The Meat Mafia Podcast

Dr. Bill Schindler is an esteemed archaeologist, anthropologist, food scientist, and the author of 'Eat Like a Human'. Dr. Schindler is also a Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at Washington College and is the is the founder and Director of the Eastern Shore Food Lab. He may be most well-known for his role in the National Geographic series, The Great Human Race, where he and survival expert Cat Bigney lived as our most primitive ancestors did. He also now owns a restaurant and store called The Modern Stone Age Kitchen. Dr. Schindler is dedicated to bridging the gap between ancient dietary practices and modern health and advocates for a return to ancestral food wisdom to combat contemporary health challenges.

Key topics discussed: 

- Nutrient density and hormone health from ancestral diets
- Evolutionary basis for humans thriving on meat
- Traditional food processing techniques like fermentation
- The dangers of improperly processed plants
- The role of ancestral diets in reversing chronic diseases
- The importance of balancing modern and ancestral dietary practices

Timestamps:

(00:02) Evolutionary Diet and Health Transformation
(04:39) Revolutionizing Nutrition Through Modern Techniques
(07:48) The Evolution of Human Diets
(14:13) Plant Consumption Risks and Safety
(24:07) Reconnecting With Food and Nutrition
(32:34) Food Perceptions and Ancestral Approaches
(39:19) The Blue Zones Lifestyle in Sardinia
(46:51) Contradictions in Blue Zone Diets


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Creators & Guests

Host
Brett Ender 🥩⚡️
The food system is corrupt and trying to poison us... I will teach you how to fight back. Co-Host of @themeatmafiapod 🥩
Host
Harry Gray 🥩⚡️
Leading the Red Meat Renaissance 🥩 ⚡️| Co-Host of @themeatmafiapod

What is The Meat Mafia Podcast?

The Meat Mafia Podcast is hosted by @MeatMafiaBrett and @MeatMafiaHarry with the mission of addressing fundamental problems in our food and healthcare system. Our concerns with our healthcare system can be drawn back to issues in our food system as far back as soil health. Our principles are simple: eat real foods, buy locally, and cook your own meals.

When you listen to our podcast, you will hear stories and conversations from people working on the fringes of the food and healthcare system to address the major crises overshadowing modern society: how do we become healthy again?

themeatmafiapodcast.substack.com

Part 1 Bill
===

[00:00:00] Bill, welcome to Austin. What a pleasure to have you in studio. I appreciate you making the trip down here. I am so glad it's worked out. Thrilled to be here. Second time on the Meat Mafia podcast. First time in person. first time we had you on was episode 107, which was about two years ago. And we were explaining when we picked you up from the airport that we want to answer the question, is meat medicine and cover a bunch of different subtopics.

So nutrient density, hormone health, environmental health, et cetera. And something that Harry and I constantly go back and forth on is are we designed evolutionarily to consume and thrive on meat? So we couldn't think of anyone better than an archaeologist, anthropologist, D1 wrestler, owner of the modern Stone Age kitchen.

Well, I'm trying to think, what else? Author of Eat Like a Human. Author of Eat Like a Human. Anything else? Wow. I think we're good. Hunted and foraged your meals for your family for a year straight too, right? Featured on National Geographic. So there, there's so much amazing work that you've done in this space, and we thought that, to [00:01:00] answer this question, you would just be an amazing guest.

But I guess before we really dig into it, I know we did, I know we dug into this a little bit on episode 107, but just your backstory for the audience and how you got into the anthropology and archeology space and just kind of some, maybe some misconceptions that you had around meat and food in general that you've cleared up over the years.

I think that would be an amazing place to kick things off. And so much has happened in the past two years. Anyhow, I think it's a great time to maybe reintroduce myself. So like, like you mentioned, uh, By training, I'm an archaeologist and anthropologist, and my work is focused on ancestral, ancient, prehistoric, very old technologies.

So things like stone tool technology, hunting technologies, tanning technologies, ceramic technologies, that sort of thing. And I hope that can lay maybe the groundwork. So I'm embedded in this. I've spent so many years of my life learning about it from some amazing, amazing professors. And most importantly, [00:02:00] It's a hands on application for all of it, so I was, I learned, you know, how to replicate stone tools, how to make these things in order to better understand the archaeological record and interpret what was going on in the past.

So, with that sort of in the background, uh, you know, my story around food is, I have had an incredibly unhealthy relationship with food my entire life. Sick, overweight, metabolic disease, all sorts of issues. And we can dive into some of that later, but just know that. For almost all of my life up until my thirties, I was very, very sick from food related issues and tried every single, every single diet on the planet.

Uh, but when it was, when I realized that almost every single prehistoric technology has something to do with food. That everything changed. And it actually happened in the shower one day when I, when I made that realization, but, you know, if you think about it for three and a half million years worth of time, that our ancestors were developing different kinds of technologies.

And so all the Albert Einsteins, all the best [00:03:00] inventors and thinkers and minds of our, of our ancestors were solely focused on creating technologies that allowed us.

It really drives home that idea that, that, that, that the relationship between food and technology is incredibly important, and we already know the relationship between our, our, uh, dietary change over millions of years is directly related to our biological change. Over time, literally, you know, our dietary change, literally, I'm convinced, built us as humans.

Uh, we know this part already, but if that technological link is such a big piece of it, then I think that's part of the conversation we really need to have with trying to understand how to feed ourselves properly. Um, so I dove deep and it was when I made that deep dive into understanding the role of technology played in the past.

And then, you know, starting to fill in gaps by living and working in, with indigenous and traditional groups all over the world and understanding what their traditional diets were, that I began to finally piece together a diet that made sense for me, um, completely transformed my own health. I applied it to my [00:04:00] family, completely transformed my family's health.

