So, What The Heck Are You Supposed To Eat? (What to eat or avoid, and the most commonly asked questions) – Nutrition Crash Course Part 7 of 7

So, What The Heck Are You Supposed To Eat? (What to eat or avoid, and the most commonly asked questions) – Nutrition Crash Course Part 7 of 7

This is Part 7 of a 7 Part Nutrition Series. You can find the other parts here:

• Part 1: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/02/the-big-3
• Part 2: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/02/nutrition-101
• Part 3: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/03/fats
• Part 4: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/03/carbs
• Part 5: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/05/cholesterol
• Part 6: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/07/gut-health
• Part 7: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/07/what-to-eat

After all of this discussion, we’ve finally come to your favorite part – the tangible, take home actions for what you need to buy next time you go to the grocery store! Before I jump into these lists, the important thing to keep in mind is that there are no universal rules. What works for me might not necessarily be best for you. Plus, how well you can stick to any given dietary advice is the biggest factor. Just because I’ve listed something doesn’t mean you haveto eat it.

After everything we’ve learned in this series so far, my hope is for you to understand that nutrition is at the root cause of disease and healing. Modern tech and marketing can make this seem confusing, but it doesn’t have to be. It really is simple, just stick to 90% of more of your food choices from meat, fruit, and some vegetables (all outlined below) and you’ll be fine.  The following lists will help you confidently make decisions that best support your health and performance goals.

Best Proteins to Eat: Listed in order of most bioavailable and nutrient dense to least.

• Ruminant Meat – Beef, Bison, Buffalo, Elk, Goat, Venison, and other wild game
  • Always choose Grass Finished when possible. (Animals spend most of their life eating grass, choosing grass finished meat ensures that they finish their life that way instead of grains.) 
  • Choose fattier cuts of meat for more nutrients and vitamins.
  • Bone-In steaks and ground meat provide a higher level of collagen and connective tissue.
• Fish (Salmon, Mackerel, Herring, Anchovies, Sardines, and Cod are best), Mollusks/other seafood.
  • Always choose wild caught when possible. 
  • Find locally sourced fish that have been sustainably harvested.
  • Fattier fish and seafood provide more nutrients and vitamins.
• Eggs and Dairy (Cheese, Greek Yogurt, Milk, and Cream) 
  • Always choose pasture raised eggs – much higher nutrient density. Locally sourced is best.
  • Many people don’t tolerate dairy. Foods like Greek yogurt and cheese are lower in lactose and are generally fine. Choose full fat versions from grass fed, organic cows, when possible.
  • If you tolerate milk, Grass fed milk is superior, choose A2 protein milk when possible. 
• Pork and Poultry (Chicken and Turkey)
  • Personally, I’m not a fan of poultry because it doesn’t have enough fat.
  • Since these are monogastric animals (one stomach) the fat they do have comes from the foods they eat. This tends to be corn and soy which I avoid as much as possible.
  • If you can find well raised, forage fed, corn and soy free pork and poultry, then go for it!
• Protein Powders and Supplements (Whey, Casein, Egg, Pea, Rice, and Hemp)
  • While these can help, they are much less beneficial than protein from whole food sources.
• Plant Sources – Beans, Lentils, Tempeh, Edamame, etc.
  • While they provide some protein, it’s often hard to get enough without prohibitive volume.
  • I personally stay as far away from soy, soy products, and soybean oil as possible.
  • Beans and Legumes are a high FODMAP food and can lead to gas and bloating in excess.

Best Fats to Eat: Listed in order of most bioavailable and energy dense to least.

• Fattier Cuts of Ruminant Meat
  • Ribeye, T-Bones, New York Strip Steaks, Sirloin Cap Roasts, Chuck Roast, Brisket, and Ribs.
  • Ground meat is a great choice – 80/20 is the best fat/protein ratio.
• Fattier Fish 
  • Salmon, Cod, Herring, Anchovies, Mackerel, and Sardines are best
  • Fish oil, salmon roe, krill oil, and cod liver oil are all good Omega 3 Supplements
• Eggs and Dairy
  • Eat the whole egg – most of the nutrients and vitamins are stored in the yolk.
  • Choose full fat dairy if you tolerate it. Grass fed, organic, and pasture raised dairy is best.
• Animal Based Fats
  • Butter, Tallow (Rendered Beef Fat), Ghee (Clarified butter), Lard (Rendered Pork Fat)
  • Choose organic, grass fed, pasture raised, and Corn/soy free sources.
• Plant Based Fats 
  • Avocado, Olives, Coconuts and their oils are fine. These are all fruit.
  • Nuts and seeds in moderation. Note that Peanuts are not actually nuts – they are legumes.
  • ABSOLUTELY NO VEGETABLE AND SEED OILS. (More on this later)
• Fattier Cuts of Pork and Poultry
  • Poultry has little fat – eat the darker meat when available.
  • Pasture raised, forage fed, corn/soy free is ideal. Limit conventionally raised pork/poultry.

