Healing Humanity Through A Proper Human Diet

Introduction to Kerry Man and the documentary 0:00

Welcome. I'm your host, Doctor David Jockers. And today I've got the honor of interviewing Kerry Man. He is the producer of the documentary Healing Humanity The Power of a Proper Human Diet and carries journey is personal. He credits the proper human diet with saving his life, having lost 100 pounds. And we're going to go through that story in this interview. And he overcame a range of health issues. His film follows others who are also transforming their health by adopting this way of eating with life changing results.

You can find it at Healing Humanity.movie Healing humanity.movie And he also has the popular YouTube channel Homestead How, where he explores holistic wellness and natural living. And he's garnered attention from major voices like Jordan Peterson for his Healing Humanity movie, for his movie. And we're excited to have him today to share this powerful story. You guys are going to get a lot out of this. Please share it with people that you know and that you care about as well. And without further ado, let's go into the interview.

Well, Kerry, great to connect with you and excited about this documentary, Healing Humanity The Power of a Proper Human Diet, something I've been teaching for a long time. And you have an amazing personal story, so please share that. Absolutely. Thank you, Doctor Jockers for having me on here. It's a it's an honor. Yeah, I'd love to share my story. So I guess just to go back, I'm 44 years old right now, and for most of my adult life I suffered with just horrible clinical depression and anxiety and besides that, a whole host of other health issues.

So at my heaviest, I was 100 pounds heavier than I am today. But I was diagnosed with so many health issues and they just

Kerry's health collapse and diagnosis journey 1:34

sort of one on top of the other. They kept growing, started taking more and more medication. First it was IBS, stomach issues. My stomach was just always bubbling and gurgling and it was hurting me after every meal. That was the first thing for me. And then I started getting trouble sleeping. I would snore at night. I went in for a sleep study and they diagnosed me with sleep apnea. I had to start using a CPAp machine. My appendix burst on the operating room table. Thankfully, I was on the operating room table as it could have taken me out otherwise.

I had multiple kidney stones. I had skin cancer on my ear. I had arthritis really bad. I never really knew it was arthritis. My lower back just hurt for years and years and I thought, that's just some foolish injury I had from high school. I'm just always going to have that sort of thing. But before I found a proper human diet, I started getting I was diagnosed with gout in my foot, and it was incredibly painful. Like, like I mentioned, I had kidney stones and those were one of the worst pains I've ever been through.

But the gout was horrible. It felt like a fractured bone. It hurt so bad for about 18 months before I found a proper human diet. Anytime I go to the grocery store or shopping, I'd use one of those mobility scooters. I just couldn't put any pressure down on the foot. They gave me injections. They tried all sorts of medications and nothing. Nothing ever helped with that. And I've had so many health issues so I could go on forever. The last thing I'll say is about eight years ago, I was at home and I was on the couch watching TV, and I went to stand up and I just got very dizzy and I couldn't find my words, and the side of my face went numb.

And my my wife was like, what is going on? And she ended up calling 911. And I suffered a Tia mini stroke, and I had to take an ambulance. And I spent five days at the stroke unit in the hospital. Thankfully, the symptoms I had, although I had some that lingered and I had to do physical therapy for nothing was permanent. However, they're like, man, what is wrong with this guy? He's. At that time I was in my late 30s and all of these health issues, he's having a mini stroke. So they did all these tests on me and they tested my heart.

And actually I had a heart catheter done. I had echo echoes done on my heart, and they determined I had congestive heart failure and my ejection fraction was 44. I had just a really high rapid heartbeat, and they diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and they put me on more medication for the congestive heart failure. And then the other thing real quick is my entire life since birth, I've had an irregular heartbeat. I mean, I've probably worn 20 or 25 of those heart monitors. I remember in kindergarten, it was like this huge vest, like two, two years ago when I had it, it was just like this little thing.

But I've always had this highly erratic heartbeat. And that was one of the biggest things is the congestive heart failure. I would stand up and I would just get dizzy and I'd get fatigued, and I always show people this. But at one point I was on all of this medication listening. He probably had, I don't know, 20 bottles in there, 15, 20 pill bottles, 15 or 20 bottles on there. And most of it was for depression, anxiety, but it was for all of those issues they just mentioned. And the crazy thing was, in retrospect, some of these pills I took for ten years, none of them ever fixed it.

Like I just kept getting more issues and then more pills and then side effects and more pills, and none of it ever fixed it. So that's kind of my journey. And then about 600 days ago, I learned about a proper human diet. For me, that's a carnivore diet. I learned from a man named Dante Ferrigno. He was doing a YouTube video and he was talking about, I'm just going to eat meat. And I'm like, this guy is insane. You can't just eat meat. However, I had learned about the ketogenic diet about ten years prior.

I watched a documentary on Netflix, and I tried it, and it actually worked for me, and it was the only thing I've ever done my whole life besides all those pills I showed you that I really had this. Whoa. Something's happening here. Moment I yoyo on keto. I couldn't maintain it. I would lose a bunch of weight. At one point, I lost 60 pounds. I felt incredible, my wife lost a bunch of weight to. And I remember were like, never again. Am I going to gain all this weight back? I figured it out, and then I went back to eating in moderation.

