting room floor. And as I was putting that stuff back in so we could talk about it, now, there's also a bunch of stuff that I found and was fascinated by. And now we're just going to kind of talk about some really fucked up shit for a while, and if there's time left over, we may watch some more liver king. But first off, yeah, I wanted to talk Kaba a little bit about the realities of the so called primal diet. Now, obviously we've used that word a lot in Part one, in the context of the liver King. The term has I mean, this goes back quite a while, but one of kind of the modern users of this term, one of the people who's been most responsible for sort of making it a big deal in the Internet age, is a health grifter. He would call himself a health blogger named Mark Sisson. Mark is the author of the Primal Blueprint, which he describes as a set of rules to let you, quote control how your genes express themselves in order to build the strongest, leanest, healthiest body possible clues from evolutionary biology, and I think some of what's going on there is we talk about this and some of the Jordan Peterson episodes very common misunderstandings of epigenetics, which are often taken by these guys to mean that like, oh, you can activate superpowers in your blood from your ancestors, and are more often like, well, sometimes you can activate through environmental stresses things that are beneficial, but sometimes you get diabetes. Like it's a crapshoot exactly, And the very basic tenets of this are always so off. It's just like, first of all, to assume our ancestors all ate the same thing as ridiculous. Yes, we will talk about that. Yeah, okay, yeah, but no no please content. Yeah, it's I'm sure you're going to talk about this. But it like you said, you we left a lot of meat on the bone, sort of sea from that. Do you like that? That's a yeah reference? Yeah, yeah. But and now as we're going to do a meat you know, as we've left meat on the bone, this is we're making like a nice stew a bone broth, which which these guys are soaking too. Yeah, we're just going to soak in this. It's um, I'm assuming this guy was like a wellness influencer, right, Like, how long ago was it that this, the primal diet came out. Yeah, back in like the nineteen sixties, I think is kind of when a lot of this started. It was generally called the Caveman or Paleolithic diet, And yeah, a lot of it revolves around the idea that our earliest ancestors, who lived from around two and a half million years ago to about ten thousand BC, had everything figured out nutrition wise, right. They were they were doing it like perfect. They avoided seed, oils and processed foods, They ate exclusively meat. This is what guys like marxis on claim that, like, yeah, they avoided seed, oils and process foods, that's why they were so healthy. They ate nothing but meat, or sixty to seventy percent of their diet was meat. And that is kind of the ancient man that food bloggers and fitness influence. There's in the primal space like our liver king imagine them. Now, not all of what the paleo crowd is saying is bad, obviously, Kava. As you know, processed foods are associated with higher cancer risks, especially processed meats. That is something you definitely want to limit in your diet optimal help. Red meat is associated though as well cancer, which is the funny thing. They never seem to note that that, like well, but red meats also not great for you in massive quantities. The funny thing about these guys is that their whole point is like modernity is killing us, And yes, modernity is, but it's more because of guys like this and their ability to reach millions of people via the Internet. You know, yeah, not everything they're saying is wrong, Like, yeah, you're totally right. Processed foods and particularly processed deli meats. Red meats are not good for you, you should avoid them, but to like glorify this ancient diet, which you know, they're probably not getting right and it's gonna be exposing them to higher risks of cancer due to red meat and lower fiber and probably lower micronutrients because of this, these primal paleo diets, I mean, yeah, they miss the points there. They're just their cherry picking little health points that help them sell a supplement at the end of the day. They're doing that, and they're also kind of like one of the things like, yeah, if you are if you are someone who is like living in a food desert, eating you know, reheated meals or whatever swansons and stuff for every meal or fast food all the time, and you are able to switch over to like a you know, raw food diet made out around like lean organic meats, Yeah, you will probably notice some health benefits. But also most of the people who are living that kind of diet are doing it because it's what's affordable, it's what they have time to cook if they're working eighty hours a week, you know, if they live in a food desert, like millions of Americans do, they you know, processed foods or what they have access to. So kind of inherently a lot of the when you do see different health outcomes with the people using you know, living the Primal Life or whatever, or doing Keto or whatever fad diet they're doing a lot of it's just going to be like, well, you're rich, so like, yeah, you know, you're accrediting it to this fad diet. But at the end of the day, you have the money to eat healthy and intentionally, as opposed to like, well, I have seventeen minutes to figure out what I'm having for dinner and it can't cost more than four dollars, which a lot of people are in that boat, and that you know you're not going to be able to make the healthiest possible joyce if that's the reality you're living with. Yeah, yeah, So there is other stuff that's kind of more on the fence. In terms of paleo advice. Paleo people tend to avoid dairy or processed grains, and while it is absolutely true that a lot of people eat more dairy than is ideal for their health, if you look at like the groups of people who are longest lived in the world. For example, an awful lot of them eat lots of yogurt like that, as traditional food like keffer and different things like that. Those can be parts of very healthy diets and are for large quantities of people. And also a lot of these paleo folks are replacing whatever they're cutting out with ma quantities of raw head meat if you're the liver king, or just red meat if you're a normal paleo person, and that's not necessarily an upgrade from a health standpoint. Meanwhile, some of the stuff they're cutting out, like bread. You know, whitebread's not great, but there's all sorts of very healthy breads and very healthy grains that are good for your diet, and that are also, as we'll talk about, part of a diet human beings have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years. These kind of people also tend to avoid peanuts, lintels, bees, peas, and legumes, which are all potentially healthy and we're also probably available to many ancient peoples. As you noted, there are many health issues with a diet heavy and red meats, and consuming said meat raw offers no health benefits and many downsides. It is worth noting a lot of primal