And now more recently, my family and I opened up the modern stone age kitchen. We, uh, I think we just celebrated our third year. Um, we're in Chestertown, Maryland on the eastern shore. We have a full service restaurant now, applying all these principles to our food. And, uh, we have 25 employees. Our team is amazing and we're, we're nourishing the community and it's really, really powerful and, and really rewarding.

Mm-Hmm, . And before I get off of that, I just wanna say one thing. My wife and I, you know, there's so much in the, in the diet and health world when, you know, people like us that are so like minded, we say, you know, these are the changes we need to make. And then we get faced with somebody telling us, well, you can't do it.

Like, it's not possible. It can't be done. You know, there's all these, the first thing that comes up with all these barriers. If my wife and I had a business degree or even had ever taken a business class, we would have never opened that restaurant. Yeah. Um, and we're only three years in, I know we're young now, but we have built in three years, something that was unbuildable.

And we have, because. All of our, everything that we do is focused on, uh, [00:05:00] creating safety, nutrient density, and bioavailability in food. We have a very strict list of things we always do and things we never do that we've never strain, uh, you know, varied from or left. And all the, there's no two ingredients put together outside of our walls means that we get to put all of our money into people.

And we have a team of 25 people that normally a restaurant our size would maybe have, uh, You know seven or eight because their cisco rolls up they pull out the tray They put in the microwave they open up and put on pretend it, you know made its way to the plate somehow Um, we have people that were you know, i'm so proud we have people where you know, we're paying We're paying them really Good wage and they're invested in what they're doing and we have this awesome team awesome atmosphere I can't wait for you guys to come.

But anyhow, the reason i'm bringing it up is it is You Doable these changes are doable and I think what's stopping it is people telling us that it's not. Mm hmm It's so awesome. Just hearing you tell the stories of [00:06:00] What you guys are doing now because what I really respect about what what you've done is combining Studying the past but also applying things to today to actually help improve people's lives not only employees But also the people who show up to your your restaurant and are actually able to nourish themselves in a healthy way but also still Enjoy the food that they're eating like eating healthy doesn't necessarily need to taste badly one of the things I wanted to dig into with you was just your study of these technologies and understanding What did these technologies actually say about what we were designed to eat?

So, I'm curious, as you've gotten deeper and deeper into understanding these tools, what did you see pop up in terms of what people were eating thousands of years ago, and even further beyond that? It's a Uh, I hope I do this well because sometimes I, I, I screw, I screw up the explanation, but the short answer is the more that I learned about what these technologies can offer and [00:07:00] how important they were in our dietary past, the more that I realized that question, you know, what are we designed to eat is really almost nothing like we are.

We are right now today in the state that we are in, and this is a very important point. I think people need to realize is that we as a modern human, a modern homo sapien are to consume solely biologically. I mean, literally taking something with our hand and putting it in our mouth and using our own anatomy, our own digestive tract to make it safe and make it nourishing.

Um, we're designed to eat almost nothing without the aid of some sort of technology. And so real quick, before we dive any deeper, we need to make the distinction between processing food and ultra processed food. Ultra processed food, we all know how terrible that is. So that's not, when I say the word processing food, I'm not talking about Doritos or something like this.

When I say processed food, I'm talking about the essential role technology plays in transforming a raw material into something that our body can safely and [00:08:00] efficiently make use of and derive nutrition from. So we require, and this is very important, I wholeheartedly believe this, we require processing in almost every food that we consume today.

There's a role that that technology plays, and has played, the only food that we are perfectly designed to consume. If you look at a cow, a cow is perfectly designed to consume, uh, tough vegetable materials, things like grass. They, they're, they're anatomically completely built for that. Granivorous birds are designed to be You know, perfectly to consume grains right off of a stalk.

The only food that modern day Homo sapiens are perfectly designed to consume without any assistance at all is dairy from our mothers. Raw milk from our mothers. And that is only for a short period of time. And then after we get weaned, we suppress or lose the ability to digest. Do that perfectly inside of our own bodies.

So where are we left with now we're left with bodies that over three and a half million years of evolutionary change in conjunction with all the technological developments of, of all the three and a [00:09:00] half million years that allowed us to process food outside of our bodies. We built these incredibly huge bodies, massive nutrient needy brains that require massive nutrition in both Um, nutrient density and bioavailability, uh, but our digestive tracts are not built for the task because they didn't have to be.

As we were building these brains, as we were building these bodies, we were creating these incredible technologies that did a better job outside of our body to this food than anything that would have happened on the inside. So our digestive tract didn't grow in relation to our bodies. We have, we have out eaten our digestive tracts.

So we require processing of foods, especially plants in order to make them safe. We require processing of foods, especially plants, to make the nutrients that are inside of it accessible to our bodies. And even if, in those rare occasions where there's some plants that have some nutrients that are safe, and are somewhat accessible, our body accesses them better when they're, when they're at least processed a little bit.

From your perspective, [00:10:00] um, did we, did technology allow us to ultimately go from gatherer to hunter? Because I've heard that we've eaten meat for 2. 5 million years. That's just this, that's the statistic that I go back to. I don't know if that's correct, but I feel like I remember you on episode 107 saying that we started off as gatherers and then with the usage, incorporation of certain technologies that allowed us to actually be able to hunt and get access to these nutrients from animals that were never accessible before.

