Top Carnivore Diet Doctor Tips | Ken Berry

Intro

i think a lot of people also have been sick for so long that they don't understand what it feels like to be healthy i absolutely agree it's it's human nature to get used to where we're at yeah right and i and so you see this on both sides of the coin when somebody's miserable every day i didn't realize how good i could feel without pain and rosacea and severe heartburn and and dunlap do you know what dunlap is michaela here in the south it sounds horrifying it is it's when your belly is done lapped over your belt that's a southernism that we say here and that means you're fat i didn't i didn't realize how miserable i was until i corrected all those things [Music] welcome to episode 117 of the michaela peterson podcast featuring the one and only dr ken berry dr barry is a doctor who specializes in the carnivore diet and keto diets he's incredibly knowledgeable one of the most knowledgeable doctors in this area that exists out there and his last name is barry so that's funny we talk about lies we've been told about health and how to transition to a healthy lifestyle this guy's the best-selling author of lies my doctor told me and i support what he does i'm also slowly convincing him to try the lion diet if you want to learn about how to get healthier in a way that actually works check this episode out if you enjoy it please hit subscribe [Music] dr ken berry welcome to my podcast hey michaela thank you so much i feel like the last time we spoke i did a live on your facebook or something like that yeah i think we didn't live maybe on youtube and facebook and that's been a minute though it's about time for us to converse again yes so before we get started for anyone who doesn't know you can you give a brief background about who you are and what it is you do sure i'm dr ken berry i'm a family physician classically trained in allopathic medicine uh i've been been in active practice for about 21 years now and uh i have a youtube channel that i'm trying to grow i've got facebook twitter instagram all the things i'm even on tick tocker you won't take talk michaela you should be i am on tick tock how do you feel about tick tock i'll go check out your tick tock but the reason i'm on all those social media platforms is because i have to go to where the people are to help them understand the lessons that i learned in my own journey first of all towards severe chronic illness and then doing a 180 away from that back to what i would consider fairly close to optimal health as a 52 year old and so the things i learned along that journey and the things that i saw reflected in my patients when they changed their diet that's kind of compelled me some would say called me to to kind of focus all my effort on reaching out to the the millions of people who suffer from chronic disease chronic inflammation obesity type 2 diabetes fatty liver you know autoimmune conditions that all of these things are at least to some degree reversible by eating a proper human diet and so it really i'm on fire for that and have been for the last three or four years and i don't see any plans in the future to stop doing that because it's you know i'm a doctor i'm supposed to make people better i'm not supposed to medicate them i'm not supposed to tell them there's no hope i'm supposed to give them hope and then also give them a path that they can follow and and also introduce them to a tribe of other people who have had similar problems and similar journeys and say hey we all we all got better and you can too that is what i like to hear from a doctor what else would a doctor say i know i know i know they say a lot of times they say yeah they say you're chronically ill and there's nothing you can do about it and hear some pills yeah you're just unlucky that's great yeah exactly and i i think that even if a patient is screwed i think there's always hope for at least some degree of improvement and that's the that's the thing that we need to focus on not the fact you know if the odds are bad why focus on that because you're not in any way helping the patient every interaction between a patient and a doctor or in between a youtuber and a watcher should be therapeutic it should be uh an opportunity to instill some hope however small to hope there should always be hope involved and there should always be a path this work for me this has worked for thousands or tens of thousands of people you should try this so what happened to you you said you had chronic health issues yeah so as a young teenager and a young man i was very slender very seemingly very healthy i just ate a complete junk food diet i was you know going through medical school and residency i didn't have time definitely to cook but really didn't have time to to think about food at that point and my body had not given me enough negative feedback yet that i knew that that was important and but when i got out of residency started my very active practice i was working in the emergency department two to four nights a week and so i might get an hour or two and then also running a full-time monday through friday family practice i quickly started to gain weight get inflamed miserable joint pain i i became at my worst morbidly obese i was just over the the criteria for being diagnosed as morbidly obese i was pre-diabetic i had severe gerd heartburn i had rosacea chronic joint pain and was just getting fat and miserable and uh you might be able to tell from what little accent i do have that i'm from the south and the people in the south i grew up around were very common sense people you couldn't be a mechanic and be successful if your car wouldn't start people judge you on that here you couldn't be a hairdresser and be successful if your hair was ratchet right you had to have you had to have nice hair to be a successful hairdresser and in the same respect you couldn't be a fat miserable sick doctor people would be like okay doctor you you told me i need to lose weight and their eyes would would for one second go down and look at my belly where the button over my um um umbilicus was in danger of popping at any second they would judge me and i felt that judgment and i think that was therapeutic judgment because it cast a light on me dude you're not you're not being consistent you're being very inconsistent you're fat and pre-diabetic but you're going to tell this person what's wrong with them and so i could not tolerate the incongruity of that i had to fix that and so i started out with with primal paleo type diets they maybe helped a little in the process of doing that i discovered this thing called the ketogenic diet and so i thought well i'll try that for a few months and that immediately started the weight loss my hemoglobin a1c which is the primary marker used for type 2 diabetes that doctors look at it started to come down precipitously all of my symptoms of heartburn joint pain inflammation rosacea dandruff skin tags all of that stuff started to get better on this ketogenic diet and in the process i was i was reading about uh your your dad jordan peterson he's he's you know doing this carnivore diet and i'm like that's interesting because that's as low carb as you can possibly get right and then i saw this crazy dr sean baker an orthopedic surgeon he's doing