And I gained all that weight back and I gained more back. But when I saw Dante Ferrigno talking about this carnivore thing, I'm like, that's just a strict ketogenic diet. I understand the biology and the science that will work, but it's insane. You can't just eat meat. You're going to clog your. I got congestive heart failure. I'm going to want to have a heart attack. I'm going to get bored. What about fiber? What about vegetables? None of that will work. And long story short, I noticed that that video from Dante was two years old, and so my wife and I were watching this on TV, on YouTube.

I'm like, let's fast forward. I was really cynical. I'm like, there's no way he's still doing this. And I went to his most recent video. So this is two years later. He lost like 80 pounds. His face, he looked like a different human. He just had a big smile on his face. And so many of the issues that I had Dante overcame, including the the IBS and depression, anxiety, mental health issues, things like that. So that was sort of the turning point for me. And I decided to actually I didn't decide to start like a carnivore died.

At that point. I watched a whole bunch of videos and did a whole bunch of research. Doctor Ken Berry, Doctor Anthony Chaffey I found Doctor Philip Ovadia. That was really helpful for me because my big concern was my heart. And this guy's a heart surgeon that's pretty much eating carnivore diet for 11 years now and advocating for it. And then eventually I started carnivore from there. Yeah. What kind of results like how did you feel as you started it? It was incredible. I try not to overhype it. And I tell people, you know, everybody's different.

But the big thing for me was I stopped snoring almost immediately and subsequently I've learned because I love doing research on this. I think like it empowers me to do this was the research and getting over the fear of it. I heard Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan say he stopped snoring week one doing a carnivore diet. And subsequently I've heard so many other people say this. And now when I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, I hated that CPAp machine. Oh man, I want to take a baseball bat to it. I used that thing for years and I just I despised it.

But my sleep doctor told me, listen, Carrie, you're just you're way overweight, like you. Maybe if anyone was so encouraging when I stopped snoring. Throughout the years when I'd done keto, I stopped snoring every now and then and whenever that would happen, my depression, anxiety, the subsequent days would be lessened, like noticeable. But then it always come back. But I believe there's a big tie in between our snoring. I believe there's a lot of downstream effects other than I'm just getting a better night's sleep.

Discovering carnivore and early improvements 7:48

No, I think my immune system is stronger. Maybe my hormones are working a little bit better. I think there's a lot of effects from it. So when I stopped snoring, I got really excited. And then a couple of weeks into it, I think about week three, my anxiety. I was horribly anxious, just it was just going away. It was like more so than any of the medications had ever done. The arthritis I had in my foot, that took a lot longer. That was around 70 days on carnivore, but around day 30 it was life changing.

I'm like, I stopped snoring, my anxiety is going away, my IBS by day 30, my IBS like my stomach. I remember saying at one point in my life, I'm like, I don't even feel my stomach. This is the weirdest thing. It's always been this heavy, bloated feeling. It feels like air, like there's nothing there now. And I'm like, I wonder if this is how I was supposed to feel my entire life, and it's just because I was putting so much stuff in there that I shouldn't have, that it was always bloated and bothering me, but that IBS that I tried everything, the low Fodmap diet, all sorts of different diets and medications and everything that was gone by day 30.

And so I've been doing YouTube for about nine years. My wife and I have a little homestead. We have triplets plus one. We own our small town movie theater. I'm in the basement of it, so we got all these weird projects I'd been doing YouTube about. So on day 30, I'm like, I'm going to do one video talking about this carnivore experience for 30 days and how it's literally I feel like it's saved my life. My depression was so bad and it was going away, and I knew if I stuck with it, go away completely.

So I did one, did one video 30 days later on Carnivore Diet or something like that, and it just went crazy. It went viral, which is great. But the comments I got, I'm like, there's so many other people doing this. I thought I was a weirdo and Dante was a weirdo. These people eating only meat. And I was hearing from people in their 70s and 80s that are saying they have their mobility back. This one gentleman, 83, he's a veteran and he was depressed for decades and decades. And he said, for the first time, I've had zero dark episodes and I'm no longer I'm happy for the first time on carnivore, and he'd been doing it for like two years.

I got all these comments from people doing this for multiple years, and I just got really fired up about it, kept doing the diet myself, and then I started talking more about it on YouTube and interviewing individuals on YouTube to share their story. Yeah. That's amazing. And I've heard a lot of other stories of people doing really well on carnivore. And when I look at nutrition, I think about it like a bell curve. It's kind of like when we think about fiber, there are some people that thrive on very low fiber or no fiber diets, and there are some people that seem to do really well on really high fiber, and most people are kind of somewhere in the middle, maybe, maybe shifted a little more towards low fiber, maybe shift a little more towards high fiber.

The way, you know is to experiment. Right. And so so you're somebody that does really well on low fiber diet. I do well kind of low to moderate level of fiber, too much fiber FODMAPs I get bloated right. But some plant foods I seem to do really, really well with and fruit and things like that. And you got to kind of find your sweet spot. And so for you, you found that in that carnivore with that carnivore style diet. So I always tell people, if you're not feeling great, you got nothing to lose. Experiment, right. Experiment with these types of things.

And I know that's what you're doing with your with your documentary is really exposing people to this and to this sort of lifestyle and, and just really helping people make good, healthy choices for their life. And I want to touch on the snoring, too. That's really key because if you and snoring and sleep apnea, if you snoring is kind of the first symptom, right. If you're a chronic snore as a first symptom, if somebody tells you that you should get a sleep study, because if you have sleep apnea, your brain is slowly dying at night, you're not getting enough oxygen, and so it can't produce enough energy.

