Are We Overfed or Undernourished?

If I eat a strawberry, that flavor is telling my body there's nutrition behind this. I'm not going to eat too many strawberries. You eventually stop eating strawberries because you're just done.

But change that to like pop tarts that are strawberry flavored where there is no nutrition. It's just a flavor that's triggering my body into thinking there's nutrition.

So I eat the pop tart and my bodies like, oh, well, there strawberry flavor, that must mean it's Nutrition. But then the nutrition never comes. I keep eating the Pop Tarts and I can't stop until I'm bloated.

Welcome to My MD Unscripted, where healthcare gets personal and the script gets tossed. I'm Dr. Clint Carter, ER doctor turned direct primary care freedom fighter on a mission to challenge how our healthcare system treats patients in America.

In every episode, my expert guests and I dive into real conversations about what's broken and how we can fix it by making healthcare about people, not just managing disease.

It's time to rethink what healthcare should be and Hey guys, and welcome back to the My MD Unscripted podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Clint Carter, And I am super pumped to have like a celebrity chef star with me today, James Berry.

He's doing a lot of things now. And he's a published author, a founder of Pluck. an Oregon-based seasoning company and stuff. We can get into all of that.

This conversation may go a hundred different ways, but I'm super excited to have him here. He's got 20 years in the culinary world, including working as a private chef for celebrities like Tom Cruise and George Clooney.

And so I fit right in with those guys. Uh, and now, um, he hosts his own podcast, the Everyday Ancestral Podcast. So, uh, if you guys like what you hear here, there's more of Um, and you know, we just, I can't wait to hear how, uh, James, what your, um, takes are on, on clearing up what healthy actually means for us.

So thanks for being on the show. Thank you for having me, Dr. Clint. It's truly a pleasure. Hey man, so let's start with that whole history with the stars that are almost as cool as I am.

You spent more than 20 years as a chef, man. Tell me a little background there and how you ended up here talking about organ meats and all that stuff.

Yeah, it's quite funny because I grew up in a household where we knew dinner was ready because the smoke detector went off. The fact that I'm now a professional chef just still to this day, you know, my mom is in awe of that.

But, as a young kid, very early on, I learned to scramble an egg and I was just hooked. I found cooking to be Well, what I later was able to articulate as my love language.

I didn't know it when I was a kid, but I loved everything about it. But yet, I did not see it as a career. A lot of people may remember or may not remember, there used to only be one celebrity chef that was Julia Child.

That was it! Yeah. She was on PBS. Yeah, so not in PBS was not considered like you're going to get rich on pbs. So it was like, it just wasn't this thing.

I didn't see it as a career. And I Didn't want to work nights, you know, in a restaurant. But then in my 30s, well, it was actually 911 that kind of, you know, our Pearl Harbor, and it just stirred something in me, made me audit my life and go, I want everything I choose to do from this point on to have heart and to be, want to find my mission when I'm here to And so I audited my life and I read, you know, reconnected with my cooking.

And I was like, You know I've always loved this has got to be something to it. Life just opened up. It was like I clearly tapped something because all of a sudden, very quickly, I was cooking for Tom Cruise and all these people.

I just, it was amazing. And even at the time, everyone was, how did you get to cook for him, like were you in an agency? And I was like, no, they called me.

I don't even know how they found me, I think they find me through the school. But it was just clearly like I had tapped into something and I've just kind of gone, just said yes since then and continue to just drill down into like how can I support people's health?

My mission is to help people feel better in their body through food. That's, I mean, let's go, so being a professional chef is one thing. You want your food to taste good.

you want people to love it. It's an experience, not just sustenance. And you are like the chef to someone who has to look a certain way and wants to feel a way, and has certain health goals.

So how, tell me like what, When they called you, what'd they say? Hey, do you know how to scramble an egg or can you cook? Tom likes to eat a certain way.

Can you do that? Or was it more, hey, Tom's trying to be healthy. Help us out. I was a bit of a unique chef. So a lot of chefs don't know really anything about nutrition.

They just know about flavor. And I did, I studied nutrition, and I really got into cooking because I wanted to help people with their health. So I was always focused on nutrition.

I went to a school that no longer exists, but I like combining nutrition with food, like really kind of highlighting how to make food more nutritious through soaking, sprouting, through the choices you make.

Yeah. And then it educated us on all the different types of ancestral diets to blood type diets, to element diets. Like we just really studied a lot of the diet paradigms.

So I came out of that program And then furthered my knowledge by taking an online nutrition program. But I came out really clear, like, okay, the way, I don't care what trends are going on.

And when I first got out of culinary school, The big book at the time was called The Fat Flush Diet. Since then, of course, we've seen other diets and books become the top of the news heap.

I have always been adamant that The the number one thing and priority we should all have is just eat real food Yeah, and that's what I came out of school doing so what happened was I became known for what?

I did so a lot of times when people came to me they weren't saying oh, hey I want you to cook this way they were just saying cook how you cook because whatever you're doing is working for everybody and here's What's so fascinating?

Some of my first clients were women who had struggled for years losing their baby weight. All I did, I made everything from scratch. I didn't use any ultra-processed foods. I made dressings, sauces, everything was from-scratch.

And then instead of using sweeteners, and to me, people always say, oh, like cane sugar. No, no, sweetener is a sweetner. It's all sugar, You know, to your body, it's all, you know what?