this carnivore diet and so on my facebook page i just i just issued a challenge i said hey guys let's do 30 days of this carnivore diet let's see what happens and so when i tell you i had heartburn it was severe almost disabling it was so severe i had to take two nexium which is a very strong prescription medication for um gerd i had to take two a day so when the drug rep came to drop off the nexium samples the patients didn't get those i got all those those were mine because i needed two a day and so i would have to do that plus some tons of rollage or some other antacid uh during the day it affected my ability to speak it affected my ability to to breathe and and swallow at the same time it was really it was really bad so on a ketogenic diet full of real whole one ingredient foods not all the keto shakes and cakes and cookies and pies but real keto food my heartburn which was severe 10 out of 10 got 80 percent better and i'm like huh at that point i didn't know enough i hadn't reached out to enough people to know that that wasn't just an anecdotal weird thing that happened to me that's something that very commonly happens for people with severe reflux when they start a ketogenic diet but then when i did my one month carnivore challenge at the end of that month i realized i hadn't taken a single thing for heartburn that entire month uh which was very unusual for me and so i thought you know that's really cool but also very weird i'm gonna i'm gonna do this carnivore another month so i'll let everybody on my facebook page off the hook they could go back to their keto if they wanted to but i stuck with carnivore and have been a carnivore now for 28 29 months and at this point i have no intentions of ever going back occasionally i'll cheat on carnivore with keto for an anniversary or a birthday or some family get together but on a daily basis consistently i eat and all it's an animal based diet for me and and that i i have not had any heartburn in 29 months which is if anybody listen this suffered from severe heartburn severe gerd reflux that's miraculous to say i have not had a single symptom in 29 months wow i am very glad to hear that me too yeah that's fantastic i've been i've been doing it since december 2017 and i've tried a couple times i'm okay for before before we get into that what does your diet look like specifically what's animal based look like for you what's like a daily daily meals what does that look like so it's there's always a large serving of some meat routinely i can i can eat eggs just fine some people on carnivore depending on why they're doing it may or may not be able to include eggs i found that many people who think they're allergic to eggs it's actually the egg whites if they'll just stick to the yolk they they don't have any inflammatory symptoms at all and so for i typically don't break my fast until one or two or three pm every day i'm just not hungry i don't think about it i've got stuff to do i've got lots of farm chores outside i've got you know the people to reach people to help and so it's somewhere between one and four p.m i'll be like oh i haven't eaten today and so i'll go have maybe a a 12 ounce ribeye with um seven or eight egg yolk scrambled and that that'll be my breakfast for that day i can include some dairy always full fat real good quality dairy if i get too far off into the dairy i'll start to notice some inflammation in different parts of my body so a tiny bit of cheese a tiny bit of heavy cream but the vast majority of my diet is uh is is meat and eggs i i notice i do better on ruminant meat so beef goat sheep uh venison is fine even elk is fine all the it seems that all the ruminant meat so it has some magical quality for me i just feel better i'm more mentally clear when i eat ruminant meat i can tolerate some chicken and some pork but if i if i eat too much of that i just don't feel my best and i don't necessarily think that chicken and pork are bad i just think for me personally they're less good i react terribly to pork like terribly to pork i can eat a lot of the plants easier than than pork that gives me really bad autoimmune symptoms yeah and i think weirdly and i think everyone should experiment with their diet because you you've discovered that about yourself and and it is true that we're all at to some degree uh biogenetically unique and different uh i think the gut microbiome which we don't know nearly enough about i think that also plays a role probably your your ancestral heritage your dna place some degree of a role i don't think we know one of those to talk about them with confidence but it's great that you know that that now you know i might i can have a bite of bacon but if i get crazy on the bacon i'm going to suffer whereas i i can eat six pieces of bacon and and eggs and it's no big deal for me but i think that that that is important for people to understand that there is some diversity between us although we are all 99.9 percent the same genetically yeah well if everybody was as sensitive as my dad and i then there'd be we'd be like the population would look a little different yeah okay so i think we should address some like common concerns for people if they're not familiar with the carnivore diet although if they've been watching my channel they probably are but for people who say suffer from kidney disease or heart disease or high cholesterol do those people have to be worried switching on to something that's animal based no next question no let me go into that a little bit so no you don't and so there's a huge myth in the medical community which should not be susceptible to mythology they should focus and and act only on facts only on evidence but there's this huge misconception in the medical community that a diet high in protein is bad for your kidneys and i've actually done several youtube videos about this explaining that this is a complete nutri myth there's no research definitely no controlled research that shows that a high protein diet protein from any source is bad for the human kidneys and there's definitely no control research showing that protein from meat is in any way bad for kidneys and so i've started using the the phrase meat is good for your kidneys prove me wrong show me the research and until i've yet to have a single controlled research studies thrown in my face saying you're wrong big guy meat is bad for your kidneys there is no research that shows that yet the average medical doctor dietitian nutritionist they will especially someone with stage one two or three chronic kidney disease they will scare them to death oh you need to avoid especially red meat somehow red meat's magical it's much much worse for your kidneys than than you know white meat but they're okay that's great so where's the research oh then you hear the crickets chirping because there is no research that supports that whatsoever which makes that at best a hypothesis at worst a myth or a big fat lie like i talk about in my book uh people with any medical condition you're still a human being you're still homo sapien sapien therefore you need to eat a human specific diet a proper human diet and for every human on the planet a proper human diet consists of a large percentage of fatty meat and you ju until we've got some controlled research you can't even