The mitochondria become old, damaged, what we call senescent. And then that's going to lead to more brain inflammation, which is going to result in depression, anxiety, right. Poor cognitive function, brain fog, lots of different things like that that you were dealing with. So as you stopped snoring, you were getting more oxygen in into those neurons and regenerating those neurons. And then of course, your mental illnesses, you know, improved dramatically. Right? And you felt so much better. So yeah, super critical stuff.

Now you also implemented you implement any sort of intermittent fasting or fasting with that. Yeah, absolutely. Sort of naturally at first because one interesting thing with carnivore is I'm eating fatty cuts of meat. I get full a lot quicker. I think a lot of people, myself included, when I heard about this carnivore, I'm like, am I going to be? How am I going to be able to afford eating meat three times a day? And I was going at it from the mindset of the standard American diet, where I was eating three meals a day and snacks in between.

A lot of times on my carnivore journey, I'll eat once or twice a day. In fact, for a stretch of about 60 days, I ate one meal a day and I wasn't starving myself. It wasn't forced. It was completely natural. I just wasn't hungry, so I'd fast for 23 hours. I also did a three day fast and a five day fast, and later I became good friends with a gentleman who sadly has passed. In the meantime, Jeff depressed,

Fasting, ketosis, and returning to natural eating 12:40

he was diagnosed with stage four cancer and he became really good friends with me. He was doing a carnivore diet. His chemotherapy was a lot more bearable. He felt like he was younger. His energy was improved. But he also follows Professor Thomas Seefried. And fasting is a big part of what Professor Seefried promotes or advocates for. And so Jeff was doing he had done 55 day fasts. He would do carnivore diet, and then he would fast for five days and get chemo in the middle of it. And so he had one day where he was going to do he's going to say, Carrie, I'm going to try to do an eight day fast because I got this big scan coming up.

We're going to starve the cancer cells. I'm going to get into deep ketosis. There's all sorts of other benefits of fasting. And so I said, Jeff, I'm become good friends with you. I want to do this with you. So I did the eight day fast with Jeff. I it's so counterintuitive. Like, I'm very passionate about fasting. I have a lot to learn about it since then, just as an individual. But I've never felt better in my life and I was doing a challenge. So I would do pull ups, which is something I never did.

I never exercised before finding carnivore before basically healing my body. But I did pull up maxed out every day and by eight, by day eight, I did more pull ups I've ever done my entire life, more than I did on day seven, day six, day five. Like, how is this even possible? I'm not eating anything. I felt almost euphoric on day eight. I am not a scientist. I'm not a doctor. I'm just an individual. But what I have learned from both carnivore and fasting is I feel like it's just a return to what is natural for humans.

Initially I was going to do this documentary is let's do a carnivore diet documentary. And then later I realized the reason I'm so healthy and so successful in healing everything is really I've returned to what's natural for humans, and I think most of humanity has gotten so far away from that. And I believe that throughout mankind, like my ancestors would have been maybe hunting a big animal in the woods and then maybe fasting for 4 or 5 days to, like, get another one. This thing where we just have food at our fingertips, 60,000 products in the grocery store.

I can go my phone right now and click a button and have food here is completely unnatural. It seems natural to us because it's the only thing I've known my whole life. But if you look at the grand scheme of things, it isn't. And so I'm a huge proponent of fasting. I do it regularly now. I'm almost trying to work it in where I can do it sort of randomly, like our ancestors would have. I think it's great to do either way, but just naturally. On carnivore, I pretty much been fasting for 600 days now because it's usually two meals a day, if not one meal a day, and then maybe 16 or even 23 hours where I'm not eating.

I just eat through that one hour window. Yeah, you're 100% right. Our ancestors under they underwent feast, famine, cycling. So, you know, another refrigerator in the pantry. So they were they had to have a good hunt or a good harvest. And there were often times where you did you were unsuccessful in the hunt and there was no harvest. Right. And so so there were a lot of times of fasting and instead of getting weaker, we release a lot of growth hormone, human growth hormone, which helps preserve your lean body mass.

You also can release more endorphins, for example. And all of that can help increase strength. Actually, testosterone can go up so it can increase strength. So a lot of people just feel E4, the ketones on the elevation and the ketones makes your brain come alive. Right. And kind of takes your brain to a whole new level. And that's why in a lot of religious communities, they'll they'll fast and they feel like they have better intuition that they hear from God more effectively. And from when we look at it from a physiological perspective, we see those ketones being elevated.

The balance between the Gabba glutamate ratio and the brain increases in dopamine and endorphins and things like that can have really profound effects on the way that you think, the way that you, your physiology adapts and performs. And so it is really remarkable. And, you know, with that carnivore diet, your blood sugar is so stable, right? It's such a blood sugar stabilizing diets. One of the key principles I talk about is prioritizing protein, of course, carnivore diets a high protein diet. So when you're eating you're eating protein, healthy fats.

And you know, and therefore you're getting very good blood sugar stability and blood sugar instability is one of the biggest stressors on the body. And so when you eliminate that stressor your body has is better able to adapt to the other stressors that you face in life. And so you become more resilient in general. So yeah, really profound stuff there. And now, look, obviously you've had this remarkable transformation and now you've put together this documentary. So tell us more about that. Yeah.

So around day 67 on my carnivore journey, I said, there's so many people talking about carnivore on YouTube that I've discovered, but this is just such a small subset of people. And I think this could really help others in particular. For me, it was the depression and anxiety. I was clinically suicidally depressed. It was the worst depression in the world and I was on every medication for it. They'd say, try this for three months, see if it works, and then it never worked and then they would up the dosage.

