And we're back with another edition of Federalists three Hour. I'm Tristan Justice.
As always, you can email the show at radio at the Federalist dot com,
follow us on Twitter at f d r l s T. Make sure
you subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and to the premium version of our
website. Today, I'm joined by doctor ken Berry, an author and position
with the practice in Royal, Tennessee on the frontlines of combating obesity, insulin
resistance, and medical misinformation. Doctor, thank you for joining me. That's
my pleasure. You good to be here. So I read through your book,
Liseman, doctor told me medical myths that can harm your health. I've
got it right here for any of our viewers, and I love to talk
about some of the major medical myths that you discussed that are totally inaccurate but
really maintain. You know that embrace is the mainstream medical wisdom that's taken ahold
of you know, so many public health authorities. But first, can you
describe for our listeners kind of what led you to write this book to begin
with. Yeah, the main impetus for this book was that, as a
family physician working full time in the emergency department, and also full time clinical
practice. I became severely obese and pre diabetic, and so for you know,
common sense people, common sense makes common sense. And so if I
were a mechanic and my car literally I was stranded on the side of the
road once a week with my car wouldn't start, people would go, I'm
not taking my car to that guy. Or if I were a cosmetologist a
hairdresser in my hair was awful, people would be like, I don't think
so. No, And so, in my common sense, country boy brain,
a fat, pre diabetic doctor is not much of a on how to
be healthy. And so in my personal journey of how am I going to
fix this, which included a three month stint of following the American Diabetes Association
recommended diet and jogging three times a week that actually made it worse, I
come to the rediscovery of what I call a proper human diet. And there
are several principles of a proper human diet that we can go into, but
that's basically. And so if doctors had lied about, oh, you need
to eat lots of whole grains and lots of fruits and vegetables and fruit juice,
smoothies and get rid of the bacon in the saturated fat and the red
and meat. If they lied about that, then they also they were lying
about what causes type two diabetes and also what reverses it. They were also
lying about what causes hypertension and what improves it, metabolic syndrome, what improves
it, obesity of what causes it, what improves it. That so there
are multiple lies, and there I think twenty two lies in the book,
big lies and then a bunch of little white lives in the book. And
these are just lies I collected in my twenty two years of medical practice,
and that just I felt like people need to know about this because then there's
a lot of people that said, well, you should have called a medical
miss because lie is a strong word. Well, I'm a straight shirt shooter.
I like to call stuff what it is, right. And so again,
if you're a mechanic, so it tells you you know you should avoid
red meat, well that's just the mechanic's opinion. He's not an expert.
He doesn't know. He just saw that on send nd or something. But
if if a lies, if you're licensed doctor who has a fiduciary duty,
to you in the doctor patient relationship. If they give you nutrition advice or
medical advice and it's absolutely wrong, and it's it's knowable to the doctor that
that advice is wrong, but they don't take the time, don't take the
effort to discover what he is noble about that topic, then in my opinion,
that's a lot. That's a profession. That's a lie told by a
professional who's trusted by a patient, who trust this guy or girl. They're
a doctor, they're supposed to know about this stuff. Or if they don't
know, they should tell me. I don't know, I'll have to look
that up or do what you want, because I have no idea what diet
you should eat. Well, I think that point's really telling. I mean,
if you followed us dietary guidelines to a t, you will be sick.
I mean they're still recommending seed oils, recommending, you know, levels
of saturated fat so low you might as well not even you know, cook
steak more than once a week. You know, they're recommending a high carb,
low fat diet, which we know to be absolutely you know, you
talk about the difference between this versus why, well, we know that was
actual lie. I just finished this book by this Science Journals to Nina te
Quals Big set Fast Prize, and I saw one of the books that you
actually recommended in your book here talking about how you know there is this this
you know, famous doctor from the mid twenty century, Ansel Keys, who
publish this famous seven country study showing you know, the nail in the coffin
for you know, a high fat diet when it should have been called the
twenty two country studies. He really just took out all the country that contradicted
his predetermined conclusion that a high fat diet beats to heart disease and just took
them right out of the data. And so it is a lie, and
it's been one of the most deadly lies, really, I would argue almost
human history since considering, you know, population is now saturated with you know,
an epidemic or chronic disease and obese three generations later. And of course
you know this as a doctor, you know a metabolically, you know,
a medical bolically obese person is going to be fundamentally different metabolically speaking, after
they lose the weight. So you know that happens three generations down. You
know, we're digging yourself into such a deeper and deeper hole that it's getting
more difficult out of. But you know, our food supply is responding to
all these different forces. But when you were writing this book, well,
I also think it's pretty telling. You know, healthcare professionals, of course,
aren't always models of health because they're following the dietary guidelines, and so
it makes sense that you, as a doctor would be kind of feel like
you're in the twilight zone before writing this book. Of Okay, I think
I'm following generic medical advice and I'm you know, obese. But when you
started writing the book, what struck you, as you know the most some
of the most surprising myths that you came across, well, the very first
myth that I ever came across. And I think this is an excellent lie
to talk about because even though it may not apply to the listener's life currently,
but if you think about just the underlying foundational principles of this lie,
immediately you see, oh wait, doctors are susceptible to the same logical fallacies
as I am. So when I was on my obstetrics rotation as an intern,
we would be on call for twenty four hours, we deliver a bunch
of babies, and then in that next morning the vaginal deliveries. If there
was uncomplicated, we would send them homes. We would write discharge orders into
discharge prescriptions, you know, some ibuprof and a few purpose said. And
then my chief resident, very intelligent guy, he said, now don't forget
in the exclusively breastfed babies to write vitamin D drop prescriptions for the babies.