It all processes the same way. Basically it all ends up as sugar. Yeah. Exactly. Like the glucose, right? So it. I basically was like, let's, instead of using those things, which are very much, um, except for maybe honey is they're all processed in some way, I would just use the actual real food to sweeten it.

So if I wanted something savory that was still sweet, I'd caramelize the onions and you're bringing out the natural sweetness of the onion. If I was sweetening a dressing, i would use a date, which is just a dried plum.

It's a dry fruit. I'm thinking of a prune. But basically, I used real food through and through, and everyone's weight just melted off. And so I became known as like, Hey, this guy not only knows how to cook, but he knows How to like actually execute, you know, in, get you your desired outcomes.

That's so, you know, Tom and, and you, know celebrity X, Y, Z, uh, George. We got, we call them Tom. And George, he gets, cause you were so tight. Um, d you.

They're just looking for you to come in and make them healthier and support their goals. Uh, just like the lady who can't lose her weight, um, since having the baby.

Yeah. Well, I mean, in Tom's case and S and some celebrities, not all of them, but definitely Tom case. Um, he's got other people, like he had a nutritionist that I was working with.

He has a train. Right. I assume there was a smart man, you know, A lot of people say, oh, what's the difference between a famous actor and a regular person?

I said, well, they're nothing. They just have more resources to throw out the problem. That's really it. There's still human. they still have cravings.

The same things we are eating ice cream late at night or whatever it is. they have tons of resources throughout the problem. So someone like a Tom or anyone that's really famous has the ability to have lots of guard, you know, gatekeepers, making sure that they're staying on target for what they want to do.

And the rest of us are stuck to, our willpower. You know what I mean? So it's just, yeah. That's the biggest difference. We all know people that grew up pretty poor and then, um, you know, married or got successful in one way or another.

And all of a sudden they're beautiful and fit and you're like, dude, like what it's like money changes things, man. Like your options are more. Um, if you are having to eat as cheap as you can at a Walmart, You're a nutritional, you know, it's just a different, that's a world.

We take care of a bunch of, um, working class folk as well as, in our membership based practice, we take our businesses as. Well, and one of my, my favorite groups is, is this chicken plant.

They, they, their line workers and we. And we're teaching them how to, how. not eat out of a gas station, right? Like, we're just trying to take them to that next level because their parents were eight out a guest station.

Like this is a generational curse in a way that they have no idea. And it's hard enough to know what's healthy when you're looking for it. But you know, they're they are in totally different world and you man, as a doc, I can prescribe a bunch of medicines that'll some of them can be pretty powerful.

Some of can change in some positive ways, but I. You can't compete with what someone eats three times a day or more, uh, whether they exercise exercise or not.

Those, those you can compete 100%. Yeah. I, call those kind of the ancestral, a pillars if you will, or you could use any word you want, no matter what kind uh, peptide or modern, you know, um, medical wonder gets put out in society and people think we continually invest in this kind of, uh magic pill syndrome.

Um, but the reality is, is none of that stuff will work effectively unless you're kindof ancestral kind attendance are met, your movement, what you are eating, Your sleep, stress.

I mean, these things are not they, they are what make us human and you can't avoid them. And we've, and we code completely lost, you know, the way our ancestors looked at food and survived, it's America and in the 2020, whatever's it.

It's completely different. I know you used the word ancestral a couple of times and I feel like that's a part of your philosophy, you know, how our ancestors used to do it.

Tell me, tell me more on that. Yeah, well, and it's a weird word word too. And I fully take ownership of that because it s like, what does ancestor really mean?

You know? Are we talking our great grandparents, our paleolithic ancestors? Like, What do we really make? And so when I talk about it, I do just mean the past.

I don't necessarily mean Paleolithic 100,000 years ago, like I'm looking at all of it because it's all relevant. And it is impossible for us in modern society to truly recreate what our Paleolithic ancestors were eating.

I mean, the breed of cow, chickens, all, yeah. The breed every single animal does not mirror what they used to eat, right? So we're already in a different playing field in terms of the animals, that agriculture, or the wild plants, whatever it it.

So I just more am looking at what pieces of the past are relevant. And so when I look at just very practically like, okay, we're in homo sapien body. That's the body that science has classified what we are in.

If you believe in this science, that goes back 200,000 plus years that this body was developed. And the food we're eating though is really more like within the last, what, a hundred years or so, 120 or less.

Yeah. Or less, I mean, it's really, really new. So there's foods that developed this body and then there is what we are eating right now. And so I'm more just looking at that and saying, okay, well, We know, first of all, that flavor, ancestrally, equaled nutrition.

Our body had really two points of interest that it needed to determine from your food. It needed either to get nourishment, because you're eating something that has that flavor and your bodies communicate to you, okay, this is something, that's gonna feed you or it's going to kill you.

That was really it. And mind you there's no labels to tell you this, is gonna kill. So you might eat that mushroom that is poisonous. You might that nut that poisons.

you don't know the berry that poison. We had to develop a communication point. And for it's basically called our neurolingual response. And so it involves not only our tastes, but it also involves our senses.

So I am a huge, huge proponent of, first of all, we want to eat real food. If I were building my food pyramid, the top of the pyramid would be, I want the food to have to just have real flavors.

So I don't want it to have added flavors, I want to it have just whatever flavor that food comes with, right? So truly natural flavor. And then in the middle, And that's what we want to delve into a little deeper in this call, because I think perceptions of what nutrient dense is, is where we have issues.

