Is Red Meat The Magic Pill?

I recently had the pleasure of welcoming Dr Shawn Baker onto the Scale without Burnout podcast and in this blog, I am going to recap the best bits of our conversation. 

Dr Baker has a long list of accolades. 

He is an Orthopaedic surgeon, ex-soldier, ex-professional rugby player, multiple world record holder and so much more however the purpose of this episode was to talk about following an ‘all meat’ diet, something Dr Baker has spoken about at lengths and has even written a book on. 

I wanted to hear his thoughts on how following such a diet could help business owners, entrepreneurs and those that are trying to thrive in their business, to do just that. 

Enjoy, because in this episode Dr Baker shares some insight into why he thinks meat is the magic pill we all need to take. 

This blog has been edited for clarity and flow, you can watch to the full recording by clicking here

There's a few people out there that will be wondering what the hell is a carnivore diet? Just very quickly, tell us about the Carnivore Diet. 

“It's a diet in which meat is considered the nutrition part then the food that you get from plants is either eliminated completely or it's very limited. 

It's not, you can't have a gram of plant food but for some people, that's where they end up. 

I really emphasise at the end of the day, the emphasis is on just health. 

If we go back historically, evolutionarily include all animals, it's something like 90% of them use a carnivorous strategy. It's just a very efficient way to get the building material that you need to run animal cells is by ingesting animal cells and this makes perfect sense. 

It's kind of the baseline nutritional strategy for all animals. Some are better hunters and others, you know, cows aren’t very good at hunting and therefore they eat mostly grass but given the opportunity, cows will eat little animals if they can catch them, it’s just they’re not very good at it. 

I would argue that humans are both omnivorous, clearly there are people that eat plants and do fine, but we tend to be what's called facultative carnivore, which means we tend to thrive more when we include and use animal products as a majority of our diet and that's kind of the base of this diet.” 

Most of the people that listen to this show, they are business owners, entrepreneurs, they're leading organisations, living a fast-paced life, they're just trying to be as healthy as they possibly can. How would the Carnivore Diet support that? What would be some of the health benefits?

“If you're obese, if you have poor body composition, if you have high levels of visceral fat, if you have problems with cognition, if you have problems with physical performance, achy joints, pains, poor digestion, poor sleep or libido, any of those things, improve upon those things and you have by definition gotten better. 

You've gotten rid of some disease, ageing really is just the accumulation of disease, so the less diseased you are, obviously, your quality of life is going to be better, performance is going to be better. 

Cognitively, you're likely to do better, business-wise you're likely to do better but also when you are in that non-disease category I would argue that it's plausible that you'll have a longer healthspan and perhaps a longer lifespan (I mean, you can't make any promises beyond that). 

For business people, I don't have to plan, or worry and humans should have a diet where we can just eat and not worry about it and that's what the carnivore diet really does, you just wake up, you say how much steak and eggs do I want to eat today for breakfast, your hunger decides that. 

What happens is your appetite is so well controlled; you're so satiated you don't want to eat again until you get home from work, and then you do the same sort of thing. 

Very minimal planning, minimal thought process and when we look at people from a blood glucose standpoint, it is like, as flat as can be. It perfectly controls your energy and so you kind of settle into this happy calmness, you're just more able to absorb the ups and downs and the stresses that come. You just don't have that physiology that's so hyper-reactive and it's a little bit more steady. 

It makes it so you have a better way to deal with it mentally and that's where I think the benefit is for people that are working in business, executives, CEOs, whatever, you know, what works.” 

That's what they're working towards, that calmness and ability make to make big decisions. There are so many benefits. What do you think is causing that when people get into that kind of state from eating this way? 

“I think two things. The really nice, calm, stable blood glucose is important. I think your brain likes constant, steady, reliable energy and it's not the glucose goes away, you still have it, but it's very well controlled, regulated, it's not dependent upon diet any more, your body makes what you need. 

I think the other thing is we see with gut health and we see that a basic carnivore diet really restores gut integrity to its natural baseline, and so we have less gut inflammation and when we have less gut inflammation other membranes, including the blood-brain barrier, normalise. 

In addition, there's a lot of compounds in meat that are brain-healthy foods, all these things are being shown to result in benefits to brain health, physiology, mood, mental illness and those sorts of things. 

I repeatedly see people with depression, anxiety, bipolar or schizophrenia, PTSD, get remarkably better, which is I think is fascinating.” 

What would you do for a busy business owner who was thinking, I'd like to give this a go? I like the idea of feeling calmer, removing some anxiety and experiencing some of these feelings, maybe even improving their training. How would someone get started? 

“So with the carnivore diet, most people, they tend to enjoy steak, not all do but that's a pretty universal thing. It doesn't have to be steak, it can be burgers, can be other things, but I tell people to eat enough to keep you out of the cupcakes. Eat enough to put away the cravings and that may be a lot more than you think, particularly early on. 