diet advocates are not weirdos about eating it uncooked like the liver king is. But by far the most unhealthy thing about these specific primal diet folks is their insistence that not only does their exclusionary diet benefit health, which is debatable, but that adhering to such a diet will cure modern illnesses. They call these modern illnesses like diabetes. Um Sisson writes on his blog, while the world has changed in innumerable ways in the last ten thousand years, for better and worse, the human genome has changed very little and thus only thrives under similar conditions. And that's that's not true. No, that's not true at all, very actually wrong. No, like say some bullshit it is it, I mean, and among other things, like a lot of these people are the folks who focus on like gut health and stuff, and we'll talk about gut biome and not acknowledge that like well, actually a lot of what has to do with whether or not we can like digest certain things has to do with gut biome, which can change much faster than ten thousand years. You know. It's it's funny these these people. The reason I think he does. He sells these like foods or the reason the liver king, I assume is pushing these this diet is not because he is even in any sense believes it works. It's just because he knows it's disgusting and he knows that no one will eat it, but he has convinced people that it's going to help him to help them because of modernity and ancient detoxing and all these nonsense words that every grifter in wellness throws out there, and because he knows no one will want to do the nasty stuff that he is advertising, which gets the clicks that he can then seek to say, instead of doing all that, you just have this, I'll take care of it. This is the stuff that you need. This one little pill. It's it's an ancient pill made in a lab. It is, it is not. It is modern, but it's not modern, and it's not gonna be. It's gonna be a modern thing that's ancient. In this nonsense that somehow people will buy and do the mental gymnastics around until they get to this point where they are willing to spend shit tons of money on these products that are completely unproven in any way yeah, and it's it's making advantage of the fact that, like health is confusing, there is a lot that we don't understand, particularly when it comes to stuff like why is it hard for some people to lose weight or keep weight off? Like why is it difficult for people to control their blood sugar? Like all of the there's all these different things that like, even when there is an answer, maybe you don't have good access to it because you don't have good access to quality medical care. But you always have access to TikTok, right, and so this guy can offer you a solution to all of your health problems. It's worth noting that, like, as we've talked about, the idea that human beings have not changed fundamentally in ten thousand years or however long is fundamentally untrue, as this right up from Scientific American makes clear. I'm going to quote from this now because it summarizes it pretty well. Several examples of recent and relatively speedy human evolution underscore that our anatomy and genetics have not been set in stone since the Stone Age. Within a span of seven thousand years. For instance, people adapted to eating dairy by developing lactose tolerance. Usually the gene encoding an enzyme named lactase, which breaks down lactose sugars and milk, shuts down after infancy. When dairy became prevalent, many people evolved a mutation that kept the gene turned on throughout life. Likewise that a genetic mutation responsible for blue eyes likely arose between six thousand and ten thousand years ago, and in regions where malaria is common, natural selection has modified people's immune systems in red blood cells in ways that help them resist the mosquito born disease. Some of these genetic mutations appeared within the last ten thousand years, or even five thousand years. The organisms with which we share our bodies have evolved even faster, particularly the billions of bacteria living in our intestines our gut. Bacteria interact with our food in many ways, helping us break down tough plant fibers, but also competing for calories. We do not have direct evidence of which bacterial species thrived in the Paleolithic intestines, but we can be sure that their microbial communities do not match our own, Even if eating only foods available to hunter gatherers in the Paleolithic made sense, it would be impossible. As Christino Warriner of the University of Zurich pre sizes in her twenty twelve ted talk, just about every single species commonly consumed today, whether a fruit, vegetable, or animal, is drastically different from its Paleolithic predecessor. In most cases, we have trans formed the species we eat through artificial selection. We have bread cows, chickens, and goats to provide as much meat, milk, and eggs as possible, and have sown seeds only from plants with the most desirable traits, with the biggest fruits, plumpest kernels, Swedish flesh, and fewest natural toxins, and like, yeah, this is like I think a big part of it for me is this ignorance of the fact that everything has changed about the things that people have access too since then. There's basically no one who's capable of living and eating the diet people did ten thousand years ago, or even particularly close to that diet. And I mean he's right to some degree. We haven't evolved so far from those ancestors that we would look that dramatically different, but there have been acquired genetic mutations since then. Things that help us with the changing diets, like starches or being able to consume cow's milk well until through childhood. I mean, you could debate how much, but clearly we have. Clearly there has been some aptation that much we can see. Yeah, I mean there's there's just a um if you want to think about, like how much even animals have changed. Like there are a lot of species of livestock that require assistance in birthing. They're young because of the ways in which we have bred them, and like wild animals, the ancestors of those animals did not need human beings to deliver their babies right like obviously they did, Otherwise they wouldn't have survived. The Kentucky fried chicken chickens that come out so big, they're breaks so big they cannot mate or walk. Yeah, we made those. We invented them, you could, I mean, and maybe we shouldn't have, but we did. And they're not the same as whatever people were eating eight thousand years ago, even if they were eating chicken um. Very basic research done by scientists who study prehistoric man with rigor rather than write fantasies about him, shows they're also they also were not immune to health problems, which is like the weirdest thing about this to me. I think a lot of it started. There was a lot of writing you would see thirty forty years ago about like, you know, people in ten thousand BC, twenty thousand BC probably you know, if you survived to adulthood, would have had kind of a muscle and bone density that only like the very best athletes have today, which like, well, yeah, they were living outside