DAVE: Good morning.
AUDIENCE: Good morning.
DAVE: So today’s a very exciting day. It marks the launch of our Talks at Google Friendly Debate Series, where we bring together people who take different positions on key issues, with the hopes that through their dialogue, we’re able to better understand questions whose answers are less clear cut. So today the question we’ll be exploring is, what is the ideal diet? And so I’d like to begin by introducing our, moderator Google’s very own Jesse Michael’s Jesse. Jesse is a program manager on machine intelligence, with a particular affinity towards dietary habits. Please join me in welcoming to the stage Jesse Michaels.
JESSE MICHAELS: Thank you, Dave. I really appreciate it. Yes, I do have a particular affinity towards dietary habits, mainly– like Kip, actually, I’m a hypochondriac, so I’m always kind of thinking about what is the ideal diet. And I think like a lot of you, you read articles, you read press, you look at what’s out there, and there are a lot of experts saying completely conflicting things. There’s no kind of apparent consensus on this issue.
And so what I’m hoping to get out of this is kind of a rational elucidation and dissection of what is the ideal diet from people who have different viewpoints. But hopefully, we can find some common ground and we can give you some resources to kind of look this up for yourself as well. So I want to introduce my panelists. So Dave Asprey. He’s a businessman, an author, a blogger. He’s a biohacker. He’s tried everything on himself. He’s a human guinea pig. He recently wrote “Head Strong,” which is all about mental clarity and peak performance and what diet is conducive to that.
After him, we have… we have Kip. Kip just came out with a bombshell of a documentary on Netflix Kip Anderson, by the way. And it basically has caused a lot of people around the world to go vegan. And it talks about all of the dangers of eating meats, processed meats, and dairy, and it exposes a lot, and I think it’s a really good documentary, and you guys should definitely check it out. Before that, he actually had a documentary called “Cowspiracy,” which talks about the environmental dangers of eating meat. So I think that work kind of speaks for itself, and you guys should definitely watch it if you haven’t.
And then we have Dr Joel Kahn, last but not least. You guys should go on drjoelkahn.com. That really kind of is the best kind of resource for him in terms of his work. He’ll give you weekly health tips. So maybe you watch Kip’s documentary and you want to go vegan, Dr Joel Kahn’s a great kind of practical way to go vegan. He gives you a lot of really helpful tips. He’s been vegan for 25 years himself. He is a cardiologist, and he focuses on preventative care importantly. And then finally, he has an actually an Amazon best-selling book called “The Whole Heart” that you guys should definitely check out.
So without further ado, I kind of want to get into just individually your backgrounds and the kind of trajectory of your thought. So, how you came to believe what you currently believe is the ideal diet through your own personal experiences. We can start with you, Dave.
DAVE ASPREY: I’ve been a Silicon Valley guy for most of my career. I used to weigh 300 pounds And I couldn’t really see my feet, much less touch them. As my career was taking off, I was a co-founder of a part of the company that held Google’s first server when it was two guys from Stanford and one server, before Google built its own data centers. And I started to have really serious brain fog. So my career’s taking off, and I just found I couldn’t really pay attention. My emotions were all over the place. And I decided, well, I could work out six days a week.
In fact, I can cut my calories to 1,800 calories. I could go vegan before it was cool. And all I got was fatter and more tired. After 18 months of working out, I could bench press all of my friends. And they didn’t work out, and they were all thinner than I was, and I ate less than they did. And at a certain point I’m like, I’m trying, but maybe I’m not trying hard enough, and I thought it was a moral failing. And eventually, I said, you know what? I’m a hacker. In fact, I can take the stuff we use to manage the internet, and I can turn it back on myself, and I can look at things we know, understanding there’s a lot of things we don’t know.
When we work on infrastructure, you only know the stuff you control, but you’re going out across all the stuff that other people control, yet somehow you can still make the results you want. We still don’t know a huge amount about our own biology, but it’s very easy for us to say, all right, here is a bunch of data points, rather than epidemiological studies saying, some people eat this, and not controlling for millions of variables that might matter, and sort of make a conclusion there, I could actually go out and say, what am I testing right now, is there a plausible reason for this, and do I see and feel results that I can measure? And I lost 100 pounds.
I turned my brain back on. I’m younger and more energetic on every level I can. And it turns out there is enormous amounts of data that everyone listening to this can go out and Google for. And you can find, oh, wait, there are studies on PubMed that say the exact opposite of what things like the American Heart Association and the recent attack on coconut oil, things like that– oh, wait, you stopped looking at all data after 1974 in order to make those conclusions? Well, what about the new data? So it’s becoming increasingly hard to fool people, but increasingly easy to just simplify things.
When I look at my favorite animal protein product, it’s spider venom. Wait, that’s an animal protein that’s clearly bad for you. And my favorite plant based protein is ricin, the nerve gas. So anytime someone tells you plant-based or animal-based, those are meaningless terms. It’s like a liquid diet. Well, was it gasoline, or was it water? Because they do different things to your biology. And how is it prepared? All these things matter. And I ended up with this basic algorithm that works. And the algorithm goes like this. Stop doing the things that make you weak. You probably don’t know all of them, but at least find some of them. Then do the things that make you strong. And most nutrition research focuses on just doing stuff that makes you strong, or these very broad platitude-based things that are so broad that they caused you to do things that make you weak even if there is value in them. So it’s a question of having precision for you.
And prime examples would be if you eat processed meats, they do one thing to you because of a bacteria in your gut. If you eat unprocessed meats that are fed a different thing, it’s actually a different outcome. It even has different environmental costs. So you look at the system of the human body. You look at all the things that are going in that you can measure, you realize you’re not measuring almost everything that’s going on in the world around you that affects your biology. And then you start course correcting.
And for me, it led to profound improvements in cognitive function, as well as sort of effortlessly maintaining the weight that I wanted without ever experiencing hunger and cravings. And I quit being a raw vegan. In fact, it made me really sick. And a lot of people have had problems with that. And there are other people, like Joel here, who have been vegan for 25 years and are still walking around.
So I will say one thing that I learned through the course of all this, if you’re not covering your plate with vegetables first, you’re doing it wrong However, not all vegetables do the same things to you either, so you might want to pay some attention there. So you have to get the details for what works for you, because your ultimate diet may not be the same as mine. But I guarantee you, if you do less of the stuff that makes you weak with your genetics, your biome, your mitochondrial DNA, you’re going to like it. And there’s a list of things that make large swaths of the population weak. So you just have to figure out what your own personal kryptonite is, avoid that, and then play around with other things, like macronutrients.
JESSE MICHAELS: Got ya Kip, I’m sure you have a lot to say to that.
KIP ANDERSEN: I’ll keep it a little shorter than that. So basically, it’s really started out as similar. I think our backgrounds are similar as really truth seekers. We’re really trying to find out what the truth is, what the truth is. And I was a hypochondriac. I was a hardcore hypochondriac. I took, at 18 years old, Metamucil every day for fiber. And my both sides were diabetes and all these things. So I was really hardcore into genetics. Like, oh my god I’m going to die. And then, I guess this is the part where we differ, where what my decision was, what I was trying to do under my own experiments on myself is I want to take other things in consideration, not just myself.
A lot of people think of health as just me, me, me. And I was getting to the point where I was starting to do a little bit of yoga, still starting to see the bigger picture of now that we’re — if anyone’s seen the film “Cowspiracy,” it goes into this a little bit more. We’re 7 billion humans on this planet. When I think of holistic health, I don’t think of holistic health as my own body, this physical being. Not only do I think of health as mind/body, but I sort started thinking more of spiritual health, spirit health, mind, body, spirit, and then taking health into consideration of the entire planet, and then taking health in also consideration of my personal moral compass.
And then that’s what I said, rather than — I guess you’d say biohacking, I guess I would call it bioharmonizing. Like, my whole thing is about harmonizing myself within this greater picture of this planet, especially at the time we live in. Rather than Bulletproof Coffee or Bulletproof Diet, you know we have enough bullets arounds. It sounds like a Trump thing. I’d say more of something like a harmony diet, to incorporate myself within the bigger picture.