Some people become ravenous and they'll eat two, three kilos of meat in a day, so that is something you just kind of let your body deal with. Don't worry about body composition or anything like that and you kind of get into it, most people find that they end up eating two meals a day.

So you get into that pattern and it becomes simple.

I find that for people that have a work schedule, have a big breakfast, it might be steak and eggs or ground beef and eggs or even bacon and eggs, dinner, steak or some fish or a little bit of dairy. 

Make it enjoyable, don't end up with a bowl of mince with no seasoning and expect to eat that way the rest of your life. Approach it as I'm going to do this for 60, 90 days and you can add things back in as you find out more.”

Business owners who may be struggling to just incorporate their training, they're finding it hard to weave training into that lifestyle. What I'm getting from this is that they can make some dramatic changes to the way they feel, even their strength and body composition by following this approach and this way of eating?

“One of the things about the carnivorous diet is it's just higher in protein than the average diet. That higher protein, just naturally, you put on more muscle.

You are what you eat, if you're eating a fair bit of protein, you're going to have a little bit more muscle. 

I've seen people that don't even exercise at all become more muscular and less fat. 

If you add resistance training, you're going to have a much better effect and people find that particularly with regards to strength, they just get stronger in many cases. 

Some people, they find overall performance, whether it's endurance or anaerobic type stuff that also gets better. I've seen Crossfit athletes, boxers, MMA people, professional rugby players, Olympic athletes, all improve. I set world records on Concept 2 on an all-meat diet. 

I think one of the things is we still maintain the capacity to utilise glucose at a high amount. You don't have the oxidative stress that occurs on a high carb diet and your sleep tends to be better. 

So you sleep better, you don't beat yourself as much up oxidatively you've got better building supplies to supply your muscles, you've got higher protein it all ultimately ends up in better performance over the long term.” 

Have you seen the film ‘Game changers’? What's your response to that? 

“It's clearly a propaganda film. James Cameron is a filmmaker; he does a good job in drawing out an emotional argument. It's not grounded in any credible science. 

They're saying that vegans can be athletes, I don't disagree with that, but I think they are performing despite their diet.

Some people that are genetically gifted, they're going to make a certain level but if you were to add a better diet, meat in the diet, my view is they would do better. 

They use some really silly, non-scientific experiments, there's just so many holes in that argument. It's one-sided, it's propaganda. 

James Cameron is heavily invested in P protein and he's got $140,000,000 invested in Verdian Foods, which is the largest P protein manufacturer in North America, so there's obviously that conflict of interest. 

The athletes, if you follow them, almost all of the athletes that appeared on that film are either injured, retired or no longer competing. Djokovic was one of those that ended up moving back. He did his vegan experiment in 2016, strict veganism, his career plummeted and then he added fish in some other animal products back and he got back on top of his game. 

The weight lifter, Kendrick Farris, he went to the Olympics three times in 2008, 2012, he had good performances. 2016, he had the worst performance of his career, he gained a weight class, got heavier and lifted less weight than he did at a lighter weight class. 

So he got fatter and weaker as a vegan, even though already, genetically, he was there. 

These athletes achieve tremendous success by eating an omnivorous diet or a meat-based diet then they go vegan for a year or two and haven't lost but by about 18 months we see that the majority of them see dramatic decreases in their career. 

They get injured and they don't heal, they don't recover as well. 

I think the nice thing about the game changers is that athletes are trying it and they're failing miserably. 

It's not that I want to see athletes fail, but they're testing out the theory behind this and seeing that, no, it is not adequate for high-level athletics, in all but the rarest of cases.

When you push the diet to its extremes you see the holes in the diet.

My recommendation for athletes is to eat a meat-based diet and it may not be a 100% based, but I mean, meat should be the foundation of your nutrition, this is where your nutrition comes from.” 

Final thoughts 

Dr Baker outlined some very interesting points in our conversation, many of which go against an increasingly popular opinion that going greener is the way forward for optimal human health. 

He is passionate about his beliefs and stands by the fact that everything he says is founded in trying to be truly healthy as his mission is to help people to find optimal health.

As a Doctor, he doesn’t just give his opinion but also uses scientific studies to back up his argument and he clearly feels that the evidence points to the way of an all-meat diet. 

It was certainly an interesting conversation and one which I am sure will lead to many people questioning their current diet and nutrition goals. 

To learn more about the carnivore diet a great place to start would be with Dr Bakers book, The Carnivore Diet, which can be found on Amazon. It’s an open and honest account and something that I found very interesting. 

You can also hear the full podcast audio by clicking here, where you can hear more of Dr Bakers thoughts and also hear more about some of the studies he draws on.