We did, but there's a step even in between that. So the quick sort of dietary timeline that, and technology is a piece of this as well, between five, I usually started between somewhere between five and 7 million years ago, because that's when we first stood upright. So anything that was literally resembling us and our ancestors and, you know, really in my mind starts between five and 7 million years ago, upright standing, you know, culture at some level, culture, community, you know, having, uh, individuals or ancestors, they were full gatherers, no technologies whatsoever.

So every bit of food that they ate, they collected with their hands or their [00:11:00] mouths. They chewed with the, the only, uh, physical processing was with their teeth. And the only chemical processing was happening inside of their digestive tract. So we, at the time, were still wild animals. Grabbing food and eating that food and subsisting solely on that food.

So we were solely gatherers and the only foods that were in the diet at the time were a very limited amount of hyper seasonal, hyper local vegetables and fruits and a whole bunch of bugs. And of the three, the most reliable food resource, the most nutrient dense food resource, the most safe food source, the of all of it are, were the insects.

Um, and we were small and our brains were small and that did, that did fine. I mean, we were able to subsist on that. Not much was changing for millions of years over that entirety of that time. At 3. 4 million years ago, that's the date right now, at least. Cause that's the oldest tool we found. Uh, and it's found in conjunction with.

Butchered bones of animals. We introduce scavenged meat into our diet. So we didn't kill the animal, but what's left on the savannah after the predator ate all the good parts out of the inside, we could [00:12:00] go and access because we're cutting pieces of meat off and bringing them back to safety, sharing it with the group.

So, we go from 5 to 7 million years ago, gatherers to scavenger gatherers at about 3 and a half million years ago. So we introduce meat into the diet. And then, uh, about two million years ago, we start hunting. So, that change from scavenger gatherer to hunter gatherer happens at about two million years ago.

And, it's a really significant Uh, point in prehistory in my mind because it's also at that time that our brains and our bodies grow to almost modern proportions. So it's homo erectus, you know, huge bodies, brains are not as big as ours, but damn close. It's one of the biggest jumps, actually the biggest jump in brain size we've ever seen.

And the two technological developments that happen at the same time are the introduction of hunting and the introduction of fire. So fire does a lot of things, but I think it's the introduction of hunting that's a significant change. Because what we see is scavenger gatherers are only eating meat and a little bit of marrow, but [00:13:00] eating meat.

They're eating the leftover meat from an animal that's been killed by another animal. But when we start hunting, we're the predators. We have first access to every part of that animal. We can, you know, we have access to the blood, the fat, the organs, all the awful, the most nutrient dense, bioavailable parts of that animal, and obviously also the meat, and can take animals down at will.

So it's that moment that I believe we really started to become human, the way that we think about it. And then, uh, You know, lots of wonderful developments over two, two million years. And then we hit the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and we're the products of that. Do you have any theories or, um, yeah, hypothesis around why we were choosing to go, go from these different stages of scavenger to hunter?

Because in theory, There's an added risk there going out and some of these animals are, you know, aggressive and you're having to take them on whereas, you know, eating plants is not as dangerous. So, I'm curious. Actually, no, it's a lot more dangerous. [00:14:00] Yeah, okay. You know, one of the things we posted about this about a year and a half ago, I said, You know, the difference between plants and animals is, uh, animals will kill you when they're alive and plants will kill you when they're dead.

Uh, so, I think, I think it's very, very true. Um, the image I have in my head, and this is, there's no single thing that I've ever seen in the archaeological record that says this is, you know, this is exactly what happened. This is all interpretation just based upon my own experience and, and the way I perceive things.

The way things were happening in the past. And again, we even talk about millions of years in this, in our conversation here. We're generalizing and, you know, a lot of diversity. But one of the things that I like to think about, the way that I think about it is, today, and we might have talked about this in the last, The last time we spoke, modern Americans want to eat all day long and not get fat.

I mean, when we get down to it, that's really what they want to do. And you can see it in the packaging, you can see it in the marketing, you, you, you go to the grocery store and people are selecting food [00:15:00] because it's advertising what it doesn't have in it. You know, low fat, low carb, whatever, um, and we seek out nutrient free food, not us, but most Americans seek out nutrient free foods and then pay a whole lot of money to go to the gym and, and, and get on a treadmill.

It's the exact opposite of the way we humans have approached food for the entirety of the time that we've been on the planet. We've always been doing the opposite. We've always been doing everything that we can to get the most amount of nutrition with the least amount of work. that when you really think about it, that's exactly what those steps are showing where, you know, every one of those steps up until the agriculture revolution, everything changes, but every one of those steps we're actually working less hard to get a lot more nutrition in return.

So real quick, let me just do a little bit of a segue because it's very important. If we think about the technologies involved with including plants in our diets and including animals in our diets, there's a very big difference. Uh, there's two very, very big differences. One is. [00:16:00] If we divide that into the technologies required to get the food, to access it, and then the technologies required to process the food or at least make it as safe and nutrient dense and bioavailable for our bodies, there's very big differences.

Plants require almost nothing to get. Now this is all hunter gatherer, this isn't agricultural stuff. Hunter gatherers, we've spent a lot of time with hunter gatherers all over the world. Every one of them has a digging stick, some version of a stick to put in the ground and dig up some roots and quorums and tubers.

But other than that, maybe a sharp edge to cut some things, but we're talking about collective foraging, right? Using your fingers, almost no technological investment to get a wild plant. Animals are the opposite, right? All the technological investment for animals is in getting it. Overcoming our physical limitations and, you know, whether it's a trap or a spear or an atlatl or a bow and arrow or a net or a fishing hook or whatever it is, a lot of technological investment goes into getting that animal, right?

