← Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark
Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark
Why You Should Peel Potatoes & Avoid Green Ones + Raw Milk Myths | Dr. Bill Schindler, PhD
01:49:51
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- [00:00]
A
What is going on with potatoes and french fries that would blow our minds.
- [00:04]
B
Every one of us has seen it you'd get a little bit of green on the outside of the potato you've.
- [00:07]
A
Seen it sometimes you see that on.
- [00:08]
B
Your lay's chips don't ever eat those you should never eat the green part of a potato whether it's in a lay's chip or on your counter it's an indicator that that potato is loaded with more toxins than it ever had before if you see any green on the outside of your potato then get rid of it most of the toxins in a potato are in the skin most of the heirloom varieties of potatoes are so incredibly poisonous they would kill you or land you in the hospital if you ate them.
- [00:55]
A
What do tribal blood drinking rituals and fake sourdough all have in common according to doctor bill schindler they're keys to understanding just how far we've strayed from the way humans were meant to eat in this episode i sit down with the food archaeologist anthropologist chef and author of eat like a human who has built his career in literal ovens on reclaiming ancestral food wisdom whether that means fermenting brains or talking about how corn should be made or how you should never and i mean never eat a green potato chip we talk about why your sourdough might be making you bloated how processed corn is quietly making your brain feel crazy if it's the gluten or if it's the conventional flour and how to survive if you ever find yourself lost in the woods this episode literally has everything if you've ever felt like something is off with our food system but didn't know where to start this conversation will blow it wide open a huge thank you to wirefi making this interview possible and hosting us while my home studio is out of commission because aliens literally came last night and held a seance on my set it's crazy there's blood everywhere anyways watch this episode on the real alex clark youtube channel or culture apothecary on spotify pause real quick do two very brief things join the cuteservatives facebook group and leave us a five star review on spotify or apple please welcome anthropologist archaeologist author of eat like a human and owner of modern stone age kitchen doctor bill schindler to culture apothecary is most sourdough bread a lie like is most sourdough bread at the grocery store basically just wonder bread one.
- [02:31]
B
Hundred percent actually almost every loaf at the grocery store is a lie and this is how you tell so the difference between sourdough bread and all the other breads available commercially now is that sourdough bread has a combination of yeast and bacteria fermentation thousands trillions of bacteria and yeast are responsible for transforming that wet dough into the final loaf of bread now what's cool about sourdough is the bacteria and yeast fermentation just happen naturally together in nature so all sourdough bread from the earliest loaf ever found eight thousand six hundred years ago in turkey until the mid eighteen hundreds every loaf of bread was sourdough by default because you had both those fermentations the yeast fermentation creates alcohol and carbon dioxide in bread we don't care about the alcohol the carbon dioxide makes the bread rise and the bacteria is responsible for all the real things that make it bread make it nourishing make it safe make the nutrients available to our bodies destroy the gluten and turn it into something our bodies can handle better it's responsible for the flavor it's responsible for the aroma it's responsible for the texture all of it is the bacteria and that was always there in thousands of years worth of bread making but when louis pastor in the mid eighteen hundreds separated took yeast and artificially separated it from the bacteria that it was living alongside of and then kept that yeast going in a lab we now have things like packets of fleischman yeast in the grocery store and we for the first time ever can leaven bread without the bacteria fermentation so we get none of the health benefits none of the flavor benefits none of all those wonderful things a sourdough bread is and so in the grocery store almost every loaf of bread is just a yeasted loaf of bread made commercially because it's very easy to standardize that and put it do it on a commercial level you don't have to pay as much attention.
- [04:08]
A
To it you're saying even the organic sourdough bread that has like three ingredients because sometimes you can find that that.