And I was, I was like what, I don't why? And he
said, dude, humans don't make they don't put vitamin D in the BREASTML
and so if they're exclusively breastfed, they won't get any vitamin D. They'll
develop brickets. So you gotta prescribe vitamin D drops for the baby. Now,
even somebody who's completely not educated in any way about medicine, nutrition biology,
that ought to throw up a red flag. It's like, well,
what about five hundred years ago when there was not a pharmacy and all babies
were exclusively breastfed without exception, right, or they died if the mom didn't
make breast milk, So how did they get vitamin D? And then even
further back and so for the totality of humanity's existence on the planet. Humans
don't put vitamin D in the breast milk, And so I was very busy
intern Also, you don't ask a lot of questions in your intern year.
You get marked as a troublemaker, and so I just kind of filed that
away, like that makes no sense. I'm going to look that up later.
And later it turned out to be about four years later when I was
out of residency and was in my private practice. And so when I looked
it up, turns out that's completely false. If the mom is getting enough
vitamin D in her diet, she puts plenty of vitamin D in the breast
milk. The problem was was that all the moms were vitamin D deficient.
So therefore, yes, they didn't have enough vitamin D in their body to
put it in the breast milk. But then we have to always look at
human nature because everything, whether it's economic, political, medicine, any specialty,
you have to consider the human nature of this. So my chief resident,
was he a moron? No, he was brilliant. I still look
up to him to this day. He is so widely and deeply read in
medicine and nutrition, but he believed that, he firmly believed that human mothers
do not put vitaminto end the breast milk. How can a board certified He's
board certified in both internal medicine and pediatrics, very intelligent. How can somebody
with that degree of intelligence and education, how can they believe something that even
somebody who dropped out of school in eighth grade would just go, well,
how is that even possible? How does that that don't even make no sense?
You see my point? And so a large part of what I've been
studying in the writing of lies and then also with my YouTube channel and all
the other work I'm doing is just the human nature of this. How can
a grown adult, educated, intelligent person hold all these true beliefs in their
mind, but that at the same exact time hold these beliefs that are not
only untrue, but are demonstrably untrue, that are just patently just like it
literally can't be true. That cannot be true if what we know about human
biology is true. But yet people are capable of doing this. And I
think you very well know. We see this in politics, we see it
in economics, we see it in philosophy. Humans we're fascinating mammals, are
we not? That we can be so intelligent but yet so abjectly ignorant at
the same exact moment. And so part of what I'm doing is educating doctors
and other healthcare providers to say, hey, you need to think about every
single thing you say to a patient, because they trust you almost at a
demigod's status, at a which doctor status, at a tribe leader status,
like it's hardwired into people to trust their doctor, and you're just you destroy
that completely when you say idiotic things. And so you know, I educate
regular folks, but a large part of what I'm trying to do is to
reach out to doctors and say, do stop saying this ignorant stuff, because
you're destroying your your doctor patient relationship and the therapeutic benefit of them believing in
you, because there is some therapeutic benefit to that. If you believe in
your doctor, then the treatment's more likely to work. But if they've said
something, especially over the last three years, if they've recommended certain things that
turns out to be just complete foolishness, actually dangerous foolishness, they've lost all
credibility with their patients. And that's not therapeutic. That's not good at all.
I'm not sure how we come back from that. But so that that
that lie was my first lie, that that human mothers don't put a critical
essential nutrient in their breast milk, we have to supplement the baby, and
that with that as kind of the foundation, then I k I discovered all
the other lives in the book. You know that that brings up another fundamental
problem I think we have in our current healthcare system. I don't think we
have healthcare system. I think it's pretty clear we have a sick care system.
We just wait until everybody gets sick and then you know, throw a
bunch of pills at everything. And so I feel like we live in this
world of you know, supplements and medications that have been designed to solve any
type any type of problem that seems to pop up, which almost always goes
back to our food supply. I think most of our problems are feutable.
I don't think they're juggable. I think that's completely wrong. I think it
shows how there's kind of this this dark side of capitalism with you know,
incentives to keep a nation that's chronically that sick and depressed. And I think
that third one is really critical because I think our mental health crisis is not
a mental health crisis. I think it's a lifestyle crisis. Lifestyle crisis that's
been fed by a toxic diet, again for at least seventy years and going.