I know the medication works for some people, but for me, I did it for years and years and it never worked. And when I found healing through this and I was so hopeless at one point in my life, it just tears me up to think about what my children and my wife had to go through with. Their dad is just a zombie. Always sad, always depressed on a couch. There's so many people in the world that are hopeless. I wanted to get the word out to them. So I'm like, we should do a documentary. I mentioned earlier I learned about the ketogenic diet through a documentary on Netflix, so that was kind of a little seed in my brain.

Like, maybe we could reach more people besides just YouTube. And I kind of foolishly like, let's just do a documentary, even though I've never done one before. I've done a lot of video on YouTube work, and the point of the documentary was, let's not get into all of the science and arguments about a ketogenic carnivore diet. There's a lot of documentaries on ketogenic diets to talk about the science. We're going to cover that. But what I really want to cover is the individual stories, because I believe that's what will inspire other people.

And I was hearing so many stories similar to mine. Like I said, people that are older, younger, all sorts of health issues to type two diabetes, fertility issues. It's just. We have a woman that we interviewed in our documentary that was diagnosed with Parkinson's, and she had a full blown stroke. She could barely walk. She was bedridden, and she's about to hike the 500 miles Saint Francis of Assisi Trail. She's been doing carnivore for like two years now. And all this is in her medical records that we've all verified that some of these things you here are just incredible.

It's amazing how the human body will heal. But now, around day 67, I decided, let's do this documentary. And one other thing that happened to me real quick in terms of my healing. I mentioned the congestive heart failure and the irregular heartbeat. About a year into carnivore, I'm like, I feel so good. I had symptoms from my congestive heart failure. I'd stand up, I'd get dizzy. I was always fatigued. I felt like I'd run a marathon around year one on carnivore. So I went back to the doctor to get my heart echo done and just to see, like they told me when I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, this is chronic. It's never going to improve.

You're lucky if you could keep it the same, but it may get worse. It's a chronic thing that you have to give me medication for it. Long story short, year one I went in, they checked my congestive heart failure. Ejection fraction was 44. It was 65. It was complete, which is completely normal. It completely reversed normal, which just blows my mind. It's sort of uncharted territory, right?

Creating the Healing Humanity documentary 19:38

Most people diagnosed with congestive heart failure aren't going to only eat meat. So there's not a lot of studies or science or even anecdotal experiences because most people wouldn't do what I did. But the other thing that really blows my mind is my lifelong, highly erratic, irregular heartbeat is completely normal. One year later. And by the way, just for those listening, all of this is in my medical records. I've shared it all on my channel. I'm happy to share it all again, because some people are like, that's impossible.

Like, how could that even happen? I was born with an irregular, erratic heartbeat. It's perfectly normal right now. It's in all of my notes and everything. I've since interviewed so many people for our documentary, including heart surgeon Doctor Philip Ovadia. I'm like, how long is this even possible? And he's like, well, there's the heart performs much more efficiently. While in ketosis you don't have inflammation anymore. You lost the weight. So that's going to help as well. So inflammation drastically reduced on a carnivore diet you're getting more electrolytes magnesium, sodium things like that.

That may be affecting it as well. But he's also like it is sort of uncharted territory. We don't have a lot of people doing it yet. But yeah, so I got really passionate, let's do this documentary. We started interviewing people all over the world. The first person we interviewed was a man named Bill not. He was 700 pounds stuck in his house in Alaska for five years. He was too big to leave his house and left his house in five years, horribly, horribly depressed. He just had this black hole depression. He saw one of my YouTube videos.

He sent me this essay and he said, I'm going to be dead if I don't do something. I think I could do carnivore, but meat in Alaska is expensive. I don't have money. He's like, maybe I could do a YouTube channel, earn a little bit of money to pay for the meat. And I ended up connecting with him and we flew out to Alaska. He's the first person we filmed for our documentary. This is about a little over a year ago, and fast forward now he's become a good friend of mine. He does his own YouTube channel.

We were able to raise money so he could get the meat. About three weeks into carnivore, he called me. He's like, carry, this is amazing. He said, I this back pain and knee pain I've had for 30 years is gone. Three weeks in and he's like, and I feel like my mood is so much better. He's like, how is that even possible? Kerry I'm like, inflammation. Bill, your inflammation is going away because you're not eating those highly inflammatory foods anymore. And fast forward, we just went to film him about two months ago at his one year later.

That was the premise of the documentary. Let's follow a couple people that have severe health issues, not just obesity, type two diabetes, depression, all sorts of issues. Follow them for a year. So we checked in with Bill. A year later, he's down 270 pounds. Wow. He's no longer depressed. He he can stand up straight. He couldn't even stand up straight before he was hunched over like a hunchback because his back hurts so bad. And he slept that way. And he's outside in the beauty of Alaska for the first time in five years.

It's just just incredible. So we filmed 34 individuals and doctors like Bill. We've also filmed Doctor Ken Berry, Doctor Anthony Chaffey. We went to Boston College because cancer is a big part of our documentary. Professor Seefried has been talking about cancer as a metabolic disease for about 30 years now. He's done some incredible work. So we interviewed him and his whole team. Yeah, you're doing a great work. They're really, really showing how people can change their lifestyle and see dramatic change in their health.