Best Carbohydrates to Eat: Listed in order of most bioavailable and energy dense to least.

• Fruits – Berries, Squash, Zucchini, Coconut, Olives, Avocados, Apples, Bananas, Pineapple, etc.
  • Choose organic, locally harvested, in-season fruits that have vine ripened.
  • Don’t eat the seeds! Swallow whole or spit them out.
• Honey – Always choose locally sourced honey for antibody and allergy benefits.
  • Bees partially ferment and leave digestive enzymes in honey in the comb, which impacts the digestion making a much smaller insulin spike.
• Fermented Foods – Kimchi, Sauerkraut, Pickles, Probiotic Yogurt, Kefir, etc.
  • The fermenting process reduces or eliminates the natural plant toxins.
  • This provides a good source of digestive bacteria support.
• Tubers – Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Carrots, Turnips, and Radishes
  • I prefer to pressure cook these and remove the peeling.
  • Choose organic, locally harvested, in-season tubers when possible.
• Vegetables – Broccoli, Green Beans, Mushrooms, Cauliflower, Leafy Greens
  • Choose organic, locally harvested, in-season vegetables when possible
  • Some vegetables can cause digestive problems, bloating and gas.
• Grains – White rice, Organic Oatmeal, Cream of Rice
  • I personally avoid grains. White rice is fine when pressure cooked, but other variants of rice/grains are harder to digest and can cause inflammation in the gut.
  • The big 4 to avoid are corn, wheat, soy, and processed sugars. (More on that later)

Superfoods: These are foods that don’t technically fill a macro but are incredibly nutrient dense.

• Organ Meat – Liver, Kidney, Heart, Tongue, Thymus, Spleen, Brain, Sweetbreads
  • Organs from animals might seem gross but they are irreplaceable for optimum health.
  • Liver and Kidney are hands down. the most nutrient dense food available. Vitamin B12, Vitamin A, Riboflavin, Folate, Iron, Copper, Choline… I eat 1-2 ounces of these daily.
  • If you’re not ready to take the plunge, you can order desiccated (dried out) organ supplements. My recommended brand is Heart and Soil.
• Salmon Roe – Wild caught fish eggs, high in Omega 3 Fatty Acids. 
  • The eggs have the highest density of Omega 3’s with the least heavy metal buildup.
  • Eating the whole fish in smaller fish (sardines and anchovies) is great for calcium.
• Collagen/Connective Tissue – Bone-In meats, Whole Fish, Bone Broths, Egg Whites, Spirulina
  • These are hugely important for repairing skin, ligaments, bone, and connective tissue.
  • Zinc, copper, and vitamin C are required for collagen synthesis and production. If you’re not healing/recovering from nagging pains/injuries, poor nutrition is likely the root cause.
  • Though not as beneficial as real food sources, collagen peptide supplements do help.
• Bone Marrow – The tissue in the long bones of larger animals
  • Good source of fat, collagen, stem cells, and other key nutrients. 

Foods to Avoid: Listed in order of most problematic and toxic.