So that’s why I started experimenting different things, looking into the environmental impacts. As you see with “Cowspiracy,” interviewing different doctors. By no means is it cherry picking, if anyone says that “What the Health?” if anything, it’s finding gold flakes of this murky industry-funded river and finding out the truth. And then the other thing I say is choose, really — there’s one thing about learning the truth, the feeling the truth, and that’s where you go to a place like True North Health Center, and you see those four case studies that people think are fake in “What the Health?”, where they’ve reversed their illnesses where they thought they were going to die within weeks or months. In three weeks, they’re off all the medications. And that is truth. And I think it’s one other thing too, though– this is kind of going another question, but we’re at a time of history we people are looking at this time. This time. And there is only, essentially, you look at different periods of time, different movements, whatever you call it, civil rights, women’s rights. You know, more recently, gay rights and transgender rights. They’re all still going. They’re all still happening. We’ve not resolved any of these. And the next one is animal rights. And the next one is about encompassing all, that we are all equal. And that’s where the mind, body, spirit comes in, and not only spiritual health, but spiritual health for the entire planet.
And I think that’s the thing that people who get lost in “What the Health?” is when we go to North Carolina, regardless of four or five facts that we can debate all day, whether it’s right or wrong, because you can manipulate nutritional studies, but go to North Carolina and see “I Love Bacon,” or “I love meat.” Do you really? Do you really? I know where my meat comes from, so it’s OK. Do you know the animal was killed? What slaughterhouse was that? And would you really kill your own animal? So that’s a part too, that you have to look into consideration of complete total health. And I think that’s where my journey leads to “Cowspiracy” that goes into “What the Health?” is health is much bigger than just me, I, and that’s all that matters. It’s more about harmonizing yourself with something that’s much greater, especially with 7 billion people.
JESSE MICHAELS: Doctor?
JOEL KAHN: So my journey to sit in the chair today began when I was actually 18, and Jesse it’s cool. But actually, I walked into the dormitory cafeteria at University of Michigan, 1977, and I became a plant eater because the salad bar attracted me and nothing else. So I’ve not had a burger in 40 years; I’m 58 and a 1/2 years old. Never taken a prescription drug. Quite stable. And I actually have more energy than all my peers, and they know that. And it irritates them, because they like their burger and fries still. But as I entered medical training– and you know, I don’t want to talk anymore about me. It doesn’t really matter.
We’re all truth seekers, but I do it in a medical office, where I feel completely obligated to give people direction to maintain their health, prevent disease, or reverse the disease they have. I think it’s a very high moral obligation, and it’s caused me to be a constant student. If there was data that I found that said that patient with heart disease eating meat would improve their health, I would recommend that and routinely prescribe it, because of my moral obligation. It doesn’t matter what I eat in my own home. It matters what’s going to be right for you.
So I’ve had to seek that out and try and synthesize and guide people. There’s some really important people in this town that have dropped dead of the disease I take care of. I’ve been up at 3:00 in the morning taking care of heart attacks for 30 years now. But I mean, a good friend of mine, Dean… who was a big project manager at Apple, 2013, playing hockey dropped dead of a 90% blocked artery, unknown, Kirk Krikorian– some you may know that name, maybe not Big time Silicon Valley investor and such, surfing last year, walking to his car, drops dead of a heart attack. You guys might not know this, the former CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini, four weeks ago dropped dead at 66. I mean, these are tragic things. That’s what I’ve been dealing with.
So I mean, the focus is health promotion. I do believe there’s a uniform diet we could agree with, the three of us sitting up here. There is a group called True Health Initiative, which has over 400 health and nutrition experts all over the world, very different opinions, who’ve agreed to come up with a core kind of nutritional philosophy no matter where they are and what they personally at home. And I’ll leave it to Jesse to maybe ask a few more questions, and I’ll share that with it.
But this is a relevant conversation for you in your 20’s, because we know from studies, I am not here to really fight with anybody. Dave kind of threw out something called PubMed, which is a National Library of Medicine, 26 million peer-reviewed medical articles. I live in PubMed, because if we don’t base our recommendations on science, recognizing the flaws, funding conflicts, that there’s more associations and actual randomized trials. Nutrition trials are tough. Let’s get a million people to eat one way and a million people to eat the other. Do that for 20 years and solve these things. It ain’t happening. So we’ve got to go with, you know, eating too much x is associated with y, or we have nothing to stand on. But I think there is a commonality.
And in fact, none of us here eat crap. None of us here pull into fast food restaurants. None of us here add sugar in our food on purpose. You know, none of us here barbecue things to a crisp and eat all the toxic components that come out of barbecuing called advanced glycation end products, heterocyclic amines, and such. So there’s a lot in common here. And I think that’s important as you walk out of here.
You know? Don’t go on your way home, pick up bucket of KFC, even if it has a Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Prevention symbol on it. And don’t go buy Fruit Loops if it has the American Heart Association symbol for whole grains. Eat whole grains. In my world, just don’t do it in a way that’s perverse to your health.
JESSE MICHAELS: Cool. I want to kind of establish where the commonalities are, and then where the kind of sticking points are. So I think everybody on this panel is pretty against like, processed meats, for example. You’re a proponent of grass fed.
JOEL KAHN: I like grass.
JESSE MICHAELS: You like grass. Exactly. You’re full vegan. Correct. And so is that really — like, I want to establish a framework for what we actually disagree on. Is that it, or do you guys disagree on more than that?
DAVE ASPREY: I actually calculated the deaths per calorie of The Bulletproof Diet I was in Tibet, where I discovered yak butter tea that was the genesis for Bulletproof Coffee. And I was vegetarian at the time. And I said, hey, Mr Llama, the guy who leads the monastery at 15,000 feet. And I said, that’s a yak skin on your prayer pole, and your sign over there says “No killing, no lying, no drugs.” So you’re a hypocrite. And he started laughing. He goes, well, one death feeds everyone. And we talked about it for about an hour. And I live on an organic farm. We raise our own sheep. I’ve been to the slaughterhouse. I haven’t had a grain-fed animal in 10 years. And if you’re eating grain-fed meat right now, you’re doing it wrong. You’re harming the planet. You’re harming yourself.
Bottom line is when you feed that stuff to a cow, especially if it’s not even organic, and you’re getting glyphosate in there, you’re getting antibiotic residues that cause your gut bacteria to change, which makes them create toxic compounds. So I think for me, soil integrity and ocean integrity is at the root of the recommendations that I make, because you will not be a high performance human if you live in a world full of crap around you that’s a result of the diet you make. And that’s an area where I think all of us agree, it’s not just about us. It’s about how we feel.
And I also think that all of us are in alignment on the fact that we want to feel a lot of energy. Because if you make it about everything around you, and you like crap all the time, and you’re struggling, and your brain doesn’t work very well, you are wasting all the calories you put into your body because you’re not getting a return on those. And that’s something that happened to me in a lot of my life. And like, I will not allow that to happen to anyone that I help today.
JESSE MICHAELS: Kip?
KIP ANDERSEN: Just one thing on the grass-fed beef. If anyone’s watched “Cowspiracy,” we don’t even talk about factory-farmed beef. We go straight into, OK, everybody knows that’s bad for you. Grass-fed beef as according to land use– these are things that are not debatable. Land use– and you have sheep– for a grass-fed cow takes five to 10 times as much land. So the part that’s debatable, greenhouse gases, that’s debatable. What’s not debatable is land use. We have a part in “Cowpiracy” that showed if everyone had two scoops of butter, cow fat, and ate grass-fed beef, of how much land use it would cover. Just America would go north of Canada. This is every square inch. This would be leveled, all the way down to Brazil. And that is not one other single animal can live where there’s pasteurized grass-fed beef. That’s why all the wolves are killed, all the bears, all the coyotes, while there’s more horses round up, living in holding cells than are free. And that is not factory farm. That is grass-fed.