the whole time, they were always moving, they were always like yeah, maybe that was the case, but that's kind of translated into they didn't have any health problems and like none of the modern issues that we have, which is objectively untrue. For one thing, obviously a minority of our paleo ancestors lived to adulthood. Many would have died before fifteen, which is why their life expectancy was so low. More to the point, they suffered a lot of the same ailments we did. A recent lance At study found signs of atherosclerosis or clogged arteries, and more than a hundred mummified remains from ancient hunter gatherer and forager societies around the world. Quote. A common assumption is that atherosclerosis is predominantly lifestyle related, and that if modern human beings could emulate pre industrial or even pre agricultural lifestyles, that athlerosclerosis, or at least it's clinical manifestations, would be avoided. But they found evidence of atherosclerosis in forty seven of one hundred and thirty seven mummies from each of the different geological or geographical regions. So, like, like the shit that they claim is like, well, this is a result of your process diet. Yeah, I'm sure that that makes it worse in some cases more common, but like they got this shit back then too, and parts of a lot of red made. Yeah, there's there's always this interaction between like and I'm sorry, this is good. This is like the probably more sciency than you guys want, but like there's always this complicated interaction between your genetics and your environment and the things you do and how it affects your body and how people with a cholesterol how that they may react or how they may have it in their bodies. And you know, when it comes down to it, it genetically, as long as you're able to pass on your genes, which means you're able to have sex at some point and have kids then whatever happens after that doesn't matter as much. So if you are dying of athosclerosis in your thirties, your forties, you know you were still able to pass on your genes. It didn't make you genetically weaker, it didn't get it wouldn't necessarily be affected that way. So it could still be there. It could have been there then and still here now. And we know that there is like a genetic contribution to all these diseases. Yeah, and there are you know, reasonable people in the paleo subculture that reject the liver king stuff about munching raw organs, but they still tend to see the basic realities of the ancient diet. They tend to argue that the basic realities of the ancient diet provided a good guideline for optimal health performance, which is also just nonsense. As you mentioned a little bit earlier, we don't really know much what about We don't know much about what prehistoric people ate in a lot of cases, in all regions of the globe, certainly, and we don't know how widespread different kinds of prehistoric diets were. But we do know that they were different all over the place based on the time of year and based on what different people had access to. But kind of more pointedly, there's no such thing as the primal diet or the hunter gatherer diet. There were a bunch of different ones. I'm looking at a chart right now that kind of lays out, and this is looking at modern modern hunter gatherers, and modern hunter gatherers like the Inuit, like the Hwei, like the Kung, like the Hadza, are often called like living fossils because of how similar they supposedly were to our hunter gatherer ancestors. That is not true. There's certainly value in studying them. You can learn things about hunter gatherers in all periods by studying hunter gatherers today. But these are modern people living in the modern world, whose lifestyle, whose bodies, whose health have been affected by modernity. They are not fossils. They're human beings. I can't imagine they like that term. No, look they are They're just people, you know. Now, It is worth kind of if you want to look at, like what these different people's diet includes. Inuit folks as much as like nineteen ninety five percent of their diet from animal products from animals that they hunt. The hewe people, it's more like eighty percent animals, about ten to fifteen percent fruits and vegetables, and then about fifteen to twenty percent roots something like that. Seventy five percent maybe a meat. But the e Kung only eat about ten percent of their calories fifteen percent of their calories from meat, whereas they get about twice as much from fruits and vegetables. They eat a few roots. The vast majority of their caloric intake more than half as seeds and nuts, and they get a little bit from meat or from milk and corn meal. The Hadza are at about fifty percent of their calories from meat and fish, they get you know, about fifteen twenty percent from fruits and vegetables, and then about thirtyish percent something like that from roots. So as you can see, even within just these four people, the diet varies quite widely. And like you know, you could look at the Inuit and say, well, that looks like least in terms of quantity of meat consumed, like what the liver king is doing. But if you look at the Akung, that doesn't look at all like the liver king's diet, nor really does the Hadza. So it probably behooves us to take a deeper look at one of these people, the hwe to just talk about kind of how their their diet and their health actually are in modernity, because they do eat a get about seventy five percent of their calories from meat and fish, and most of this, like sometimes up to ninety five percent of their diet is wild caught or wild foraged. Right, so they are getting almost everything they eat from nature around them in a way that is very traditional, that is very much kind of like what these paleo people imagine folks, you know, the hunter gatherers. They're looking back to getting their calories from. But the animals they're not eating, for one thing, are not the kinds of animals that you are going to find in a grocery store. The hue eat capybara, they eat colored peccary, they eat ant eater, armadillo, fish, turtles, iguanas, birds. A lot of these are species that simply are not available in grocery stores. I would I would love to try cappy barra if I'm being honest. I've seen a couple of the zoo and I could they look a little tasty. They have like a little juice to them, like a little ham running around with fur. I'm not gonna not eat a cappy barra if it's if it's an offer to me, absolutely, although they are very sweet so that might be emotionally difficult, but it's a hard pass for me. I'm I'm a curious man. I'm a curious man. I'll eat anything someone offers me in their home. I yet exactly. I watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. We've talked about this. There's only one good movie of that whole movie. Move one only one good part about that whole racist movie, and it's that it teaches it doesn't matter what you're what's put in front of you, you eat it because that might be the last meal that those people have to offer. You eat it. That is a that is a firm fit that I believe in. That is the one, the one bright moment in that in that movie's