And so your example about vitamin D I think it's really you know,
analogous to what we're seeing with ozampic. You know, we have this problem
that's been created by a toxic diet, a nation that's forty two percent apiece
at least sixty seven percent overweight, and we're just throwing a bunch of farm
sucles out it. That's making these you know, corporate titans on Wall Street
so rich that it's actually reshaping the economy of Denmark, where some of these
name brand medications are coming from. And so, you know, we just
want to pill to solve every problem, and we never really want to ask
ourselves what can we do to fix it ourselves. But also you talked about
medical education. I think in the book your number was what twenty one hours
medical students get, like twenty one hours of nutrition schooling at my medical school.
But now there are many medical schools where you get a two hour lecture
or no nutrition education whatsoever. And let me just add that although I was
lucky to have gotten about twenty two hours of nutrition education, first of all,
at least half, if not more, of that was completely incorrect,
not only incorrect, but exactly incorrect, like the exact opposite of what they
should have taught us. Now, when it comes to somebody who's got severe
burns or been in a severe car accident and we have to start an intravenous
needle and feed them intravenously, we were taught pretty well how to do that,
how to get them all their amino acids and fatty acids and vitamins and
minerals. That was useful. But the carried and feeding of just a normal
human in the wild, which is what you and I are right now,
this is currently our wild. All of it was wrong. All of it
was wrong. And then that was in the second year of my medical training,
from the last nutrition class. From that moment forward, nutrition basically was
not mentioned again, only in a negative way. If a patient was morbidly
obe, somebody might crack a joke about what we imagined they were eating at
home. But there was never any more mention of nutrition. It was always
about what's the best pharmaceutical in this specific condition. That was every question from
every attending physician to every resident, every single day of the rest of our
training, is what's the right pharmaceutical in this situation. Never ever in my
medical training after that small nutrition class was nutrition mentioned in any kind of productive,
useful way. The Watchdout on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every
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or wherever you get your podcast. Wow, how much of our health crisis
do you think could be solved if we were to just calibrate our nation's diet
to incentivize a diet that's built on you know, a whole mostly unprocessed foods
and just you know, going back to the way we were supposed to eat,
you know, pre nineteen sixty two AHA recommendations. Yeah, if I
could be appointed dictator and make the following changes in the American diet and then
walk away George Washington style and say that's it, I'm retiring to my farm,
it would be that a proper human diet by definition is low in carbohydrates.
Anybody eating more than one hundred grams of total carbohydrates today is causing this
metabolic disease. Without exception. Some people need to eat or fewer carbohydrates than
that. A proper human diet by definition is ancestrally appropriate. And so you
probably know, Tristan, that eight to twelve thousand years ago there was this
thing called the agricultural revolution. I call it the agricultural de evolution because that's
kind of what it did to the health of human beings Before that. Let's
go back before that. We know very well what humans were eating then.
It was mostly meat from large ruminants and large megafauna. That means over one
hundred pounds. That's what we ate every single day of our life. And
then yeah, we definitely we ate some seeds, we ate some fruit,
we ate some berries. If it was available, we would eat some grass
if we were starving. But our primary food was large fatty animals, and
then seafood if we lived near an ocean, fish, if we lived near
a river, that was the predominance of our food, which, by definition,
all that's very low in carbohydrates and also very nutrient dents. That's the
next print, blit. Everything you eat should be nutrient dense. The very
reason we eat foods for nutrition. Now, a lot of people eat food
for pleasure, eat food because it's socially correct to eat at this time of
day, et cetera, et cetera. Eat to fight against anxiety or depression
or boredom. None of those are appropriate ways to eat. But of course
the big food manufacturers they want to equate eating with fun. Oh you know
pringles, Oh, Coca cola, it's fun, have a smile on your
face, Have a coca and a smile. That's inappropriate, right. A
proper human diet, by definition, does not include things that are inflammatory in
nature, like vegetable seed oils, like highly processed grains, like too much
sugar in the diet. These things are known to cause inflammation, and so
that I would implement some kind of system like that, and then I would
pull a GW and just walk away and say, Okay, you guys are
back in charge now. And I'm also just amazed at this kind of erasure
of discipline. And I understand. I think big food is largely culpable,
and you know, engineering your product to become as addictive as possible. I
mean they study, you know, what can they how can they make their
food leave people craving more? And the marketing here is so predatory if anyone
ever wonders why, you know, those sugariest cereals are always at hip level.
You know, just look at Hughes walking next to the parents at the
grocery store. Next time you're at Walmart, it's always a child because they
want the child to beg the parents to buy the fruity pebbles and the fruit
loops and the lucky charms. But I had this doctor email me after a
call I WRO several weeks about exampek, saying, yeah, but I was
explaining. I was explaining to him some of this, you know how our
health crier set crises are foutable, not druggable. And he's like, yeah,
but people don't follow diets. There's just this total erasure and he's he's
actually correct, But that is not the fault of the patient. That's the
fault of the doctor. I'll give you an example back in two thousand and
three, two thousand and four, back when I was becoming severely obese,
if someone came to me, as my patient had said, hey, doc,
I need to lose weight, type two diabetic, you know I would
My literal advice to them was, you need to join weight Watchers, and
you need to join the gym, which has lifetime memberships. By the way,
and there's less move more. Let's move more. You need to just
burn more calories than you eat. Now, I used to suspect, just
like that doctor, Oh my patients don't listen, or they say they listen,
but they're lying. They don't really try that. But when I was
the patient, right when I was like, Okay, I can't be a
fat doctor here in Tennessee because people here will call you out on your bullshit,
right, and they're like, Oh, you're going to tell me how
to lose weight, Doc, you might you might want to take your own
advice. Well, when I followed my own advices and it did not work.