But then on the bottom of that pyramid, I want people to actually eat their food and eat it mindfully, then we start making really bad choices. And then, we're also compromising, is that food getting digested properly?

Is it getting absorbed properly, because I used to tell all my clients, I was like, look, i can feed you the most expensive, the highest quality food in the world, but if you're not digesting it and absorbing it, it doesn't matter.

So, my emphasis with ancestral food is How do I get us away from looking for that magic pill? Because that is what we're doing. We're basically eating our kind of Western diet and then we are finding we nutrient deficient and we turn to the supplement industry to fill in the gaps.

So that means we getting our sustenance from a pill. And there's no world where our ancestral biology was designed to do that because you get no communication.

When I swallow a pill, I get in no. I don't know if my body needs it. A lot of times when people swallow, for example, organ capsules, they feel nauseous.

And I'm like, yeah, well, that's probably because you got too much. I always use the example of salt. If I put salt on your tongue, your body will, you will hit me.

You will beat me up if I'd put too. Like your. Body will viscerally react if. Put too, much on there. you. Will like try to get it off your, tongue you'll either fight away.

The person's is trying to give it to you because your bodies just, it knows when it's got. Too much But if I gave you salt tablets, you get zero communication until you just feel bloated and you're like, why am I bloating?

Oh, I got too much salt. So we do have taste buds in our, in, down below near our stomach, but those are just to regurgitate, poison or something that we've eaten that our body doesn't want.

It wants to re to reject for us to really know what does your body need. You have to eat your food. That's kind of insane. I, you know, I like the idea that, maybe sweet and salty were good to a point, but maybe sour was bad or, how the body deal dealt with.

poison versus nutrition. That's fun to think about. I had never really put that, I mean, if you were to lead me down that road, would have come up with that solution as well.

But in our modern day, we don't think like that. We're like, tastes good, it's cheap, It's easy, its available, i'll take it. And I did ER for 15 years or whatever.

There was no lunch break. You just grabbed food, shoved it in your mouth and kept going. Um, uh, and so I still like even out with friends, I have a hard time with like not being finished before everyone else is just really getting going.

Like I just eat shoving in my body to slow down, right? Yeah. It's just like I'm trained my in a very unhealthy way to do ingest food and then, you know, leave it up to my intestines to try to sort it all out.

And that's assuming that I've eaten something with some nutrition. Let's go back to the, the nutrient-dense part. I think that is gonna be a fun unpacking.

Yeah, well, it's interesting, because a lot of people define their health by what they've removed from their diet. So they go like, oh, I don't eat sweets, so I'm healthy.

Or I, uh, i'm gluten-free, So I Don't Eat Gluten, that means I am healthy, and I and i am like well that's one piece, like good job, you removed something that potentially stimulating you in a negative way.

But we still have to look at what are you actually eating? And most people now this is an old visual of a plate, a healthy plate. But it's still pretty, pretty much stands today, which is the grilled chicken breast.

the steamed vegetables, and then some kind of baked something, baked potato, bake sweet potato or something like that, right? That's typically what people think is a healthy meal and they eat that plate and go like, oh, I ate healthy.

And I look at it, and I just see gaps. So I looked at the chicken breast, I go, well, that's a chicken breasts that had no skin, no bones, so you're already missing those nutrients.

It's the breast part, which is a muscle, but it's muscle that is not working. it is just the breasts of the chickens, it doesn't really move much. And whenever a muscles doesn´t move, they don't have a lot of nutrients because it does not need them.

So we want the parts that move because they're more nutritious. Um, we're also not utilizing the whole bird. We're not eating the organs from that bird or even the neck.

Were not making bone broth with the bones, you know, which is what our ancestors would have done. Absolutely. People have, they would not have wasted it.

Yeah. people have to remember we are in on like, unprecedented times basically. We never ever in the history of humankind would we ever slaughter an animal and only eat the ribeye or the chicken breast or fillet.

Like we have always used every resource we could because we needed the nutrients first of all. It's completely inhumane to kill an animals and not utilize all of it and then Yeah, and you didn't know where your food was going to come from, right?

So you needed to maximize nutrition. So that's something we just have to remember, like right away when you're just eating the chicken breast and your only focusing on protein amounts, you are already not eating.

The way your biology was designed. Now we can then also skip to, okay, what about the steamed vegetables? I thought vegetables were good. Yeah, sure. Whatever you believe around vegetables, that's great.

But we have an issue because the government's been tracking agricultural systems since the late 50s and they are every decade showing how produce is losing nutrients, like has less nutrients than previously.

They're also, there's agricultural practices where the topsoil is so poor that they have to spray fertilizer on it for even something to grow. Then you're using these kind of seeds that will only grow from that fertilizer.

So they're already kind hybridized or genetically modified seeds. And then they are pulling them before they've actually ripened. Like tomatoes are pulled, conventional tomatoes, are polled when they green.

They spray them to turn them red. And they got to ship them across country. And if they wait till they're ready, they'll be bad. They got, you know, it's just not how that works.

Exactly. So this system is set up not for your health. It's set for, can it sell at the grocery store? Like let's make sure it looks uniform and healthy for the health, for their grocery stores so that you buy it.

Yes. And then let's not even forget. There's the, so there's a transit time to the market, but then there is the time it's in the. Until you buy it. Then there was a time from once you've bought it, it in your refrigerator and you use it and there have been some studies that show people like who brought broccoli, for example, and by the they actually cook the broccoli.