The reason why is land use. Land use, and they live 35% longer, so they’re using more resources. So the whole grass-fed thing is just a marketing term, you know, about regenerating soil that’s already been exposed of what that is. Only 15% come out– when you have any animal, and you whatever you eat, an animal, only about 15%, 20%, comes back in the land, so you’re regenerating hardly anything. It’s extremely inefficient.
And I think just the other thing that we disag– it’s very important to note of you mentioning, like when you did this biohacking and losing weight, it’s very important to recognize– and you say this openly– that you were on steroids and testosterone and legal, as you call it, “meth,” but safer, for eight years And I think that’s very important—
DAVE ASPREY: No. That is false. Just so we can be really clear on that.
KIP ANDERSEN: OK. Well, it was medophenol, or some sort of speed. If I am jacked up on—
DAVE ASPREY: It’s not speed, dude. Get your science right.
KIP ANDERSEN: OK, OK. Something that’s for narcoleptics. Does anyone know what narcolepsy is? It’s someone who takes that for steroids. And I think it’s just very important to note that that’s not left out. Because that’s very important in this equation. So we can do this without getting jacked up on drugs—
DAVE ASPREY: All right. Here’s the deal. I went off the stuff for three years while developing The Bulletproof Diet. The fact that I use cognitive enhancers kicks ass. And the fact that you’re not doing them might be why there’s cigars on hot dog buns in your movie.
KIP ANDERSEN: What?
DAVE ASPREY: All right. All right. All right All right. OK So—
JOEL KAHN: I’m going to bring it back. I’m actually a militant vegan blogger.
KIP ANDERSEN: That’s an oxymoron.
JOEL KAHN: Mike labeled that. But I’m in a very loving and harmonious mood today. I’m just excited to be at Google, and all your people out there I will say one, and only one thing. Dave may not have seen it. May have seen it. October 2, 2017, 127-page publication of Oxford University on the impact of grass-fed beef on the environment. It’s as deleterious to greenhouse gas production as his CAFOO-based, grain-fed beef. According to science, and I’m always going to science. I don’t really want an opinion. I want science. I trust doctors at universities. I want to bring this together, though I’ve mentioned something called the True Health Initiative. It’s not a paid position. It’s over 400 scientists and physicians and dieticians that have come up. And I want to give you that core definition that we use, because I want you to walk out of here with something you can do.
So number one, eat minimally processed foods. I think all three of us will say that’s right. That’s not the middle of the grocery store. That’s not vending machines, usually. That’s not fast food. That’s not gas station food. Eat minimally processed. Eat close to nature. If you can find farmer’s markets, if you can find produce– frozen vegetables are often better than stuff that’s been transported 2,000 miles from California to my home in Detroit. Eat close to nature.
Number three is eat a predominately a plant-based diet. Those aren’t my words. It doesn’t say exclusively. The plate needs to be full. The USDA says that half your plate should be fruits and vegetables. The Harvard School of Public Health says half your plates are fruits and vegetables. How many people do that in America? Less than 3%. So predominantly plants.
And your liquid should be predominantly water, not sugar-sweetened beverages, not all kinds of energized drinks that are putting chemicals in you, and particularly, refined sugars, you don’t need. We have to be very careful about the language too, because there’s all kinds of carbs, there’s all kinds of sugars. Are they added in an orange? Are they natural in an orange? Are they added in a soda? And you add to that seven to eight hours of sleep a night, you add regular physical activity, you add community, you add socialization, and social support, you prevent disease and you promote health, whether you’re in Okinawa, whether you’re in Sardinia, whether you’re in Costa Rica, whether you’re in Loma Linda, whether you’re here in Mountain View I mean, it isn’t that hard.
So if you like that three or four close to nature, minimally processed, predominantly plants, and you want to put some other stuff on it, you’re probably on the right track, because you’re doing better than you know 3/4 and 80% of people that don’t have their own animals in the yard and don’t have access to the kind of food we’re talking about. We’re all sort of elitist eaters, either because of spiritual, because of environmental. In my case, predominantly because of medical I think you have to be– and one of the questions Jessie prepared us for, where does moderation– I am not– I don’t think any of us are moderate eaters on the panel. I’m an exquisitely careful eater, and I’ve done that for 40 years. And I teach my patients be moderate in your exercise. Be fanatic about the care you put in your body. I think Dave would agree with that. He’s fanatic about what he puts in his body in a different sense. But there’s a lot in common here that would bring up the health of America.
JESSE MICHAELS: Dr Kahn, I want to press you on one thing. Just the grass-fed beef. Both you and Kip spoke to kind of just negative environmental repercussions. Do you think it’s not healthy as well, and why?
JOEL KAHN: Just a quick answer, because I do want to be fair to time. It’s an elitist question in that 95 plus percent of the meat eaten in America is not grass-fed beef. It’s still what’s called CAFO factory farmed beef. We all agree that is the worst of scenarios. To cruelty to animals, cruelty to workers, disease in workers, environmental destruction. And the cool thing is with all these ag-gag laws, now drones are flying over these places and making movies that couldn’t be made before of these pools of crap from animals that are exploding and going into the waters and the ground.
Why do we have arsenic in rice and chicken? Because there’s just been exposures of all these toxins in the environment. It’s horrible. So we all agree. Shut those down. And that’s not going to happen quick. That’s Tyson. That Smithfield Conagra. These are the biggest, most powerful companies with lobbies. But you should be concerned that 95-plus percent of the meat in America is toxic.
Dave agreed in a blog he wrote that meat is like smoking if we’re talking about processed meat. And we all agree to that. I mean, it’s horrible. But it’s what you’re going to eat unless you’re exquisitely careful about what you put in your body. This is a good age to do it at, because you’ll reap the benefits. Science is progressing. You guys can all live over 100 if you take good care of yourself now. You really can, and wear a seat belt.
KIP ANDERSEN: What’s your thoughts on whether grass-fed beef is better though?
JOEL KAHN: Well, you know, there’s little clues. There is science– again, I like science. There’s clues that grass-fed beef versus conventional beef has some health benefits over the CAFO-raised beef. The factory-farmed beef, in terms of omega-3 and some nutrients. There is no beef on the planet that has fiber. There’s no beef on the planet that has much in the way of rich vitamins. We know those are plant-based. But we all agree your plate should be either completely, or to a large extent, covered with plants. That’s already elitist compared to the 1% to 3% of Americans that actually eat five servings of fruit and vegetables a day. We want you to do that. There’s this coolest study out there. You take a hospital hamburger. Literally, and I love it, because I think hospital food is the biggest damn embarrassment in the United States right now. You take a hospital hamburger and you eat it, and you can measure within 45 minutes if your arteries are functioning less well than before the hospital hamburger. You throw a big slab of avocado or a big salad along with the hamburger, you bring yourself back up to neutral. So whatever you’re eating, always add the plants to the meal. Again, there’s commonality of opinion here.
Grass-fed beef, again, 90% plus– John Mackey spoke here, the founder of Whole Foods. His kind of philosophy is eat plants 90% and the last 10% is your decision. There’s certain patients I don’t think that’s true for as a medical doctor. But as a societal recommendation, that’s cool by me.
JESSE MICHAELS: OK. Assuming diets aren’t one size fits all, how do you go about kind of figuring out what the best ideal diet is for you?
DAVE ASPREY: One of the things I did on the Bulletproof Diet roadmap, which is a free download on the website, and it’s basically my first big book in an infographic, is to say, look, there’s a bunch of suspect foods. And one of the examples here is the nightshade family. These are potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, things like that. Roughly a third of cases of rheumatoid arthritis are caused by eating this. And what happens is that animals don’t want you to eat their babies. That’s why we’re so protective of our young.
Well, plants really can’t do those same things, so they cover their babies in protective compounds. That’s why if you go into the park and you eat most of the plants there, you’ll get profoundly sick, because they’re protecting themselves from you. So some of us have genetic reasons that we will not handle those well. If you give me something that’s cooked with a little sprinkle of cayenne pepper, I’ll have the arthritis back in my knee that I’ve had since I was 14. It’s caused by food.