attitude towards I don't know, but then it gets really racist with like, yeah, it's get racist pretty quick. Yeah. Anyway, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Doctor Cavahota recommends it as a woke guide to life. So let's let's continue talking about the Heewee, because while these folks do kind of live the ideal liver king life on paper, they are not a famously healthy people. Now, obviously this doesn't just due to their diet. We do not know how they would have lived a couple of thousand years ago, right before you know the colonization. You cannot divorce the health problems that these people face from capitalist modernity or the degree to which they've had their climate ravaged, their environment ravaged, and their traditional homelands encroached upon. But they also suffer consequences that have probably always been present of eating huge quantities of game that has not always been sufficiently cooked. The Heewe are shorter, thinner, and less energetic than other hunter gatherer tribes nearby, like the Ace and Paraguay. They suffer from infections of parasites like hookworms at an exceptionally high rate, and only about fifty percent of their children survived to adulthood. Behind the paleocras is a legitimate debate by some scholars over the realities of the Stone Age diet and how much it might match an ideal diet for modern people. The fact that some of these scientists like Lauren Cordain of Colorado State University have written books advocating the paleo diet. Muddies their claims a bit more, and I'm going to quote from National Geographic here. After studying the diets of living hunter gatherers and concluding that seventy three percent of these societies derive more than half their calories from meat, Cordain came up with his own paleoprescription. Eat plenty of lean mitten fish, but not dairy products, beans, or cereal grains, foods introduced into our diet after the invention of cooking and agriculture. Paleo diet advocates like Cordain say that if we stick to the foods our hunter gatherers once eight, we can avoid the diseases of civilization, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, even acne. Now, again, there's some of this that has its origins and probably kind of the motivation to start writing about this shit has its origins and as somewhat legitimate anthropological theory, which is the idea that we humans might have developed our big brains and thus our ability to invent shit like podcasts because our ancestors were such good hunters that they eate a shitload of protein and that made their brains grow up big and strong. Now, it is true that hunter gathers around the world crave meat more than any other food and usually get around thirty percent or more of their annual calories from animals, but most of these groups also endure extremely lean times where they eat less than a handful of meat each week. There's studies right now that suggest that kind of reliance on meat, and ancient humans probably was not the only thing that fueled the brains expansion, especially since there would have been large chunks of the year where that simply would not have been available. And we're going to talk about that as well as the high meat subculture, which I'm excited to introduce to Yukava. But first, you know what, never you know what is responsible for our large brains, doctor hoda Um. Yes, the fact that the female human anatomy allows for the pelvis to have an anterior sort of direction, allows for a wider birth canal. And non, no, sorry, no, no, it's it's these products and services. That was my second guess. That's the second guess. That's right. Uh, we're back, and I just I feel smarter. Thanks are amazing dick pill ads that really hit the spot. I mean, I typically don't like dick pill ads, but those make me think that it actually works. Yeah. And and you know what they say about dicks, they're like a brain. They're the brains of the crotch. Um, that's not what people say. Um, So let's talk about um the anthropological theory that a reliance on meat is kind of what what made human brains get so much bigger. Um. It's kind of worth noting that, like the idealized version of hunter gathers and of our ancient ancestors is of these kind of like super hunters, you know, stumbling into the bush or going into the bush with you know, a spear or an adiladdle or a bow and arrow, and just like dropping animals every single day in order to bring meat back to the family. That's not the way it ever has been or ever will be, because hunting is actually really hard, Kava. It's extremely difficult to do. Um. Today, I try fishing once. It didn't work out well for me. Yeah, I would if there ever isn't an apocalypse, And I'm going to try and find you so you can gather food for me and hunt things for me, because I will perish, I mean most people will. Basically everyone will perish if you rely entirely upon hunting for your calories. Trapping is much better, you know, when it comes to fishing, doing stuff like setting up kind of traps along the coast that are you know, big nets that can sweep up large numbers of fish. That's much smarter than just like going out into the bush with a bow and arrow. You do get calories that way, and you get stuff that's useful for you, like you know, skins and pelts and whatnot that can be a necessary part of like clothing folks. But you know, groups like the Hadza and the ku Kung bushmen of Africa fail to get meat more than half the time when they go out hunting, which doesn't mean they're bad hunters. It's just like hunting is difficult, and it's gotten more difficult in the modern period. But also, even though certain things have gotten more difficult now, they also have better weapons than people would have had access to twenty thousand years ago, because again, they're not living fossils, right, they're human beings. At twenty twenty three. Yeah, it's kind of worth noting that when you actually look at different kind of people's living a more traditional life, who do eat meat all the time and who do make it the vast majority of their diet year round, it tends to be coastal peoples or people like up in the Art. I mean that is also a coastal people's like the Inuit, who do a lot of you know, fishing, They do a lot of trapping. They do get a lot of like larger animals like seals and nar walls. But as a general rule, most hunter gatherers cannot rely on hunted meat year round, or even trapped meat, which is why all of these groups only survived because of foragers, which was a job primarily done as far as we can, as far as we are aware, by women. Often women with like young children would do a lot of the foraging. They would get things, you know, various kinds of plants, tubers, nuts. It can be kind of resource intensive to process them, so it's a good thing to have little kids do. It's not hard to teach little kids to like process nuts or to process tubers, things like plantains and manioc In the Americas, Australian Aboriginal people often feasted on nutgrass and water chestnuts. There's this kind of story that these peoples all must have been these sort of primal hunters, but again, none of them survive without