But once you have that animal, I mean, you just need a sharp edge. You don't even have to cook it, right? All you need [00:17:00] is something to cut it open and you have, you know, this incredibly safe, nutrient dense, bioavailable food in front of you. But plants are the exact opposite on that other end, right? The real work starts once you have that plant and you have to detoxify it.

And then you have to do a massive amount of work to make the nutrients in it available to our bodies. So if you look over time, almost all the technological input for animals was getting the animal almost all the technological input for plants was making a plant safe and more nutrient dense and they are bioavailable to our bodies detail and but the one of the things has been and I didn't even know it at the time because I wasn't as animal focused 20 years ago as I am now, but For 20 years, one of the major things that I focused on in my research is indigenous and traditional ways of detoxifying plants.

Like, it fascinates me. And the amount and the complexity of it is just off the charts. Like, it is unbelievable the ways that people have figured out how to make a plant that has no business going [00:18:00] into our mouth safe enough that we can derive some nutrition from it. And on one level, you say, wow, that's really cool.

That's really ingenious. And then you have somebody like Anthony Chafe, you say, Well, then why the hell bother? Why would you even, why would you even spend any time with it? So I truly believe plants are a lot. Yes. Is there a risk with some of these animals, maybe hunting wise, potentially for, for, for some of them.

Um, but what's the most dangerous to me is plants. And with that, I would say, um, in the. What's most dangerous is, you know, I, I did a foraging tour for a school, uh, last fall and, uh, it was beautiful. We go out into the woods. The school was located right on the edge of the river and it was a beautiful campus.

There's trees everywhere. We're walking through the woods. We're doing a couple hour foraging tour. It was great. We're identifying all these plants. We're sampling some and doing all this stuff. And we come across this, um, this one mushroom, this jack o lantern mushroom, which is incredibly poisonous. And, uh, one of the, uh, girls in the class, she goes, Would you say that, poison, [00:19:00] oh my god, would, would you say that's like the most dangerous plant is a, is a mushroom?

And I said, absolutely not. She's, you just said that would kill you. I said, oh. I said, if I ate that plant, if I ate that mushroom, and you saw me die, that is an incredibly safe mushroom for everybody else in this group. Because nobody else would ever eat it. Like, you'd never eat it. I said, do you want to talk about a dangerous plant?

A dangerous plant is spinach. Like a dangerous plant is something where you don't see an immediate effect and you eat massive quantities of it and weeks and months and years later you start to feel the effects of this accumulation of things like oxalates and all of a sudden then you're like, Oh my God, you know, what's causing this problem?

And someone's like, Oh, it might be the spinach. And you'd be like, no, it's not the spinach. I haven't eaten spinach for 10 years. Well, exactly. That's the problem. So especially in the past where you have plants that. You don't have the ways that we can identify, you know, blood tests and other things that are going on.

In the past, when we have, we're including plants in our diet that we've detoxified to the point where we have this image that they're safe. [00:20:00] But 10 years down the road, they're causing some sort of harm, and we can't connect that plant, consumption of it for 10 years, and, you know, whatever effects, that, to me, is the most dangerous.

Hmm. How do you feel about Dr. Chafee's perspective on like, instead of detoxifying, just cut them out in general? Do you agree with that at all? I think he's 100 percent spot on. If your focus is, and I've had conversations, I was talking to him about somebody he was working with in Canada that, Was almost entirely meat based and I forget the exact conversation But she was still using some herbs in her cooking like flavor level right like very minute amount and I forget what she Symptoms she still had and he finally said look just just take him out.

Just try it. Just take it all out and He said according to him once you took them out, whatever the last little ill effects were were completely gone He's right. I do believe if you want a toxin free diet You can [00:21:00] guarantee that with carnivore. However, um, if that's your goal, uh, I do find value. And I know we had this conversation earlier.

I do, I do find, I love Brussels sprouts. I love, I love Brussels sprouts fried in lard at with bacon. One of my favorite things on the planet. I love it when it's cooked properly and it's crispy. I mean, I enjoy the flavor. I enjoy the texture. I enjoy all of it. So, um, we include plants in our diet. There, there are things about, you know, the thing that I think we need to focus on is, you know, and our kind of eat like a human approach is recognize, you know, eating an ancestrally appropriate diet.

But recognizing we're living in modern times and finding that balance is the key because there's a piece that the nutritional piece of it whether it's bioavailability or macronutrients or micronutrients or safety in our food or [00:22:00] all of those things are Incredibly important from a biological level food is permeated every single part of our life.

It's part of our tradition It's part of our religion. It's part of our politics. It's everything Everything that we can't nourish ourselves fully as humans if we're solely focused on just the biological aspects of it. So, I'll eat my fried bread. But, but I do believe he's right. Not necessary, but for enjoyment, cultural things, aspects, like you can incorporate those things, but not necessary.

I don't think they're necessary from a nutritional level if you're eating the entire animal. If you're eating the entire animal and that animal has been raised properly and fed the right diet, I don't, no, you do not need vegetables from a, from a, uh, nutritional perspective. But from that, but, but, very few of us are eating the entire animal as much as we should be and very few of us are getting animals that have the maximum amount [00:23:00] of nutrient density because of how they may have been raised, right?

Um, So, for that, there's other things we need to think about for sure. Even, even, uh, certainly, and I'm, and I used to not be a fan of supplementation, but I know that the food we have today is not the food we had 20 years ago. Well, that's a really important segue because there are a lot of carnivores that are just relying on ribeye strips, ground beef, et cetera.

But it sounds like that's very different than what our ancestors were doing to thriving like that holistic animal approach. Maybe we could dig into that a little bit. Absolutely. And one of one of the things that used to bother me a lot because I grew up in the 70s and the 80s. And if if if you wanted to be healthy, there was there was an element in the 70s of recognizing the importance of protein.

