Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In today's episode of Duster Mud podcast, we're going to take a few minutes and answer some questions that a longtime friend of ours from our hometown sent us. She's taken to watching and listening, and we just wanted to take an devoted entire episode because she asked some really good questions about exercise, what we eat, why we eat, what we eat, and such.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Okay. In no particular order, as she says. First, why did you stop? Full carnivore.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Why did we stop? Full carnivore. So we ate carnivore, full carnivore meat, some dairy and eggs for about 14 months.
When we left your job in the air force and moved onto the farm, we started feeling like we just wanted to eat more fresh things, I think. And with your crohn's, you kind of wanted to give your stomach a rest, if I remember right.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And we had just read super gut also.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Oh, right.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: And so there was some thought there about the prebiotics that we might be missing by having a meat only type diet. So we were really just in an ongoing quest to, as we talked about last week, this journey of health.
We just decided, why don't we start adding some things back in?
[00:01:29] Speaker A: One of the things that I think is a good way to think about what we're eating when we're eating, it is to be flexible in our way of eating. And when we went way over there into carnivore, and I'm not saying I wouldn't go back. I would go back for a season. I don't know that necessarily. I would do it for ever and ever to add the keep my microbiome happy and healthy. I don't know that stopping carnivore changed anything for me one way or the other. I didn't see any significant changes one way or another to me.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Yeah, me either.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: I liked carnivore a lot as far as I'm concerned. Highly recommend it.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: We just stopped it because we wanted to add some more bugs to our gut.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Following on with the carnivore. Did you miss vegetables when you went carnivore?
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Not really, no.
Maybe fresh salads occasionally, but for the most part, I personally liked eating a pound of beef with some butter. What about you?
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I did. I liked it a lot.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Missing veggies, they were never my favorite thing anyway, so I wouldn't say that I missed it.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Yeah. No, not really.
Yes. So just simple.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Continuing that again, does your daughter eat like you all carnivore, et cetera. And then the follow up to that is, do you have an opinion on if children should eat in this way?
[00:03:08] Speaker A: Okay, first of all, we have five daughters, but I'm going to go with the fact that she's talking about the one that's the youngest and she's going to be twelve this month. She does not eat the way that we eat.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
In our opinion, it is just fine for kids to eat keto.
From the research that we've done, I can find nothing that would say they should not eat like this. If you watch Dr. Ken Berry, he has answered this question multiple times. And the way he answers it is absolutely what's wrong with the proper human diet, as he, and he's very big on what he calls ketovore or pure carnivore. And to him, it's a proper human diet and there's no reason a kid can't eat it. Now, for us, it's a little bit more than that. And this goes now into parenting style.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Yeah. When you get into parenting, what do you want to offer your kid? What do you want to force them to eat? How do you want to do their food stuffs? And we come from a space of, I'm going to offer you the best, most healthiest things that I can, along with some of your requests, if you like to eat, what is one of, some of her kids all like? Ramen noodles. Well, if you want to eat ramen noodles, eat the ramen noodles. They're not my favorite thing. I wouldn't choose that for you. But if I put too many rules around that, we all know what kids do whenever they're not given some leeway in what they eat.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: Yeah. So the way we try to go at this is that we want to demonstrate for her a proper diet and the health benefits of a proper diet, and the fact that we are healthy and lead a healthy, active life and we eat this way, we want her to see what we do, and then, as she grows older, be able to make that decision for herself. Hey, mom and dad do this. They're healthy, they feel good. Thus, I want to do this, too. So we're really trying to just allow her to make that decision, make that.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Choice as she gets older. What we do do is.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: You said do, do.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: I did because I did. So what we do is make sure her suppers, they're going to be a meat and vegetable with a lot of fat. That's just what we eat. Those are the types of meals that we cook supper with us.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Our main meal of the day is typically all of us sit down together at the table and we all eat the same thing so she doesn't get fixed. A chicken nugget and macaroni and cheese meal.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: She eats whatever it is we're eating, which is typically a meat and a green vegetable.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: Now, for her breakfasts and her lunches, and yes, she's home schooled, so she governs her breakfast and her lunch and her snacks. And we provide in the house healthy options.
So we're keto. And she says that she's keto.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: And we allow her to be a kiddo.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:29] Speaker A: But can they? Should they?
I think absolutely. If a kid wants to be a carnivore or keto, I would say, okay, yeah, awesome. If it were my kid, that'd be great.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: Okay.
The next one, I think, is just for you.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: Okay. What?
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Are you in menopause?
[00:06:51] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: I'm not.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: No, you're not?
[00:06:57] Speaker B: No.
Have you had any symptoms? Okay, you said that carnivore diet gave you mental clarity at your age. What about insomnia? Hot flashes. Do you ever check your hormone levels?