• Vegetable and Seed Oils – Soybean, Canola, Sunflower, Vegetable, Peanut, Rapeseed, Corn…
  • These are all high in Polyunsaturated Omega 6 Fatty Acids. Those Omega 6’s are essential, our consumption of them has skyrocketed. Vegetable/Seed oils are horrible for you.
  • Watch out for foods cooked in these oils like chips, fried foods, nuts, seeds, and others.
  • Choose Butter, Ghee, and Tallow instead. Olive oil, Avocado oil, and Coconut oil are acceptable but do not cook well at high heats. (These are fruits, not vegetables)
• Transaturated Fats – Vegetable shortening, margarine, hydrogenated oils, bakery products, icings…
  • These were used as a substitute for saturated fats to make food more shelf stable. 
  • Avoid these like the plague. They aren’t safe for human consumption.
• The Big 4 – Corn, Soy, Wheat (bread), and Processed Sugars
  • These are problematic in the huge quantities we consume now. These are not ancestrally consistent foods and were introduced within the last few thousand years.
  • Much of these are pesticide laden, Genetically Modified, and processed to the point of being highly toxic and problematic for humans – especially gluten sensitive individuals.
  • Additionally, these foods have little to no nutritional value. You do not need them.
• Plant Based Meats/”Alternative” Meats – Impossible burgers, Beyond Meat, “Chick’n”…
  • These “alternatives” are created in a lab with a long list of ingredients that include soy, vegetable oils, sugars, and other binders.
  • Contrary to popular marketing, these are not “better for the environment”. 
  • If you don’t want to eat meat, don’t eat meat. 
• Processed Meats – Salami, Pepperoni, Bacon, Ham, Sandwich meats, Hot Dogs, Chicken Nuggets…
  • High amounts of nitrates and nitrites, food additives, and poor quality meat make these problematic. Note that in their less processed form, many of these are fine to consume.
  • More often than not, these foods are cheap renditions of smashed together leftovers. For example, chicken nuggets that are basically chicken pulp wrapped in breading are very different than actual strips of chicken meat. Same with sausages and hot dogs.
• High FODMAP/Toxic Vegetables – Legumes, grains, nightshades, and some cruciferous vegetables.
  • This is individual, but it’s important to note that many people have trouble digesting plants. For example, those with thyroid issues will want to avoid Brassica Cruciferous vegetables.
  • Excess grains in the form of legumes, wheat, seeds, and nuts can cause digestive issues, emotional and mental dysfunction, poor tooth and bone health, and inflammation.
  • Peanuts are not actually nuts; they are legumes. Choose almonds/almond butter instead.

Some Frequently Asked Questions About Animal Based Eating

After making it this far through the series, you might have a few questions. I know I did when I was getting through this stuff the first time. Let’s cover some of the basics…

You want me to eat organs?!? I know this one is a bit tough to swallow (pun intended). Organs? Where do you even buy them? Just so you know that I’m not crazy, I did not grow up eating any of these things. The furthest I strayed into the “crunchy bits” was bone in meats. But just because something isn’t part of your normal cuisine or culture, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. And the simple fact is that animal organs are the most nutrient dense foods available, hands down. You will not find another food that packs the vitamins, minerals, and bioavailability, gram for gram, as liver, kidney, heart, and spleen.

But I’m sure that logical approach isn’t enough to sway your taste buds right now. We can tackle it from a different angle. The Chinese medicine philosophy puts it this way – For healthy muscles, eat muscles. For healthy organs, eat organs. For healthy skin, bones, and connective tissue, eat skin, bones, and connective tissue. It’s simple but consider this – more often than not we have big muscles while our organs, joints, and skin are what fail us. Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but I think that the difference in the foods we eat is quite telling. When we avoid foods that are rich in glycine (an amino acid that’s crucial for protein and connective tissue) like organs, bone broths, connective tissue, and collagen, we end up not getting the nutrition that our bodies need to thrive and rebuild.

But isn’t that what the plants are for? Well, kind of. While we can get some nutrients from plant foods, the reality is that most of the vitamins and minerals aren’t natively available for animals. You can think of it like the difference between Windows and Apple. They both have software ecosystems that do similar things, but Apple programs don’t run smoothly on Windows computers and vice versa. They aren’t designed with the other system’s hardware in mind. The same thing happens with plant nutrients and animal bodies. Again, we have evolved some capacity to convert plant variations of vitamins and minerals for our use, but the efficiency is poor. Go look at the Omega 3 conversion of ALA (plant version) to EPA (animal version) or the Vitamin A conversion of Carotenoids (plant version) to Retinols (animal version) for an example.

Of course, you don’t have to eat organs to achieve this, but if you really care about maximizing your body’s health and capacity, it’s well worth your while. You can pick up some organs from a local butcher or farmer’s market, and there is an ever-expanding availability online. As we spoke on earlier, the point of eating is to get required nutrients into your body. The single best way to do that is to use animal organs as your “multivitamin”. (If you’re still not able to get over the hump mentally, check out desiccated organ supplements – they’re dried out organs put into capsules. More on that later.)

Don’t you need a lot of fiber? This is the primary concern I hear when discussing an animal-based eating approach. After all, fiber has been the poster child of health, satiety, and regular bowel movements for decades now. The reasoning for this comes down to three main points – avoiding illness (mainly diverticulitis), supporting the gut microbiome, and keeping you regular. Before I touch on those topics, I’m not saying that fiber is inherently bad. So, if you like Metamucil in your morning drink, then go right ahead. But it’s important to know that fiber doesn’t come without downsides.