That said, cayenne is really a healthy compound for the other 2/3 of people. So I go through these four big categories of plant defense systems that are put in by mother nature, not by man, and say, these may not be compatible with your biology, but they might be compatible with the biology of someone next to you. So you need to eliminate all of those likely suspects for a couple of weeks and see how you feel, and then go out and have like, pizza, beer, cheesecake, whatever bad stuff you can think of and just be like, oh, my god, that’s how I used to feel. All of that stuff came back, and then go through the process of elimination. It is not the same for everyone.
JESSE MICHAELS: You guys would probably say a lot of the foods—
JOEL KAHN: I’ll grab a quickie on that. So if it’s not one diet fits all, and I don’t know that we know that I don’t know that we couldn’t put everybody on a single diet and their health would blossom. You know what I would choose? It would be a well-constructed rainbow diet of minimally processed plant-based foods. It works real well for disease processes to eat that way according to medical science, and certainly in my field, cardiology. But there is such a thing, if you don’t feel well, if you’ve got brain fog, if you’ve got bloating, if you’ve got joint pain, do an elimination diet Dave and I share a friend JJ Virgin who wrote a rather good book called “The Virgin Diet.” So you eliminate dairy. See how you feel for six to eight weeks. Very common, not just the bloating and the gas. My wife was that example. I hope she doesn’t mind my saying. But when we walked into that dorm cafeteria 40 years ago and she stopped eating dairy, in a week she felt better. She thought it was just Jewish food made you feel bad.
It turns out it was dairy in the Jewish food made her feel bad. You know, she’s enjoyed that. So do that. Try gluten-free. I don’t think America needs a gluten-free 100% of people, but there are people with celiac disease undiagnosed. There’s people who have celiac sensitivity. Do that for six to eight. It might even take three months to see how better you feel now.
Now, I will argue with you, if you don’t need to be gluten-free, the science says, particularly if you’re buying processed, rice-based bread substitutes, which are common everywhere, you may not be doing your health a favor. So elimination diet is a way to do it. There are a lot of people who will do a 21-day Daniel fast. Maybe you’ve heard of that in churches, which is based on the Book of Daniel. It’s kind of a plant-based religious thing. But the medical documentation from the University of Tennessee in Memphis is blood sugar, C-reactive protein, blood pressure, blood cholesterol will go down in three weeks by doing kind of that kind of elimination. And then go back and add foods in one at a time. Very logical way to see what’s bugging you.
KIP ANDERSEN: Just to add to that, because we asked every single doctor in our film, oh, you hear, oh, I’ve been vegan for two weeks, or three weeks, or whatever it is. Or at least people say, and I don’t feel good. What is going on? The bottom line they all kind of said is that get tested for what’s going on. I think Dr Goldhamer says, there’s nothing in dead rotting animal flesh, whether it’s you just killed or not, in animal flesh that you cannot get somewhere else. And you so find out. If you’re not feeling well, you’re not having the right diet. There’s maybe something that you can tweak yourself, your diet too. But you can substitute everything with plant-based foods. If you love cheese, like I do– I was a hardcore cheeseholic. When I got off cheese, when I went vegan for the first three weeks, I’ve felt the best I’ve ever had in my life to this day.
But now finally, I’ve been vegan 10 years, just in the past year and a half to two years, now I have nut cheeses again, because they’re actually good. So that’s the main thing, is the takeaway. If you have something to tweak to your diet, it’s Keto or whatever, or even if it’s fat or not fat, you can have a plant-based version, and it’s incredible, and it’s good for you. Not only for good for you mentally, physically, spiritually, but it’s good for the planet, and you don’t have to kill any animals. Bonus all around.
JOEL KAHN: I just want to jump in there for a minute. The hottest diet right now in Silicon Valley according to the newspaper almost every day is the keto diet, ketogenic diet. Low carb, relatively high fat, and brain power, and the rest. And I’m not even mimicking it. In fact, there’s a new startup this week, you can now buy ketone bodies in a bottle, three bottles for $100, to enhance your athletic performance. There are plant-based keto diets. There’s a Facebook user page in the last few months that’s grown to enormous numbers of plant-based ketogenic diet. But more important, science rules to me, Valter Longo, PhD, is the world’s leading expert on aging and longevity. He’s the head of a Biogerontology Research Institute in Los Angeles at USC. He’s got a plant-based ketogenic five day a month diet. I use in all my patients. It’s amazing and transformative to eat nuts, olives, 60% of calories from fat, very low protein, because protein activates aging pathways. No added sugar, because everybody hates sugar. Nobody loves sugar.
We can debate what sugar does to your health status, but we don’t like it. And the results that have been published in animals and humans with a plant-based, five-day ketogenic diet are actually transformative in terms of multiple sclerosis, brain growth, BDNF, a protein in your brain. But just getting a flat belly again. So there are all these different paths I just wanted to shout out. But even in Silicon Valley, you can be on the cutting edge of what seems to be a trend, but also do it in a way that might be a little more helpful, in my opinion.
JESSE MICHAELS: Dave, if you can get all of your protein from plants and you can do a plant-based ketogenic diet, why are you a big fan of grass-fed beef and other meats?
DAVE ASPREY: There are these things called cell membranes in the body. We like to think that we have this membrane around ourselves, but it’s actually made of tiny droplets of fat. And all of our hormones are made out of cholesterol. And very interesting new research just came out that shows that the plaque in your arteries doesn’t come from the food that you eat. It actually comes from bacteria.
JOEL KAHN: It’s a maybe.
DAVE ASPREY: In the gut.
JOEL KAHN: But it is new.
DAVE ASPREY: Yeah, well, it’s that whole I like science thing.
JOEL KAHN: It’s one study. It’s one study.
DAVE ASPREY: I don’t know. It’s one study, though—
JOEL KAHN: Versus 110 years of other studies. But there is one new study, I agree.
DAVE ASPREY: This is that whole epidemiology versus understanding the core mechanisms of life. When we analyze the fats and we look at exactly what they’re made of, we’re like, oh, those fats don’t come from plants. They don’t come from animals. They come from bacteria, which means we’ve got a problem with bacteria in the gut. So if you’re eating sugar, you’re eating these CAFO meats, you’re going to be causing that problem.
That said, if you want to have adequate testosterone production, it’s really helpful to have some of these animal fats in your diet, to have healthy membranes. Because the bottom line is we actually aren’t made out of plants. Like, if you look around, we are made out of animals because we are animals. We have a very long history of eating animals. And I’ve looked a lot at monoculture habitat destruction. And if you’ve ever seen what a field of soybeans does to all of the animals that are killed by tractors—
KIP ANDERSEN: They’re there to feed cows I mean—
DAVE ASPREY: I think vegetarians eat soybeans last time I checked.
KIP ANDERSEN: 90% of all soy is fed to cows.
DAVE ASPREY: Hey, we’re all in agreement. Let’s not do that. Right?
JOEL KAHN: Agree.
DAVE ASPREY: But here’s the deal, whatever plants you’re growing, keep in mind, I run an organic farm with very high productivity per acre. Guess what plants eat? They eat dead animals. They eat poop. That’s what it does. So what we’re doing to feed these vegan diets out there is we’re actually mining minerals. We’re about to run out, in 40 years, the stuff we use to make fertilizer. Or maybe we can get some from natural gas and put it back in. But we are trashing the soil to make what most vegans eat because there aren’t that many organic vegans. Talk about– yeah, I know. It’s kind of funny when science comes in.
So what happens here is literally bunnies, cute little bunnies, turtles, mice, whole families, tractors just come through and just take out their whole thing. You know, you’ve got to think about that if you’re going to eat a big grain bowl for lunch. Because the net deaths per calories if I eat one grass-fed cow per year is 0.7 deaths per year unless the cow stepped on a frog in the front pasture of my farm. So what’s going on here is that if you want take care of the soil, you should have animals shitting on the soil. That’s how it works.