Yeah. Like, we demonized fat, for sure. We demonized cholesterol. But everybody seemed, most people seemed to understand the value of fat. So the answer to it was, oh, we, if you're gonna eat, you need to, one egg a week, max. I know we're laughing about it now, but it was a reality of my [00:24:00] life for years. Uh, one egg a week, max, and, and feel guilty about it at the same time.

And chicken breast. And I just remember how weird it was, like, to go to the store and just get chicken breast. Just get chicken breast, just get chicken breast. And I was even as a kid, I'm like, where's the rest of the chicken? So, and then you'd ask questions like, how much should I eat? And so I always, I always grew up my entire life thinking it was weird that you could go to the grocery store and buy a chicken breast and not, and I mean, you could eat if you were focused.

You know, really focus. You could walk right in and just get the chicken breast and not even see another part of a chicken on the shelf. Uh, and then you could walk away. I thought that was weird. But now I also feel, and I think this is a great way to start to answer that question. I feel like we've gone a little weird on the other side as well.

Like, um, you know, we have a lot of famous celebrities eating massive amounts of meat. Bull testicles online and that sort of thing, right? Uh, which is raising an awareness of the value of, or at least that there's other things out there we can eat from the [00:25:00] animal. But I have so many people coming to me now, and how much liver should I eat?

I know liver's now, like how much should I be eating? And it's a really strange question. And my, I, I remember that I, uh, I did a presentation recently and I showed this picture. When we were in Tanzania, living with the Hadza, there was a night, and actually it was when we were filming that Geo show, the very first episode had no idea, we had no idea what we were doing.

And when we went to film each episode, we would land in a place and get to spend about a week with a group somewhere. And we would learn that plant's safe, that plant's going to kill you. I remember there's one plant that was there, if we ate it, it wouldn't make mosquitoes stop it. Uh, biting you, but it would, it would make it, when they bit you, it wouldn't itch.

I love that plant. A lot, a lot of different things. Uh, where the snakes were, you know, all the kind of, so we'd learn all this stuff, right? Behavior patterns, animals. So we, we were literally living with a group and learning all these, it was a, it was one of my favorite parts of the show. So, but when we were doing that part of it, we were just like living in tents and, you know, normal, [00:26:00] normal, but, and then when we started filming.

For the 10 days that we filmed and everything was what you see on TV was what was going on there, at least for me and Kat. And then they put us up at a five star resort for two nights and then we go to the next place. It was this really weird thing. But um, that, in that first, the first night we were out there, we were in the middle of nowhere in Tanzania.

And it was super dark and we were with this one, uh, Hadza group. And everybody there, we were with about six or seven guys that were in maybe their twenties. That were in baboon skins and all this. And we had a fire. And we had, we had headlamps. Cause we were, it was the tent part of the whole thing, right?

And I don't know if they'd ever seen a headlamp before. So they kept looking at it and pointing at it. And then, we had a translator. And, and they said to the translator, it's maybe 10 or 11 o'clock at night. And they said, hey, Can we borrow that headlamp, you know, that thing, because we have to go get water for everybody.

We'll be back in an hour. So we gave them their headlamp, our headlamps, and they take off. And then all of a sudden we realized, like, we have no lights. We're in the middle of the savannah in [00:27:00] Tanzania, and, like, we started hearing the Hyenas and everything else and Jesus and there's nobody here to protect us.

Like what are we doing? So we're just sitting there trying to pretend we're not scared, but every one of us was scared These guys were gone for hours. I mean hours they came back at probably two o'clock in the morning Happier than hell and they had they had shot a genet cat out of the out of a tree Then it was hanging over his shoulder and they were so thrilled because the first time they ever went hunting at night Because they had these lamps.

They didn't go get water. They went hunting with our lights And yeah, they brought this cat back and the first thing they did was we cut it up And we shared all the organs and then they kept the meat for the next day because the organs were going to go bad, but then the meat they were going to share with everybody.

And I think about that image of them coming up out of the, you know, out of the, where the trees were with this jenna cat and he had carrying these bows and in their baboon skins and asking them that question. How much liver should, should we eat? And they would look at it and they'd be like, what the hell kind of question is that?

How much liver does it have? And then we're going to eat the kidneys and the [00:28:00] heart and the, you know, the pancreas, all of this. And then we're going to eat the meat. And then we're going to go kill another one. Like, I don't understand what that question is, but we are so disconnected that for as much as we can go to the grocery store and buy chicken breasts and nothing else, we can go to Whole Foods and buy 20 pounds of chicken livers and not see another part of the chicken.

So that, first of all, that, that connection is essential. And that's one of the things, uh, one of the best things I think that I've done food wise as a father in our house is we've always brought in, uh, animals. Like we brought feathers and skin and hair and bones and hoofs and things that resembled the shape of an animal into our kitchen.

So even if our kid, you know, even if my youngest daughter never wanted to butcher anything, but she was there. And she knows what the inside of that looks like. And she knows, you know, the average size pig, the size of the liver that's in there, you know, this is not, it's not foreign to her. And I think that thought process is when our, when our, when we jumped in body and [00:29:00] brain size, the most ever in our evolutionary past of 2 million years ago is because we were hunting it at full access to the animal.

I'm convinced that's the primary reason. Fire played a role, but that was the main reason. That massive amount of nutrition that's in a state that it is so incredibly bioavailable you have to look at it and your body gets nourished, right? It's, it's that state, that food, that nutrient density, that bioavailability is what literally created us as humans and, and allowed our brains to grow and our bodies to grow, all of those things to happen.