The reason that people don't follow the diets that they're doctors tell them to
follow is because they've already tried that and it does not work. It leads
to frustration. It leads to you, Oh, I wasted a bunch of
money on the gym membership and the wave watchers, and I mean I lost
ten or twenty to start with, but now I'm basically starving all the time.
Because that's what every single diet that doctors recommend is based on, is
life long semi starvation. Think about it. That's literally the plan. And
so when we as common sense humans, when we apply that to any other
mammal on the planet. Right, let's lock a goat in a pasture and
let's chronically underfeed that goat. What's that goat going to do? He's going
to jump the fence and go find something to eat. That's exactly what all
my patients were doing. They tried to starve themselves so the rest of their
life that is not sustainable. It's also not biologically plausible. We are hardwired
not to allow ourselves to starve to debt. But when you're eating a diet
that keeps you hungry twenty four to seven, there's not enough willpower or stamina
in the world to fight against that. But also, and so now they're
trying to say, well, these genetic nothing you can do about it.
You just need to take ozipic or we go over your manjoro again, a
big fat lie. Right, And so, there is a genetic predisposition for
obesity, there's no doubt about that. But to pretend that the entire question
is just one of genetics is that's a lie. What doctors should be saying
is you're probably a little more genetically susceptible to developing obesity. Yes, that's
true. But what I believe in very firmly, and have believed in for
many decades is the absolute sovereignty of the individual. And so if you are
watching this and you're currently obese or severely obese, it is one hundred percent
your fault. Okay, now it's not necessarily your fault out of an act
of commission you didn't know better, but it's still your fault, and that's
the bad news. But the good news, again, going back to that
sovereignty of the individual, that's the good news is you can fix it just
as easily as you caused it. But it's gonna take some time. It's
going to take some education, it's going to take some trial and error until
you figure all this stuff out. Now, is it your fault that you
don't know about any of this? No? Is it your problem? Yes,
it is your problem. And so the degree to with which you take
this seriously and you start to make meaningful changes, moving your current diet,
whatever it happens to be, back towards a proper human diet, your health
is going to benefit. Your waistline's gonna benefit, your ae C is gonna
benefit. But the degree to which you ignore this what we're talking about right
now, your health's going to suffer, and also the health of your family.
Because your children and grandchildren they're watching you daily and they're learning from you,
whether you're giving them the right example or the wrong example. They are
hardwired to watch you into following your footsteps. They cannot help that. And
so either you're literally making a new tradition of family tradition in your family of
good health, of a normal whteline of a normal I want say, or
you are literally creating a family tradition of disease. Yeah. I often get
worried when the discussion of genetics comes up because I often think that genetics is
used so much as kind of a scapegoat to say, why I'm just a
victim of my faith, and no one's a victim of their faith. I
think, you know, especially I've been pretty convinced about how our epigenetics will
change to make us more susceptible to weight gain. But you know, this
idea that our genes changed last have radically changed the last seventy years to give
rise the level of the BC today, I think it's often used as a
scapegoat. You know, I've been reading a lot of books about nutrition this
year, but I've also been reading a lot of books about people who are
in the body positive movement, typically associated with you know, left ideas of
the social justices. Obesity is kind of becoming the you know, the next
ring on the you know, social justice hierarchy of victimization. Uh. But
you know, I'm reading some of the things that these people have been trying
to do to lose weight, and it's like, it's no wonder these equal
can't lose weight because, like you said, they're all starving themselves to death.