JOEL KAHN: I thought we weren’t allowed to use that word.
DAVE ASPREY: Oops.
JOEL KAHN: I asked before we started, if you can google a word, can we say it? And he said no.
DAVE ASPREY: There’s an environmental argument, and there’s the study that shows it’s what’s going on your bacteria, and also the fact that people feel better on moderate protein. One thing that’s terribly missing from vegan diet is collagen, which is the connective tissue that makes your joints. One of the things that makes my joints not hurt any more, even though I thought your joints were supposed to always hurt, is that your joints are made of collagen, and I eat collagen again. And this comes from animals. There is no plant-based collagen. So there’s a great argument for this. I’ll also tell you there’s a great argument for eating a lot less grass-fed meat. You don’t need to have a huge steak. The whole paleo thing, where it’s all like, carnivore-based is not a good way to live a long time. It’s a good way to get cancer.
But moderate amounts, particularly of animal fat and some animal protein, will make you feel better. They’ll give you more energy. They’ll make you look younger. They’ll make you live longer, and they feed the plants the crap they need so we can stop destroying large swaths of our environment and our soil to feed cows that eat the wrong stuff or to feed people who eat the wrong stuff, like grains.
JESSE MICHAELS: OK. Let’s give Kip a chance to respond.
KIP ANDERSEN: So that was hilarious. So, science grass-fed beef, again and again, it’s about land use. You cannot have any other animals share this land with you. Yes, it is true.
DAVE ASPREY: I have a farm.
KIP ANDERSEN: OK, OK. Actually, this is a great– How many acres are in your farm?
DAVE ASPREY: I have 32 acres.
KIP ANDERSEN: OK. So 32 acres, how many sheep?
DAVE ASPREY: Right now, I have a half-acre with three sheep.
KIP ANDERSEN: A half-acre with three sheep.
DAVE ASPREY: And we rotate them around so they—
KIP ANDERSEN: So they eat lots of grass, which is land use. So if we were to take his 32 acres, and I was going veganic farming, which is how “Cowspiracy” ends, I would blow away the production with veganic composting and production, not only by 10, but probably 30– if you have only three sheep not so much– I’d grow around 10 times, probably 5 to 10 times more food than you would. Because we just had a meme on this on our “Cowspiracy.” We do it all the time. You have a funnel of food. A cow, for example, eats around 35, 50, 100 pounds, depending on where it is, of how much food. Day after day after day, it drinks 25 gallons of water every single day. Add that up over 18 months, and guess what you get? You funnel down, funnel down, funnel down. You get some of that goes back in the soil.
At the end of the day, the animal flesh you get is around 250, 300 pounds. Out of thousands and thousands of food. So what it is, it’s called inefficiency. And then the other question too is, again, how efficient can you be in the– what was the last part? There’s one other part about that. But I guess the goal is to be as efficient as we can with– not all of us have 35 acres. If you want to break it down to five acres, say we’re all given five acres, you try putting one sheep on that, and I’ll put mine, I’ll leave the sheep out, and see who grows more. There’s not even a remote comparison. And know what? I don’t have to kill the sheep. Can I film some time you killing the sheep with your own bare hands? Can I film that?
DAVE ASPREY: You can actually film me taking it down on a bandsaw, because I actually know how to do that.
KIP ANDERSEN: I can film that?
DAVE ASPREY: Sure, you can film that. As long as you take a bite when we’re done.
JOEL KAHN: He won’t TMAO if you do, though. All right I just have a quick, just again, we got to bounce back quick. Collagen is important. And this is obscure, but it’s also you guys are young, healthy, you want great skin, great hair, great nails, taking biotin and all this stuff. You know, you don’t need to eat animal collagen, because our human body makes collagen. It’s a miracle. You need, however– this is an interesting historical point, but it’s relevant today.
There are only four species on the planet don’t make collagen– Guinea pigs, bats, gorillas, and humans. We’re the only four mammals on the planet. My dog and my cat make collagen. Humans can’t. We lost an enzyme in our liver. We are required– and Linus Pauling, double Nobel Prize winner taught this in his biochemistry research, we have to eat a ton of vitamin C– tada, fruits and vegetables, fruits, and vegetables. We need a ton of leucine, which comes from the legumes primarily and almonds to some degree. If you’re a plant-based eater and you eat properly as the rainbow, whole food, close to nature, minimally processed diet, you make all the collagen you need. There’s actually a very cool sign, where your earlobe gets a crease, and it shows you’re collagen weak and collagen deficient. It’s a marker of heart disease. It’s less common amongst those that eat tons of plants. So you can make collagen. You don’t have to eat animal collagen. You don’t have to drink bone broth. You need to eat healthy to maintain it.
I will say I’m rather proud of this because, again, as you’re growing up in a world that’s going to be congested, and dirtier, and more polluted, and more… I can calculate it online in my 40 years of being a plant eater, I’ve saved 15,000 animals and 16 million gallons of water. So when I have my eulogy told, which I hope by that time will be 45,000 animals and 60,000 gallons of water that, you know, each of us, if you know the story about throwing a starfish back. You know, we can make one little difference in the world. And you know, being sensitive to your carbon footprint in every way, in your car, in your bike, in your walking, but in your food, which is the biggest segment of your carbon emission as a human on the planet. You know, it can be just one personal vote for sensitivity, humanity, and for doing good.
And if we spread that word, which Google can do probably better than anybody out there, you know, we can make a difference. Because air pollution is choking your guys’ health off. You just had a fire up north and you knew it firsthand, but these things are important.
JESSE MICHAELS: OK. I want to move on. We can follow up with you slaughtering a lamb for Kip. But we focused up until now on kind of animal protein, fats, carbs sugar, sodium. I kind of want to just do a little rapid fire and hear what they’re good for and why you might think they’re bad, either in excess or just generically. We’ll also follow up with your version of “War” by Edwin Starr.
JOEL KAHN: They’re all saying, what song is that? I know I’m old.
AUDIENCE: We know it.
JOEL KAHN: Yes Rock on. The wise people in the audience.
JESSE MICHAELS: Go for it.
DAVE ASPREY: So fats. Certain kinds of fats are great for building cell membranes. Many other kinds of fats are good for making energy because they have more electrons in them than sugar or carbohydrates, and you want high octane fuel in the body. And other fats are good for causing inflammation, which is a problem. So different fats, different things.
Sugar, generally, you don’t eat a lot of sugar, particularly fructose. It’s just not good for you. And we have abundant evidence that it messes up your gut biome, which also then increases your risk of heart disease, your risk of cancer, and your risk of every other degenerative disease ever, and it’ll make you get hypergly-bitchy. It’s just bad news.
The next one after that was sodium. It turns out that you’re probably not getting enough salt in your diet right now. The more stressed you are, the more salt you need. The current recommendations from the government around salt intake are actually so low that they raise heart attack risk through an enzyme called renin. The Russian space program just figured out some amazing things like if you have a high salt diet, you can eat 25% more calories without gaining weight. Not that you necessarily want to do that.
But I’ll tell you that if you’re stressed, you’re not getting enough sleep, you’re traveling a lot, you’re staying up late, you’re getting bad light in your eyes, all the stuff that increases biological stress, you’re in a bad relationship, eat more salt if your body wants you to. But make it sea salt that has balanced minerals in it versus industrial salt that has aluminum in it, because you really don’t want aluminum.
JESSE MICHAELS: Carbs and sugar.
JOEL KAHN: You did sugar.
DAVE ASPREY: I did say sugar. But carbs, carbs in general, I am not an anti-carb person. I’m an anti-sugar person. And I think the right kinds of carbs that aren’t wrapped in mother nature’s defense system is a useful thing to do. That’s what I’ll tell you white rice is better than brown rice. People say, oh, brown rice, but fiber. And they forget the 80 times more arsenic that’s in brown rice versus white rice. The covering on grains triggers all sorts of immune system problems in people. In fact, wheat has 26 different compounds you can be allergic to that are not gluten. And we can test for those today. So these tend to trigger problems in people. Can you survive a famine on grain? Yes. Will you live with the highest performance, best feeling life where you give the most back to the world you have to give if you eat a lot of whole grains? I don’t believe so.