argue otherwise what about heart disease yeah so heart you know red meat is going to cause a heart attack uh eating red meat is going to raise your cholesterol so the american heart association which is the de facto world heart association because most other countries take their walking orders directly from the american heart association when it comes to all matters heart related they have stopped recommending a maximum amount of cholesterol intake in the diets the research is very clear and the reason why you didn't know that michaela is because they they didn't have a press conference as they should have they should have held a press conference and said we know we know we've been recommending that you limit your cholesterol intake for decades but the research doesn't support that and it doesn't matter at all how much cholesterol you eat your body's going to make the amount of cholesterol you need so we are no longer recommending that that's that would have been the uh ethical thing for them to do because what happens when they don't hold that press conference is we even though the top cardiologists and the people that set the guidelines they've stopped worrying about cholesterol intake in your diet and they've stopped uh recommending that to their personal patients but we have this thing that i call the echo of the lie that i talk about in the book so even though the preeminent authorities have stopped talking about that they don't even it's not even in the if you print out their dietary guidelines it's not in there anymore but we still have all these doctors and dietitians and nutritionists and mothers and fathers who are saying oh don't eat cholesterol it's bad for your heart that's it and it's idiotic because it was a it was a weak hypothesis for a few decades and it's been completely disproven even though the researchers were trying desperately to prove that it was a valid hypothesis they failed miserably and we've still got this echo of the light that your hairdresser will tell you that your aunt betty will tell you oh don't eat those the egg yolks it's too high in cholesterol but there's no research to support that so a lot of people listen to this will be like you're telling me the american heart association said that cholesterol is no longer a molecule of concern when it comes to dietary intake yep it's on page 187 of their guidelines buried in the minutia but it's there and so then well okay well then what about saturated fat eating saturated fats bad things yeah well they've also stepped very quietly away from that recommendation as well they don't really speak about oh if you eat too much saturated fat that is a direct directly causative of heart disease no actually that's no longer in their guidelines either but again they didn't hold that that press conference to let the world know so we've got all these people who mean well right they mean very well but they're just wrong and uh you and any smart person understands that no matter how good your intentions are if the information and teaching that you're giving is just wrong you're gonna do harm and so there's all these people who are scared to death of ancestrally appropriate foods like egg yolks and fatty meat because they're afraid it will affect their heart because of the cholesterol or the saturated fat and the world authority on all things heart related has stopped that recommendation they don't even recommend that you limit cholesterol intake or limit saturated fat intake any longer but they didn't have a press conference so no one knows what's that saying uh the road to hell is paved with good intentions yeah in this case i think that's very applicable yeah no that's completely criminal in my opinion i agree at what point do we have a young attorney out there who's hungry for a class action lawsuit or do we have an assistant d.a in some state who's hungry to make a name for herself and who files a class-action lawsuit against one of these organizations saying hey you're actually doing harm yeah by by not making public the fact that you no longer recommend that people limit cholesterol and and saturated fat intake because here's the harm that's being done there are all kinds of vitamins and minerals essential fatty acids that you really can only get from foods that are high in cholesterol and high in saturated fat and so if you're avoiding cholesterol and saturated fat you're not getting access to this this this cornucopia of vitamins and minerals and fatty acids that your body absolutely needs for essential optimal human function you might be able to limp along without these vitamins and minerals and fatty acids but never will you realize your best health your most optimal function it's just not accessible to you because you're being restricted from these necessary nutrients yeah i think a lot of people also have been sick for so long that they don't understand what it feels like to be healthy i absolutely agree it's it's human nature to get used to where we're at yeah right and i and so you see this on both sides of the coin when somebody's miserable every day i didn't realize how good i could feel without pain and rosacea and severe heartburn and and dunlap do you know what dunlap is michaela here in the south it sounds it's horrifying it is it's when your belly is done lapped over your belt that's a southernism that we say here and that means you're fat i didn't i didn't realize how miserable i was until i corrected all those things but then on the flip side people like you and i now that we've found our point on the spectrum of a proper human diet and we feel great every single day we kind of get used to that as well don't we and so it felt amazing at the beginning but then after 29 months of this it just feels normal to me now to feel great and to be able to go out and work on the farm and sweat two gallons out you know just non-stop manual labor that just feels normal to me and so i don't i don't you lose sight of just how bad or how good you feel i think that's just human nature i think it's human nature too however have you tried just doing like lion diet style for six weeks super strict i have not and uh uh that is to i agree because i feel great now but could i feel even better exactly i know i totally get the logic behind that and at some point i'll i'll probably do three months because i really feel like 90 days is what you really need for any dietary experiment to let your body have time to calm down and to improve and at some point i will do 90 days of just beef salt and water and and just see uh and you know i may have to include a little lamb in that because lamb lamb i eat mostly lamb very fond of lamb and i like godot so i may just do 90 days of rooming at me yeah and i may do that here and i'll i'll issue a you know a challenge to all my people when the time comes okay cool keep me posted i'll advertise that on my instagram too so people can join that's fun uh let's talk a little bit about transition symptoms you've seen from people going from say the standard american diet into an animal-based diet what people should be prepared for yeah so there are a couple of things that you need to understand and also be ready for so the first thing in my opinion uh highly processed carbohydrates are very very addictive they mimic