foraging. And when they're foraging, they're eating the kind of stuff that these primal diet advocates and guys like the liver Kings are telling you not to eat, including grains. There's evidence of people eating grains for at least one hundred thousand years, which is more than enough time for us to have evolved the ability to tolerate them. In fact, we would not have survived to this point without them. Yeah, we have those, We have had adaptations clearly for starches and giants. Sure. Yeah, And there was probably a fairly long period of time where large numbers of people were doing a lot of weird pooping. And those people are heroes and we should remember them as such, our courageous ancestors who pooped out grains long enough that they were eventually able to tolerate them. God bless you all, heroes, marrigan heroes, just like those ancient Europeans guzzling milk and just shitting constantly. For generations pooping themselves to death so that I could enjoy a nice block of cheese. That's right, just trying different milk from different animals. Just pioneers, all so. White people have a long history of fetishizing indigenous peoples and those living kind of what are called more traditional lifestyles, while also attempting to profit off of merchandising aspects of that lifestyle. The liver king is one silly example of this trend, but perhaps the most preposterous is the tale of high meat so covet fermentation. Yeah, yeah, you will make blue apron high meat if you just don't take your blue Apron bag in for several months, because it's just rotting meat, so you can ferment meat. Fermentation is a process of controlled decay. You can ferment meat and eat it and it can be fine for you. That is a process that's not wildly different from the process of making sourkrout. Various peoples all around the planet have done this with meat and fish for as long as there have been people, probably or pretty close to it. There are examples for early food and scan andavy. I think like lootfisk, right, which is basically fish that you let rot in a very specific way so that it ferments. The Greenland Induit, the Greenland Inuits enjoy what's called kivac, which is a fermented seabird dish, and it's actually fascinating. I've never had this. I would try it were it offered to me, as we just discussed. But the way that you make kiviak basically, you get several hundred small birds called ox, and you leaving the feathers and stuff on them. You tightly pack the bodies into a bag made of seal skin that you've left the fat on because as it rots, the fat is going to make the bird meat tender. So you sew up this seal skin with all of these hundreds of birds in it, and you grease it with seal fat, which repels flies, and then you store it underneath a bunch of rocks right so that animals can't get to it, and you let it ferment for I think usually it's something like three or four months. When the process is done, when you kind of come back for it, you open it up, you remove the feathers from the birds, and then you eat the birds skin, bones, organs and all. It's consumed raw I think the bones get a lot softer when you kind of let it ferment like that, And that's the thing. A lot of people are gonna be like, well, that sounds nasty, and that's fine. You don't need to eat it. I would again I try it. The Greenland Inuits, like most Inuit people's, eat mostly meat, and they sometimes get as much as ninety eight percent of their calories from animals. They do consider kivaka delicacy, but it evolved for a specific and very practical purpose. The fact is that hunting, as we've talked about, is often difficult or impossible for chunks of the year. Think about what it's like where the Greenland induits live. There's times where you simply can't go out and hunt because it's too fucking cold to survive doing that, and you need to have food that's stored that can tide you over during those periods of time. Kiviak is hunted and prepared in the spring so that it can be consumed during the winter, and it was probably developed over time as a way to preserve calories during periods of abundance for the lean winter months. Because it contains so much organ meat. Kiviac is extremely high vitamins and nutrients. It is thus an incredibly pragmatic thing to have in your diet if you live the way in Greenland that the Inuit do, right, it makes total sense when you actually think about logically, why would they do this? What role does it fulfill? A very practical thing to do. But of course weirdo fitness influencers and diet freaks on the internet have leaped onto the idea that fermented meat is the ultimate source of nutrition. They call it high meat, which they say, I think is a term that has been used and been used by some Inuit peoples rather than but you know, when we're talking about like kivac, this is a that's a pretty deliberate and elaborate process. Lot of high meat advocates are basically leaving mason jars of raw meat out for months at a time, either in their fridge or at room temperature, to consume after its age. Some people will aid shit for like a year, which people aren't generally doing with stuff like kevat. So you want, I wonder how many gi illnesses that I, as a gastroenteorologists have treated over the years where it was someone who did something like this, and they just didn't want to tell me. Yeah, they've been eating high meat and it's making them boop themselves to death because they didn't. Yeah, and it is worth noting you can buy meat and you can ferment it and you can eat it and it will not be dangerous for it is possible. I should I'm not saying you should do this. It is theoretically possible to ferment meat as other people have done for generations, in a way that is not dangerous for you. It is not likely that you are going to do it with the advice that you are getting on Reddit dot com. And there's no specific health benefits for it, right, And again then it are not eating kiviak because it's like a super food that gives them liver king like powers. They're eating it because like it has a lot of vitamins and it stores well, right, Like it's it's not they have to, Yeah, well it's if they have to, it's become part of the culture. There's all sorts of cheese and stuff. Is a way we've got all this milk. How do we store this ship for a long period of time? You know? Yeah? Sure, some of it was found out by mistake, Like they were really hungry and they had stored something and they realized it was it was something they had stored for a while and it fermented that point and they tried it and they realized that they were able to survive it and it got them through and then they were able to sort of adapt that and make it work for them. I get it. Yeah, it's like the story of how cheese. I mean this is It probably is much it's certainly much more complicated than that. But there's kind of like a legend that there's this guy in the desert and he's got this water bag that's made out of like a lamb's stomach and he pours some milk in it to go hiking in the desert and over time because it's got that I forget exactly what there's like a stomach acid that you used to make cheese, and like