- [04:16]
B
It'S basically worthless no if it has three ingredients it's sourdough bread this is this is how you tell real sourdough bread bakers hate the term sourdough because what they're producing is anything but just sour right it's so many other wonderful things about their bread the term sourdough turns the general public off people that don't know good sourdough bread they hear i don't want my bread to be sour so i don't want sourdough we get it all the time in our bakery the modern industrial food system has taken this misconception that sourdough bread is sour created fake bread and gives the public what they're expecting a sour yeasted loaf of bread so what they're doing is they're just taking flour water salt and a whole bunch of emulsifiers and dough conditioners and all the other nonsense and adding something sour to it so acetic acid which is vinegar lactic acid or citric acid and they're just making a yeasted bread that tastes sour because we're expecting that wrongly putting it in a paper bag jacking up the price putting in the deli section as opposed to over by the wonder bread and expecting and having us pay more for literally the same exact bread so the thing to do when you turn over a package of sourdough bread if that's what you're looking for if it says acetic acid or vinegar which is the same thing or citric acid or lactic acid it's probably not sourdough because there's no reason to add those things whoa okay the hard part is if it says yeast there are some sourdough bakers that do add yeast we don't at our bakery and really hardcore sourdough people don't but there's a lot of sourdough bakers that will also add a little bit of commercial yeast in addition to the wild bacteria and yeast that are already in the bread because of the sourdough mother but because it helps make it rise a little bit more it's a little bit more predictable and from a health perspective i don't have a problem with that because you're still getting that bacterial fermentation all the health benefits of that but it is a red flag if it says yeast on the back of it there's a good chance it's not sourdough but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not but if it has that fake sour addition to it it probably isn't sourdough the two best ways to get real genuine sourdough bread is make it yourself which is incredibly easy or go to somewhere where you can actually talk to the baker you know you actually a real sourdough bread bakery not the big grocery store the big baker and talk to the baker which is how we should get our.
- [06:28]
A
Food anyhow really well of course yeah know your farmer know your rancher know your baker all of those things your local farmer's market go there for your produce okay so i've talked a lot about raw milk on this show i've never had a guest who's drank blood no no i haven't had that so you are the first what are some of the wildest things you've eaten for.
- [06:50]
B
Health that may be one of the wildest so we were in we were with sambura warriors in kenya the whole family i wanted to experience this very ancient practice that the samburu warriors and the maasai they're nomadic pastoralists they don't farm any plants they're nomadic pastorists they have animals typically cattle and they follow them around so they're semi nomadic during the during the wet season when there's a lot of good plants for the animals to eat they stay put and during the dry season when the vegetation has dried up so much that the animals have to eat a massive amount of vegetable plants in order to nourish themselves they just start moving and they just the men and the boys follow the animals for half the year and their mainstay of their diet is blood and milk blood and milk do they.
- [07:36]
A
Mix it together yeah so i'll tell.
- [07:39]
B
You this is exactly how it happened well it took us forever we have a friend who's a cheese maker in nairobi and and we went and met her and then we flew out and finally got to this tribe that we were gonna be with it was it was a long trip but worth every second and when we got up there they took a cow and they brought it over and they tied a rope around its neck and this is the same as if you were gonna give blood and they put the rubber band around your arm you know before your veins get big so they put this rope around its neck and tied it tight and the jugular got huge and they walked up with this little tiny bow and arrow and the arrow had a little met but it was only like a quarter inch maybe a half inch long and it was wrapped with a bunch of strings that it only went in about a half an inch and popped out so it's a little tiny bow and arrow and they shot this cow right in the jugular like this and the arrow goes in and pops out and it literally there's blood coming out like a fountain like a water fountain and they had this gourd and they caught about a liter of blood from the cow meanwhile our youngest daughter thought they killed the cow so she's over super upset because it did it was pretty gruesome and then as soon as they got about a liter of this blood they took the rope off the neck threw some dirt up in the wound the cow never flinched like didn't even feel it we feel more taking blood for you know giving blood at a blood bank than what happened with this cow cow walks away like nothing happened they had a liter of blood they went over and milked another cow fresh about a liter of fresh milk raw milk and then the first thing they did with the blood was they picked up a stick right off the ground and stirred it until it coagulated around the stick and they picked it up and it looked like a bloody meat lollipop it was this weird looking thing and they fed it to a dog and then they went back and forth to the milk and the blood and mixed it together and then we just drank it and it seemed so different than anything we've ever.