And so many people think or they're told by their doctors, oh, you, you know, you have this genetic condition, you have whatever it is here, take this medication and then take these medications, cover up the side effects of the other medication and other lifestyle issues. And so you're really giving hope. And unfortunately, what most conventional doctors are doing because they're not giving hope, unfortunately. And they're not. And it's because they're not seeing results because they're not addressing root cause factors such as diet.

And so you're doing really great work as far as that goes. And I want everybody to know, I mean, carnivore died of course is controversial in that natural health space. And I don't believe that carnivore diets the right diet for everybody. And I don't think you do either. But it works for many people. Right. And so and obviously it's given people's lives back. And I think in the natural health world, people just jump into too much dogma. You know, sometimes we learn things like, like meat is bad for your heart, right?

Or saturated fat or this or that and that you need to be a plant based diet and this and that, really. I mean, I think one thing that everybody, at least everybody in the natural health space agrees on is get rid of those ultra processed foods, get rid of the seed oil, the corn, safflower, you know, soybean oil, all those kind of refined vegetable oils. And then do your best to try to remove as much toxins as possible. So you want to go as organic as possible. You're going to get more nutrients, less toxins.

When you try to go as organic as possible. It can be it can be really hard to go 100% organic, but the more that you can shift in that direction, getting organic or growing your own, or using a local farmer for for meat or whatever it is, the better off you're going to be. And then you kind of want to experiment and find out, okay. Do you do well on lots of plant foods? Do you do better on less plants, plant foods, maybe pushed all the way into the carnivore space. Right. And and see if you feel great, just like, you know, just like Kerry, Kerry has and many of the people he's talked about so you can experiment, none of these things are going to when you take out the processed foods, the food should really be healing your body, right.

And so when you eat, you should see feedback, right? And you should notice, okay, you know, I feel a lot better when I'm doing this. And then none of those diets are necessarily dangerous for you. So you can experiment. You can do, you know, a 2 or 3 week experiment, you know, with the amount of plant based foods and see what you feel better with less right, moderate amount or more right and kind of see and go from there. I think that's that's really key. It's called personalized nutrition rather than dogmatic nutrition.

And I think, you know, that's what we have to we have to come in with that mindset and then experiment from there. And there's all these n equals one right where this individual we'll see great results finding the right diet for themselves. Right. I appreciate everything you're saying there. I love what you said about doctors sometimes just saying, well, it's a fluke or it's genetic. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that lead a lot of people to suffering, myself included, because, for example, I have a close family member, has type two diabetes, and in his head.

This is just something wrong with me. There's just something wrong with the way my body processes carbohydrates, when in reality I believe with every fiber of my body. The truth is, he's just consuming an excessive amount of carbohydrates, perpetuating that problem. But because he's told, oh, we don't know, this is just a fluke. This is just a genetic thing. He continues to try to moderate eating these carbohydrates and things while checking his continuous glucose monitors. I'm sitting there eating like the cleanest human could possibly eat while he's like, well, I can have a little Pepsi, I can have a little birthday cake.

But that whole fluke thing drives me insane. I think it's a dangerous thing about the doctors. I really appreciate your nice words about giving people hope and finding healing. That has been the most incredible thing here. And this isn't me patting myself on the back, but just lately it's been happening more and more. I had a woman come on my channel and she said, Kerry, I found healing through your videos, through your inspiration doing carnivore diet. She had an advanced autoimmune disorder that she was using a cane.

She could barely walk. She said, I owe you my walking. I'm like, what do I even say to that? It's just insane. And then on the flip side, it kind of makes me mad when I take a big step back and think about it, that this YouTuber that does homesteading YouTube videos was the only way this individual was able to find healing. Like what? What does that say about how broken our system is now in this day and age hundred percent? Because the doctors should be seeing that right? We should be seeing that all the time.

And the reality is that most doctors never see that. And that's because, again, they're not addressing root cause factors. And you're giving people hope. And it's something simple as I mean, it's simple, but it's not easy, right. Because lifestyle change in general, you know, you got to have the right mindset. You got to have a growth mindset, committed mindset to make the lifestyle change. But it really is simple. When you actually break it down, you take out kind of the emotions that we have around food and you just kind of simplify it from there, okay?

You just make these swaps and these changes is actually a simple process. Yeah. The way I wrap my brain around it, when people hear that I'm doing carnivore is I just said it's an elimination diet. I'm not going to eat sugar, seed oil, processed garbage for 30 days.

Heart recovery and expanded interviews 27:38

I'm going to see how I feel. Ultimately, that kind of left me with meat. Now, as you said earlier, there's vegetables, there's plants, you eat organic things like that. But for me, I did that before and I was still I was still suffering. People tell me this all the time. They're like, if you would have just gotten rid of the sugar and the junk, you would have healed the same way as you did on carnivore. And maybe that's true for some people, but I got to tell the truth, and that wasn't true for me because I did that.

I did a strict plant based ketogenic diet where I'd have a salad for lunch, salad for dinner, really clean, no processed anything, just a little tiny bit of protein. It seemed like for me, I feel like I was deficient in cholesterol or fatty meat, like my hormones balanced when I got that back in my body. As you said, though, everyone's different. One thing interesting though, like I said, I'm not telling everyone eat a carnivore diet. What I'm advocating for is returning to what is natural. And I think most of us have escaped from what's natural through the foods we're eating.