That if we're not eating the entire animal, Then we're missing a large piece nutritionally, but I also think, and this is just as important, we're missing that connective piece. If we're not eating that entire animal, we really don't know what we're doing. And we're relying on, um, you know, podcasts or relying on doctors and other people to tell us how we should be eating.

And it shouldn't be the case. I'm thrilled that you guys have this podcast, but I wish we were in a state where we didn't need it. Yes. Right. So eating the entire animal, having connection to the animal helps with that as [00:30:00] well. It helps inform us and empower us, but it also is the most. You know, bio, I'm sorry, it is the most, um, ethical and sustainable way to go about including animals in our diets, without a doubt.

It's so interesting how our relationship with food has changed through these different arcs of human history, where the agricultural revolution, where skills changed from hunting to actually, like, stewarding these animals lives just so they're going to be consumed as food. Mm hmm. It's, it's so fascinating where we're at today because we, we don't have these skills and now we don't even really have the information to the point where, you know, I took a class, um, in college and it was about Mediterranean food and culture.

The first day the professor put a slide on the, uh, screen and said, what is food? And I'm like, all right, like, Uh, this is like kind of a funny premise to, to ask a bunch of college kids, [00:31:00] but it really got to the point like we've grown so disconnected from food. We now think a bag of Doritos is considered food when, you know, back, you know, hundreds of years ago we had a whole different relationship.

We knew every little thing about the animal. We wouldn't waste any part of the animal going back to your point on, you know, this efficiency equation of not wanting to spend enough energy to get the animal. And then, you know, that animal provided. So I do think that, you know, these little arcs throughout history have, have been, are really incredibly interesting to examine.

But I'm imagining from your perspective to going to these indigenous tribes, you know, And then seeing like how the West has our relationship with food, like they're living in a different time period almost. So do you, do you observe that and think, you know, how interesting it is? Like their skills and relationship with food is just so different than ours.

Oh, absolutely. And, and connected. I mean, the, the, the, I think the best thing [00:32:00] we can do. is find a way to connect with their food. And we like to say like removing a link from your food chain. Like the number one thing, what can I do right away? Remove a link from your food chain, whatever that happens to be.

If you buy chicken breast right now, then go buy a whole chicken. If you're already going to buy a whole chicken, then go to the farmer's market or go to the farm and get the chicken, whatever, whatever that, and I think it's an empowering way to think about it because there's so many of us in this space that, you know, come, okay, well, if you're going to be healthy, You need to kill all of your animals and you need to do this.

And this is the only way you can live it. And it's so much information from somebody coming from a modern Western diet that they're just like, I'm done. Like, I'm not even going to try. Right. One step implemented every single day, every single week, every single month can make a big difference. Uh, I know, I know I'm talking to the meat mafia, but one of the biggest things that I did in my house, I wholeheartedly mean, this is when we decided to never buy bread again.

Like literally we were in every, and we haven't, not even a loaf, and we're going to make a loaf of bread. And this is when my kids were young and I said, I'm going [00:33:00] to make every loaf of bread that my kids eat from this point forward. And what kind of change can that make? So my kids, again, for many people listening to this, they're like, oh my God, Brad, just bear with me for a minute.

My kids. eat sandwiches. And I know that, and they enjoy eating sandwiches. And if I at least could make sure that the two slices of bread that went on every single one of their sandwiches every day they were in school for however many years they're in school, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of slices of bread over their childhood.

If I could make sure that that was made with the most high quality ingredients, 100 percent wild, long fermented sourdough, that made a difference. One slice of bread didn't make a difference. Thousands of slices of bread made a difference over that many years. And so, those little small incremental changes I think are incredibly, incredibly important no matter what they are.

Yeah, it goes back to that nuanced topic of stop demonizing foods, demonize the way that it's processed. Where like, the bread you're talking about is probably four ingredients, right? Or something really [00:34:00] minimalistic versus the bread at a grocery store where it's literally like 25 plus ingredients. Our sourdough pretzels at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen are, not only are they 100 percent wild, long fermented sourdough, they have five ingredients.

Five. And, you guys have a Wawa's out here? You know Wawa? I actually don't think they do. I think Bucky's You guys know what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. Jesus, Bucky's. That could be a full tangent. The pretzels at Wawa, I looked at the soft pretzel, I counted the other day, they have 32 ingredients. 32 ingredients.

It needs to have five. And, and again, it's one of those things you, you know, you don't, you can't name me Bucky's. I went to my first and I think only Bucky's a couple months ago, and I wa we were looking for something to eat and we went over to the, we, the meat section, you know, so I, I picked up the pulled pork sandwich just to look at it, and I started reading the ingredients and I had to turn the package over.

I mean, I, if it did, if it didn't have 70 ingredients in it, I'd have been surprised. 70 and pulled pork sandwich. That was it. It's wild. It's actually crazy [00:35:00] to think about the fact that there are probably north of a thousand food products in Buc ee's and you can't find a single thing that's agreeable with your diet that we're talking about here.

I grabbed the chicken. It was a fried chicken skin thing or something in a bag. is what I ended with, and I ate one of them and I almost threw up. It was, it was weird. And I love fat. I mean, I'm like, I love fat, and I bit into this thing and I couldn't do it. But no, I couldn't. You do, yeah, thousands of things in there.

Water. I'll eat the water. Water. Water and fasting, right? At least we have that. Yeah. But that's the beautiful thing about what you're talking about, is like, when you really develop this amazing metabolic machinery, It is such a good point that you make where your, your body almost makes the switch from how many calories, like what's the maximum number of calories I need to thrive versus like what's the minimal number of calories.