that's where we we get our cheese from, right, is like this guy's hiking and he realizes, oh, something has happened. You know. Um, that's that's but delicious. You wouldn't call it cheese is not super food. It doesn't because it's made this weird way. It does not come with like all sorts of superhuman medical benefits. It can be part of a healthy diet, right. High meat advocates are of course weirdos on the internet, and so they take the weirdo on the internet tact of being like this shit gives you powers. Basically, it makes you euphoric. It'll they do talk about it helping you lose weight, which I suspect they're right about, but not. Yeah. Man, if you eat nothing but rotting meat, you will lose weight. Your silly shit yourself to good health. Um the Robert Evans Health Book. Just get by four hundred hot dogs and leave them, leave them in the bed of your truck. Get one of those like get get get a four D f one fifty that's a key key or a Toyota tom and get one of those big metal lids. Fill the whole bed with hot dogs and just drive around all summer in it. Right, and then when winter comes and food is scarce, pop that hood open and just go to town with a spoon. You know you're good to go. You're good. The hot dog truck is the ideal way to consume calories. It'll put it, it'll go straight to muscle it's like steroids for you. Really, you get extra energy from it. It's great. That's a coma truck full of basically hot dog pudding. Yeah, a hot dog, A hot dog to coma. Sometimes I'll get your sour cream pour some in there too. You want to like start at the beginning of June and then buy October. Your hot dog to Coma's probably ready to eat. Are we just trying to see if we can make Sophie puke? Yeah? I think we are. You can't do it, but you know who can make Sophie vomit with joy? Yes? The sponsors of this podcast. Hey everybody, we're We're back and the boy we have some more high meat to talk about. But Sophie has informed me that earth shattering political news has just come down the fucking pipe. Yeah. Donald Donald Trump will be the first former president to face criminal charges. Honestly, good for him, Proud of him, proud of him. Man, it's been a while since fun breaking news broke. Oh yeah, rock. See, so this means that a grand jury has voted to indict him on this is okay, So I'm sorry I shouldn't know this, but this is because of the hush money is that that's why? Yeah, yeah, ye hundred and thirty thousand or something. Yeah, his roll back in the in the hush money paid Stormy Daniels back in twenty sixteen. Mm, no before, no, apologies before that. He paid Stormy as before the twenty sixteen election and then lied about God, that's funny. Is it so funny? Is there any chance, any chance that he will actually suffer any form of consequence from this? Well? I mean I think he has to either surrender himself or be arrested just because he has been charged criminally. Um, so you know that's you could argue a consequence. Although there are there is some kind of reporting from people around him saying that he wants to be arrested and get the cameras on him and stuff, and you know, obviously you can. And there is a decently long American political tradition of being arrested in ways that benefit you as a as a public figure, right, that is a thing. And Trump is certainly capable of being that kind of guy. I am still saying it's pretty funny. No, it's it's hilarious and I love it, and it's the best news I've heard in a while. Wow, what a great piece of news, Sophie, to come in while we're talking about eating meat that you've allowed to rot for unbelievable quantities of time. Speaking of rotting meat, yeah, Donald Trump in a way, isn't Donald Trump like a Toyo Tacoma filled with rancid hot dogs and butter? Yeah? Yes, like that did ex president is Yeah, he is a politician that we have. I mean, honestly, Rudy Giuliani has been fermenting for a lot longer. So high meat advocates report feeling euphoria after eating ransom meat. It's called high meat because you feel high having eaten it. There's no way to disprove a subjective claim like this. It might be due to the placebo effect, it might be due to the fact that a lot of these people shit themselves have to death and them feel hilarious. But also outside of I mean, maybe they do. Maybe it does make you feel high. Right, I've definitely had like a fucking good ass kombucha that made me feel pretty pumped, So I get it. Maybe it's I'm not saying it's impossible, but the health claims that are generally made by these people about high meat are impossible. A. Jonas vander Planets is an advocate of the primal diet and one of the former leading lights of the high meat subculture. He claimed that a primal diet cured him of everything from autism to juvenile diabetes. Here's a fun quote from a New Yorker article pointing because his name is so fucking cool, it is a pretty cool name. Vander Planet says he got the high meat and its name from the ESCU that he they used. You know, the term that you shouldn't use for the Inuit who savor rotten cariboo and seal. A regular serving of decade heart or liver should can have a tremendous viagra effect on the elderly. Vonder Planets told me recently. The first few bites, though, can be rough going. I still have some resistance to it, but the health benefits. I'm fifty two now. I started this when I was forty two, and I feel like I'm in my twenties. So that article was published in twenty fourteen. Shortly after being interviewed for it. In August of twenty thirteen, vonder Planets fell off the railing of his balcony and Thailand and seriously injured himself. A statement I found from a friend on the get Raw Milk website explains what happens next. Oh yeah, he broke his back quite severely next to the first rib and could not move his legs. He took charge of the care of his body, even in the hospital, where he had them wrap his torso to stabilize the bones. He did have one X ray and then would not let them do more. The doctors wanted to operate, and he refused. He had them wrap him and feed him food, and continued so for two days. He was apparently in good spirits, but did experience what must have been severe pain, for he did let them give him at least two pain shots. This might have been necessary for him to stay awaken in control, as the body can shut down from pain. There was blood in his stomach at some point, for he did regurgitate some food with it. On the third day of his hospital stay, he sent his girlfriend to a court proceeding in Bangkok, about three and a half hours away about the land there in Thailand. Over her protests, he insisted she go. While she was gone, he went into a coma and they put an Ivy in him. When she returned, he was very bad. At this point, she emailed our time member who called a few of us. The doctors say he had a kidney infection and a blood infection. They continued to feed him butter and honey as instructed and followed his wishes as possible of him oxygen. As his breathing decreased and he steadily lost blood pressure. They told us that kidneys had stopped functioning and we're not producing urine. They wanted to do something, but no one had any authority