It's devoid of new, has zero nutrition just because it so it losing nutritional value in. Exactly. Where is it? Wait, where's the nutrition going? It's like, I don't know.

I feel like that's a violation of the second law of thermodynamics or something like matter doesn't disappear. Like where does it go? But it's just like if you think about it, it it like aged meat or meat that has been left to sit the longer, if it is cooked, its high in histamines, for example.

The histamine increase. It's just one of those things that I think just just like a peach, you know, if you leave a Peach and you let it actually kind of you pull it, it's still is it still not ripe.

It takes a little bit of time to ripe and then it finally ripe, and it is perfect to eat. But then if You go too long, It starts to wither a bit and get even softer.

So it just the way of life, right? It is just that. how they've done those experiments where they show food that's just left out and it starts to grow bacteria.

It's bacteria is constantly trying to deplete whatever is living. Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. It's a chemical reaction. Or I should say feed off of whatever is, you know, living.

Yeah. I agree. That makes since, there's, between, small amounts of microscopic mold and bacteria and things that are just, That's how they exist. Cause if you didn't cook it soon enough, it would have been eaten by something else.

And that peach, man, You've got like a day. Exactly. and it's perfect. After that, It dries and you're like, God, this would have been so good yesterday.

When you even look at bananas, their nutrition changes from when they're green to then ripe to them brown. It's like the sugars increasing, the nutrition is completely changing of a banana just in that time frame.

So you can only imagine what it's also doing with vegetables and other things. It makes perfect sense. It's easy to see with fruit. I didn't see it come in with vegetables, but of course it does.

Yeah, it's all living. And then we're encapsulating the agricultural piece and the travel time. But then there's also, well, how did you cook it? How did Did you, did you steam it?

Like most of us grew up. One of the reasons why we don't like vegetables, particularly like Brussels sprouts, some is cause we were raised, you know, with these steamed or boiled Brussels spouts that were like all mushy and that pale green, right?

Yeah. It's just like, it's not, not something you want to eat. And really it makes sense because how you, how our parent or whoever made our food, How they did it destroyed it.

You know, they just depleted all the nutrition from it and it just this mushy mess now. It just fiber basically. Yeah. A lot of people see veggies as fiber, basically, because, you know I think it would take Ah, see now, but you alluded to it, I think at least five servings of vegetables to get the same nutrition out of one serving, you know, that our grandparents would have had.

Totally. You know just you, know that total generation away. And then, and let's talk. Oh I was gonna say. Oregon meets a little bit. The gap of, of just, okay, so now we're devoid of these nutrients from the food we think is healthy.

So where, where do we get like, how do fill in that gap? And maybe that's where you were going. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, so yes, because most of my listeners, aka me, are also going, You lost me at Oregon meats.

That's like you lose on your fantasy football league and you're the last place team. You have to eat an Oregon meat. Like that's your punishment. I'm confused.

Help me with getting the nutritional value. Are you gonna have top me into wanting to take it in? So here we go. Yeah, I love it. And I am up for this challenge because I wanna set it all, be straight with everyone.

I did not grow up eating these either. So it's a stretch for me too. I am you and you are me. Like, I don't want to sit down and eat liver and onions.

That's not what I imagine a meal being. And I, in culinary school, I learned about Oregon meats. I learn about Weston A. Price and Nourishing Traditions Cookbook and just how to make food more nutritious and how nutritious eating the whole animal is and things like that.

And yet I did not incorporate it. It didn't cook it for Tom Cruise. but it became becoming a father is what really shifted me. I started to look at my life with more kind of reverence of like, hey, I wanna make sure I'm healthy to be there for my kids as they grow up, because I am having them later in life.

If I didn't have them in my early 20s, if I had them my mid to late 30s. So I got to take care of myself. Um, right. It's so, yeah. And then after, after you're into kids, just a little while of having a kid, you were like, dude, this is a young man.

I am exhausted. Um. But so I was thinking about, of course my own health, but I also thinking of others and I. Okay. Yeah. To be nourished, I want them to thrive and seeing a lot of kids that are not thriving.

So what's missing from the diet here? And so dug back into what I learned and, and it did research and. Now I have the internet, right? Of course. So it's like I can really dig into what is the most nutrient dense food on the planet.

And it pops up that it is organ meats. I'm like, well, that's interesting. But I am not eating them and I doubt anyone else wants to eat them. There are some big hurdles, and you named one and people think they are gross.

Right? Yeah, they don't know how to cook them or and they're intimidated to Cook them. Correct. They don' know where to source them and then if they do know to eat them, their doing capsules and their like getting capsule fatigue or they are forgetting or it's not consistent.

And then it is also bypassing, you know, the eating which I talked about earlier, right? So I just set out as a chef and a father to solve that. That's really ultimately what I did.

So what i realized was we already had freeze dried powdered organ meats and so organ They're the most nutrient dense food on the planet. They do have many of the nutrients you would find in muscle meat, but they're higher in them and they have even more.

So for example, beef heart has coenzyme Q10, which if you take any kind of heart supplement, you know It has CoQ10, like Coq10 is supporting your heart, cardiovascular system.

It's got copper, it has heme iron, so that's absorbable iron. Its got choline, selenium, all the B vitamins. Every B vitamin is in that, right? And the beautiful thing is when you get told, hey, take this B Vitamin, but you got to eat it with food because it's fat soluble, well guess what?

When you're eating the organ meats, It already is a food, you don't need to eat food with food. It's already ready for you. So I'm looking and I am learning and realizing, okay, organ meats are pretty much mother nature's multivitamin.