all of the signs of addiction uh we we can see uh pet scan and and mri data in the nucleus accumbens you know which is basically the center that of the brain that that leads to addictive behavior it lights up just like you're smoking pot or smoking nicotine or smoking crack it lights up the same way when you're eating highly processed carbohydrates or even thinking about eating them which is interesting right and so the first thing you're going to contend with is carbohydrate withdrawal symptoms and a lot of people call this the keto flu or the carnivore flu but when people are quitting smoking and they have these same exact symptoms of withdrawal nobody calls that the the the quitters flu that right because you you know that it's bad for you to smoke so you it doesn't matter what your symptoms of withdrawal are it's still worth it in the long run to quit smoking but but food is so wrapped up in emotion in religion in family ties that we don't think of that the same way as we do tobacco which obviously no one needs to smoke no one needs to to do illicit drugs no one needs to be an alcoholic so there's we don't have all the social and emotional ties to those things we can just single those out and say that is bad for you stop that but food's different right because we have all these emotional strings attached to it and so when you change your diet from the standard american crap processed diet to a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet and you start to feel miserable people immediately are going to jump to the conclusion well duh that diet's bad for you you should go back to eating your regular diet instead of thinking oh maybe you're having withdrawal symptoms from the highly processed grains and the sugar content maybe you need to give that 3 to 14 days just like the withdrawal from any other standard addictive substance for those signs and symptoms of withdrawal to abate because that's exactly what you have to do and some people they don't have much withdrawal symptom and these are usually people who are already eating paleo or trying to eat real whole foods but if you're if you're going straight from carnivore from a standard american or a standard canadian crap diet you're probably going to have three to seven days of withdrawal symptoms and it's going to suck that doesn't mean you should stop that means you should persevere until you get to the other side because that's where all the benefits are the second thing that people need to be aware of is when you're eating a high carbohydrate diet your insulin levels are staying chronically high your levels of chronic inappropriate inflammation are chronically high that both of those things are going to make you store a lot of fluid unhealthy fluid in your body right and so the way the human kidney works is when you start eating a very low carbohydrate diet your blood sugar levels and your insulin levels are going to quickly return to normal and that's going to cause a diuresis which means that you're going to start to to urinate out all this unhealthy fluid that you've been storing inappropriately all over your body but the way the human kidney works is you can't just urinate out free water you have to have some degree of salt go with that water you have to have some degree of magnesium and potassium and even calcium has to go with that water because of the way the human kidneys designed and so you'll wind up with with other symptoms of being not eating enough salt because we all been taught that salt is bad which is another big fat lie that you don't have to worry about when you start eating a proper human diet but for the first few days of this transition you need to be very mindful that you're eating enough salt and you need to be very mindful that you're getting enough magnesium and potassium either in your diet or in the form of a supplement and those things alone mitigate this the side the symptoms of of carbohydrate withdrawal and just the the keto flu or the carnivore flu that many people mislabel it as it's just electrolyte fluctuations salt fluctuations and carbohydrate withdrawal that's what you're suffering from it's short-lived it's temporary and i promise you it is worth the three to seven days transition period to get to the other side for me and for people i've seen who have really severe autoimmune disorders that can be up to 21 days the cravings i had and i and taken i went from a standard american diet to a very restrictive paleo diet to a keto diet with no dairy and no eggs to the carnivore diet over a period of like two years and the cravings the cravings were bad enough and they lasted three weeks for me where i was having dreams about these foods yeah and it was ridiculous every time i so i didn't screw up because as soon as i cut out of food it was like i'm it's out but occasionally i'd be somewhere and i'd have some contamination on something and as soon as i had that contaminated food all my cravings would come back it was wild and so it'd be like i'd have something and there'd be soybean oil on it and i wouldn't know and then i'd have soy cravings yep it was crazy and i think and the the other thing that caused your withdrawal your cravings to last longer is your gut microbiome and as i said earlier we don't know nearly enough about this but also you have a set of fungi that live in your gut as well and and people most people aren't aware of that but you have a microfungum as well as a microbiome and fungi can have serious effects on your mental health and so i i opine this is merely a hypothesis because nobody's studying this but i think when you go from a high carbohydrate diet to a very very low carbohydrate diet your gut bacteria rebel because you are populated with a high carb loving uh bunch of bacteria in your gut and all of a sudden they're not getting the sugar they're not getting the high processed grains and starches that they they operate best on and so they start to down regulate as well as protest you can just imagine the little bacteria with their placards saying hell no no more meat right but what you're also doing is up regulating all of the healthy beneficial bacteria and funguses that love a low carbohydrate nutrient dense diet and that can take a few weeks to to get your gut bacteria and fungus regulated and a lot of carnivores notice they'll have three days to three weeks of diarrhea and that's part of their transition and that's because that's that's the protestation of your gut bacteria and fungus saying what the hell are you doing where's where are my carbs and and i think also vegetable seed oils do play a role in that as well and a lot of people don't understand the power that fungus can have over your actual mental activity if no one's seen the the video of the zombie ants where a fungus literally makes this ant ignore all of its its instinct in its training climb to a top of the leaf attached to a certain kind of leaf on a certain tree on a certain side of the tree and then die and then fall to the ground so that the fungus can re replicate in the ant's body just search youtube for or fungus ants i'm gonna link that crazy screwed up it is but that's the power that that fungi can have over seemingly sentient beings and make you literally become a zombie and you're going to the fridge and looking