I have no doubt that these people actually did try to starve themselves to
lose weight, but of course that just caused you know, reads more havoc
on their metabolism. And you know, I read this book, uh,
doctor Benjamin Bickman about you know, why he get sick and talks about how
starvation leads to insulin resistance, and it's just these you know, all these
negative feedback cycles everywhere. Uh, you know, wreaking, we're on this
metabolic roller coaster, and then we wonder why we're not healthy. And so
now they've kind of you know, the answer to this is, as I'm
wearing becoming this kind of you know, let's absolve discipline and kind of you
know, normalize obesity as to do norm and even glorify it as you know
the next ring on the social justice hierarchy. That's kind of a message from
these body positive influencers, And so I get worried, you know that we're
raising discipline, but also think you know the second prong of the pellar of
this is education. Like you said, we need to educate people not just
on how to actually lose weight through optal metapolism, but also educate doctors who
are, you know, still I think coerced into buying into a lot of
these ideas coming from the American Heart Association, the USDA, the FDA supporting
you know, these these low fat guidelines. Yeah, and I think that
the average doctor is not coerced in any meaningful way. Now, they may
feel coerced, but that doesn't make it true. Yes, if a doctor
steps outside of their box and starts recommending a proper human diet loudly on social
media, they might get a visit from their state medical board. Yeah,
but my question would be, well, doctor, did you did you mean
it when you when you swore that oath? Did you mean that? Or
were you just full of crap? Because if you didn't mean it, then
fine, you know, just put your head down and do what you're told
by the American Heart Association. But if you actually meant that, then that
means that you, by definition, need to be a thinking, reasoning individual
who's also still a very active student, who's constantly looking at the old way,
constantly reading about new options. That's your job as a doctor. Otherwise,
what do you think your job is, especially primary care doctors? I
mean, literally, what the hell do you think your job is? You
think it's just to prescribe medication, because I don't think that's what the real
job of a doctor is. I think the real job of a doctor is
to constantly have their thinking had on, and to constantly be a student,
and to constantly be tailoring the advice they give their patients based on evolutionary principle,
on archaeology, anthropology, on the latest nutrition studies, and also look
at what the AHA and the ADA are saying. But that doesn't ever mean
that you blindly follow that. It's called private practice for a reason. You
are ultimately responsible for the advice that you give your patience, and if that's
bad advice, you're not a good doctor. And that's just the end of
that. A few years back, I tweeted that no one should take nutrition
advice from a fat doctor, and man, all the body positivity people,
the healthy at every size people, they came at me with a vengeance,
not knowing just seeing my latest profile picture, not knowing that I used to
weigh two hundred and ninety seven pounds, And the point of my tweet was,
back when I was severely obese, you should absolutely not have taken nutrition
advice from me. But they didn't know that part. They thought I was
some skinny doctor making fun of fat people. It was like, nah,
you need to dig into this story a little bit more. And a lot
of them did and apologize, but I get their point, like you shouldn't
be mean to people who are with obesity. I totally agree. I'm not
trying to be mean to anybody. I'm trying to literally save their life from
the metabolic disease, of which obesity is just one of the many symptoms.
Yeah. I bring it to this book called Health at Every Size right Now,
which has kind of become you know, the academic backbone or this body
positivity movement, and they're talking about how well a beast people can often live
even longer lives and people in otherwise healthy way. And of course it criticized
BMI, which BMI has its own issues, But the end of the day,
it's not about living as long anymore. It's about living well into your
sixties, seventies, and eighties, you know, being able to get out
of bed without any type of support whatsoever. And I think that discussion gets
really lost when we talk about longevity. It's not just about living to ninety
or one hundred some day. It's about, you know, being able to
get out of bed and function like a normal, independent person and not spend
your final twenty years in a nursing home. I don't think anybody wants that.
And so, you know, this body positivity boomit is kind of coming
out and you know, jumping through you know, scientific gymnastics to kind of
try to normalize OBEs as this socially accepted norm and even garner you know,
freer plane seats and whatsoever. But I just want to talk about you also
talk about in the book about testosterone levels and how you know testosterone replacement therapy
doesn't actually lead to prostate cancer. And I spoke to an an antrochronologist earlier
this year about this issue about how you know, doctors don't even know that
their patients are have low testosterone because testosinan levels have fallen so dramatically over the
past few decades that these averages are based on population averages, and so patient
that might you know, be seen as normal today, it's based on a
population average that's already dropped by what I think, it's forty two percent since
two thousand and six. Yeah, And I'll give you an example. When
I first started practicing in the early two thousands, when I would check a
total testosterone on a patient, the normal range that lab Core would say this
is a normal range was from three hundred and fifty to eleven hundred and ninety
nine twelve hundred, right, So three fifty to twelve hundred was considered normal.
Now, if you get your total testosterone checked, when you get your
lab core results back, it's considered normal if your total testosterone is above two
hundred and forty nine. So they've lowered it from three fifty down to two
fifty. Now, did it suddenly become healthier to have a testosterone of two
ninety versus three ninety. No, absolutely not. But the average testosterone is
so low and the general population of healthy people that they had to lower that.
And so, yeah, testosterones back from the nineteen tens were double what
they are now, if not more in some cases. And so testosterone opens
up such so many cans of worms that we could dig down in just eating
lots of fatty red meat and lifting heavy things. Just those two practices alone,
for the average guy in his twenties, thirties, forties, fifties can
increase his total testosterone level anywhere from fifty points all the way up to four
hundred points. Oh wow, those two interventions alone. And so we've had
guys documented. Here's my before testosterone. I started the carnivore diet, which
is a subset of a proper human diet, and I started lifting heavy things,
not even going to the gym, Just lifting you know, logs here
at the house and old car batteries and just stuff I had around raised their
testosterone four hundred points. Now, then we get into the social side of
this, because a lot of people there's a lot of myths and misconceptions about
what a high testosterone man looks like and acts like, and a lot of
these have social connotations. And so a high testosterone man, by definition,
in a natural human setting is going to have lots of perseverance, They're going
to be vigilant, they are going to be somewhat dangerous. But I would
argue that a grown man should be considered somewhat dangerous or have the potential to
be dangerous in the right situation. I think that's a big part of what
of social cohesiveness. That's what holds our society together is I know I can't
go over next door be mean to Joel, or be mean to Joe's wife
or Joe's kids or Joe's dog because Joel whipped my ass, and so therefore
it's kind of like that. That's part of the guardrails of social society is
knowing that if you push a man far enough, he's going to be dangerous
to you, and you should know that and you should act accordingly. But
now we've got this society of men whose testosterones routinely or somewhere between one hundred
and fifty and three hundred and fifty. And I'm talking about men in their
twenties, thirties, forties, even fifties. That's way too low. And
these men are docile, they're pushovers. They cry at cat food commercials.