First, preventing illness. Fiber by its very nature is insoluble. Meaning that we can’t actually use it. (There are some forms of soluble fiber, but that refers to the bacteria’s capacity to digest it. Not ours.) The original recommendation for increasing fiber was based on observational studies showing that rates of metabolic disease were increasing amongst people who ate a “low fiber” diet. In the 1900’s, the mainstream production of cereals, grains, and corn was fueling the majority of the western diet. Obesity and metabolic disease were on the rise and we needed a solution. “Eat more fiber” became the panacea based off of a famous study done by fiber enthusiast Dennis Burkitt who concluded that the reason hunter/gatherer tribes in Africa had such low incidence of disease was their seemingly high fiber diets. (Of course, it couldn’t be their lifestyle, physical activity, and animal-based diet, could it?)

But with money to be made by large monocropping food conglomerates, fiber became the main solution to this problem. While it does help with satiety, provide some fuel for gut bacteria, and give substance to bowel movements, it doesn’t come without a cost. At best it’s a symptom treatment for poor dietary choices, and at worst, it’s actually causing more issues for your digestion. Fiber isn’t a no-cost passenger in your GI tract. The body actually loses valuable minerals like magnesium in an effort to move it, the bacteria that digest it produce gas and bloating, and the insoluble fiber is simply a hard substance to pass through your body.

The body can use amino acids and ketones as fuel for the gut bacteria and the evidence to support that fiber is directly related to decreasing rates of diverticulitis is underwhelming. But doesn’t It at least help you poop? Only if you like big bowel movements. Studies consistently show either mixed or negative results in fiber’s ability to decrease constipation and IBS/Chron’s. In fact, the removal of all fiber is the only thing proven to eliminate these issues. Think of it this way – fiber is not food. We can’t digest it, so if it wasn’t part of an edible food (like fruit) why would we have wasted time eating it?

Of course, this is just a brief overview. Fiber is important if you still want to continue eating junk food every day on the typical western diet. But if you actually make the changes to a nutrient dense, whole food pattern of eating, you don’t need to go out of your way to get it. You might poop less often, but that’s simply because you’ve stopped eating a bunch of junk that your body can’t digest. Your body is great at recycling things, so anytime you have a large bowel movement, you’ve eaten a bunch of stuff that’s just passing through. 

But don’t I need carbs for energy? If you’re an athlete, carbs can be useful as fuel around your training. If you’re sitting at a desk all day, then no. The issue is that if you’ve eaten a moderate or high carb meal every 4-6 hours for the last few decades of your life, your body has gotten used to it. It might take a few days or weeks to become “fat adapted”, which means that you’re good at using your body’s endogenous fat stores or fat in your diet for fuel, but once you’ve made that transition carbs become optional. 

Does that mean you can’t have carbs anymore? Of course not! It just means that you’ll be best served by eating your carbs intentionally around when you’re actually active. There is nothing inherently wrong with a high carb diet, it just becomes hard to get enough fat for the fat-soluble vitamins in each day. (Remember the meal proportion break down in section 4?). The main point is that your body is incredibly resilient and can function off of ketones and stored fat in times of low calories and low carbohydrates. Historically speaking, we would have experienced periods of fasting fairly frequently and our ancestors who survived were able to thrive in these conditions. Besides, in most places in the world carbs are available seasonally at best, so humans would have had to function without these constantly.

The shakiness, fatigue, and growling stomach you feel after not eating for 6 hours isn’t actual hunger. It’s likely dehydration, low blood sugar, and gastric emptying. It’s not good to be constantly fed. Think of it this way, if you’ve got 5 pounds of fat on your body, you have 17,500 calories sitting there, waiting to be used! You’re not going to starve, I promise. Remember, there are essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, but no such thing as essential carbs! Carbs and fats are not found in the same foods, so the idea that we would have had a “balanced” plate is a modern invention. The more likely scenario would have been a high fat/high protein diet most of the year, with high protein/high carb diet on occasion.

Won’t eating a bunch of meat give me cancer? I’m sure you’ve heard this one before. For a claim as ubiquitous as this you’d assume that there is a landslide of positively correlating studies to support it. Strangely, there aren’t. At best, there are observational studies that point to a possible relationship between meat consumption and increased risk of cancer, but these all suffer from the same bias error in grouping multiple types of meat together. Essentially, these surveys ask broad questions like “In the last year, how many times each week did you eat meat?” Of course, I can hardly remember what I ate last week, let alone last year. But more specifically, there is no differentiation between the cheap Big Mac you had with a soda, fries, and ice cream from a grass finished ribeye steak. You can see the problem.