for the carbs and it's completely against your will but yeah i think that's absolutely a thing and i think that's something that our researchers at the hobbit school of public health they need to start looking into that kind of stuff yeah instead of oh every piece of bacon you eat shortens your life by seven minutes because they kind of played that that's a that's a dead horse they need to stop beating that and start looking at the effect that the microbiome and the fungus have on our behavior and changing our mental health when i first went to paleo that's when the cravings were the worst and i could tell i knew because i've been doing research on microbiome even though there's not a lot to read out there that's like legitimate exactly because it's so new but i could tell that the cravings weren't mine like i'd be like no i'm on this diet and then just like angel food cake would just appear in my head and i'd be like what is that what is that and i'd be hungry but i wouldn't be hungry for the food that was healthy i'd just be hungry for the food that wasn't healthy and be like well then i'm not hungry if like if i only want to eat one food but i don't want a steak that's not actual hunger so i just got angry at it i was like how dare you whatever's in me trying to control me how dare you starve and that was very unpleasant absolutely okay so i have your book this is your older book right here lies my doctor told me which is a great book but what is what is happening with this new book so i'm i'm working on my my new book and it's tentatively titled the proper human diet because i think that there is a spectrum that every single human on the planet if if they if their goal is to achieve optimal health optimal function both physically and mentally you need to be eating on the proper human diet spectrum i'm going to try to have it out by the new year that may or may not happen i have a bit of adhd and so i tend to get distracted but i am working diligently on that i have a team working with me to kind of keep me focused uh sometimes that's a challenge but i think it's going to be a very important book perhaps even more important than lies uh when i wrote lies i i was called to write that book i i could not sleep i could not eat uh nisha basically uh recounting the that the memories now she's like yeah i basically didn't see you for 18 months while you're writing that book and uh i i think that the proper human diet is going to wind up being a more important book that's going to be more helpful to even more people than lies was and i can't wait to get it finished but it's a work in progress okay well i'm looking forward to that this is a good one i mean i can tell why you felt like you were called to writing it medical myths that can harm your health there's probably an emotional aspect to that yeah well it's so it's such a convoluted complex topic but because just think of the interaction in the average doctor's office here's a doctor who got received very little training on nutrition right on average in western medicine it's maybe a few hours of training and and then you they are looked upon by the patient as a an authority figure almost like a witch doctor like they know things i don't know anything that comes out of their mouth i should consider gospel i should do what they say but the doctor not only doesn't know what the hell he or she is talking about when it comes to human nutrition on average they don't know that they don't know yeah and then they trust these preeminent authorities like the american diabetes association the american heart association the american academy of pediatrics they trust these people just like the patient trusts them so you've got this almost exponential just terrible trust problem and it multiplies each step up the ladder you go so not only is the doctor diluted misled then you multiply that by the doctor misleading and diluting the patient so it just becomes almost an uh an unsolvable puzzle of how do you fix that interaction but that that's the most important interaction between the doctor and the patient and that's why i wrote lies like i did so that we break it up into one topic and this is what your doctor says but this is the actual truth of the matter and i think that i wrote it for patients but if you notice there's actually an entire chapter in the back dedicated to health care providers like this is this is what you're doing wrong this is how you correct that and that's why i've dedicated the remainder of my life to educating people i'm not trying to change doctor's minds or health care providers i don't give a damn with the ada or the aha thinks of me i could care less i'm trying to reach out directly to people and say hey i know your doctor told you this but it's actually wrong try this instead and i've got pretty good feedback from you know a few people so i think that that model working very well but it's really sad that that interaction has to go so wrong and has to just be just exponentially wrong because no one in that interaction neither the doctor nor the patient know the truth and they also don't know the power of the truth i mean just for you and your dad you know absolutely all of these medical interventions all of these prescription medications became moot when you discovered the power of proper nutrition species specific nutrition a proper human diet when you became aware of that yourself how many doctors did you did you render meaningless in your life when you made that adjustment and said hey maybe my diet's way more important than everybody thinks it is it's not just about weight loss it's about optimizing my health how many doctors did you turn out to pasture personally when you discovered oh my god diet really matters a lot a lot i had a lot of doctors i had a lot of doctors i had a rheumatologist at a psychiatrist i had a family doctor that was that was three at least oh and then i was going to see an immunologist for allergies so that's four oh and a dermatologist for skin so that's five i bet you there was more but there were definitely five yeah so all of those very complex interactions that you were having with each different doctor and then the prescription that inevitably came from each different doctor which added up for you as a handful of pills every day multiple times a day how powerful is that that you basically at some point just put up your hand and said no no more no more i'm gonna do something different i'm gonna try a different path and then all of a sudden all of these things all these doctors all these pills which to you at the time seemed mandatory yeah life-saving if i'm going to have any kind of a life i've got to see these doctors i've got to take all these pills just they just magically melt away in importance and i think i've seen that's replicated so many times in people on a ketogenic diet or carnivore diet it's like yeah i'm off five pills i'm off 10 pills i'm off three pills i used to have four doctors now i have one that i see once a year and that's mainly just because i like hanging out with my doctor once a year i don't really need him or her anymore but that that is such an empowering thing that moment when you hold up your hand say no more i'm going to try a different path it's scary initially very scary but right before