And I remember when I was going through my own journey, rewiring my relationship with food, like having a meal where. Like I was just conditioning to eating everything on my plate, and I think I had like a nice fatty steak with some vegetables. And [00:36:00] I think I ate like three quarter of the steak. I was like, I'm good.

I'm full. And I knew that I, you know, like just that intuition that you have. You're in touch with it. You know what it feels like. Yeah. Yeah, you're not just like bypassing, you know, it's like you're like on manual overdrive where, like Harry's talking about a bag of Doritos. You could know how terrible the Dorito is for you, but you're eating that entire bag, regardless of if you're full or not, because it's so damn hyperpalatable.

And I think there's a, part of it's perception as well, and you made a good, your professor made a great point, what is food? It was really hard when, when my wife, when you know, my wife and I were going through this journey together and she used to be a vegetarian. I didn't force anything on her. She actually, when she was pregnant with our son, she just started craving meat and that was the end of it.

Um, but. Just this this deep dive towards ancestral approaches to food and that sort of thing. We've been on this journey obviously together and It's a give and take relationship I mean, she'd pull me back from you know, going down these rabbit holes and you know back and forth [00:37:00] But one thing that was really difficult is when I realized how terrible some of these foods were like not in seed oils For example, um either get rid of them She's like, no, no, no, we can't throw food out.

And we'd have these conversations back and forth and we couldn't always get past it. So it would sit there for two years in a cupboard and we just never would eat it. And finally we came to the realization, well, it's because of our perception of what food is, right? Food, if our answer to your professor is, food is something that is supposed to nourish us.

then that isn't food. It's not wasting food. You know, putting the nut and seed oils in the garage by the other lubricants where they belong is, is, it's not food. It's doing us harm. So throwing it out is not, uh, it's not a bad thing. It's not like, you know, cause, you know, our grandparents would have grown up during the Depression.

The idea of throwing food out would have been, Oh my God, are you kidding me? But it isn't food, and I think that's what we really need to think about. From your perspective, from somebody who's studied a lot of different [00:38:00] cultures and their food habits, what's your take on the Blue Zones? Like, do you think that there's merit to how we've been doing it?

Talking about and portraying as blue zones because it's got a lot of hype and I think it's one of those things that caught a Lot of mainstream popularity pretty quickly and then it was kind of just like oh blue zones are you know, correct? Like this is the right way to be eating I'm so glad you brought that up because I think our perception of the blue zone diet is So incredibly dangerous that you know opportunities to speak about it are really are really worthwhile My family and I went to Sardinia last year to, well, believe it or not, we, the main reason we went to Sardinia was to do research on detoxification of egg corns using ash and clay for this ancient bread called panisbelli, but that's a whole nother purpose, but uh, This was, uh, stemming from this research that I had been doing for, for 20 years.

I, I [00:39:00] learned about this one bread and ways of detoxifying it. We see this geophagy, the intentional consumption of birth coming up over and over again in, in ancestral human diets. And, and any opportunity I had to witness somebody today that's still practicing it. I wanted to take advantage of because there's not many human animals do it all the time, but not many human populations still intentionally consuming earth.

It's the main reason I went to Bolivia, um, to do that with potatoes. But I learned about this and I spent 10 years trying to find somebody that still made this bread. Pliny the elder wrote about it. Actually, this is, it's, it's a fairly famous bread. It's a precursor supposedly to polenta. Um, it's made out of egg corns.

Uh, but. I kept hitting dead ends and everybody said, nobody knows how to do this anymore. This isn't a practice anymore. And I'm like, there's gotta be somebody gotta be somebody. And then, um, I finally caught a break about two years ago and I found three elderly women in this one village that still knew how to make it, but it turns out they were way too old to meet with anybody, but they had taught [00:40:00] their son.

So I finally got in contact and it was, this is, I mean, years of work and I finally got in contact with our son and he said, please come. And, uh, I'd be happy to show you. So I was thrilled, even though I don't really eat any plants, much many plants, many more definitely not acorns, but I'm like, okay, I'm, we're going to go.

Like we're going to go. But what are the things in Sardinia? I really want to learn beyond acorns. And there were a couple of things I really wanted to learn. So I didn't even know that much about the blue zone stuff when I was setting up this, this trip for the family. And what I wanted to learn most was the most rudimentary form of cheese making.

They still practice there, and it's called Cayo de Cabreto. And they take a baby goat, and they bring the goat to its mother, and have it milk from its mother, you know, have it feed from its mother, fills its stomach with milk, and then slaughter the goat immediately, and pull the goat, and hang the stomach up.

And 10 days later you eat the cheese. I mean, it is the, it's amazing in the simplicity. So the milk is [00:41:00] raw teeming with live bacteria at the right temperature. It's already in the process of fermenting as soon as it hits that stomach. And then the chymosin enzyme is produced in the stomach. It's an unweaned calf.

So it starts to coagulate and it's fermenting and coagulating and it's dehydrating a little bit. It's eight, all of it's happening right there in that stomach for 10 days. So I wanted to do that. There's something called tritelleria, which is the rest of that goat, Every other part of that goat except for the skin.

And the feet are consumed. The skin, the feet, and the, and the large intestine contents. Every other part of that goat is consumed. So it's not like you take the stomach out and the goat goes away. It's like, eh, it, it was one. So, uh, that and then a few other, um, cheese and animal related things. So, I knew I wanted to do that, and I, and I got in contact with this amazing woman named Gisela Rubio, who's a food historian, uh, an older woman, and she's Sardinian, but she's a food historian in Sardinia, wrote several food, uh, books on Sardinian, traditional Sardinian food, and through a translator, you know, I, I set this all up.