If we look at population data, you’d expect to see a clear distinction between countries who eat meat and those that didn’t. Again, not the case. Individuals in Hong Kong, which has the world’s longest life expectancy, eat more meat per capita than anywhere else. India, on the other hand, eats the second lowest level of meat per capita and ranks in the bottom 40% of the life expectancy chart. But before you say it, I know this is just one data point – you can’t draw a conclusion. 

What about the “Blue Zones”? Ah, the Blue Zones. These magical places where people live longer than average. Put simply, this theory is a cherry picked and misleading representation of the reality that the choices you make impact how long you live. Not unlike Ancel Key’s 7 country study where he pulled data from hand-picked countries (like Greece that was observing Lent at the time) in an attempt to support his claim that cholesterol consumption led to cardiovascular disease, the Blue Zone fallacy tries to boil longevity down to simply not eating meat. But if you actually look at these locations, they all eat meat. More importantly, they all have a strong emphasis on daily activity, community, and making better lifestyle choices like not smoking or drinking alcohol. It makes a difference!

The reality is that there are no randomized, double-blind trials that show any correlation between meat consumption and cancer. The best that the World Health Organization can come up with is a weak positive that doesn’t even meet their own criteria for statistically significant. And while I’m not advocating eating a bunch of cheap, processed meats like cold cuts, you might find it interesting to know that vegetables and fruits have much higher levels of nitrites than processed meats do. And while these naturally occur in the plants you eat, somehow, they cause cancer when added to meat? Obviously, the jury is still out on that one, simply pointing to the fact that the “slam-dunk” case of meat and cancer isn’t so clear.

The issue with this claim is the same with all other nutrition claims. It’s almost impossible to truly know. First, everyone responds to food differently based on their genetics and epigenetics. Second, no one eats food in isolation, there is always a mixture of different red herrings that can cause problems. Remember the Big Mac with fries cooked in vegetable oil, a soda, and ice cream sundae for dessert? Which of those is the actual problem? Or is it all of them together? And finally, the studies we do have use absolute life span as the metric for success. But you and I both know that living to 100 isn’t great if you spent your last 20 years in a wheelchair suffering from dementia. 

I’ll leave you with the piece that I find most compelling: If we evolved over millions of years eating meat as our primary energy source, cooking it and charring it over fire for a significant portion of that, how then does that same food become inherently bad for us? And no, humans didn’t have a significantly shortened lifespan “back in the day”. That data is severely skewed by infant mortality and death during childbirth that pulls the average lifespan down. I’m fairly certain that the invention of the C-section and hand washing has little to do with what these people were eating (unless you want to thank fat and meat for expanding the human brain!).

But isn’t eating meat bad for the environment? This is obviously a big topic, but the short answer is that bad farming practices (both Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s) and monocrop agriculture) are horrible for the environment at multiple levels. To be clear, CAFO’s are inexcusable. The mistreatment of animals shoved into confined spaces without access to their natural food and environment leads to excessive rates of sick animals, antibiotic treatment, and toxic waste production. But that doesn’t mean that animal husbandry or farming animals for food in general is a bad practice.

If I juxtaposed massive year-round monocrop agricultural practices for corn, soy, and wheat to your local farmer that brings in-season, organic produce to the market, you’d obviously know the difference. This is no different than the distinction between CAFO’s and well raised, grass finished, beef (or pastured chickens and pigs). What gets thrown away as an oversimplification, “eating meat is bad for the environment”, actually misses a crucial point. You can’t have healthy soil without animals!

Animals get blamed for releasing carbon into the atmosphere through methane gas as a byproduct of their waste. Methane gas is about 30 times warmer than Carbon Dioxide, so this leads people to worry more about sources of release. But this fearmongering misses two big things. First, the EPA reports that beef production accounts for less than 2 percent of total US greenhouse gas emissions, and second, cows actually put carbon back into the soil when raised properly. Somehow, these grazing herbivores numbered in the millions (if not billions) for hundreds of thousands of years without causing acute global warming, but now it’s their fault? Couldn’t possibly be the petrochemical industry, of course…

If you’re really so concerned about the environment, ride a bike to work, stop drinking out of plastic water bottles, and cancel your destination vacation that requires a six-hour flight. You see, it’s not as simple of a solution as the mainstream narrative would lead you to believe. The problem with this reductionist thinking is that it paints an incomplete narrative by juxtaposing meat production as bad with vegetable production as good. But if you don’t have animals to eat, you inevitably end up consuming more grains and vegetables. 