And I think it's gotten so far away that, sadly, it's kind of sobering. But in many cases, I believe that a lot of these plants and fruits are still bad, are worse for us than we believe. When you take into account the pesticides, the glyphosate, even if you're eating organic, they've done tests. 60% of organic kale, for example, has glyphosate on it. One of the things I've been exploring more recently, and the person that I'm talking to specializes in gut biome gut bacteria. And what she tells me is it's kind of like the ocean.

We understand, like 4% of it. It's kind of like the human brain. We understand very little. But there's some beliefs going around right now that maybe the reason I'm so successful on this proper human diet carnivore diet is due to the gut bacteria gut biome, balancing it back out. And when we're eating these plants and vegetables or other processed foods, cereal, for example, anytime you eat a bowl of cereal, you're ingesting glyphosate. She was teaching me. I didn't realize it until recently. Glyphosate, just an antibiotic.

So when you look at humanity, most of humanity is ingesting a little bit of glyphosate all the time, chronically for a long period of time, which is like taking antibiotics for years and years and decades and decades, wondering what that does to our gut biome, our gut bacteria, which then feeds into our our hormones and our immune system. And it was like Hippocrates said, all disease begins in the gut. I think a lot of that's gut bacteria. But sorry, I'm getting off on a tangent, but that's something we're you're 100% right.

You're 100% right. And really the the mechanism and this is really interesting stuff that I've been studying quite a bit. And the mechanism is that the mitochondria within the intestinal cells becomes poisoned by toxins. And those toxins could be endotoxins coming from bad bacteria and overgrowth of bacteria that shouldn't be there. Of course, there's also toxins coming from glyphosate coming from pesticides, herbicides coming from heavy metals, all different types of things that were being exposed to molds and mycotoxins.

But all of those things and blood sugar imbalances also is a factor that's actually can be really damaging to the body as well. All of that poisons the mitochondria in the intestinal cells. And when the mitochondria are now functioning well, the cells can't produce energy effectively in what we call aerobic respiration. And so they become dependent upon glycolysis. Breakdown of glucose produces quick energy. But it's dirty fuel a lot of oxidative stress in the cell. We get all these senescent mitochondria and senescent cells in the intestines.

And then they can't pull oxygen out of for producing energy. Normally the mitochondria, they are using oxygen and in order to produce cellular energy. And so when they can't do that it leaves extra oxygen in the intestinal lumen and in the intestinal luminaires should be very, very, very low oxygen specifically, as you get further along into the small intestine. Into the large intestine should be very low oxygen. When there's higher oxygen levels, it results in an increase in aerobics. Bacteria and those Arabic bacteria tend to be histamine producers.

They tend to be, you know, like that's where you get salmonella. Actor A lot of these kind of known pathogens are associated with these aerobic bacteria. They should be in very small, very, very minute small quantities when they start to overgrow because of the increased oxygen that's there, they start producing more toxins and it becomes a vicious cycle. And so basically what you did was through blood sugar, stability, getting optimal nutrients, lowering your toxic load, which, you know, you didn't necessarily know you were doing this, you were just changed your diet.

But by doing that and then the blood sugar stability allowed you to fast, which that's a natural mechanism for breaking down the damaged mitochondria, what we call mitos, and then taking the the raw materials and recycling them and producing new, healthy mitochondria and those intestinal cells. Now that mitochondria can suck the oxygen out of the intestinal lumen, which therefore creates a, you know, the environment where those those pathogens can't really they can't thrive, right? And so they die down.

And now that creates diversity in the microbiome because they were stealing nutrients from good microbes. Right. And then you have secondary feeders like Aquaman's which is your your keystone bacteria they call because it's associated with lower rates of all forms of metabolic and chronic inflammatory disease. And it lives in the deep part of the mucosa in the gut. And so now that's able to eat the mucosa produce, it produces something called euro lithium A, which stimulates more mitotic and the mitochondria.

And you get kind of this overall improved diversity in the gut microbiome by doing that. And therefore you're going to get a lot of great positive health benefits from that. And that's what you experience. So that's kind of more of the the physiology of science of that. Yeah it's fascinating stuff. I've been buying books and trying to learn more on this because again, I'm just an individual. I think that's why some people enjoy listening to my content. I always say, I'm not a doctor. You guys got to do your own research and go to the doctors for this stuff.

But the more I'm learning, it is really fascinating. And when you're talking about mitochondria damage, that's what I learned a lot from Professor Seefried, which can lead to cancer, chronic inflammation, systemic inflammation can lead to damage of the mitochondria, which can lead to cancer. That was one of my big epiphanies later on in the documentary. It's like, I believe that most people in the world are chronically inflamed from the foods we're eating that we shouldn't be eating. That's not to say you can't get cancer from other reasons, but I have a feeling this is something I'm exploring more.

I'm talking to Professor Seefried and others about, but it's my gut feeling that most of the cancers in the world nowadays are from the foods that we're eating, because we're chronically inflamed for years and years and decades and decades earlier generations that might have been smoking. But it seems like now, given this day and age, with all the processed foods people are eating more and more, that that seems to be the case. So that's my other reason. I've healed all of these things doing a carnivore diet for myself.

So a lot of people are like, well, why don't you just go back to moderation or something else? I'm looking at the long term. I believe my odds of getting some of these diseases, like cancer or dementia, Alzheimer's, a lot of them seem to be rooted in systemic chronic inflammation for years and years or decades and decades. And I just feel better, too. So I'm like, why would I mess with it? Don't fix what's not broken sort of thing. So I plan to just continue doing this for the rest of my life unless something changes.