JESSE MICHAELS: Kip, Dr Kahn.
KIP ANDERSEN: I’ll let him– I mean, he’s the MD.
JOEL KAHN: Are you sure? OK. You got to remind me. So sugar. Small, medium amounts. But we’ve gone crazy with sugar, and we eat too much. And of course, we should always distinguish. We’re talking sugar in fruit, go for it. 500,000 people just studied out of China, first author their name Du. More sugar you eat, the lower your chance of developing type 2 diabetes if it’s in fruit. And if you have two type diabetes and you eat sugar in fruit, you live longer. That’s totally different than Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Amp. So enjoy the sweet of nature, but don’t add in the amazing amounts of added sugar, refined sugar, of all types.
Give me another Carb? We have to be specific. Talking about refined carbs as you’re going to find in pastries. One of the worst foods you can eat in your life are pastries. That’s been known since the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. Perfect bomb of refined flour, refined sugar, added, usually processed, poor quality non-organic oils. Don’t eat donuts, the number one food you’ll see at the doctor’s office. Typically, don’t eat processed pastries. Don’t eat you know Ding Dongs and HoHos and all the rest. You know, we’re talking carbs like a bean carbs, like a squash, carbs like a piece of lettuce, which all food is a combination of fat, carbs, and protein to some extent. Go for it in my world. And then give me another.
JESSE MICHAELS: Sodium.
JOEL KAHN: Sodium. If you’re a tribesman in South America called the Yanamamo, you need a few hundred milligrams of sodium a day. Current recommendations now are 1,500 to 2000. Your average blood pressure is around 100. The number one killer in the world is hypertension. Number one killer in the world according to a study called the Global Burden of Disease Studies. Because again, it’s everything in excess. Americans are eating too much of everything. Too much refined sugar. Too much refined flour. Too much refined salt. Too many refined and poor quality fats. I’m fine with whole food fats I agree, there’s populations that eat high percentage of fats and are healthy.
There’s populations like Okinawa and this tribe in the Bolivian called the Chimane, they eat very little fat, and they’re healthy, but don’t eat the refined crap. So I’m more towards a low salt diet, recognizing this number one killer. And was there one more? Are we done?
JESSE MICHAELS: No, we’re done.
JOEL KAHN: OK, good.
KIP ANDERSEN: The only thing I’ll add to that is just, again, kind of personal experimentation. I used to do marathons being vegetarian. I was a hardcore cheese-aholic. And I really thought protein, because I ate eggs and cheese, and then just with “What the Health?”, there was going to impart more of the story arc with me. It was the first time I did a full marathon being vegan. And then I purposely never owned a bike or swam on a lap in my life, and I wanted to train for an Ironman within 90 days.
And by doing nothing different, other than– this brings in of carb– I did carb overloading. Carb loading, and then getting rid of all those inflammatory things, like dairy, especially, and eggs and protein, I increased my training half the time. I bettered my marathon by 23 minutes. And then I did the Ironman– I’ve never done this– within 90 days. And that was mainly a lot from carbs. That’s my experience with carbs.
So it’s maybe not all the times; I don’t do that now. But I think there’s a time and place, not only like, who you are, but what are you doing at this time? Are you trying to build muscle? Are you a long distance runner like Rich Roll? Most of the ultra endurance runners, they’re mostly vegan, if not 100%, they’re getting more and more, so I guess it depends.
JOEL KAHN: They’re renaming the NBA the NVA because so many players have gone vegan this month. OK Don’t announce it yet. It’s just something I know inside.
JESSE MICHAELS: I want to give you guys a chance to kind of disintermediate yourselves, meaning that you guys, you know, believe certain things, and you guys all have platforms, and people believe you when you speak about these things.
JOEL KAHN: I have a pro-erection platform. I want to just put it right out there. Sorry.
JESSE MICHAELS: But I’d love to get kind of your process and your sources. We hear a lot of terms like peer reviewed, like meta studies. Where should we look? You mentioned PubMed. How should we look at these things? How do we look at them for ourselves? Can you empower us?
DAVE ASPREY: Well, we’re here at Google. And we went through this long period of time where you had to go to a guy in a white lab coat or “Reader’s Digest.” Those are your two sources of information.
JOEL KAHN: “Prevention” magazine.
DAVE ASPREY: Right. And so we really didn’t have the ability to do this. You guys remember microfiche readers? Like, when I was in seventh grade, we had to go look up like, these incredibly stupid ways of finding stuff. So everything was hidden. And you could never find a million other people doing what you do to find something that works. And we’ve solved that problem over the last 20 years, and Google’s been one of the biggest companies to do that.
So there’s two places to go. One is you can look at PubMed. You can find almost any academic research ever about the specific thing that you’re looking for. And the second thing to do is find other people who are doing something similar or trying to solve the problem you want to solve. Biohacking is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your own biology. So if your job is to get swole, you’re going to talk to people who are doing that. And if your job is to live past 180, you’re going to talk to people who are doing that. But you can find these communities. And then you find these amazing things that should not be possible if the dogma is true. And that’s what happened to me.
I did the vegan thing. I did the excessive exercise thing, and it didn’t work. And I found, wow, there’s all these anti-aging people who meet 10 minutes from Google and have for 25 years. I’m chairman of this group now. They’re looking at these things. They’re studying, will it work? And yes, we talk with vegans. We talk with non-vegans Begins. We bring them in for lectures. But the bottom line is community is what’s going to help you the most, because the community has the power to go out and do the searching for you and to bring up interesting things. Well, wait, how can this paper exist if we all believe this? I’m going to run an experiment.
And if you find that your life was radically different after doing that, there is truth in that, because the number one part of the scientific method is observation. And then you can form a hypothesis, and then you can test it. You have a community. You can test it now that’s never existed before. And that is the most amazing thing right now.
JESSE MICHAELS: Kip?
KIP ANDERSEN: Want to go first?
JOEL KAHN: I would say you go to PubMed. You know, P-U-B-M-E-D.com. Some of you may have been there. So you may not. The National Library of Medicine, 26 million medical articles. Different than a blog. Different than a newspaper. But a tremendous range of quality. Negative studies often don’t get published. You do a study that grass-fed beef does or doesn’t do something, and it’s negative, you’re unlikely to publish it. It may damage your chances of getting further grants Egg board, dairy board, meat board. There is a green board, a broccoli board. I mean, they don’t have any money. But you do need to read.
The first place I go usually is the end of article, where was the funding from? And that’s true at the Harvard School of Public Health, and that’s true overseas. And sometimes, it’s not disclosed. And with all that muck, that’s where you go, nonetheless. We have 110 years of studies on nutrition and atherosclerosis. Somewhere amongst that, we can come to that core, you know, eat minimally processed, mainly close to the ground, and largely plants as a rallying point that is likely to favor your health and prevent disease.
And yes, there’s inconsistencies, and there’s disappointments when we learn that three guys at Harvard in the 1960s took some money to favor the idea that sugar was bad for your health and not disclose that. But that’s three researchers in 50 years in all. So we’re doing OK with medical science. There’s people that really care and really are ethical. Not everybody’s in a bad place, so I trust science. I really do.
KIP ANDERSEN: What’s happened, especially after the film comes out, people have these articles that come out. And eventually, we’re going to get ready to do one specifically that goes over each point, because they’re very easy to refute the rebuttals. And a lot of them– I was just on “Doctors,” and they’re all attacking us, and they’re literally quoting studies for the egg industry that’s put out by the egg industry. And this happens time and time again, where they have these studies that they’re refuting. They’re like, what about this? What about this? And it’s like, did you actually see the film? This is a huge part of the film. Follow the money. Follow who it went to. Don’t look at things at face value, surface level. You have to go deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper. And that’s what the film did.