This is ancestrally what everyone ate. when they were needing sustenance, it's what pregnant women would get served from in tribes first, the elderly, like this is something that around the world, nearly every world cuisine has got organ meats incorporated into their food.

But yet they never talked about it. This was just instinctual. They all knew this was necessary. And yet here in the US, We, it is lost fit favor. And we, if we had the time, I can absolutely go in the history of it.

Um, why it's lost favor, but let's just, let' just bottom line it and just say it unfamiliar. Like people have, because of its, uh, not being familiar, we've, kind of lost the interest and we associate it with the ickiness despite most people never even having tried them.

They just automatically think they're gross. So what I did was I took the freeze-dried powdered orgamins that we already had going into capsules and I combined it with salt and organic spices and herbs and in my mind, my chef mind I made a dry pate.

That's what i was trying to do. Okay. And so I made it so, cause I knew that I could make, I can hide the taste with garlic and onion and all the different spices and herbs.

Yeah. If I Could remove you needing to cook it. Cause with what I created is called pluck and with pluck, you can literally just salt your food. So now you don't need to Cook.

You could be having pizza and salt, your pizza or put the herbs and stuff on their pizza. the microdosing of those organ meats every time you eat. And this is where kind of a whole other philosophy comes in, which is, we tend to live in this space of go big or go home here in the US.

You know, like, ah, how much am I really getting, you know? Pluck when I use it. And my whole point is like look, I don't, i'm not interested in fads.

I'm no interested trends. In my 22 years as chef I've watched them come and go. for what I'm trying to do is I am trying have lifetime of health. I not just trying one month of help.

lifetime health. And so for me to do that, it's gotta be easy and it has got to be delicious. So with Pluck, I knew that if it involved you just salting your food and you're doing small amounts, but you are doing it every time you eat, that's going to more sustainable than me hunting and cooking liver or whatever the organ is a few times of a month in a year.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. If it's up to me to cook liver, kidneys, heart, it just not going to happen. I mean, even if I, in the short term say, you know what, we're going do it.

James said it was nutritious. It's just going fall off because it is unfamiliar and it, and I'm going have to talk to my family and you, know, there's so much points of resistance between here and success.

that it, it wasn't going to happen, but, having a little bit. And so what you're talking about is like, It's it can sit on your, in your salt shaker or however you have it presented and it could just stay there and, and in a dried form.

It'll be good for a long time. Yeah. So it's already shelf stable. I mean, the organ meats themselves have a two year shelf life. The only thing that maybe is.

can you know a part of contention is like oh well it has some onion or garlic and an onion and garlic after too much time it just gets a little clumpy right but the organ meats themselves are good for two years um but also what it what ultimately we have we've created kind of three categories because i realize there's there're really all these different types of needs and and like i said i'm in it for i want to help people feel better in their body so i know that if you're nutrient deficient if you're not feeling good.

And we treat people how we feel. So yeah, my belief is that if we just get these nutrients, we will solve so much like I've people that are now using pluck tell me like they're losing weight because they don't have as many cravings because their nutrition, they are getting the nutrients craving has come from yes from nutrient deficiency.

Nice. So, and then I'm seeing skin issues improve. I am seeing people with Crohn's actually being able to absorb their nutrients from it, you know, things like that.

And I've seen people improve their sleep. But what I realized is that we have different needs. So we created three categories and and I'll share the categories but I also do want to share just people truly understand that I'm not here just to promote pluck like I am trying to Promote eating organ meats pluck is just the easiest way to do it.

some ways you can incorporate the organs themselves into your diet without purchasing pluck, just so everyone knows. Categories we have are everyday meals and those ones are truly seasonings.

They're no different than any seasoning out there except they have organ meats in it, but you wouldn't know it. one is called like zesty garlic, it's got really great garlicky kind of Italian herb kind, of flavor to it.

We have the original, which is kind like Old Bay or Lowry's All Purpose. It's just like a nice kind. Of blend. You have habanero lime, like, a, nice taco replacement one.

So we have all the chimichurri is another one that I love, but they're all just really good flavors. I'm a chef, I design them all like and they will Make all the food taste better and give you micro dosing every time you use it of the organ meats and they're about 17 now 20% organ meat Then we have does it say Oregon meat on the packaging because I really want to get this to my mother-in-law for Christmas It but she won't eat anything but white meat chicken because she thinks it has less blood in it I'm like, it's not why that's whiter, but I'll not gonna I'm not going to ruin white meat chicken for you.

And you know, it's like, she's, She's a little bit in her head space on this, but I would love to trick her into some Oregon meat. It would be the delight of my life.

Tell me it doesn't say Oregon. Does not say it blatantly. Like it it, It's there, But you have to really look to read it. You know? Find it in most people, like kids, they don't look at it like parents are using this left and right in the food.

The kids love it and only later do the parents tell them it s Oregon meats. Yeah. No, no, that's I love art. I'm already getting it for that. If no one else is going to eat it, my mother-in-law is at least one.

Oh, and it's, it was, I mean, use it myself. So then we have this mid tier one and this one's really cool. The organs in the mid-tier, these are more like boosts and we recommend using them one, one to two times a day.

We have a center brain. This is going to blow your mind. So we have. A brain, so it has brain bovine brain and cinnamon and a little bit of nutmeg. And it's awesome.