- [09:27]
A
Done before well sure i mean that's an understatement but i mean i want your honest truth doctor bill was it disgusting or did it actually taste good i mean honestly it depends on who.
- [09:36]
B
In your family you ask you ask me i thought it was absolutely delicious now it was in context if i put that on the table here in the st studio like you wouldn't want.
- [09:45]
A
To drink it yeah maybe the atmosphere.
- [09:47]
B
The atmosphere the context you know and it was such a culturally rich thing for they were so proud to share this with us right it's all those things brought us into this place where everybody in my family but our youngest had it i thought it tasted like a chocolatey irony salty milkshake which sounds disgusting but it was people listening to this i really want to describe it it felt satiating like it felt nourishing like you put this in your body and you felt like oh my gosh my body is getting everything it needs right this very moment wow and they drink it every single day twice a day that's what they drink every day and that's the only thing that they have for the dry season that's it nothing else in their diet and i will tell you they from a visual perspective kind of a weston price sort of you know going and seeing some traditional group and talking about their broad smiles or whatever they were the healthiest people i've seen we've been all over the world the healthiest people i've ever seen in my life and all they do is drink raw milk and blood.
- [10:42]
A
So they're not even eating meat at.
- [10:44]
B
First certain times they will but but but they're and and again people listening to this our idea of blood we we equate it to death but they look at blood the way we look at milk it's a renewable resource that cow gave less blood percentage to their body than we give at a blood bank right they're not they'll tap that cow again for the blood in two.
- [11:02]
A
More weeks how did you become an expert in eating ancestral my background so.
- [11:06]
B
I'M an archeologist my entire you know i taught college university level for over twenty years archeology and anthropology and my focus was on prehistoric technologies so my expertise has been and i've trained all over the world in how to replicate ancient technologies like stone tools fire primitive ceramics you know fibers and nets and that sort of thing and years ago i realized that almost every single prehistoric technology every single one of them was focused on food getting food processing food storing food redistributing food sharing food some aspect of that every single almost every single prehistoric technology i mean you think about it like every single albert einstein of our ancestors was doing something that transformed our diets and what's cool is when you see how our diets transform we're here as a result of these dietary transformations when i started to look at that how do we as humans and how have we transformed a raw material into its safest and most nourishing form possible that unlocked that last kind of secret that i needed in order to improve my own health and my own family so things like fermenting sourdough bread huge huge transformation we have no business as humans from a dietary perspective our digestive tract has no business eating grains on its own in fact if i handed you a handful of grains and you ate them it would make you sick like your stomach would hurt you wouldn't get much nutrition from it the phytates and the lectins would rob your bodies of nutrients like it is not a nourishing food but if we put it through that sourdough process or sprout it or do a number of different things we can transform a grain that we have no business eating into something that i would argue we can safely derive nutrition from so it's those technologies that are the key for me.
- [12:48]
A
He'S like the albert einstein of sourdough you've never seen anything like it are pasteurization laws criminalizing health absolutely so we.