I had a patient literally tell me something's wrong with me. Doc last time
I was watching TV and a cat food commercial came on, and I literally
tuned up, what's wrong with me? I didn't even have to check his
level. I knew he had low testoster but I checked it anyway, it
was one hundred and eighty nine. So and then I had a guy reach
out recently to me from the kind of the preparedness preparedness community, and he
said, Doc, if you wanted to create and easy to control populous,
what's the one thing that you would do to them? And I'm like,
well, I would make them all have low testosterone. He's like, uh
huh, because he believes in the conspiracy theory that this is a concerted plan,
which I don't think that's true. I think that this is just kind
of the culmination of many different corporate, governmental profit interests that's culminated in a
diet and a lifestyle that is just, by the default and definition, going
to make young men have low testosterone. But he kind of has a point
like, if you wanted to do something to a society that would make them
just go along with whatever you said at the upper levels of corporate and government
structure, it would be a low testosterone society. It would be a society
that says things like, oh healthy at every size, whether you're you know,
just a bony little weak man or you're a you know, this severely
old based woman. You're still healthy and you're still fine, and we still
love you. That's kind of what that society would look like. And although
I don't believe there's a conspiracy, I think we're still suffering from this,
just like if it were a conspiracy. Does that make sense? Yeah,
And that's so interesting the part about so I actually I have an example about
this. A couple of years ago, I was convinced to try veganism for
a month. I just wanted to see what it'd be like. You know,
is during COVID, I had nothing else to do, and I was
actually sober throughout the pandemic because I just didn't want to indulge in anything that
could become addictive. And so it was like February twenty twenty one and I
had just gotten in a crossbit and I just watched this documentor on Netflix.
I think it was called The Game Changers, and so I said, well,
let's give this a shot and see what it's like. And first of
all, I hated all of you that I ate tofu. I'll never touch
it again. I only buy you know, pasture raised eggs the store now.
But I remember at the end of that month, I was crying at
the stupidest things. I would watch Survivor and I finished the series and I
found is So I'll tell you, I felt so much better when I started
putting eggs back in my diet and then you know, real meat and started
eating how you know, we were We did our entire evolution. You know,
we've been the eaters since the inception of the species forty million years ago.
And so it's that's such an interesting point that as as a medical doctor,
what do you think is driving down these testosterone levels? I read this
book earlier this year about how it's you know, the chemical contamination from our
to our water supply, to the plastics that we come in contact with.
But you know, I think a larger part could be our diet, what
we're eating. We're still ingesting. We're ingesting some of these chemicals and toxins
instead of just touching them. Is it our diet or is it our you
know, just physical exposure. Yes. So it's such a there it's it
is the ultimate multi factorial problem, I think. And so then it's like,
Okay, there are moreultiple things causing the low testosterone epidemic. Okay,
I believe that but then the question becomes is what can I, personally at
doctor Barry do about it, but also you the listener, what can I
actually do about it? Well, the one thing you can absolutely start to
change today is what you're eating and what you're avoiding. And as I intimated
earlier, you can expect anywhere from a fifty to a four hundred percent increase
in your testosterone when you stop eating effectively a plant based diet. And a
lot of people in America don't understand this. They're like, oh, no,
I don't eat plant based I just eat whatever. Well, dude,
track what you're eating for a week. You're eating a plant based diet.
As just eating the standard American diet, seventy percent of your food energy is
coming from plants. You're eating a plant based diet. And so if you
live on junk food, you're you're you could possibly be a vegan and not
even know it. And so that's the problem with a lot of people is
they're like, I just eat whatever. I don't know, but that's a
plant based diet that's lowering your testosterone. And then lifestyle, you can actually
start to change that immediately by going right now and doing some pushups, or
doing some body weight squats, or doing some jumping jacks or just whatever,
go to the bedroom and have sex. All those things are going to raise
your testosterone. Right now, we get off in and so I think diet
is eighty percent of the solution. I think lifestyle exercise ten to fifteen percent
of the solution. Now we're down into the one percent things that you can't
really do anything about. For I think the forever chemicals, I think they're
having an effect on our testosterone. I think herbicides definitely are lowering testosterone.
And keep in mind that every plant based, every grain that you eat,
wheat, rice, oaks, corn is dowsed with glyfe asakee and they don't
wash that off. That's still there. Okay, you're and so you can
take any box of cereal in the cereal aisle, and you know that the
cereal aisle is stuck with options because that's a huge profit markup for them.