Yeah, for sure. And you know, you have the philosophy of like, not necessarily. I'm sure you enjoy what you eat, but your primary focus with food is not pleasure, it's performance. Yes. It's so interesting you said that.

Personalized nutrition and root-cause health 34:48

I think it was maybe 90 days into carnivore. I don't know when it was, but this switch went off where it's like, you know what? I'm just eating for sustenance now, not entertainment. It was almost an addiction or entertainment before. It was always, what are we gonna eat? What are we gonna eat? What's the next meal? Oh, we're going to a birthday party. What are they going to have? Let's go out for dinner. I don't do that anymore. Now, don't get me wrong. I really appreciate really good ribeye, I love it.

It puts a big smile on my face, but it's not an addiction like it used to be. That's the thing that's so incredible with all of this. Because when I started doing carnivore, a lot of family and friends, they're like, here it goes. Another crazy fad diet. He did keto. He did one meal a day. He did Weight Watchers. This one's going to work. But my argument in retrospect to those people are, this is the most natural thing I've ever done. I'm not. It sounds crazy to the outsider. It would have a sound crazy to me when I was addicted to the standard American diet and eating all that variety of stuff, but it's it's the most natural thing.

I don't even think about eating. I sometimes I forget to eat. It's it's not forced in every one of those other diets. Weight Watchers, counting calories, all of that stuff. It always felt forced and temporary, like, I just got to get through this and drop these pounds and then I can go back. That has been the biggest game changer. The word natural has been the biggest changer for me. It feels natural to me. Everything feels so much more natural, and I've heard other people make the argument, which I always think is very interesting and I don't know, everyone's different.

There's a spectrum, like you said, but there's millions of species on this planet. Every species has sort of its natural diet, like a cow eats grass, a koala bear eats eucalyptus. It's only humans that are eating just 60,000 products in the grocery store. I laugh sometimes, no, I used to do it. I used to fill my card up with all those things. You go down the ketchup aisle in the grocery store and there's 65 types of ketchup. Like, do I really need to choose 65 types of ketchup or a thousand different beverages?

And meanwhile, like every other species, they have, like basically there's 1 or 2 things that they eat and every other species is thriving and not having these crazy rates of cancer, obesity. What is it like? 90% of humans walking around have poor metabolic health. People are arthritic. And the thing that got me really passionate for the documentary was hopeless. People with depression and anxiety like myself, but more so now. It's this next generation. I look at my daughters, my wife and I have triplets plus one.

The triplets are 17. They're all eating a proper human diet, most of them carnivore. One of them is kind of keto. They're thriving. But when I look at their peers, they're walking around with Starbucks. It's just full of sugar. And I'm looking at some of these stats. It's heartbreaking. It's like kids getting type two diabetes in their teenage years or whatever. They used to be unheard of. And now they're depression, anxiety, all the learning disorders and health issues that go on into their adult years.

It's just it's I feel like it's way worse of a problem than we realize, because it happens slowly over time and we normalize it. I ate pretty bad growing up to get me to the level of sickness where I just showed you my 15 medications and all of those issues, but this next generation is eating way worse than even I was with this ultra, ultra processed food. Dyes, seed oil, toxins, metals, all of this stuff. I just have a feeling it's going to come down pretty hard pretty quickly. It's just crazy what's going on out there.

Yeah, 100%. Absolutely. And you know, you're talking about the other species. Well, when humans start to domesticate these species and feed them processed foods, they get sick too. In fact, I mean, most dogs, most of the most of the pets out there are on highly processed diets that are not right for their species type, and they end up getting chronic disease. And my wife and I, you know, our family, we just adopted a dog from my mother in law. Right. Unfortunately, she was feeding them, you know, processed foods. Right.

And so he was on anxiety medication for six years, a dog, right. And so we're like, you know, we adopted him because, you know, she's like, you know, I don't really want to take care of him anymore. Can you guys take him? And we have young kids that my my one of my daughters. Just absolutely. Like she makes a pet out of every animal that's around our house. So we're like, okay, I guess we we need to get one, so we'll get a dog. So we're feeding him, you know, meat, right? 100% meat. Right. Natural diet. Right. And we kind of weaned him.

You know, he was on a process diet. So we weaned him. And then and then we went from cooking holy cooking the meat and then gradually into more of a raw meat diet, which is natural, right. Because dogs don't dogs don't make fires. Right. So and he loves the taste of it. He loves it just the same, right? Whether it's raw or cooked. And so, you know, immediately, you know, we got him off the anxiety medication after weaned him down after like two weeks or so. He's doing great. No issues. You know, he used to bark at night when, you know, that was why they started him on the anxiety medication.

He would get scared and bark at night. And so his brain is doing better, right? And he's functioning better. And so it's kind of the same thing. I mean, there's so many domesticated animals now that are on processed diets. So we really need to get people on those species appropriate diets. Like you were talking about finding the right diet for you, you know, following those principles like I talked about, you know, I think that's so key. Let's finish up with like what? You know, you talked about your diet, what are kind of your go to foods.

What are you eating on a regular basis. Yeah. So I try to stick to grass fed grass finished beef. And I do better on beef than pork or chicken. But when I started carnivore I did beef, butter, bacon, eggs, chicken, fish, all animal products. Yeah. And that's basically been it. But then I later evolved to where for probably 3 or 4 months I did they call it lion diet. It's just ruminant animal. For me it was just beef. Any animal with a multi chamber stomach. And the reason for that is because if the animal is ingesting grains or some of these, some things that have glyphosate in it or chemicals, a lot of that is broken down or filtered out by the time that goes through that animals digestive system.