- [12:56]
B
Have been we know for sure that we have been drink as humans been drinking milk from other animals for at least eight thousand years i would argue much longer than that the entirety of that time it's been raw there were reasons why and i don't agree with them but there were reasons that people could argue it made sense to start pasteurizing milk when the milk that people were getting in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds were making them sick and killing them because of the system that had been built there was two ways to solve the problem we realized there were such issues one way was to completely transform the dairy industry all over the world but in this case the country which would have been almost impossible to do and super expensive or you could boil the milk i mean who at that moment wouldn't have said okay just boil the milk we don't want these babies dying right but what people need to understand is number one raw milk has nourished us for a very long time the second thing is pasteurization does not make bad milk good pasteurization makes bad milk not lethal or makes bad milk not make you sick at least over the short term it doesn't turn bad milk into something that is a nourishing food it turns it into a food that isn't going to make you sick and put you in the hospital immediately i mean that's the difference pasteurization is a but the other problem is pasteurization i know we're focused on pasteurization pasteurization is a problem homogenization is even a worse problem why there's no argument anywhere in the world ever for homogenization making something safer in fact it makes it a lot less safe there's two reasons that we homogenize milk so so the fat molecules in cow's milk are are large and light and they float to the surface over time there's two reasons we homogenize milk one is because so we don't have to get up in the morning and shake our milk before we pour it into our cereal or coffee right not that we should be eating cereal it's joke so because we're lazy but the other reason is because and the main reason is when we were more connected to our food when we were going to the local markets or even the grocery stores decades ago and all the milk was in clear glass containers one of the things in the dairy industry that we need to recognize is that the wool's been pulled over eyes the past several decades there is a massive amount of money in fat right cream butter ice cream creme fraiche all of the there's a massive amount of money in fat there's more money in milk fat than there is in skim milk so the dairy industry pulls off fat even even with whole milk whole milk is three point three two percent fat i think and what comes out of a cow depending on the season is much much more than that so even when you're buying whole milk from the grocery store some of that fat has already been taken off by the dairy industry and goes into other products okay but the fact that they've talked us into the idea that okay if you want to be healthy obviously we're crawling out of this now but for decades skim milk skim milk no fat skim milk and then they go ahead and sell us on the back end you know the butter and the cream and the rest of it when they started doing that and pulling more and more milk off and their cows weren't as healthy and their cows weren't on grass and they're trying and you would also see that there was fluctuations in the amount of the cap of the cream on top of the milk when it was being sold in clear jars you could tell the difference the consumer could see oh that hardly has any fat in it there's hardly any fat in that there's hardly any fat in that and it's going less and that one that producer has more fat and cream on the top if they homogenize the milk you have no idea how much fat's in that milk you have you as a consumer this is before even we started to push the skim milk part of it and the homogenization is solely there to hide how much fat is in the milk that's how it started but now it's just kind of routine i don't want to see the fat on the top i don't want to shake the milk to make homogenized milk you have a steel plate microscopic holes and you force the fat under high pressure through this steel plate with microscopic holes and you physically explode the fat molecule the result of that is something our bodies cannot recognize it is not a natural form of the fat it's a artificially physically exploded fat molecule and now it'll hang in suspension so at least if you're going to buy milk like if you if you have access to incredible raw milk fantastic gold standard right there but if you if you you know if you don't what do you buy at the grocery store it's a huge question like what yeah because there's so many choices for milk it's insane the only thing you can't buy in the grocery store in the milk aisle which is huge is real milk like so you have all these things what do you do number one my number one thing would be that it would be non homogenized milk that would be my the very first thing to look for non homogenized milk milk the second thing to look for is the lowest temperature pasteurization possible so and even with that so obviously no ultra pasteurized no ultra high temperature pasteurized but that pasteurized milk is more gentle on the proteins than the other forms of pasteurization so fat pasteurized milk that's non homogenized obviously a two would be fantastic organic would be amazing but the homogenization and the low temperature pasteurization are my number two or my my first and.
- [18:02]
A
Second you give raw milk to your.
- [18:04]
B
Kids their whole lives had nothing but.
- [18:05]
A
Raw milk if somebody says to you how could you give that to your child that is so dangerous what's your.