And I think it was kind of sidetracked, but “Cowspiracy” just a few years ago, a lot of the facts were refuted then, and I learned a lot from that. Just in two, three years from now, everything pretty much in that entire film is common knowledge for the most part. And the same with “What the Health?” And looking back in history, 10, 20, 30 years from now, there’s one way this can go. And this one way is the plant-based diet, not only for again, for the planet, for your health, mind, body, and spirit is the way to go, and to search through these murky studies and find the ones that are truly independent.
And again, I guess brought up again, rather than like biohacking, really bioharmonizing yourself with the planet, not to have everything come towards you and fix me, myself. How about, how can I integrate myself with the entire planet so I’m at one with it, and so I feel liberated because of a much bigger self than just my own self? And I think that’s the goal too. It’s 7 billion people, and how do we all fit in? What can I do to become part of the greater whole of us?
JESSE MICHAELS: I want to get questions from the audience. Does anybody have any questions?
JOEL KAHN: Don’t be shy. Good, good, good.
AUDIENCE: What are your thoughts on the supposed estrogenic effects of soy?
JOEL KAHN: I’ll jump in as a medical doctor. I personally think that eating– well, I don’t personally think. The science says if you eat organic soy in place of meat, you favor the chance you won’t develop breast cancer for women. And if you’ve had breast cancer, you won’t develop recurrence of breast cancer, because there’s natural estrogen. And the very, very weak activity that’s in plant-based estrogen like the soybean– and only organic, because thank you Monsanto, we’ve largely destroyed that crap in terms of quality.
But it’s out there. Your soy milk I noticed in your coffee shops are Pacific brand, organic soy it’s a good choice. But so to replace– again, CAFO, where they’re administering extra hormones to get that chicken to grow fast, that cow to grow fast, make more money. You’re better off by far eating soy than that type of food. You get into higher quality, there’s no head to head study. Soy is a very safe food if you don’t have a food allergy or food intolerance. I wouldn’t eat it three meals a day. It can have something that’s called goitergenic thyroid interacting effects. But you don’t see that in natural populations in Japan. I mean, it’s a condiment to your stir fry and the rest of your diet.
KIP ANDERSEN: This is the one thing– you know, we wanted to make our film 90 minutes, and was the last thing we cut out. And I was like, oh god, someday we’ll do a director’s cut. Because that was a huge marketing, essentially– again, by theory, not 100%. Well, we do know it was put out by the Weston Price. And this big scare, right when soy milk started taking off, and cow milk started going down, all of a sudden this thing came out. Soy is bad because of, ironically, estrogen. What is in cow’s milk? Its growth hormone fluids. Whether it’s organic or not, it’s supposed to make a small calf grow into a big, thousand pound cow as fast as it possibly can. So it’s so ironic, because they’re saying it’s about the estrogen part. It’s phytoestrogen. When the real concern is the estrogen and the growth hormones from cow’s milk and cheese and dairy. That’s the one that you have to be worried about. And that was what? 25, 30 years ago I’ve been vegan 10 years.
For four years, I did not eat soy because of that. And then I found out it it was put out by the Weston Price, and it’s like, thank God. And it’s very true. If you do eat soy, organic, that is one thing, because it is heavily pesticide. But soy is incredibly good for you, and there’s study after study after study on that. And I’m bummed we put that out, because that was a big thing.
JOEL KAHN: On the other hand…
DAVE ASPREY: My wife is a medical doctor from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. When I met her, she drank soy milk. She was infertile. My very first book was how to turn fertility back on with 1,300 studies on it. When we took her off soy milk, she was able to gain weight that she’d been unable to gain her entire adult life drinking soy milk. Soy contains phytic acid, which inhibits your ability to absorb minerals from the other vegetables you might eat. So if you want to eat soy, you should pair it with a nice piece of grass-fed steak.
JOEL KAHN: But you won’t get colon cancer, because we know phytates resist the development of colon cancer. So you pick your choice.
DAVE ASPREY: The point there also about soy, aside from the estrogenic effects, which are present. And the estrogen that’s in soy doesn’t fit in your estrogen receptors properly, so it basically clogs them up so your own natural estrogen activities don’t work. You can use soy, for instance, at certain times of the month to help with PMS symptoms because it has an effect. But to take it sort of all willynilly, I am highly skeptical of that being a good choice.
The other problem is that fermented soy is the second highest histamine food after fermented fish sauce. Histamine is actually a neurotransmitter. It also causes allergies and things like that. So there are lots of people who go on the Bulletproof Diet, and I’m like hey, maybe you should stop eating even the gluten-free soy sauce for a little while and see what happens. And what happens is, I don’t get hives anymore. So if you eat soy and you get some brain fog later in the day, you get profoundly tired, it may not be estrogen. It may be one of the other many problems with soy, aside from the environmental destruction caused by mowing down beautiful fields and forests to plant soybeans to feed people low-quality crap.
JOEL KAHN: You don’t eat natto? Fermented natto is not on your diet.
DAVE ASPREY: No, natto is actually the one form of soy that I do recommend.
JESSE MICHAELS: We’ve got one question in the back. I can repeat the question.
AUDIENCE: Just to alleviate the situation, this question’s not about soy.
DAVE ASPREY: Darn.
AUDIENCE: A huge thanks for Kip because your films definitely changed my and my girlfriend’s life. So as a vegan or vegetarian, you definitely have a situation you’re with your friends, and suddenly your friend becomes a plant activist. And I was wondering, in this kind of situation, how do you usually go about it and can you share your experience of friends who eat lots of meat and they got irritated about—
KIP ANDERSEN: What was the first part of that?
JOEL KAHN: Their friends become activist.
JESSE MICHAELS: The question is around social situations where– he was influenced by your film. He went vegan. Maybe you’re at the dinner table and you have to explain that to meat eaters.
KIP ANDERSEN: Well, I went vegan, because part of it was health. Health was the last part. What’s interesting, I used to never go to barbecues, especially in the first years of when I was vegan, because everybody does these very immature things, kind of like, where you say, oh, if you’re going to eat animals, I’m going to eat two times animals. Or the whole soy thing, and this and that. And then, especially with the animals, I’m going to eat three times as many animals. Every time, it’s such a thing.
If you tell someone to not eat sugar, that’s like, well, you know, it’s interesting stuff. But if you tell someone to not eat animals because of certain things, it triggers someone back, and these immature things around when they’re 8 to 12 years old. And that is when we become jaded to that animal as another living being, of exactly that you would never in a million years, if you’re 12 years old, look a cow, look a sheep, in the eye and slit his throat. So it’s beyond– it’s a whole other level of betrayal, not only within yourself, but you’re saying, wow, are you saying. I’m not in line with who truly morally am? And that’s a deep question not only for yourself. Are you saying my parents are bad because they fed me this way, or my culture’s bad? So it’s a very deep thing.
That’s why it’s such a sensitive topic because at the core level, human beings are compassionate, loving beings. And that’s why at the core level, whether 5%, 10% of the core of who we are inside, we’re frugivores. We’re meant to love other beings and all of the planet’s other life forms. And that’s the big reason why we’re in the situation where we are, because we’ve gone away from that. So the only thing I say is people is the reason why I made these films is just hey, watch this funny film called “Cowspiracy,” or this comedy called “What the Health?” And you know, I mean, that’s all you can do, is try to educate. Because it is hard, because it’s such a deep-lying seeded contradictory with their own selves.
DAVE ASPREY: There’s something that happens any time you go on a new diet. And this happened when I was raw vegan. It happened when I discovered like Atkins in the early ’90s. Like, all right. Like, lost half this fat, and the other half won’t budge on that diet, and things like that. You go through this like, oh, my god, I have the solution, and I feel a moral obligation to tell everyone. But the real moral obligation you have, whether you’re like, a radical keto dieter– like that’s the latest like, you know, carb shaming, or the vegan side of things, where, OK, this is it. Like, this is what’s working for me right now. The best thing you can do, no matter what your diet is, and you just discovered it, is shut up and eat.