Like people are using it in their oatmeal, the kids oatmeal. They're putting in there coffee and they are feeling more grounded and more focused. It's almost like a animal based nootropic.

Do they do the kids automatically like lay down right before it's going to start raining? Like, do they have any of these other bovine instincts that, that we can't explain?

They're all sleeping, laying down. That's the only thing I can really tell you. No one's sleeping standing up. I don't know. Um, but, uh, and then we, the other one is lion salt and that one was really cool.

It's got seven organs in it. and salt that's it so it doesn't taste like organs it tastes like salt with some depth and okay it's a really cool salt replacement because um one of the big issues around salt right now is you're either damned if you do damned you don't so its either high and heavy metals right with lead or its got microplastics if its ocean salt so what this does is we got a sea salt.

It has been processed, but it's maintained as many of the nutrients as it can. But whenever you process anything, you're going to lose some nutrients.

There's 40% animal organs and they're from seven organs. So we're not only replenishing the So I see it as a win because you're not going to get the myoclastics, you are not gonna have the heavy metals, so there's no complaints there and you just getting unparalleled nutrition.

And then we have our third category, which is pure. The pure is just orgamines. There's not salt, there is nothing else in it. That one is really cool.

because you can go sweet, savory with it doesn't matter. You can add it to a smoothie. But here's the thing that might interest you is because if you're working with a client, or a patient, and you know, hey, this person's anemic, they I want measured amounts, one teaspoon of pure is equal to two ounces of organs.

So you just tell your your client you say, Hey, take a half a to start with half teaspoon, that's one ounce of Oregon's do that a day. And There's no world where it's not going to affect their, you know, not not gonna increase their iron.

It's just, it works so effectively. I mean, I know people that eat meat who had low B12, And then their doctor said, well, will you want to take a B12 pill?

And she's like, no, now let me just try eating some organs. She started eating the organs and her B-12 shot up. So she was still eating, the same animal.

Still eating beef, low B 12, but then ate the organ liver and it increased. You can't just think while I'm eating meat, I am going to get it. It's like, not if your body is not breaking it down properly, which could be a hydrochloric acid issue.

You never know. Yeah. How this toxic world and our stressful lives are affecting how we absorb food. Right. What does their microbiome look like? I mean, a lot of people's GI tract is just like World War III in there.

Exactly. that's hard. And if you can get micronutrients laced in there, at least you know, you're going to be able to get, the easiest stuff in the world to absorb.

It's in a form your body was expecting to see it. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. Well, so I want to meet my promise. So I said, I would tell people how to incorporate organ means without pluck.

If you don't want, cause that my question too. Let me set the stage up from my perspective is, If I take broccoli and I boil it and kill all the nutrition, I soak out all of the nutrients and just eat the fiber that's left.

What was the point of broccoli anyway? Is there a way to do this wrong? And then how would you have me do it right? With pluck, we always recommend using it as a finishing salt.

Now if you're cooking it in something, if your mixing it with ground meat or something no issue because it's the internal temperature of the ground is going to be lower than the outside so you are fine mixing into something.

But in general when people put seasoning on the out side of a chop for example or a steak right. What happens when you barbecue or when? You cook it. It just turns black, right?

I mean it it that is burning. I, mean the the seasonings can burn too. That's what's happening, that's why a lot of times these rubs have sugar in them not not only to tenderize the meat, but also because they know when it gets burnt, which it always does.

burnt is bitter, burnt becomes bitter. And so by having sugar in there, you offset the bitter so it's nice. It's you know, people don't realize like one of the best ways to cook a steak is not to put stuff on the outside of it.

The best way is you put a little bit of salt on a fat because remember salt brings out moisture you don t want to bring moisture out of t e meat. You just bring it out o the fat.

And then what you do is after you've cooked it, then you take like some some compounded butter, what we like to do, is we take the plot, we Take butter put the pluck in the butter and then put it back in refrigerator and now you have you can just slice a dab of butter that has pluck on it and just let it melt right over the steak.

And so full of flavor and of course nutrition because you didn't burn any of it. But that's just that with with pluck. So if you let's say you're someone, hey, this sounds good.

Chef James, I want to start in corporate organ meats, but I don't want do pluck I wanted just I have some liver in my freezer. It's been there for a year.

What do I do? So what I recommend is anytime you are eating ground meat does not matter what kind of species could be turkey could, be elk could. be chicken, beef, lamb does.

Not matter. You probably, if you get a beef liver, it's gonna already be frozen. Keep it in your freezer, because it is most intimidating when you defrost it.

So keep it frozen! And then when you're meeting any ground meat, pull that liver out and just use a cheese grater and grate it into the ground me and it's just great about one tablespoon or even two tablespoons max for one pound of groundmeat and then mix it really well.

No one will know what's in there. You won't. It won' t affect the taste and won t effect the texture. And yet you' re getting the organ meats and th n put that lever right back in the freezer and use it the next time you have ground That's one of the simplest ways you can just start incorporating it tomorrow without even purchasing pluck or anything.

That actually really, really tempting. Um, cause I feel like that's a, That's something I can accomplish right. That is pretty interesting. A little frozen liver in the freezer would be super interesting Another thing you can do is buy chicken hearts.

Chicken is a lot milder. All the organs of chicken are just a little mild than beef. And so what you do, is you get some of the hearts If we're making a ragu, for example, if we put mushrooms in it, you maybe put one, maybe two mushrooms.

