Name: Joe Rogan Experience #842 - Chris Kresser
Uploaded: 2016-09-05T21:46:36.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #842 - Chris Kresser' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-09-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #842 - Chris Kresser' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-09-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #842 - Chris Kresser

no three two one i always wonder what you base your countdown on jamie
you got two things going see is it an accurate count on or you're just roughly
guessing it's
like a five count because we have a there's a delay the thing and then the
thing and the thing
okay well we're live chris what's up good to be here thanks for doing this man
my pleasure
we were just talking about the term paleo like i put up uh that we're gonna you
know talk about
nutrition and diet all that good stuff and then uh somebody went to your page
and it says you know
paleo and lifestyle expert as soon as you have that word paleo people go oh
serious baggage
it's true i mean every day i think about oh i kind of wish i never would have
used this word
yeah well it's mark sisson went with primal yeah he uses that primal blueprint
yeah you know that's
his sort of yeah distinction of it i like that i mean they're both just words
is what it really comes
down to yeah and uh i thought about i wrote a book that has the word paleo in
it and i thought about
even before i published the book i was thinking you know what i'm talking about
is not really what people
mean when they say paleo it's a lot more inclusive and a lot less dogmatic and
if i use this word
there's going to be pros and cons yeah the pro is people recognize it it's it's
one word that that
points at a whole way of thinking i could have called it the nutrient dense
ancestral you know nutrition
book but that's not too catchy there would have been like five people that read
it um and but on the
other hand paleo has a ton of baggage as you said you know it people get a
certain idea when they hear
that word and for some it's good for others it's kind of neutral they don't
know anything about it and
and then for still others it's like instant turn off and you know why should we
be emulating our paleo
ancestors lifestyles they all died when they were 30 this is stupid right you
know why should we do this
so it's a totally loaded term i think we just need to get past it as as uh you
know an idea or a term
and look at what it's really pointing at and evaluate it on that basis no i
think that makes a lot of
sense and also there was the issue with the term paleolithic like using the
term paleo and then there
were some articles written about the actual diet of the paleolithic people
right where they ate everything
they got a hold of and if they got grains they ate a ton of grains yeah
absolutely so i mean we know
they weren't eating cheese doodles and drinking big gulps right so it's kind of
easier to talk about
paleo in terms of what it didn't include right so it didn't include processed
and refined
you know bread flour cookies muffins uh all kinds of packaged foods that that
comprise a large
percentage of the american diet i think the top six foods now are grain-based
desserts sugar sweetened
beverages pizza um chicken dishes which are like primarily fried chicken
nuggets um forgetting the
other two but it's all crap you know that's the primary foods those are the
primary six primary foods
america of americans it's just completely nutrient depleted junk you know so we
can all agree that our
paleolithic ancestors weren't eating those foods yeah and then we know it's
pretty clear that they were
eating a lot of meat well i'm sure we'll talk about that meat and fish wild
fruits and vegetables not
the domesticated varieties that we're eating today but wild fruits and
vegetables nuts and seeds and some
starchy plants so so so those are the two extremes if we bracket it and then
things like grains and legumes
were more of a question mark like there's some recent evidence that shows that
that legume consumption was
probably pretty more common than we thought amongst our paleolithic ancestors
they were they came later
onto the scene but if they were there they probably ate them is that based on
geography like where legumes
are present exactly and what other food sources were available it's pretty
clear that they weren't the first option
you know if they were able to slaughter an animal they would have done that and
and eaten the organs and
and the brain and probably throwing the muscle meat to the dogs really yeah
yeah we have it backwards i
mean when you look at traditional hunter-gatherers and the way they eat animals
they go just like wild
animals do when wild animal kills another animal it goes straight for the
organs right and that's because
the organs are way more nutrient dense than the muscle meats and so traditional
peoples they knew the same
thing even without having access to science and you know knowing even what a
nutrient was they just over
generations figured out that eating the liver uh and the kidneys and the spleen
and the brain was was
gonna give them more energy make them feel better make them more fertile than
eating the muscle meats
but did they eat the muscle meats at all i mean it seems to me that they
probably did they're probably hungry yeah
they used every part of the animal but it was clear that the organs were were
the the the favored thing to eat
and how do we know this um just anthropological studies of hunter-gatherers uh
contemporary hunter-gatherers
you know in the 60s 70s 80s there aren't many extant hunter-gatherer groups
that we can even study now
because they've you know they've all been basically assimilated
um but you know like the hodza hunter-gatherers in in africa and there are some
groups that are still
living a lifestyle that's relatively close to what they were living for the
last 10 000 years and we can
learn a lot by studying those groups and that's a pretty common theme in all
these traditional peoples is
they they focused on eating the organ meats you know second would be probably
meat and other animal