- [18:11]
B
Response my kids are in great shape they've had it their entire lives and i'll tell you when we started my wife and i started going down this path hardcore into where we are now raw milk was one of the first things we started to tackle and this was now twenty something years ago and if you look on the internet then you google raw milk like the results that came back were every one of them you're going to kill your family you're a horrible parent don't even think about it it was horrible so i said i'm going to experiment on me first this is very important to me and this is about the time i really started to find weston price and some other places that were huge advocates for raw milk so we were living in new jersey at the time new jersey's horrible with raw milk so i would drive to pennsylvania every week get raw milk to come back and make a kefir shake with it all the time and this was going on for months and i'm like okay i think this is this is this is okay maybe we should start thinking about feeding it to the family and then one day i went i came back i went to where i got the raw milk and i brought it home and i made made kefir made my shake and i forgot i had like goji berries and all these other things in it and i got violently ill like super violently ill called the dairy right away and i said hey i just want to let you know i had your raw milk and i got super violently ill i mean i was on the side of driving pulling over on my knees on the side of the road it was horrible and they're like oh but nobody else has reported this thank you so much for letting me know and they're obviously incredibly nervous because i called them so i was nervous too i'm like well maybe there's something there's raw milk maybe this isn't for us so i went a few weeks and then you know as it went further back in the back of my brain and i was less nervous about it anymore so let me try again so i start drinking raw milk and everything's fine and then about a week or so later i made that goji berry shake again finally ill on the side of the road i was on a side road this time but i was violently ill again it's a great story because it was the goji berries it was the goji berries from whole foods organic goji berries from whole foods that made me sick but my mind because i was pre sort of you know i had that idea that the raw milk was really unsafe everything the milk was absolutely fine it was the organic goji berries from whole foods did.
- [20:16]
A
You call the farmers say i'm so.
- [20:17]
B
Sorry oh yeah yeah we're yeah absolutely because we ended up using them for another another few years so the the idea that raw milk is unsafe is untrue there's a responsibility that's on us if we're going to get raw milk in a state where it's not tested so the and this would be what we do with our food anyhow so in maryland we're only allowed to get it as pet milk you can sell it as pet milk and there's no there's no oversight on it which again that's a good thing but the downside is nobody else is looking at that farmer besides you and how they treat their cows and how they deal with their milk so going to a store and buying raw pet milk to me isn't necessarily the best choice going to the farm meeting the farmer which we should be doing anyhow but meeting the farmer seeing the cows taking a tour of how they milk and and what they do with that milk and getting that just sense of i don't think you should buy milk from raw milk from a farmer that doesn't know the name of every cow that they're milking like that those kind of things are very important but it's responsibility of the consumer to go and check that out for themselves.
- [21:25]
A
I used to floss with whatever i could find shoestrings a cat's whisker fishing line half a twizzler one day i read that most floss is made of polyester polyester that's right you're dragging the equivalent of a forever twenty one top through your gum line every night like some deranged dental dominatrix zebras floss is made of silk not plastic it's infused with peppermint oil and xylitol which is both safe and won't leave gray spots on your teeth like some people get with hydroxyapatite it's been tested and there's no detectable pfas which are those forever chemicals that apparently make your teeth glow in the dark or turn you into a werewolf i don't know zebra's floss is the only thing that i will shove between my teeth get your mind out of the gutter other than passive aggression and the occasional gluten free cookie okay go to yay zebra dot com use code alex for ten off that's yayzebra dot com with code alex for ten off non toxic floss first morning in my new place i wake up starving nothing was unpacked no idea where my plates are no idea where the fridge even is i open the first box i see and it's just bags and bags of lovebird cereal samples no bowls no spoons just raw survival mode so i sat on the floor because i don't have furniture yet and i ate lovebird out of the bag like a raccoon but honestly it was incredible and clean none of that synthetic sugar loaded nonsense that you get with most cereals yes even the ones that pretend to be healthy no pesticides no artificial dyes no lab created ingredients from a guy named chad in r and d lovebird was started by a dad named parker who left big food to make real cereal with actual nutrition for his daughter it's made with organic cassava from regenerative farm sweetened with honey and loaded with prebiotic fiber no junk just real food that tastes good and doesn't trash your body so if you are a cereal addict like this is a great little snack they even give twenty percent of profits to fight childhood cancer family owned totally independent and they run a school cereal swap program to replace junk cereals with real food without charging schools more that is a mission not marketing it's the one cereal that you won't feel weird about eating dry on your kitchen floor go to lovebirdfoods dot com with code alex twenty for twenty percent off that's lovebird foods dot com code alex twenty for twenty percent off what do you say to people who say there is no nutritional difference between raw milk and regular pasteurized milk.