Do the same thing with the hearts. Just pull them out. You usually get like 10 to 15 hearts in a container. And just chop them up and throw them in the sauce, just two or three of them.

and no one will know they're in there, they'll think they are mushrooms. They won't taste like anything, promise you. And yet you will start to not only get the nutrition, but even more importantly, you're going to start recalibrate your palate to be not so resistant to these foods.

Because organ meats are more umami. And sometimes they're also more metallic and it's just we just have to recondition our palate, you know, most picky eaters are stuck in sweet and salty and that's because all the food coming all The processed food from the grocery stores is sweet.

And salty. That's how they preserve it. So yeah, to to re calibrate your palate you got to pull out some of those overly sweet foods. You got introduce the other flavors you gotta introduce some bitter some sour and sumo mommy and you'll see your your palette will start to open up one of the Feet one one piece of feedback we get from a lot of people who work with their clients that tell me all I told my people to do was to just use pluck.

That's the only they have like maybe a kid who's sensitive to flavors or something who is picky that parents are dealing pick eaters. So the the practitioner will say just just start using pluck.

Like don't make any other change. Don't change what they're eating. Just start adding pluck to it. And then they get reports that my kids now starting to be more adventurous.

I mean, yeah, it's because they are now getting umami. They're getting these new their palates starting open up because their not just getting the same flavors over and over.

Wow. That's I Cause I give parents a hard time for letting their kids be so picky. But my kid is picky and I'm like, I know, but. I mean, that's hard.

You know, it's funny. Cause when you were talking about, you know you had kids and you wanted it to be more nutritious and going through that, sort of like that light bulb moment where you're like, well, I don't need to organ.

It was funny if you go and I'm not saying baby food is healthy, but if go through the baby, food aisle, the mixes of things they'll put in those jars that you as the parent would never, never do it.

You're like, oh, no, I'm not, but you know, it's kind of like that kid is a blank slate, man. They will just spoon that combination right down their gullet.

And I love that you can, and then that goes away when they're on a goldfish diet. But I, love, that we can sort of reintroduce this at a rate that our bodies can handle.

Cause my next question kind was, if I start throwing, a decent amount of Oregon meat into my family's food. Is there a point where it's going to be too much?

They're not going So there's a concept of like supports like. So the part of the animal you're eating is going to support that part in you. That one is really cool because it's proving to be a support the brain.

It's helping people focus and ground down. You know, it having these nootropic effects. And if you go back to what I talked about earlier that this biology wherein was developed, our life depended on the communication point of eating the food and the feedback our body gave from that food.

So as long as you're eating food, And it's nutritious food, and it is not tricking your body. Your body will tell you when to stop. This is the hard truth.

if i am if let's just use strawberries for example if if I eat a strawberry that that flavor is telling my body oh there's nutrition behind this I'm not going to eat too many straw like you eventually stop eating strawberries because you're just done but change that to like pop tarts that are strawberry flavored where there is no nutrition it's triggering my body into thinking there's nutrition.

So I eat the pop tart and my bodies like, Oh, well, there strawberry flavor, that must mean it's Nutrition. But then the nutrition never comes. I keep eating the Pop Tarts and I can't stop until I'm bloated.

It's the same thing that's happening when we're eating cookies. Same thing is happening. When we reading the chips and ice cream, our body is looking for the nutrition that the flavor is, is conjuring and it, if it's not there, then your body will just keep looking for it and not know when to stop.

And basically it your, your waistline that's going to tell you when it stopped. Cause if you're wearing a belt, that what happens at Thanksgiving, right?

We overeat or in a lot of times it is because you know, it's, of course, emotional too. And we're trying to eat all these different types of foods. But it is also because a lot of that food that we are eating is still devoid of nutrition.

You know? Yeah. It might be a whole turkey, but you're still eating the chicken breast part. Those turkeys are not as nutritious as they once were because they are all hybridized.

So, I think that's what we have to kind of get into our thick skulls. Just because we Does not mean we're nutritious. Calorie rich does is not the same as nutrient rich.

And I would think that there's a rate at which you eat kind of going back to my ER based bad habits. that outpaces your body's ability to let you know when you should have stopped.

If you go too fast for that, your buddy can't stop. It doesn't know. You know, you, go to far. Yeah. A hundred percent. Your body is like, wait, I mean, now you've got to unbutton your pants and watch the Cowboys.

It turns into a bad day quick. So true, though, even with like cravings, right? One of the simplest trick with a craving is if you really want to see if it's a true craving, when the craving comes up, just change the environment and see If it still there.

If you're in your kitchen and you craving let's say ice cream and just leave the kitchen, and go for a walk and or drink, drink a glass of water and then go for the walk.

Cause sometimes it's even just that you're parched and the, and your body just needs something. So it, it is fascinating. Like, like you can break things up by just kind of switching gears, switching the mental framework.

And that's kind why, you know, going back to the organ meats and pluck like, that why I like it in the form, I will use it as in, in a form of pluck, but I don't always do it.

As I mentioned, like I cook tongue and I will do the graded liver, but I don't like, I'm not going out and cooking, uh, Like, beef heart very often, even though it's quite good.

I just not doing it. And I I mean, not cooking tripe or I not some of these other things, But I'll do pluck till I blue. Like I have no issue with it because it, it doesn't, when I am using it I was not thinking to myself, this has organs.

This is really delicious. Yeah. Sprinkle it out. No, that's I use a lot of it like. Like, a lot of people are like, oh, but the back says only use a fourth of a teaspoon per serving.