And so some people that have these really severe issues, like Michaela Peterson, she'll only eat ruminant animal meat or lion diet. I don't have that severe of issues, but I did find I felt a lot better just eating meat. So that's kind of been my go to. And my God, you're you're eating your vegetables because the cow eight grass. Right. And that's what made all these powerful nutrients within it. And now you're eating that just in a form that your body can digest and process in a much more effective manner. 100%. Yeah.

So I feel like if I'm eating grass fed grass finish meat, this is kind of a sobering reality, but I feel like that's the cleanest humans can eat. Given the options. I would put fruits and vegetables next, like you mentioned, but I believe there's a caveat there that people need to be aware of with the pesticides and the plant toxins and the glyphosate and the fact that a lot of produce. I've learned this recently we interviewed a woman rancher, Maggie. She's been eating carnivore for 65 years. She's 83 years old. She's flexing on camera.

She's got full blond hair. She's incredible. We filmed her for about a week for our longevity segment. But she she's been ranching forever. And she pointed out that a lot of the soil of the Earth is diminished in terms of minerals and nutrients. And when you plant a seed in there, you're going to get what was in the soil. And so you may get a carrot, it looks like a great healthy carrot because they put fertilizer on there,

Go-to foods, pets, and closing inspiration 41:48

but it has a lot less nutrients than it would have 50 years ago. So when I take all of those things into account and all the different types of meat and animals I can eat, I feel like ruminant meat, grass fed grass finished. I buy it locally from my neighbor. I see the cows. They're out. Grazing in a natural field is the cleanest I can get given the options that we have, especially in terms of healing. My dogs are also carnivore. Just real quick, I want to mention that's awesome that you're doing that with your dogs.

It took me a while to get my dogs on carnivore. They're thriving like they're like puppies again. They're running around outside. I get people that say to me to, they're like, you mean you feed your dogs raw meat and just like you, I'm like, what do you think they would have done in nature? Like caught a squirrel and made a fire and cooked it and they're thriving. And so your dog was on anxiety medicine. I've got a really close friend of the family and their dog right now. I didn't even know this was possible for dogs.

I knew it was for humans. Their dog has diabetes and they give it insulin. I'm like, just feed it meat. Like stop. Literally the dog food is processed. It's almost like I believe cereal is like dog food for humans. It's just ultra processed garbage. You're giving these dogs, it's just give them meat. We have found giving our dogs meat. It's almost the same price or not less expensive. If you get a decent, decent kibble, we give them chicken thighs and we grind them up and that's it. And you get them on sale for like $0.70 a pound or something.

When you price it out, basis the kibble, it's cheaper. And then when you look at they don't need medication they're going to live longer. They're thriving. My dog was limping and he was always like wheezing, almost like he had asthma. It both went away. And he's just he's got like nonstop zoomies just running around right now on meat. And it seems so surprising. But it shouldn't because he's just eating his natural diet. That's what he was intended to eat. When humans eat their natural diet, when animals eat their natural diet, it's amazing what happens.

Most people, I think, are walking around in this brain fog and they can't they can't really see things clearly until they get out of that brain fog, and they just sort of normalize feeling bad their entire lives. No other species feels bad like that. They just feel natural 100%. Kerry I mean, we are made to thrive. We just have to remove the interference, right? And right now it's interfering with us is terrible lifestyle habits, toxins. And, you know, everything that we're doing, particularly the foods that we're eating, water that we're drinking, in some cases, the air that we're breathing hard to control, the air.

You can get air purifier, you can get a water purifier. And that's probably the best thing you can do there. You know, get outside more. Right. But making we focus a lot on nutrition because nutrition is a huge lever, right, when it comes to your overall health. And it's the conscious choices you're making about nobody's forcing things in your mouth, right? You're not a baby. And so it's conscious decisions you're making about what you're putting in your body on a regular basis. But you know what?

All of us, when we're making lifestyle changes, we need inspiration. And that's what's great about your movie. So you can check out Kerry's movie Healing humanity.movie is the best website, and it's called Healing Humanity The Power of a Proper Human Diet. You'll follow all those stories and really be inspired. So a lot of the stuff we talked about is common sense. And like I said, it's it's really simple, but it's not easy if you're accustomed to, you know, a certain way of life, if you got family members and other social pressures.

And that's where watching a movie like this really help inspire you and give you the momentum, right? And give you the kind of the emotional charge to really make these changes and see the physiological changes, the healing results in your own life. Any last words of inspiration for us here? Kerry? I think the last thing I'll say is just keep it simple. You see all of these doctors online and doing so much great work like you. And I think for the individual like myself, sometimes it can be overwhelming when we're talking about metabolism, mitochondria, the simplest thing that I have learned, and it's so simple, is just return to what is natural.

Are you doing? What are you doing that is natural? What are you doing that is unnatural? The further away you get from natural to sicker you get. And the best way you can do that is through your nutrition and diet, but also getting exercise, getting fresh air, getting sunshine, getting out there, not just staring at a screen all day. It's amazing what will happen to your health when you return to what is natural. Awesome. Thanks so much, Kerry. Appreciate all the great work you're doing. Looking forward to seeing this documentary. Be blessed.

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.