You can send it to the lab. It's gonna test positive for glaphisake okay,
or some of the other pesticides or herbicides. It's gonna test positive every
time because you can't wash it off. It actually gets into the plant,
and so yeah, electromagnetic radiation maybe if you live too near a high power
line, or who knows what other kind of electronic things that may have an
effect. I think there are any number of effects. Fluoride maybe in the
water that might have an effect. But the two biggest effects, thankfully,
are also the two effects that you literally are in charge of, and that
you can get up after you finished listening to this and go, Okay,
I'm going to change my diet and I'm going to change my lifestyle. Those
are the two biggest things that you can do to raise your testosterone level.
Those are in your control. So you know, you might want to worry
about the little one percent potential one percent problems of forever chemicals and pesticides and
herbicides and you know there's a power line outside my window, but let's work
on what we can actually change, and those just happen to be the ones
that are going to make the biggest difference. Yeah. I always come back
to cereal because I think cereal is just so amblematic of so many issues with
our food system. I mean, we can't market cigarettes to children, but
we can market you know, corn pops to children that are just full of
blicifa and all these different pesticides that just recavic on our endocrine systems. But
just to go back to the book a little bit, I thought you you
had an interesting point in here about how I think it was in your in
the back in the little in the Little White Lives about health nutrition, you
rate that eating before a bed does not make you fat. So what do
you think then of this intermittent fasting? Seems to be you know, the
big height these days about how you know how ketones are actually so important for
longevity. So what's your take on intermittent fasting for people who do need to
lose weight and need to optimize their metabolism. I think into intermint fasting is
great for everybody and mandatory for some people. And so intermittent fasting means that
you go for a period of time each day or for a few days without
eating any anything. That's that's what intermint fasting is. And so the bedtime
myth, it's like, oh, the time of day that you eat somehow
magically matters. Well, if you have a couple of big bowls of cereal
with skim skim milk, and you know, a bag of douritos at bedtime.
Yeah, you're not gonna lose weight. You're going to gain weight,
but it's not because you ate that at that time of day. I would
love it if someone would design a research study where they said, Okay,
I'm gonna take up twenty guys and I'm gonna put them on a carnivore diet
fatty red meat eggs with the yolk. But then they're gonna also eat one
meal a day and it's gonna be right an hour before bedtime. What do
you think you think those guys if they started to study obed so, they're
gonna lose weight one hundred percent. They're gonna lose weight because they're doing twenty
two hours of intermittent fasting, and then when they do break their fast and
eat, they're eating high healthy animal fat, high healthy animal protein, lots
of vitamins and minerals, and they're not eating any junk that's going to cause
inflammation or cause an insulin spike or a blood sugar spike. One hundred percent,
they're going to lose weight. Yeah, So it's not the time of
day, it's your meal frequency, and it's what is your meal made up
of and so, yeah, I think intermint fasting is a great thing.
And that's one of the principles of a proper human diet is that you're going
to include at least some degree of not eating in your proper human diet.
All of us fast for eight hours a night while we're asleep, right,
And so if anybody says, oh, you shouldn't do daily intermint fasting,
that can be dangerous. Well, again, that's like any common sense person
should go, Dude, I don't eat for eight hours every night. What
the hell are you talking about. So you're saying if I go from not
eating for eight hours a night, if I add an hour on each end
of that and now I'm not eating for ten hours, you're saying that's inherently
dangerous. Like where's the danger cut off at? Is it eight hours?
In one minute? That doesn't make any sense at all, And so people
should just understand that just biological extension. If you can fast for eight hours
every night, you can fast for ten hours, you can fast for twelve,
you can fast for fourteen. That's what I recommend from most people is
just slowly increase the amount of time each day that you don't eat it's noon
here right now where I'm at, and I haven't eaten today. I've had
two cups of coffee. I'm not going to eat. I probably won't eat
till three or four pm. That's my standard. I never eat in the
first part of the day. I'm outside working on the farm or I'm inside
working on videos. And I think that's that mimics how our ancestors they didn't
eat three meals a day with snacks in between. Anybody that suggests that that,
oh, you need three three meals a day, that's been proofe No,
that was actually a marketing employee by Kellogg's to get everybody to start eating
breakfast, because it used to be super common for nobody to eat breakfast.
You would eat lunch and dinner. That was it. That was. And
then there are parts back in the medieval times when you were considered sinful if
you ate in the morning. It was so uncommon that you were a sinner
if you ate some bread and cheese in the morning. Nobody ate before lunch,
before noon. It just was unheard of. And so now for nutritionists
registered dietitians to say, oh, you need to eat three meals a day
and snacks in between to keep your energy up. If you hear somebody say
that, you are literally listening to a big food trained zombie, because they're
not even they're not even thinking about what they're saying. With the regards to
Homo safety and safey and being a specific species of mammal that's been on this
planet a long damn time, and we know exactly how often we used to
eat. Through archaeology, anthropology, and paleoanthropology, we can figure all this
stuff out. And it wasn't three times a day with snacks in between.
Hopefully with the Kellogg's label or the Post or the General Meals or the Craft
Times or the Coca cola or the pepsi. That is absolutely by definition unhealthy.
And that's a big part of many people's problem. But of course,
the incentives for everyone on Wall Street is to have us eating all the time.