[00:07:12] Speaker A: So prior to going on a ketogenic diet. Yes. Wake up with night sweats? Horribly thirsty? Yes.
Grumpy?
Sure. Sometimes the typical perimenopause menopause symptoms. Insomnia.
I know I've never really suffered from insomnia. I typically sleep, but I sleep better on ketogenic diet. When my diet's really, really clean, I sleep really good. I don't know if I'm in menopause simply because I had a partial hysterectomy in 2016. So I don't know.
However, I would say at 50, I'll be 51 next month, I should be somewhere in there. And sometimes I notice maybe I'll have my own personal summer.
Occasionally, not very often, and it's not extreme. I do not feel the extreme craziness in my head that people describe with when they're in menopause, when they're going into menopause, I don't have that, and I have to attribute it to diet.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: How about your hormones? Have you had your hormones?
[00:08:36] Speaker A: I have not had my hormone levels checked.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: Is it something you would do, plan to do? Won't do.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: I guess I would. I think if I was showing symptoms or reasons to, like, if I felt like something was off kilter, but right now I feel like everything is really even keel for a while. Maybe before, I don't know, in my early mid forty s, I thought maybe I had some hormone issues.
You remember that, like, something's not right. But now at 50, almost one, I don't feel that way, come to think of it.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: I don't. I don't have any. Do you think so? You live with me all the time.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: No, honey.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Thanks, dear. You answer so good.
[00:09:30] Speaker B: Honestly.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: No, I don't think so. But back when it was like, something's not right.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: But getting the carbs and the sugar and the inflammation. Because menopause, when we're having the crazies in our heads, when we're menopausal or PMS, it's inflammation on the brain. And whenever you don't have the carbs in your diet or the sugar in your diet and you keep the inflammation down, it helps with the crazies, I think.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: I truly do believe that.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Okay. Do you do planned fasts or intermittent fasting?
[00:10:09] Speaker A: No, we used to.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: Yeah. We haven't done, like, a planned fast for any length of time. We used to specifically do intermittent fasting on purpose, and we limited ourselves to about always to a 16 eight and then often to an 18 six, meaning 16 hours of not eating and then an eight hour period in which we would have probably two meals and not eat anything outside of that. But at this point, we do not.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: A lot of days these days, we only eat two meals a day, though.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: That's true.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: So our window. But then we'll have a snack at night. We're not super strict on our timing right now. We just eat food when we feel like we have time and want to sit down and eat food.
But we will fast when we travel.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: We do understand the health benefits of fasting or intermittent fasting.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: And we get it. We understand it.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: If we were going to intermittent fasting when we did, we'd just cut breakfast. So we would say at 01:00 we'll start our eating window, have some lunch, have a nice big lunch, and then have a dinner.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: And honestly, that changed for us when we moved here as well because we got chickens.
We didn't know how to buy four or five chickens, so we bought about 40 chickens. So we were getting about three dozen eggs a day. And without eating breakfast, we had nothing.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: To do with eggs.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: That turns into a lot of eggs.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: A lot of eggs real fast. So we started eating them, and it was in the mornings, but I could easily do intermittent fasting every single day. Yeah, just don't eat breakfast. And when you eat keto or low carb, you're not hungry for breakfast anyways.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Generally, no.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: Take it or leave it. Work right. At least. No, we're not. Not right now.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: But highly recommend intermittent fasting.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, for sure.
A question here about sweetener, and we dealt with that last week. The one addition in this question that we really didn't talk to last week was talking about is a natural sweetener like honey or molasses. Is that better? Although it may have more carbs. Is that better than some of the not natural sweeteners? And she used swerve as an example. Right.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: Erythritol.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: Yeah, erythritol. Back to last week. Erythritol. It is a natural sweetener. It's just fermented, so it turns it into a sugar alcohol.
So I think that the erythritol is a better option. What you get with the true natural sweeteners, like honey, is a really high glycemic index and a really high carb load as well from that sweetener.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: Honey is a special one, though, because you do get a lot of other things from honey. You get the natural enzymes.
It can help if you have allergies, because the bees make the honey out of things. And then in nature, there can be good properties to honey. However, at the end of the day, if you're trying to keep your carbs low, honey is a sugar, and it will spike your insulin. So again, depending on your why and what your goals are, go back three episodes, depending on what your why is, if it's keeping your carbs low, 20 carbs to 50 carbs. Honey doesn't really fit in there very well, and it will spike your insulin. So that's why we stay away from it.
I don't have a thing against honey specifically. It's a sugar.
We try to keep the sugars down.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: And in that same line, why don't you eat white potatoes and corn? It's a whole food.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's a carb. And once you're.