you make the decision and then right after the decision it can be terrifying like oh my god i'm going to die i'm eating all this saturated fat and cholesterol now but then when the benefits start to come some come quickly some take several months before you start to realize them it's at that point you know no i made the right decision and i i'm i'm not anti-doctor i'm not anti-medical uh care i'm just anti-unnecessary doctoring unnecessary pharmaceuticals that's that's that's the anti that i am if you want to put a label on me and i think many people in the keto and carnivore communities are now very anti-medical intervention unless it's absolutely necessary yes i agree do you have words of comfort for people who are overweight or obese who are concerned about increasing their meat intake and losing weight yeah so carbohydrates are uniquely fattening for human beings in in my research that i've been doing into not only human nutrition and human medicine but also archaeology anthropology and even paleoanthropology it's become quite obvious to me that human beings are by design or by evolution low carbohydrate mammals that's just what we are and so anyone who's eating over a hundred total grams of carbohydrates a day you're going to have some degree of hyperinsulinemia some degree of inappropriate chronic inflammation and it may manifest in your skin it may manifest in your gut in your joints in your hair there are any number in your mental health right we all tend to express the inappropriate inflammation in hyperinsulinemia different parts of our body and that's why initially a lot of people don't see the connection between all of these chronic medical conditions and diets because we manifest them in different ways but once you start to lower the carbohydrate intake you're going to immediately start to notice improvements and a lot of people lose inches before they lose pounds or kilograms and so i always recommend people take your measurements when you when you start keto when you start carnivore because the scale may not move for weeks or even months but you're going to steadily be losing inches as the inflammation and the unhealthy water you lose that and as you start to burn fat because it's been my experience that when you start a a fatty meat heavy keto diet or a carnivore diet you're going to naturally start to put on muscle and i've heard this from thousands of people feedback it's like i'm not working out at all but but i'm noticing more muscle definition is that normal and at first i thought that was completely anecdotal and crazy but after you hear something from a thousand or two thousand or five thousand people you have to give some respect and credence to all those anecdotal experiences right also you're you're eating a diet that's full of all the ingredients to build muscle and to build stronger bones and people don't realize when they say i want to lose weight what they mean is i want to lose fat that's what you mean by that you don't want to lose bone density you want to lose muscle you don't want to lose cartilage ligament fascia and so you start to actually build up all those vital organs your bones get stronger your muscles get stronger your your fascia which is which is its own organ in the human body starts to get tougher and stronger ligaments tendons cartilage all this stuff starts to get stronger that's going to show up on the scale so as you're losing stored fat you're actually gaining these other things and so for weeks you can actually break even on the on the bathroom scale and think this diet's not working for me at all but if you're taking your measurements you unlock that information you're like oh my god yeah i've lost three inches off my waist even though the scale hasn't moved and so it can be for some people the the benefits and the weight loss is immediate for other people it takes longer and so i i would i would say you're now eating a proper human diet how can that not be good for you at least in the long term if not in the short term so stick with it and this diet works equally well for people who are underweight and and a lot of people are surprised when i say keto and carnivore are not weight loss diets that's not what they are when i first started this seven eight years ago i 100 believe that that keto was a was a a temporary weight loss hack because that's all i knew at that time but now seeing this in totality i realized no if you're underweight if you suffer from an eating disorder or or anything you can actually gain weight but you're not going to gain fat you're going to gain muscle you're going to gain bone density you're going to gain all the the beneficial organs are going to actually fill out and resume their normal appearance and i've seen people gain 20 30 40 pounds of needed weight on both a ketogenic and a carnivore diet yeah it seems to just normalize your weight exactly right but it moves your body weight to a proper weight for you because it is a proper human diet that's what it should do right that is what it should do so if anyone isn't aware what how do you define a keto diet so a keto diet for me is definitely going to be under 50 total grams of carbohydrates a day for most people especially if you have two lots of stored fat that you need to burn off and lose it probably needs to be under 20 total grams of carbohydrates a day and i think that total carbs that's a big deal because as you know keto is becoming very very popular and a lot of the big food manufacturers are jumping into the keto space and if you let them count net carbs they can trick you with with soluble fibers and by misnaming things and a friend of mine did an experiment she was eating under 20 net grams of carbs a day and she was eating over a hundred grams of total carbs a day but still getting less than 20 net and so the why so how is that different what's the difference between net in total so total carbs means counting every carb including fiber because many of the fibers some fibers are insoluble and you truly don't absorb them and get any carbohydrates from them at all many fibers are soluble fibers and you will at least partially digest those with your goods and so um tapioca fiber uh oat fiber corn fiber a lot of these fibers are soluble fibers but most people don't know the difference right the average customer and so they just see fiber and they think boom fiber that's good i've heard my doctor told me that i need fiber so there you go but a lot of it so corn fiber and tapioca fiber and oat fiber you're going to get about two grams of carbs from each from each gram uh you're going to get desserts you see what i'm saying you're going to get two grams of carbs out of that four grams and you're like oh wait a minute i didn't realize that yeah that's right and the big food manufacturers they know you don't know the difference so they'll fill their uh their fake keto foods up with lots of soluble fiber and then on the the nutrition information panel they get to call that fiber not sugar and and say oh that doesn't count because that's fiber yeah it's it's very insidious it's it's very disappointing but of course big food manufacturers they have a duty to their board of directors to make a profit they have no duty to the customer to increase their health or improve their health