It's three meals a day and then it's snacks in the afternoon, and
it snacks before bed. And it's because not only is there money to be
made on selling all that stuff, but there's so much money to be made
on the prescriptions that follow, the diseases that follow the fact that because fourign
ten Americans have or at least two crime diseases. And so we've, you
know, again, the dark side of capitalism has incentivized a sickness industry,
and we wonder why healthcare is, you know, remains at the major issue
in every single presidential election every four years because Americans just don't have a high
level baseline health to begin with. Just to wrap up, what are some
of the main takeaways that you want an audience to have when it comes to
health from your book. So it's not out of your control. It's not
your genetics, it's not oh, you're just you come from a family of
fat people. It's not that, oh, there's just nothing I can't afford
good quality food. Okay. My takeaway message is I've got almost a thousand
videos on my YouTube chant that will teach you what a proper human diet is.
It will teach you what to avoid, and the more you follow my
recommendations, the healthier you'll become. It's just that simple. Then, it's
really at this point, there's been so many hundreds of thousands of people who
have left comments on my YouTube videos, you can't really even argue with it
anymore because I try every time I make a video, I try to consider
the paleoanthropology of the situation, the anthropology, the archaeology, the common sense,
and then the latest medical and nutrition research. I try to go through
all of those for every video I make. And so you can't just go
by the latest nutrition study because very often they're literally funded and paid for it
by Kellogg's or Pepsi or Coke or some front group that is basically a lobbying
group for Coke and Pepsi, like the American Beverage just came out. There's
a new story that just broke that the American Beverage was paying twelve or fifteen
big TikTok and Instagram influencers literally writing them a check to say, oh,
it's fine to eat this or drink this, and they weren't disclosing that it
was a paid ad on their TikTok or Instagram accounts, and who some government
agency FC yes, said Hey, you're gonna get fined or put in prison
if you don't stop this. This is this is illegal. And I can
just see these TikTokers, most of them registered dietitians. They don't know the
federal law and this kind of stuff. They're just like, oh, man,
pepsi. Colub paid me five thousand dollars to say it's okay to drink
pepsi as a dietitian, Well, they've forgotten. They have a fiduciary duty
to anybody they give nutrition advice to. So if you literally just took a
five thousand dollars check to say it, so it's fine to have pepsi,
just don't drink too much. Drink pepsi and moderation, you're part of the
problem. You're part of the problem. And so the take on message is
is that your diet matters more than anything else in your life. When it
comes to your health. Eighty eighty five percent of the battle is what you
put in your mouth and what you don't put in your mouth. And we
can all argue and scuffle and fight about the other fifteen percent. Eighty five
percent of the battle is what you eat and what you don't eat. Also,
you're in charge of that, so you have the ability to change that
if you have the mindset, if you want, if you want to get
healthier, here's my videos. Go get healthier. It's just that easy.
But also, you're a grown human, so you get to make a choice.
I feel like I don't care, then fine, that's great, we
can still be friends. But don't don't pretend like it's genetic. Just fess
up and say, yeah, I just don't care about my health. And
then finally, it's not genetic. You may have a one percent, you
know, predisposition, so you have obesity or type two diabetes or high pertension.
But that one percent, that's not a death sentence, that's not a
mandate. That's just means you're slightly more likely to develop that if you follow
an improper diet for long enough. All these people, even people who are
the third generation epigenetically changed because their grandmother ate a crap standard American diet.
Their mother did that, and now they're doing that, they may not be
able to reverse their obesity back to where they look. We would consider them
a waif. Yeah, maybe not, maybe their epigenetics have been too much
with over the last three generations. But even that person can still lose a
ton of weight and still reverse their hyperinsulinemia, reverse their type two diabetes,
lower their blood pressure, improve their health drastically. And so that's the message
is this is doable. You can do it. Also, it's not a
question of well I can't afford grass fed, grass finished pandom massaged beef from
the you know, the slopes of the New Zealand for it now and none
of that. You don't need any of that stuff. You can improve your
health with hot dogs and mustard and baloney and potted meat and spam. Watch
the ingredients. Keep the carbohydrates as low as you can. You're going to
improve your health with the cheapest version of a keto diet or a carnival diet.
That's going to improve your health. Yeah, I just want to bring
up one more example. You're talking about the influencer a story that came out
this week about the FTC cracking down. I think it's so interesting that a
lot of these big body positivity influencers are sponsored by Nestley, They're sponsored by
Unilever, which is the brand behind Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Uh.
There's a new campaign by Dove Soap this year sponsoring UH Liza a sponsor sponsoring
Lizo and backed by the National Association Fat Acceptance and as you know, a
big body positivity influencer on Instagram. Of course, of course dev Soap is
owned by Unilever, which, again Ben Jerry's ex there couldn't be better spokes
for people for to sell ice cream than some of these models for body positivity.
So, uh, you know, these incentives are out there, and
it's just clear that you know the country is just lining down this you know,
slippery scale of of you know, normalizing obesity and raising the Y flag
on this issue. But on that note, doctor Barry, thank you for
joining me. That's my pleasure. Thank you. You've been listening to another
edition of Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Christian Justice. We'll be back soon with
more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for pray. You
got me right, well you