to override his stated wishes. And I'm not going to laugh about this guy's situation, but that is kind of the consequence of this attitude towards how I'm just I'm I'm surprised the honey didn't fix his kidneys. That's a part of it that I don't understand. Yeah, it's shocking. Seems like that should have done the trick. Huh, they didn't give it iv that's the thing. Yeah, that's that's that's probably at ivy honey, that that would have saved him. Most of the high meat videos that you were going to find online are of some dude who looks like he owns multiple crypto wallets and has intense opinions on decentral land. I did find a fun one by doctor Anette Bosworth, MD. Now when you google her, the first result is and that boss Worth guilty of all charges, which immediately let me know we were in the right direction here. It turns out she ran for Senate and filed a bunch of false documents, which is actually a lot better than I'd expected, given that she's a doctor, Like I was expecting, like, oh, how many people did she get killed? Like, how many bodies is this lady stacked? It's the best case. Yeah. So in this video, she starts by saying she's on the ketogenic diet and recommends rotting meat for ketosis, which again I guess kind of makes sense in the same way that like getting so drunk you vomit up everything in your stomach can technically aid in ketosis. The first thing that she notes is she walks you through her journey of fermenting raw chicken livers, is that she was quickly forced to put the jar outside because it stanks so bad, which might have been a sign you have to like basically burp the meat like this to let the gases out and like expose it to air periodically and stuff. There's like there is a process to fermenting the meat if you don't want to get super sick. Although it doesn't look good, Sophie, can you show him the day one of the fermenting chicken lover, just so we're starting with the baseline. It's okay, I've seen some bad She's like adding some salt to it, a little bit of water. So that's day one, Cava. Yeah, let's do it. Ye Okay, that doesn't look great. Okay, it look amazing, but it does bad. Yeah, just just kind of looks like meat that you've got seasoning or something. Here's day four. Oh that's rough. Yeah, yeah, that's that's not the way the meat that you put in your body should ever look. No. No, So she does this for weeks, she doesn't say exactly how long until it's a pure black sludge. Look at this shit, Cova. That looks like oil, that looks like just beer, patrol can. I'm gonna tell you this. There are certain things that the body does that um that hits you in a primal way to tell you it's yeah, okay, don't do this. This is a dark tory sludge deaf. I'm being honest. It looks like when you have a big upper gi bleed and it gets partially digested as it moves through your track, it comes out looking like this. We call it melana and that's is That is what this looks like. Just the look of it is like it hits me on the primal level that like my brain stores for like the fear of sharks and the aliens from Alien you know, this is what this is how this hits me. This is not to be consumed. No, no, speaking of aliens, this reminds me of the black ooze that comes out of the Aliens and the super Soldiers and X files like that is the closest, the closest thing to this. Um Sophie, can you can you play that segment from the video for us? All this is them, This is them eating it and they seem as frightened as you should be. It's her and her son. Okay, so that oh black? Yeah, well that's what they wear in all thetis. I don't know, Oh god, the consistency of identical. There's a piece of liver oh still has all Okay, so there's put that happen. You can have half hack in her half. Oh that's a lot. That's a lot. Who is this kid? Yeah? Your son? Oh? Why she making her kids do that? You don't fall she can't handle it. Supposed to eat things like this. That's horrible. This is a jackass video. Can I stop it? And I don't like intertance salt online. It's a great This is like what Chuck Grassley Seman looks like. Yeah, it does look exactly like I imagine that one time. I no, Sophie, I am going to take over though, because I want to show you guys some stuff. Because I've been I've been doing my digging here, you know, as as I'm want to do, and I've been following a bunch of different Paleo and primal accounts. So here's one. This is a Twitter account Aristo Perp breakfast for winners raw heavy cream, fruit and honey, leftover raw ground beef with raw eggs. It doesn't look good, um, but at least it's fresh. And the next response is him saying, a friend convinced me to eat raw rotten meat high meat yesterday and it actually felt great. Very interesting since everyone would think it's crazy and then there's a deleted tweet and he posts a picture of the high meat that he ate. Oh it's bubble, there's bubbles all over it, there's its growth on the meat. It's horrible, so fucking gross. Man, that's so fucking I don't understand what they think they're getting from this that they could just get from regular meat. What about the I mean, could they just not see like fermented things that we have made in our nor safe, Like, can't they just have like sourkraud? Yeah, it's I think a lot of it just comes from these are people who are in the kind of fitness and various like kind of weird specific elimination diet communities. And the more you get into that, the more kind of weird stuff that you'll hear and be willing to try. And it's one thing if like you're actually doing your research and you're interested in, like, oh, I want to know all these different ways people used to ferment weat meat or do ferment meat and cultures around the world, but a lot of folks aren't doing that. I found this one Reddit thread where this guy is talking about his high meat diet and people are like he's doing like oysters like he's letting oysters rot. His goal is to ferment shell My goal is to ferment shellfish until it is at least one year old. Holy shit, who knows, maybe it won't even smell like farts, but to go more tasty. Oh god, it's horrible. And there's like, huh, I listen, I can't explain to you the nasty things that I've seen with my job and the unspeakable things I've seen in the human body and and done in the human body to help people. And this is troubling to me. This is this is hard for me. I can do it. I can do it. You're not gonna I'm not gonna tap out. I will not tap out from from these videos. But I don't enjoy this. Yeah, it's it's there's a lot that's like fucked up about it. At one point, someone is like, hey, I'm looking at your I'm looking at like what you're doing here, and um, you know, I live in Inuit territory and it's never as hot as it is where you live here. Like whatever they're doing to ferment their mate, it's like sixty at the hottest part of the year, So you may not be doing it right, and he's like, na, man, the induoud have been doing it forever. He just like doesn't listen at all. There's another person who responds because they're talking about like, well, sam Lanella and batulenum and any coli are are faculative anaerobes, so they can't grow when oxygen rich