- [23:39]
B
Oh it's absolutely false one hundred percent false here's a great example when you pasteurize milk you kill off the vitamin a and d the vitamin a and d is destroyed so then we artificially put artificial vitamin a and d back in so when you say see on the milk it says fortified with vitamin a and d what they didn't tell you was it was already in the milk then they killed it they destroyed it then they put it back in artificially dairy is in my mind the only food that is perfectly designed for.
- [24:06]
A
Humans but they say the opposite they say why do we need to drink the milk that was supposed to be for baby cows there's three things in.
- [24:14]
B
The world that are designed for something else to eat it like so it is milk milk is produced by mother mammals for baby mammals there is honey which is produced to nourish baby bees fruit is the third the purpose of a fruit on this planet is to attract an animal to come and eat a beautiful sweet smelling sweet tasting fruit when the seeds are mature so that they eat that fruit consume the seeds and deposit the seeds in a polle manure somewhere else and then make baby plants right from that those are the only three things in the world that are on this planet produced for something else to eat it everything else is just part of a biological process of another plant a grain a wheat grain is not for bread it is to make a baby wheat plant but milk honey and fruit ripe fruit are the only things on the planet that are on this planet for something else to.
- [25:08]
A
Eat it now hot take but i had candy frasier the primal bod on and she said no to fruit it makes you fat what's your take i'm.
- [25:17]
B
Not suggesting that we are designed to eat fruit i'm suggesting that fruit is here for something else to eat it okay they're two different things oh are.
- [25:24]
A
You also anti fruit no no no.
- [25:26]
B
I'M not anti fruit i'm not anti fruit especially wild fruits but what what's important to understand about fruit every single plant on this planet has toxins in it they all have toxins and unfortunately the way that we now talk about toxins in this world it's either you know as soon as we hear the word toxins our brains shut off we shouldn't eat it like if you look at i started foraging when i was ten years old i'm fifty two right now and i started i've been foraging for forty two years the problem with foraging books is that they say okay this plant is safe to eat or this plant is dangerous every single plant is dangerous at some level every single plant on this earth is trying to survive and reproduce viable offspring like every other species of anything else and since they can't move they're engaged in chemical warfare of the outside world so they naturally are producing insecticides and fungicides and you know all sorts of things they're trying to protect themselves these toxins that they're producing i know they scare us and some of them are scary like things like oxalates are very scary the some of the toxins that mushrooms produce will kill you and if they don't kill you immediately your liver and your kidney will shut down and you wish you were dead like there's some really dangerous things out there but those toxins are also the same things that we use as medicine like one of the reasons why the medical industry pharmaceutical industry goes and studies plants in the jungle is because they're taking these plant compounds that are protective mechanisms for the plant and they're finding incredible value to make medicine from these things some of these toxins are also spices cinnamon is a fantastic example cinnamon is the bark of a tree the flavor cinnamon that we eat and enjoy at christmas time and the like is actually a fungicide it's there it's an insecticide and a fungicide to keep things off the bark it's in the bark of the tree it's protecting the tree from things that can attack it in small doses we love it as a spice in larger doses people use cinnamon as a medicine and in much larger doses it'll land you.
- [27:17]
A
In the hospital okay is that why people say you need to be using ceylon cinnamon or whatever that is salon.