And I'm like I use like half a tea spoon to a T spoon at times. Like I just follow my taste buds. Yeah. The, the flavoring is the determinant. Like I don't want flavorless food because I didn't hit the.

Yeah, and, you know, just to even go even deeper into that question, how do you, or is it too much? Well, here's the thing. My wife went through a month where she didn' and and she happened to get blood tests during that time and her iron was fine like all her markers were good so it's like well yeah if your your body knows what it needs like that's why we crave certain things sometimes like we create bananas maybe we're low on potassium or so you know we'll crave oranges whatever it is right it''s like right your bodies always looking to to find homeostasis and balance And so, yeah, I wonder what the nutrient deficiency is in pregnant women that make them want pickles and ice.

Yeah, exactly. Right. I think that one's a. Strange way. It probably could be though. I've thought about that before. And I, well, I my thought is that they're fat deprived, right?

And the fat is needing more fat. Um, but exactly. In the pickles could the salt. Exactly. Yeah. But all to say though, is if you're eating it, which is how pluck is used, you, should I want people to just listen to their body.

If you find you want more of it. Great. Do it And then if you find you don't want it, great. Don't do it. Let your body ebb and flow based on what it needs, not what our head thinks it need or what some bottle is telling us to take.

I would much rather people start advocating for their own health. There's a great quote from a friend of mine, Dr. Bill Schindler. He wrote a book called Eat Like a Human.

And he says, we are the only species in the world that looks to someone else to tell us what to eat. and that's very humbling when you think about well there's over nine million species so clearly we did know at one point we are not so special that we're the only species out of nine millions that doesn't know what to eat you know so the key is like well what what of where are we going wrong and of course grocery stores are tricky you there is trickery going on i don't want to pretend it's all in this there it is absolute trick going with the food the processed food industry Food is depleted and the food that we think is so nutritious is not as nutritious But ultimately though we have to be the gatekeepers of our health and and so I just the more I can support people in Eating their food so that they can make the decision on what is working or not working Then I feel like i've done a good job because because to me There's really one main, I don't know what to call it, like one main persona within your life, or persona's probably the wrong word, but there's one thing in your live that will not lie to you, that's not going to lead you down the long way, and it's your body.

Whatever diet you're following, whatever you are eating, all you gotta do is then eat it and then look to your to tell you did this work or not. Your body will tell ya immediately.

Pretty within within hours and definitely within a day. It will tell you you'll have skin eruptions You'll like, you know rashes you will have digestion distress.

You you have you won't sleep. Well, You will be bloated whatever it is brain fog Yeah, your body will you and then all I ask is you adjust just adjust listen to your buddy.

Yeah Well then Dude, that's all and hey if you've got enough You know if he put enough graded liver into your ground beef and you decide to stop eating before you would have normally stopped eating because your body felt like it was finished, even better.

There's no law that says you have to clean your plate despite what our parents taught us back in the day. Which we got from our grandparents during the great depression and all those things.

So dude, thank you so much for your time. This was so fun. How do people, you know, where would I get pluck? How do I hear more? Uh, how do we get ahold of you?

Yeah. Uh well, thank you so much for having me. It's, it's always a pleasure. Um, diving deep into these conversations, but you can find us at our website, eatpluck.com.

You can, uh, find this on Amazon, just do a search for plucker organ seasoning and it will pop up. And, and then you'll find us on socials at Eat Pluck, or I'm at Chef James Berry.

And then as you mentioned, at the top, we have a podcast called Every Day Ancestral, which you can find on any podcaster you you watch or listen to your podcast.

So that's, that I mean, like who are your guests on everyday ancestral? Like, is this cave people? We're digging out people from the ground and like, it's lots of skeletons.

No. Yeah. Um, you well, Bill Schindler was on there. He he's a, uh, he is a professor of archeology specifically focusing on food archeological. Oh, there's.

A woman named, um, Mary, Oh, what's her name? I'm skipping on her last name right now, but her names Mary and she's really cool. I look at her like as the modern day Indiana Jones.

So she actually goes to tribes and will talk, like she is learning from them and kind of helping people understand ourselves through them. And then of course we talk to doctors and Um, anyone that has knowledge of something that is that we can remind us of to bring into the modern day, you know, so any practices that support our health today is really what we're doing.

Uh, that's fun. I, yeah, we gotta, w we need to dial into that. Thank you for coming on. We'll put all of that in the show notes as far as how to get ahold of you and, and maybe where to some pluck and man, just thanks for the, the conversation.

Um, can't believe I'm considering buying some liver and throwing it in freezer. That sounds. That sounds fun. And maybe sneaking some chicken hearts into some food from a, from my mother-in-law.

I can't, I cannot wait. So yeah. Thanks for coming on, man. You're very welcome. Yeah. The key is just ratio. Make sure that the amount you're using is small enough and the flavors they're used to is, is high, you know, the higher amounts, but yeah, thank you again for having me.

Anyone have questions or need more tips, go to epluck.com. Cause we have recipe section. It's all free. And there's lots of ways to incorporate organs without heavy lifting.

That could be life-changing for a lot of folks. I mean, we live a quite a nutrient deficient life. So the nutraceutical industry is probably not going to go out of business tomorrow, but this would be a good start for people living a healthier life, man.

Thanks for coming on. If you found value in this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone passionate about transforming healthcare.

Real change starts with real conversation, so let's keep on going. Until next time, stay well, Stay curious, And never stop pushing for better.