JOEL KAHN: I agree.
DAVE ASPREY: And when you do that, the people who are open to learning will ask you why you’re doing what you’re doing, and you’ll have the best conversations of your life. And if instead you’re like, I’m going to tell you why I’m doing what I’m doing, people are like, could you, you know, STFU. Like, we’re not here for that. We want to do what we’re going to do.
So my path over the last 20 years of discovering this stuff has been to learn that, look, when I’m eating, I don’t judge other people for what they eat. Like, I’m assuming they’re doing it. If they want to know why I’m doing what I’m doing, I’ll tell them, but I never offer it first. And given that I’m well-known now, they usually ask. But even back when I was doing what I was doing like, why, you’re working at a computer security company. Like, why did you carry a stick of butter to lunch with you? Right? I’m like, OK. Now it’s an opening. Right? And so if you just politely order the plant-based diet that you want to order and you eat it without emotion and without judgment, you’ll find that you’ll have the best conversations, and you’ll probably swing the people who are your target, the ones who are open versus angering the ones who are not open and are really not your target.
KIP ANDERSEN: I agree 100%. Now, I actually go to a barbecues. I don’t say anything I used to say something. In the first couple of years, so passionate. And now I don’t say anything, and it kind of comes to you, or they’ll ask something exactly. So again, whatever you do. And just kind of like, lead by example and really be present, but don’t say anything. So now I purposely go to barbecues, and just my presence there, like bringing a veggie burger, the new Beyond Burger. Having that there. Then you’re like, it’s a little minimal form of passive activism. And I don’t say anything. You know, if they come to me. But it’s very true. Very true. Because it does not work. I tried for 10 years. It doesn’t work.
DAVE ASPREY: Like, I go to barbecues. I don’t eat the barbecue. I’m like, well, it’s probably fed a bunch of crap. Like, it’s not good quality meat. And you shouldn’t burn your meat on open fire. I can show you all the science for that. So, it’s like, I’ll have the salad. And when I go out to eat, I’d go to Joel’s restaurant. I’ll go to a vegan restaurant because you’re going to get less crap, as long as you throw away the tofu and stuff, at a vegan restaurant than you are at the typical American feedlot restaurant.
But just by making those choices, and then saying, I’m going to do this not that, and you can say it’s about me. It’s about what works for my biology, and it’s OK. You can eat whatever you want to eat, but we can just have a really like, productive dialogue versus like, shaming.
JESSE MICHAELS: I think on that, two more questions, although that was very nice olive branch. Yes, Erica?
AUDIENCE: So then, for those of us that can’t cook for every meal, let’s say we’re going out for our birthday dinner or going out to a restaurant, what is going to the safest thing at a restaurant, then, that isn’t like, plant-based Or you’re going out with a group, you want to kind of be easy.
JOEL KAHN: I’ve been eating in restaurants—
JESSE MICHAELS: Dr Kahn, let me just repeat the question real quick for the listeners out there, viewers out there. So it’s basically, you’re in a group situation, you’re going to a restaurant. Maybe they ask you about dietary restrictions. Maybe they don’t. You want to kind of be easy and eat with them. How do you do that while adhering to the healthiest diet possible? Dr Kahn?
JOEL KAHN: Just quickly, there’s an amazing website that’s been around 20 years, happycow.net, if you’re looking for that healthy restaurant, whether you’re in Moscow, St Petersburg, Istanbul, or Mountain View. So that’s a great resource when you’re out of town happycow.net. It’s, as far as I know, noncommercial. Maybe it will list every whole food, or list every similar market and restaurant. Two, is I go right– if I’m in an Italian restaurant, the contorni, you know, the side dishes I put together spinach, root garlic, with a braised grilled cauliflower. Whatever it is. That’s a nice safe place to go. And ask questions Food allergies are everywhere, so it’s not at all odd to even the chef to come out of the kitchen I do own a large restaurant in Detroit besides being a cardiologist. I mean, that should be encouraged because nut allergies are life-threatening. So get the food you want out of a restaurant.
And if you got to tell your friends, I’m doing the Beyonce diet, or doing the NBA diet, or I’ve developed whatever allergy– I mean, allergies everybody respects nowadays if you don’t want to go into the whole conversation.
DAVE ASPREY: I always just go in and I say, I want a plate covered in vegetables. And I go, actually, guys, I mean covered in vegetables. That doesn’t mean three pieces of asparagus. Right? And then, they’re like, really? Like, no, I mean that. And then I’ll look on the menu. If there’s a wild caught fish, I’ll do it. And yes, I’m concerned about overfishing. I’m also concerned about eating. And I’m hoping that we’ll do some more work on that.
But in the meantime, if you just get the plate of vegetables, here’s the trick. They always put canola oil in almost every restaurant, and they tell you it’s olive oil, because they cut the olive oil with canola. You tell them it has to be 100% olive oil, because if I get canola oil, I have seizures right there on the floor. And then you always get the real oil.
JOEL KAHN: That actually is true.
DAVE ASPREY: Yeah, and for me, I just say, could you cook it in butter?
JOEL KAHN: He won’t have a seizure. But if you say that, they will be very careful not to put what you don’t want.
DAVE ASPREY: Otherwise, most well-meaning waiters and waitresses will give you bad fats because they don’t know it. And oftentimes, the cook doesn’t even know until they turn the big jug of industrial oil around. Oh, yeah. It is 25% canola, I didn’t know! So just avoiding bad fats is critically important if you want to feel good. But literally, you can always say a plate of vegetables. And that’s enough. Right? I bring my own fat to pour on the vegetables to get enough fat to feel good. But maybe you do that, maybe you don’t. That’s the trick. Only vegetables. And if they’re feeding industrial meat, I’m right with these guys. Don’t eat industrial meat. Like, it will take away years from your life, and it’s bad for the planet. And that said, if you can get a little bit of good quality protein, do it. If not get some protein once a day that’s really high quality protein, which probably didn’t come from vegetables.
JESSE MICHAELS: Anybody else? Go for it.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, thanks a lot for talking about the big issues like how we can harmonize with life, and how we can listen to science. Dr Kahn, I wanted to ask if you could give us a little more recommendations than just going to PubMed. That’s such an open-ended thing. I’m particularly thinking of like, Dr Greger’s website or other consolidated sources where we don’t have to figure it all out on our own.
JESSE MICHAELS: Question as, is other verified medical sources outside of just PubMed, Dr Kahn.
JOEL KAHN: Yeah. It brings up a little bit of a sensitive issue. Can a doctor who chooses a plant diet, a vegan diet not be objective? And I’ve already declared it. When I see that meat will reverse my patients heart blockage, I will be obligated to recommend meat. Just that science doesn’t exist. The only diet for atherosclerosis reversal are plant diets, naturally low in added fats and oils. And until that changes, that’s what I’ll recommend. So there is a website, nutritionfacts.org. I don’t think that would be received well in the ketogenic diet and some other movements but if you watch “What the Health?” and you’re looking for some more information, yes, that’s always a recommendation. Where else would you go if you want some– because I really do like Dr Greger’s work, because the medical references are there And you can search for others. There usually aren’t others. These are the ones that exist. I don’t think he’s got a bias. It’s just the way the literature goes. PCRM.org, Physician Committee of Responsible Medicine, there’s a lot websites. So if you get into the plant-based movement, I mean, there’s all kinds of websites. But they’re basing their website usually on science that’s in PubMeds.
KIP ANDERSEN: Highly, highly recommend nutritionfacts.org for something simple. It’s a video. It’s always very fast, always sourced very well. Nutritionfacts.org. You can type in anything, anything, and it’ll come out in a very succinct, two-three minute way, Sourced, sourced, sourced. It’s a great, great resource.
JESSE MICHAELS: Cool Thank you guys so much for coming. Really appreciate it. Let’s give it up for them.
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