- [27:22]
B
Cinnamon is true cinnamon but it but that doesn't discount this it's still in larger doses all all spices are a toxin i mean they all are i mean there's a reason why mace i mean mace is the outer part of the nutmeg plant mace is a great spice in things like eggnog and it's also the stuff you spray on somebody if they're attacking you oh so it's.
- [27:43]
A
I didn't know you could eat that.
- [27:45]
B
Oh yeah mace is amazing i like it even it's part of the nutmeg it's fantastic well in small doses in large doses it's a problem so all these plants are producing these we ever.
- [27:53]
A
See you on cops they're going to spray you and then you're like delicious.
- [27:59]
B
This is what if we from a quick biological perspective think about this the plants are trying to protect their most important parts yeah so and creating these toxins are not i mean they're energy expensive they have to make they're serving a purpose or else they wouldn't do it so roots corms tubers what we call underground storage organs things like potatoes are highly guarded through chemical processes because that's a very important part of the plant it spends all year a plant that has a starch rich underground storage organ spends the entire spring and summer through photosynthesis filling it with starch so that in this winter when the top part of the plant dies off it's living off of that it's very important to the plant usually very toxic the flowers are actually designed not to repel but to attract they look pretty they smell pretty they usually have no toxins in them at all very little because they're attracting pollinators right they're attracting fruits are attracting only for mature seeds it's part of the biology process of the plant it doesn't make sense for a plant to attract an animal to eat its seeds before it's mature it doesn't make any reproductive sense right it has to be mature so almost all fruits are either slightly or very toxic before the seeds are mature and as soon as they mature they turn it off so we should never eat unripe fruit period you shouldn't eat unripe tomatoes you shouldn't eat unripe anything the seeds though seeds nuts grains and legumes are the babies of the plant of the next generation they are usually heavily guarded with all sorts of toxins so if we're eating massive amounts of these things then we do need to do something to them to make them safer to eat.
- [29:33]
A
How do you know if your local farm's raw milk is good enough in.
- [29:36]
B
A state where the raw milk is legal for human consumption there's already a layer of testing that's ensuring that the milk coming out of there is to the standards that they're asking for but in all cases whether it so pennsylvania is a great example you can go to pennsylvania and buy raw milk at a store not even at you can go to the farm and buy it but you can also buy it at a store like a health food store.
- [30:00]
A
Yeah you can hear in arizona too.
- [30:01]
B
I don't like that for the first time i'm trying a new milk like i we should be going to the farm we should be meeting the farmer they should and it's not only meeting the farmer i do think there's a level of you know going to the farm meeting the farmer seeing the cows seeing how they care for the cows seeing how they care for the milk all of that is incredibly important but i also like the idea of go there with your family because not only do they get to see it all as well but the farmer also sees you the farmer also sees your kids who are going to be drinking the milk that's coming out of his cows and you know whether he's handling it right or wrong you know all of that that sort of food system where it's close connection everybody knows one another is the safest most incredible food system on every level not just nourishment and safety but also for you know all the other things that make us human so i suggest you always go to the farm at least in the beginning before you start buying the milk to understand we can filter these things everybody knows what a clean farm looks like everybody knows what a clean farm smells.
- [31:00]
A
Like does it matter to you if a cow is grass fed grass finished for you to drink the raw milk.
- [31:06]
B
It'S going to be very hard to have a cow that is grass fed grass finished all your to get raw milk the entire year round where we live on the east coast so if it's possible one hundred percent if it's not i'm i still would suggest the raw milk is better okay one other thing too with the organic milk unfortunately the pasteurization process obviously makes the shelf life a lot longer it is very difficult to find organic milk that is not ultra pasteurized so one of the decisions people have to make because almost all organic milk is ultra pasteurized in the grocery store because it's so expensive to produce they want that longer shelf life to be able to sell it sits on the shelf it's very difficult to find organic non homogenized just fat pasteurized milk if you can find a get it one hundred percent but one of the things that the consumer is going to have to decide is is it more important for them to have something that isn't ultra pasteurized or is it more important for them this is if you don't have access to a good you know raw milk source is it more important to have non ultra pasteurized milk that's not organic or organic ultra pasteurized milk and i'm gonna guess.