right so they're they're actually doing their job but their job is not to help you be healthier and that's why i talk about total carbs because you cannot play reindeer games with total carbs it either is a carbohydrate or it ain't a carbohydrate and so if people are really serious about doing a 180 with regards to their health you got to count total carbs and that's very unpopular especially with you know keto influencers who are either manufacturing keto treats or who are endorsing keto treats because that that shoots their keto treat in the head when you start counting total carbohydrates okay you just said play reindeer games yeah yeah you know how the the the reindeer wouldn't let rudolph play any reindeer games right oh yeah reindeer game is basically just a game of semantics or you know con you know uh so so yeah they'll play all the games they can with the nutrition facts they'll call sugar organic cane juice and they'll say oh i've seen that yeah exactly that's a reindeer game that's i guess i guess that's just a personal thing i say i thought you said that yeah yeah but they'll do that for a profit because their their goal is not to make you healthier it's to make the the bottom line healthier okay so i also think a ketogenic diet every bite of food you put in your mouth needs to be nutrient dense that's why we eat we don't eat but we shouldn't eat for just pleasure everybody food should be meaningful nutrition right i think every bite of foods you eat should be a real whole food with one ingredient these are all my my definitions of a ketogenic diet uh you might be able to use keto cookies and cakes and pies and bars and shakes to transition to a ketogenic diet but ultimately if your goal is optimal health your your diet on keto is going to consist of a lot of fatty meat some kale or broccoli and a few blueberries that's that's keto if you're if you're making keto cakes and pies that's that's kind of keto simulacrum that's that's it man it might help you transition but that isn't by no means a proper human diet okay i agree there's a good differentiation there uh i know i know a lot of people who've transitioned from the standard american diet who do have an easier time going okay i'm not eating pizza anymore but i'll have like keto pizza or paleo pizza and it cuts out a lot of the super super super harmful ingredients but it's not a way to so it's a way to transition or for kids who are really used to the standard american diet and used to eating like sugar all the time you can switch them onto keto treats and they'll like hardly notice but after a month of doing that they'll be more inclined because the withdrawal will like taper down they'll be more inclined to go to whole foods exactly and i think another thing that the average person does not know the average doctor doesn't know is that you can actually train or retrain your palate there are so many people in the us especially who the they're they only know chicken chicken strip breaded chicken strips and ketchup and coke or pepsi that and that's literally all the taste they can taste they cannot taste the stuff that was me yeah i swear that was me 100 it's very common but people aren't aware of this so they don't know this happens and so they'll initially say no i don't like meat and i'm like oh you 100 like me you just don't know it yet because you're used to your breaded chicken strips with sugar filled ketchup and a coca-cola and then you know a little debbie snack cake at the end that's what you're used to but you can actually retrain the human palate and it's you know it preferably you don't want to do that so you start a baby out like we did beckett with beef ribs and uh ground beef that was that was the first foods that went in his mouth and so he's loved meat from day one yeah many children don't get that opportunity they're raised on the little rice crispy things and the little wheat crackers and so they never develop a true broad human palate that can enjoy lots of different subtlety in the taste and the flavors and one thing that i tell people is when you eat a raw almond does it taste sweet to you and if someone if they haven't been on keto for long or they haven't they're not keto adapted they're like sweet no what do you talk an almond you mean i mean if it's like a candied almond yeah but i'm like no no no almonds are very sweet and when you taste that you know that you're retraining your palate your palate is learning oh there are much more subtle flavors than just sweet sour and salty there are way hundreds and hundreds of layers of of the palate that you can redevelop by slowly transitioning to eating real human food and when when an almond tastes sweet to you you know you're on the proper path you know you're moving in the right direction i found that for me when i switched from standard american diet to a paleo diet the paleo was really it was basically keto right it was it was almost keto it took three months so for the first three months everything i ate was terrible i was making stews that i would later really appreciate but it was like parsnips and carrots and beef and i was just like this is horrible like repulsive there's no flavor here everything's kind of bitter the meat's bland and it was like that for three months and then slowly carrots started to taste sweet and then parsnips were sweet and i was like parsnips are sweet i didn't know that uh then i went to meat and greens and i did that for a year and i started to be able to differentiate between the different types of lettuces i was like oh no no i want the sweet lettuce like i know that that's the sweet lettuce i was like what is going on it's pretty cool yeah and the human tongue is capable of that but most people don't know that at all they don't know they have that it's kind of a super power to be able to differentiate between types of lettuce just by the taste but people don't realize they have that superpower it is undiscovered currently did your did your sense of smell change yeah my uh and so in in two ways my sense of smell changed not only did i become much more acutely aware of smells and able to differentiate smells but also my personal smell improved greatly yeah my body odor has gotten so much better on a carnivore diet and that's something i don't think is talked about enough but i think that speaks directly to how the diet affects your skin microbiome and and your odor and so humans are supposed to have odors but we're not supposed to smell like a dead cat if we don't take a bath every six hours right but many people notice i've got to take two showers a day or i smell like and that the reason is is your diet is not right you're selecting for the wrong skin bacteria that are very uh malodorous and that that's why you stink my brother or my sister it's not because just you stink it's because you're eating a diet yeah yeah i found i also think it's your body trying to get rid of food so when i tried to reintroduce soy and i i had like no body odor totally fine on paleo and i tried to reintroduce soy and during the reaction when my arthritis came back my skin broke out i like horrifying doom my digestion was upset i had terrible body odor and i noticed if i got in a sauna and kind of sweated it out then it would get a little bit better so i think