products in terms of nutrient density they ate a much broader variety of plant
species than we eat
like they you know across the world most people eat you know four to eight
plant species in their diet
traditional hunter-gatherer groups it was over a hundred
wow just whatever was edible huge diversity of plants and and that of course
increased the nutrient density
increased the fiber that they were eating which we now know feeds your
beneficial gut bacteria
which has all kinds of uh benefits for health and and again they they weren't
eating the foods that
we are now you know uh eating way more than we're eating anything else and when
i say we i mean
you know just americans or people living in the industrialized world in general
and that's that's
a problem because of this concept of a species appropriate diet and we know
that all organisms
evolve in a certain environment and they're adapted to survive in that
environment and when their diet or
lifestyle gets too far from what they evolved for this mismatch occurs and that
mismatch is really
responsible for all modern disease yeah that is uh something that i thought was
really interesting
about reading uh some of your work and some of your articles um that you had it
sort of narrowed down to i
believe eight the eight different factors that contribute to uh to ill health
that uh are a lot of times
ignored when diseases are when when someone gets when someone gets diagnosed
with an illness almost
immediately there's a drug prescribed to treat the illness but there's not like
sort of um
backing up of the process to find out okay how did you get to this position
like what is your diet
like are you getting enough sleep you know what kind of stress are you under is
your body um exposed to
toxins on a regular basis like do you do you work with paint you know what i
mean are you are you near
something that's really bad for you to breathe yeah yeah i mean the analogy i
like to use is you have
a rock in your shoe and it's making your foot hurt you could take advil right
and it's gonna you'll
probably feel less pain right you could also just take your shoe off and dump
out the rock and that
would be a better idea right i think we can all agree on that and our our
medical system is the
equivalent of taking advil when you have that rock in your shoe if you have
high blood pressure you
go to the doctor you'll get a medication to lower it if you have high
cholesterol you'll be prescribed
a statin and those can be effective at bringing those numbers down but there's
rarely any investigation
into what's causing that symptom in the first place and you know the problem
with that is if you take
the high blood pressure medication it lowers your blood pressure but then you
have no libido and so
what's the solution there another drug that increases your libido you get viagra
but then viagra you know
causes some other side effect and then you get prescribed another drug to deal
with that side effect
and then by the time you're 65 or 70 you're taking seven or eight medications
and the statistics actually
bear this out you know most people at that age are taking two handfuls of pills
just to you know to
to be able to get by and that's that's really not um the way that human beings
evolve evolved and are
designed for it's also it becomes a problem because there's a lot of money
being made on selling those
things absolutely and the pharmaceutical industry is this gigantic monster of a
business where they're
just making billions and billions of dollars and there's so much momentum when
you have a big industry
like that absolutely and they realized a while back that the big money in drugs
is not in treating sick
people it's in treating healthy people because there are way more healthy
people than there are sick people
and so once you get done with making drugs to treat diseases you need to start
making drugs to give
to people who are fundamentally healthy but maybe have like some one lab marker
that's out of range so
take statin drugs for example you know there's only a certain number of people
that have already had
heart attacks and are in danger of you know high risk of having another heart
attack so you if for statin
drug sales to grow they need to expand beyond that population and start you
know prescribing them to
people who aren't necessarily at high risk for heart disease but um you know
maybe have slightly high
cholesterol and that's that's where the real money is made wow so so people
that don't have really
health consequences of this like uh like if you have high cholesterol um now
high cholesterol is a lot of
times associated with diet yeah but the reality of cholesterol and like
cholesterol rich diets and blood
lipids is that it doesn't really move the needle yeah it's so much more complex
than that what is the
cause of like if a person has high cholesterol what are the potential causes so
diet is definitely one
genetics or another just you know certain genetic polymorphisms that make you
more susceptible to having high
cholesterol but there are a number of causes that are lesser known so poor
thyroid function is one cause
because thyroid hormones required to clear ldl cholesterol from the circulation
so if you have
you know even suboptimal thyroid function not frank you know full-on hypothyroidism
but just a little bit
of a problem with thyroid your cholesterol can be high
and in fact back in the 80s or 70s before statins were became you know a bigger
part of the of the
treatment of high cholesterol doctors used to use low dose of thyroid hormone
to treat high cholesterol so
they knew this at one time disrupted gut microbiome and leaky gut which i know
you've talked about
before on the show with other guests ldl is actually an antimicrobial substance
so the liver will make
more ldl particles if there's toxin endotoxins getting into the bloodstream
from the gut
infections can raise cholesterol ldl and toxins can do that too so there's
studies showing mercury
toxicity for example can raise cholesterol so these are all the the potential
underlying causes of high
cholesterol so if someone comes to see me and they have that problem i'm going
to test for all those
things and i'm going to add