She said, come [00:42:00] visit us, I'll get you all set up, we'll go and do this and do all this. Well, it turns out, the place I wanted to go to visit And I didn't even realize it until we got there. It was Villagrande. It's the epicenter of the first blue zone ever identified. And we lived with a family there, and we ate with a couple families there.

And every meal, this, this is exactly what I experienced. Number one, it was some of the most intense animal and dairy research I've ever witnessed. In the middle of the blue zone. Uh, living with the family that was there that we're eating with. Couple of things that are really important. Number one is.

Every meal. One of the things I pride ourselves on at the restaurant is that there are no two ingredients put together outside of those walls. So when you come in and eat, you're one link away from all of that food. Like, literally, it's all been made there. If you have a question about that food, somebody in that room can answer it because we made it, right?

That's rare for meals nowadays, especially going into somebody's home. Every single meal that [00:43:00] we ate, not only did somebody in that room make it, But somebody in that room raised it, slaughtered it, butchered it, like, Every piece of it, it came off of their land, and I mean, it isn't like we ate a little bit of an ore, like, it was full three course meals, like, food everywhere, and every ingredient came from somebody there.

The most, except for one case, the most extravagant meal we ate, and I mean, this was a typical Italian, like, multi hour meal. The only food that we consumed at that table that somebody in that room didn't harvest and grow and make and prepare themselves was the wine, and it was Gisela's nephew or uncle or somebody that made it.

Like, literally, that is how connected we were to the food. Uh, it was brilliant. The reality of the Blue Zones is And some of them, and I think they did a, they were very smart in the way they portrayed it on, on the net. I only watched some of the Netflix stuff because I couldn't take it too long. But, uh, they did a great job of telling you a whole bunch of stuff that was true about [00:44:00] lifestyle.

And then they threw in the food with a complete switch. And you already trusted them because this stuff was real and then, and then they wanted you to believe this and it was false. Um, the reality there is the people there are super old. Like, it's true. Like, old people everywhere and living. It wasn't old people dying, it was old people thriving.

This village is on the side of a mountain, and they're walking up and down the mountain. I mean, there's a guy that lived in the house next door to the house we stayed in. 103 years old, he lived on the second floor. He went up and down the steps every day by himself. It was unbelievable. We got, when we arrived there, we had been driving through Sardinia and the roads.

Everybody in the car was sick. We were exhausted. It was hours and hours and hours of driving. We pulled up. All we wanted to do was lay down. And uh, that woman just started looking up, she's so excited. Come on, let's go, let's go for a walk. Like, first thing, anytime they have a break, they go for a walk. And it's not like, flat.

Like, we're on the eastern shore of Maryland. Everything's flat. Up and down the mountains. Walking and walking and walking. Um, very, old, [00:45:00] very, very kind to one another. And I asked them, I said, Okay, I know everybody, it's cliche when I realize where we actually were. What's the secret? I know it's not one thing, what's the secret?

And the answer everybody said was, we're nice to each other. It wasn't, it wasn't because they ate minestrone soup, it wasn't, it was because they were kind. Those things were real. It was slow paced, always moving. The things that you didn't see there, which you would expect from a western perspective of a community of people that had such, you know, Age, right?

Is you'd expect, you'd expect to see gyms and, um, nutritionists on every corner telling you how to eat and a place for you to work out. And you'd expect to see a whole bunch of, like, old folks homes, right? None of that, because nobody questioned their food. They all, nobody had any questions about their food.

You sat in a room and somebody in that room, if you had a question, somebody would answer it. They didn't need that. They weren't going to gym. None of them were jacked. But they [00:46:00] were all fit, right? Because they were always moving. And they didn't need old folks homes because they literally are living these entire amazing lives and then keeling over dead.

Like, they're living, but they're living into their hundreds. They're not dying into their hundreds. The food itself, though, I don't know if that's the main part you were talking about. The food itself was the exact opposite of what was portrayed on TV. If, the, the vegetable animal switch was the complete opposite.

Um, and not only, and it wasn't meat, it was animal. Every, it was beautiful. Every single part of the animal. And a large reliance on, on fermented dairy as well. Very little vegetables. Any vegetable they had, they grew themselves. So there was olive oil. Um, I know people listening are gonna cringe. There was some eggplant, which I know is a nightshade.

There's eggplant. Um, there was garlic, there was basil,

there was, what was the fruit? We had something fruit wise. But I mean, that's how hard [00:47:00] I'm struggling to tell you the vegetables that we had. And I brought up minestrone soup and they laughed. Because I guess minestrone soup is supposed to be a part of this whole Blue Zone kind of narrative. And they're like, we don't need minestrone soup.

Like, I don't know where they got this minestrone soup thing. And they're laughing at us. So interesting. I will say, I've talked to people that have been in the areas in Greece there, and they're like, it's the same thing. In fact, some of the dishes are very similar to what I experienced there. Um. And, you know, Mary Ruddick has had experiences in some of these places, I've talked to her at length.

It's the same across the board, except for the Loma Linda, or Loma Linda, or whatever the heck that place is. I mean, that one, I think they've, they've probably categorized that one properly. But it's dangerous. I mean, it is very, because we are now getting policies set up on people thinking that this is not only, A proper diet, but that it's an actual diet itself and the narrative is wrong, and this is the kind of thing that impacts people really, really hard, that it's gonna impact 'em for the next 10 years.

It's gonna take us 15 years to crawl out of the crawl, out of the issues. Hmm.