They have a higher glycemic index. As far as, quote, whole foods go, there are a lot of whole foods out there. Some of them happen to spike your insulin and such faster and longer than other things. Potatoes and corn happen to be one of the two of those things that are higher and longer. So you have an insulin load and having to deal with it. Now, it is still whole food if you're eating it with a meal.
Okay, but still, I go back to, what's the goal?
[00:15:05] Speaker B: If your goal is to stay in ketosis, a potato is not going to help you do that.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: Right?
[00:15:13] Speaker B: If you are just a normal person, like us. And you're trying to keep your carbs low so that your body stays in ketosis. A potato, no matter how natural it is, it's very high in carbs, and it's not going to help you stay there.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Another thing is, whether it's honey or a potato, once it gets past here, it's glucose your body doesn't recognize. Oh, well, this came from a whole food? Yes. It adds some fiber to it, and I understand the digestive processes, and it slows it down a little bit, or it can, depending on what the vegetable is. But the fact that you're at the cellular level, a carbohydrate is carbohydrate. Sugar is formed no matter where it came from.
And sugar just feeds things in our bodies.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: That goes back to what we talked about when we were talking about insulin and what it does to your fat cells. And as long as there's insulin in your bloodstream, you're not using fat, right.
You're not burning any fat from your body for sure.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: So, speaking of sugar and what it feeds in our bodies, I used to suffer from tinia versacolor, which is a yeast based, like, stuff on your skin. It turns your skin white or pink. A lot of people from the south kind of have it, I don't know, run around playing the dirt. I guess you get it. I'm not sure exactly where it comes from, but I suffered from it for years. My discolored skin started eating this way. Cut the sugar, and I don't have it anymore because the sugar, the yeast didn't have anything to eat.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: Right.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: So you starve it away and it went away.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: It's crazy, though. You wouldn't think that it would have that much of an impact on the other systems in your body. But it flat does.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: Yeah, it does.
So follow on to that. Have you all had any blood tests to check your health markers? What has changed since keto or carnivore?
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I had blood work about a year and a half ago when we were establishing with a new doctor here in town. Everything was amazing as far as my blood work was concerned, at least to me.
They came back and said, oh, we might want to put you on a statin because your cholesterol is a little high.
And I said, no, thank you, I'm not going on a statin because of high. Of course, my cholesterol is a little elevated beyond what the medical community would want it to be because I eat a high fat, I eat a lot of eggs. It's going to have cholesterol. I want that for my brain and for my bodily function. So outside of that, everything was great.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And my blood work, I had some as I was leaving the air force, and the same with shell. And mine is all been fine. The biggest thing for me, the biggest takeaway, was that I had blood work done at twelve months in on our carnivore little, what would you call it?
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Experiment. Experiment, yeah, our year long experiment. Year long experiment.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: Experiment. I was about a year into it, and so I had not had really any carbohydrates. And so I was very interested in what my blood glucose was going to be, because if you follow conventional wisdom, it should have been very low, and it was not. It was right smack dab in the middle of normal, which I thought was really cool. Very interesting.
My body made the glucose that I needed from the fuel that I was giving it. And so for me, I can tell you that for my body, it is not necessary for me to eat any glucose containing foods in order for my glucose levels to stay normal. And that was probably the biggest take for me. Do you weight train at all?
Aside from farm chores?
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Right now we're farmer fit as we can be.
We historically do have over the years.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: Yeah, we've had a home gym for years and years.
It was a requirement for me to stay fit in the air force, and.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: I like my pants to fit.
[00:20:07] Speaker B: Yeah. So when we could, when we had time or lived close enough, we would go to a gym, and when we didn't, we had a home gym. And yes, we lifted weights. And we believe that weight training is very important, especially as we age, to maintain muscle mass.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: We think, yeah, diet is definitely king. As I say, you can't run off a bad diet, but exercise, being queen. If I'm going to do an exercise, it's going to be weight training, whether it's body weight or actually with some weights, some kind of resistance on my muscles, because that is the key to our longevity. Can we get up off the floor as we age?
[00:20:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: So definitely weight train.
[00:20:58] Speaker B: How does alcohol consumption fit into a ketogenic or carnivore diet?
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Well, it can.
High carb alcoholic beverages should not, because you're trying to keep your carbs low.
The pure alcohols are going to be zero carb. But alcohol is a macronutrient.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And your body has to deal with the alcohol while it's in your system. So your liver will stop dealing with fats at all. It will stop producing fats or ketones from the fats and it will filter the alcohol out of your blood, and so it will continue to do that until the alcohol is gone, and then it will return to producing ketones, using fat to produce ketones.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: So, yeah.
Does it fit? No, it's not healthy. But you can go from ketosis out and back into ketosis if that was your goal.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: Rather quickly, while the alcohol is in your system, you are not burning fat.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: No, you are not.