The issue is that these are low calorie foods, requiring a lot of specific space for farming, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to protect the crops, and clean water for irrigation. Fun fact, over 70% of the world’s freshwater withdrawal goes towards crops. Plus, to support the growing population, even more forests would need to be cut down to pave the way for monocrop farmland since only 30% of the world’s surface is arable (and of that, most of the farmland is continually being degraded as the topsoil loses nutrients over years of monocropping, leaving only a few decades of harvestable soil). 

Compare that to the fact that cattle are raised on non-arable land (land that isn’t able to be farmed), use green water (natural rain fall or non-potable water) for up to 98% of their consumption, and are essential for undoing the desertification of otherwise ruined landscapes. Large herds are needed to graze, trample dead grass, dung the ground, and urinate before moving to fresh terrain. This process is essential for maintaining the topsoil health and keeping these grass species alive. Without this, the topsoil loses nutrients, grasslands dry up, and desertification happens.

The most frustrating part is that none of this is necessary. Most animals are raised on grassland for the first 60-70% of their life before being sent to a CAFO. We have the space and infrastructure to make the simple switch to this sustainable, regenerative agriculture practice that would quite literally save the planet. But people want cheap food and large monopolies respond to the dollar. You can’t have a dollar menu at McDonald’s without these practices. 

What’s worse is that these large meat producing companies buy out time at the slaughterhouses to prevent smaller farms from being able to process their meat. To put this into perspective, 85% of all meat production in the US comes from just four companies. The demand for sustainably raised, free range meats is steadily rising, but the availability of slaughterhouses has dropped by almost 90% in the last 50 years – mostly due to consolidation by regulation that favors these large companies.

This drives up the prices of high-quality meats and puts a strain on the low profit margins of those doing it right. As a result, we see a further shift toward unsustainable CAFO practices that harm the environment and are ethically untenable which drives the public discourse into a black and white paradigm of “eating meat is bad”. What gets lost in the middle is that eating animals is what made us human and that there is no way for a reversal of climate change without raising livestock.

If you’re interested in this topic, I highly encourage you to read “Sacred Cow” by Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf. It’s potentially one of the most important discussions we can have today, with so much on the line and runaway climate change becoming an ever-growing possibility. And though I could go on for pages, suffice it to say that eating meat isn’t bad for the climate. In fact, sourcing your meat from local farmers who are doing it right might just be one of the best things you can do for the environment. 

So you’re saying I can get everything I need from animal foods? What about calcium, minerals, and other vitamins? I’ll put it this way – supplements are simply components of the foods we eat that provide specific quantities of the nutrients required for health. Much of the supplement industry advertises the untruth that supplements will somehow elevate your capacity and performance. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work like that. While certain drugs can provide this type of “high”, they always come at a cost. Supplements are only necessary when your diet and lifestyle isn’t cutting it.

The obvious fix would be to change what you eat. Spoiler alert, pasta, pop tarts, and cookies don’t have much in the way of vitamins and minerals. But if you’re not willing to make changes then supplements can help. What they won’t do is offset the dis-health and disease brought on by these fake foods. But yes, you can absolutely get all of the nutrients you need from an entirely animal based diet. You just have to expand your horizon. Meaning bone broths, organ meats, and high-quality meat.

Remember that the point of food is three-fold: a vehicle for nutrients, calories, and to some extent, enjoyment. If what you’re eating isn’t meeting your nutrient needs, then you’d be best served by making a change. And if nothing else sticks out to you after making it this far, what you eat determines how you look, feel, and live. Odds are that if it’s not providing a net positive, it’s likely negatively impacting your health, body composition, and longevity.

Again, I’m not dogmatic about what you eat – it’s your life! Fruits and vegetables can be a great supplement as well. At the end of the day, it comes back to the simple guideline of eating 90% of your calories from meat, fruit, and some vegetables. If you do that, you’re good. If you want to supplement on top of that to be safe, go for it. But understand that the sourcing of the supplements matters. Remember that there is a difference between plant nutrients and animal nutrients, not all supplements are created or converted equally. As is usually the case, you get what you pay for.

While there are certainly more topics that could be discussed here (like the ethics of eating animals), these are the main sticking points that can be objectively assessed. I expect you to disagree, fact-check, and make your own decisions. My hope is that you can use this information and my years of experience as a guidepost on your path to achieving your best health and capacity.