air is present, which is why you expose stuff to oxygen. And someone responds biochemistry researcher here, this is absolutely incorrect. Samonella and E. Coli are faculative anaerobes, but this means they grow best with oxygen yet can adapt to anaerobic environments. Like there's all of these like and hopefully everyone is okay. Hopefully the people doing this don't get themselves a year ago, right, Yeah, anything, I didn'tee any follow up on that. Yeah, no way to know. Um, but I don't know. Don't do this. Don't do this is kind of I think we're both Cava and I are going to come to at the end of this episode. We don't agree on much, my friend, you and I, Yeah, but this is one thing I think we can both agree on. Yeah, I don't know about this. You know. The funny thing about all these people this is so I've been spending a lot of time sort of like diving into medical grifters recently and doing stuff on people like doctor bos Here. It's it's always the same concept. It's always they start with this very basic premise of like health is a choice. I mean, they don't take into account of any of the socioeconomic stuff, any of the genetic stuff. It's a choice, kind of implying that you know, if you're sick, it's your fault. And then on top of that, there's like they'll polarize foods. They'll be like, here are foods that you should eat, Here are foods that you should not eat. Here foods that are good and food they almost make it like a moral thing, like they're good and there's evil foods. And they do that. And then the third thing they do is then they have their supplement that they sell, or their scam of their book or their YouTube channel that you have to subscribe to. That's how they they monetize it. At the end of the day, it's always the same thing, this polarizing of food and romanticize the past and romanticizing things. It's whenever you see the term ancient, it's always it is ninety nine at the time, a scam of some sort. Yeah, yeah, it's like you wouldn't Ancient people sometimes were able to take care of they're injured and sick loved ones, and sometimes they beat them to death with rocks or left them to starve because times were tough and that was the best thing that they could do. Right, sh It's tough. You know, shit was tougher in the past, and people had to make hard decisions. You wouldn't advocate that because those hard decisions were a necessary part of the survival of our ancestors, that they are good things to do in the modern era, right, because for example, we have like splints now, Like you don't have to you don't need to if it's a cold winter and there's not enough food. You don't need to club grandpa to death because he breaks his ankle. You know, that's not that that's what everyone did. People went to great lengths to try to save their ones, but hard choices had to be made, and we don't have to make choices like that anymore because we have like stoves and heaters and people who can splint wounds. You know. You know, the whole thing about this doctor and these people eating the fermented foods that they you know, and doing this again. The thing about it is, you know, ten years ago, you would have shown me this video and I would have been like, all right, whatever, they're doing it to themselves, let them make themselves sick. Let her do that to her and her son. We I mean, who cares. If it doesn't kill them, then you know whatever. But you know, the truth of it is, like all this pseudoscience stuff now more than ever after the last four or five years, I realize that it's all contributing to our society getting much worse. It's all all this stuff is incrementally making people trust real science less. It's making people not clear about what is real and not real when it comes to things like say the vaccine, and people have a harder time making the right decision when it comes to things that are really important. So and yes, also the our dangerous too to do these things. There's parasites, there's bacteria and all this stuff. But this stuff all makes me so mad. Now. It didn't used to bother me that much. I used to just laugh about it, and now it makes me just actually kind of angry. Whenever I see this nonsense. I mean, the liver king is a weird one too, like his I'm not entirely sure what his thinking is, but like it's almost like implied, like you eat the balls of a bull, you get the strength of the bull. You eat the liver, it'll make your liver stronger. You eat the brain, you'll make your brain. It's like this weird homeopathy like cures like sort of thing which has been disproven. And again it's just it's perpetuating this this faulty science at best, I'll call it faulty science. But it's all like a grift, and it all contributes to basically the collapse of our society. It makes me upset. And I think what you're saying, Kava, is that we need about sixty volunteers that because we're scientists, we're going to do a double blind. So thirty of you fill a tacoma bed with a metal top with hot dogs and butter or cream and just let it sit for three months and then eat all of it. And then the other thirty of you, around October just buy a fresh tacoma full of hot dogs and butter and eat it all fresh, and then we'll see who's healthiest, and that'll let us know if this is a good idea. It's randomized, it's I don't know if we could double blind it because we might have to figure out, like how to hide the smell and the stench. But I feel like we have a trial here. I feel like there is something we could do. There's something we could work with here. Now, you don't hide the stench. You just get like a decal that says work truck and stick it on the side. People won't ask questions. Nobody, nobody's going to ask questions. There's no good smelling Tacomas. Well, everyone, uh, sign up to volunteer for our our Tacoma High hot Dog challenge to see if it's good to eat hot dogs that have been left in the back of a Tacoma Um, well, we'll do a science altogether. Endorsed by doctor Cava Jota. Yeah, sure, sure. It's the end of the world anyway, so why not might as well m Maybe this will help us survive the end of the world. Maybe this is what makes us not need water, you know. Yeah, enough Tacoma hot dogs and we could make it possible for people to survive in Arizona again. Yeah, it's like the terrigen mist. You'll survive it and be stronger or you won't. Yeah, yeah, one way or the other. Look, there's only one way to find out. Do you have any place that people can find you online? M on the Twitter find me at the House of Pod Twitter and listen to my podcast where we talk about things like medical drifters and we'll talk about other medical fun stuff and then sometimes not such medical fun stuff. It's called the House of Pods podcast. Listen to it where you listen to the podcasts. That's it. That is it. Well, thank you, Kaba, thank you for being there with me and the live show, going into the field with me to fight the liver King and all of these other silly people. There for you, buddy, Yeah yeah, Well, and I'm there for you all next week, but not anymore this week because we're done for the week. Goodbye bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.