Your liver can just do kind of one thing at a time.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: Yeah. What's your favorite MCT oil brand?
[00:22:13] Speaker A: Oh, bulletproof.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: We use brain octane.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: Yeah, brain octane is kind of the name of the oil, but bulletproof is the brand.
Dave Asprey, his company, bulletproof, to me, it's the best one out there. There are a lot, a lot of them. It's an expensive one, but if you get a cheap MCT oil, sometimes you can get what they call digestive discomfort. It can give you diarrhea and. No kidding. And this one just doesn't. And it's a good quality. And our digestive systems like it the best.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: And I really do think when he calls it brain octane, it's legit, because especially if you put it into your coffee or anything else that you're eating, it boosts that liver to start making those ketones, because as the medium chain triglycerides, that kind of fat goes into the liver, out come the ketones, and they go to your brain, and the next thing you know, you're like this.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Clicking good. Do you take a probiotic?
[00:23:26] Speaker A: No, but we eat yogurt.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: Do you take a probiotic?
[00:23:29] Speaker B: No.
[00:23:30] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: I mean, we did for a little while, and we did the super gut yogurt probiotic stuff.
[00:23:38] Speaker A: I do. Anytime I have to go on antibiotics, if I've been sick or something, we always get the highest doses of probiotics.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: But that is one of the reasons that we drink raw milk and have our own yogurt. We do think that probiotics are important.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: And we eat salads to feed all that. But the salads are just pretty much a vehicle for the oil.
That's true.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Not right now we don't. But we get probiotics naturally through foods. Oh, and we make our own kombucha. Yes, we like that, too. And we drink apple cider vinegar almost a bunch of times a week.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Yeah, that's true.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: So we get probiotics in other places.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: Are all meats for keto carnivore created equal. Could I eat sausage every day? If that's what was available.
Or is there something else better, like chicken, lamb, et cetera? And then where does fish fit?
[00:24:38] Speaker A: All of it fits. Yeah, all of it fits. All of it fits.
[00:24:40] Speaker B: Again, I think it depends on.
Go back to your. Why? Why are you doing it?
Meat is fine.
Some meats are higher in fat, and if you're trying to get a high fat diet, then you won't have to add as much fat. If that meat is higher in fat.
The thing that you get with some of the ground meats, like ground beef.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, ground beef. Like an 80 20 ground beef.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: You get a lot of the connective tissues and things that you won't normally get in just pure steaks. And so there is more.
There's more stuff in the ground meats, actually, as far, like, if you're going pure carnivore, you get more of the micronutrients in the ground meat.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: One of the things that you get with sausage, though, oftentimes, sausage has a lot of additives in it with the nitrates and the nitrates, and I don't know how good or bad they really are for you. There are mixed reviews on all of that. However, msgs, we pretty much know those aren't super great for us. And there can just be all that added stuff that's not. If I was just going to eat sausage every day, I don't know that that would be the best choice, but it would still be better than the twinkie.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And we do get our sausage.
Our processor makes a variant of sausage that is just salt and pepper and sage and some red pepper.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: Normal, natural, non chemical, no sugar, no chemicals. Right? So you could eat the sausage, our sausage, every day, because it's non gmo pork with some salt and pepper and naturally occurring spices in it, and then fish.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: It's the same way oftentimes, low in fat, high in protein. You're going to have to supplement the fats in order to get yourself to the ketogenic level of fat in the diet.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: Remember, ketogenic is 70% fat, 20% protein or 25. It's not a lot. So you're supplementing your fat. So a piece of fish or. Of course, we eat a lot more than the small amounts that are recommended in the world, but we'll get that. Second, we don't count calories, but at any rate, it provides great protein and nutrition. Just add the fat, butter, olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: As far as we're concerned, meats are pretty much meats. We either supplement with additional fats or we don't, based on what the meat is.
[00:27:40] Speaker A: Yeah, meat we see as the protein card in it, and the fats just have to be added. There's not a perfect. A ribeye is close because there is a lot more fat in a ribeye.
And hamburger is close. But you've really still got to add hamburger. You've still got to add the fat to it to get them up there for the meal itself.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: That's it on the questions. And you said, we'll get to that in a minute.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Well, we don't count calories.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Why not?
[00:28:13] Speaker A: Because we don't have to.
Calories in, calories out, I think, was a farce. And I eat basically the exact same thing as you do.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: Yes, that's true.
[00:28:26] Speaker A: And we are.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: We both eat until we're full.
[00:28:29] Speaker A: We eat until we're full always.
But we eat a select things, a selection of things that it doesn't matter. We don't get a blood glucose spike. We don't get big insulin wave. Of course, we get the amount to digest our food, but we don't count calories. We just fill up our plate and eat till we can't.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: Yeah, that's true.