it's also your body being like get this out of me whatever you're eating it could absolutely be that uh or it could be you're you re-up regulating your skin microbiome to the to the previous unhealthy one either either one or a combination could absolutely be the case yeah okay so if people are interested in this is there an easy like first do you tell people to jump right in and just do it and get through the withdrawal and get through the electrolyte up and down or is there a way to transition in more smoothly it depends on the person michaela is some people are tea totalers like it sounds like you're kind of like that yeah i mean you're all in or i'm not going to do it if you're that type of person and you're aware that you're probably going to have some carbohydrate withdrawal symptoms for a few days you're probably going to have some diarrhea for a few days there's no danger whatsoever to just going from from day zero to day one to a 100 carnivore diet even a lion diet that's in no way dangerous uh you may feel like crap for a few days but if you're if you understand the physiology of why you feel like crap you understand it's worth it to stick with it other people are kind of incremental improvers right they can't they're not t totalers and so for those people i think it's perfectly fine to transition slowly and to use all the keto products as a transition tool and then to slowly tighten up from dirty keto or lazy keto to doing a more real whole food one ingredient keto and then to transition from there to carnivore if you feel like you need to yeah i've noticed that this has been my experience talking to people specifically with serious autoimmunity is that some of those people have pretty bad transition symptoms because initially i was saying just jump in because you're going to heal the fastest the fastest you get on the diet so even if the withdrawal and and the transition symptoms are a bit worse it's still worth it in the long run but then there were a couple people and you talked about potassium sodium magnesium there were a couple of people who didn't regulate their electrolytes and ended up super faint with like serious like sodium disbalances because they didn't increase their electrolytes first thing in the diet so i think jumping right in if you're if you've done your research and you're aware that you probably need to take i i have i was taking almost 2 000 milligrams of sodium a day to regulate my electrolytes for quite a while until my body got used to it like maybe like a year and a half it took a long time for me but i think if you can mitigate those effects then the sooner the better hopefully i agree but different people have different methods of transition and i think that if there if they are self-aware enough to know which kind of person they are yeah then they should definitely use that to their advantage during the transition process whether it's a teetotaler or an incremental because if you don't honor who you are as a person during the transition your risk of failure skyrockets right because you're not you're not following the path that you should be following and so i think it's important for people to try to understand which which kind of person am i yeah i agree okay dr barry you've kind of downplayed the size of your youtube channel how many subscribers do you have right now i think i have 1.6 million youtube subscribers uh on my channel which i'm very thankful for and very grateful for i had no idea when when my wife nisha shamed me into starting a youtube channel i had no dream that it would ever become what it's become but i'm very grateful for that and i'm grateful that i've had the opportunity to help so many people who i've never met to you know and i get i get comments all the time on the videos it's like you've helped me lose this much weight and i've reversed these chronic medical conditions and i no longer am contemplating having a knee replacement surgery because my knee doesn't hurt anymore that kind of stuff and that stuff to me that's that is payment that is that is better than money that's better than accolades from the american medical association who can they can kiss my ass by the way uh that that's that's what keeps me going every day is is the feedback from people who saying who's saying you have changed my life for the better okay so other than your youtube channel what's your youtube channel called by the way uh kendyberrymd but i think if you just search for dr barry you'll you'll find me do you find it funny that your last name is barry it is funny and you know somebody made a a graphic of of me dr barry and then uh dr shawn baker and then dr paul salad eno and they're like it's funny that the three carnivore doctors all have carbs in their name and i think that's also funny but probably that's very funny i find that very funny okay you're also on instagram right yeah i'm feeling especially uh loving and kind i'll post on instagram when i'm feeling especially snarky i'll post on twitter um i'm i'm currently most proud of my uh growth on my tick tock uh it i i think tick tock is going to be the next big thing yeah for sure i still don't understand it but i'm trying really hard to master it i'm also i'm on all social media because as i said in the beginning my mission is to help as many people as i can reclaim their best health and the only way i'm going to do that is to reach out to people and currently the way you do that is with social media okay well i definitely recommend anybody listening if they're interested in these kind of diets uh to follow dr kenbury i've been following him for a while and he knows what's up so thank you very much for coming on that was a fun conversation absolutely thank you for good luck with the book good luck with the book coming out too no don't don't tell me good luck michaela tell me to get my ass in gear i need some do it it'll help a lot of people and also try that you know what try the lion diet first then do the book and then you can see the difference just in case like what if you're only operating at 80 right now and you don't even know it that's a valid point i will i'm gonna i'm gonna put that on the schedule okay okay okay i'll talk to you soon thanks a lot [Music] you

Introducing Ken Berry.

Ken Berry's health issues.

Ken Berry's daily meal and what his diet looks like specifically.

Do people who suffer have to be worried about the carnivore diet?

Has Dr. Ken Berry ever tried the lion diet for six weeks straight?

The keto flu and the transition symptoms from carbohydrate withdrawal and electrolyte and salt fluctuations.

Gut Microbiome causes a more extended period of cravings.

Dr. Ken Berry's book Lies My Doctor Told Me and the new book he is writing, tentatively titled, "The Proper Human Diet."

Words of comfort for people who are overweight and are concerned about overconsuming meat.

Dr. Berry defines a Keto Diet.

Difference between net carbs vs. total carbs.

Food manufacturers "Reindeer Games."

Retraining your pallet and using different keto foods to transition from the standard American diet.

Sense of smell changing from the keto diet.

How to get started with this type of diet.

Dr. Berry's YouTube Channel.

The carnivore's doctors and their carbohydrate last names.

Where to find Dr. Ken Berry.