- [32:18]
A
You'Re going for the other you're gonna choose the non organic version to get.
- [32:22]
B
Those other two things yes when we're infant baby humans we are perfectly designed to consume our mother's milk i mean that's the way it's supposed to be right so this is what happens when we drink from our mothers number one the milk in our mothers is at body temperature and it's teeming with live bacteria it's not fermenting yet there's a mechanism inside of the mother all mammals that make it so it's not fermenting until it leaves the body but as soon as it leaves the mother and goes into the baby whether it's a human a rat a whale whatever it starts the process of fermenting that live bacteria start that process of fermenting when the baby's drinking from the mother it's the baby including humans all of us when we're babies we produce several enzymes that allowed us to safely and efficiently digest that milk so things like lipase breaks down the fats the lipids lactase breaks down the sugars and we also produce an enzyme a protease enzyme and it depends on the animal humans are a little different than other animals it all does the same thing which pro which enzyme it is but it coagulates the milk so it denatures it denaturing means taking it out of its natural state so when we fry an egg the egg whites get denatured and they turn white and they get firm so this milk comes in and it gets denatured the proteins do because of the enzymes that we're producing and it turns into a semi solid in our stomachs and it does that because if all we're doing is drinking liquids which babies are the liquid goes through the body way too fast to break down fully and for the nutrients to be absorbed fully in the small intestines so nature's figured out hey if i if i turn it into a jello like substance in the stomach then it's going to sit there longer it's going to chemically and physically break down better it's going to ferment and then it's going to go into the small intestines in a very similar semi solid state sit there longer the nutrients are going to get absorbed through the intestinal walls and we have a healthy human baby what we're essentially doing is making cheese in our stomachs that's every step of it is making cheese in our stomach we were in the first blue zone ever identified two years ago in the village of villa grande in sardinia and we were with shepherds up in the mountains and everything depicted about the blue zone diet is wrong completely wrong dang it see.
- [34:30]
A
Doctor bill this is you say stuff like this i'm like well now i want to do one hundred eighty and do a whole episode on that there's.
- [34:35]
B
A lot there but we were so we were in the first blue zone ever identified in villa grande in sardinia we were in the mountains with shepherds and we were making the most traditional and basic form of cheese this is how we did it and bear with me for a minute because it's not pretty but we took a baby goat and we had it drink from its mother not baby it was unweaned though and had it drink from its mother and then we took the baby away and then we harvested the goat and we took the stomach out and hung it up for ten days and then ate the cheese that's literally all you had to do every step of the cheese making process was in place there the milk was alive and teeming with live bacteria it was the right temperature it had because the baby was or the goat was unweaned it was still producing the enzymes needed including the coagulation and literally ten days later we ate the cheese so you cannot if i'm right about this and it is we're making cheese in our stomach when you burp a baby on your shoulder and it spits up and it looks like ricotta cheese and it tastes like or taste smells like provolone that's exactly what it is it's cheese we make cheese in our stomachs it's part of the natural digestive process so to take this ingredient this milk and nourish a human baby at one of the most vulnerable nutritionally needy times in our life that is the perfect food but it has to go through that process to nourish us properly so raw milk to me is a fantastic food fermented raw milk is the next step up which is.
- [35:58]
A
What kefir or whatever that is kefir.
- [36:01]
B
Cheese yogurt all of these traditional fermentation are mimicking what we did as human babies that we can no longer do because nobody in this room no human adult is producing those same enzymes and has that same ability to fully digest the milk and break it down properly the way that we did when we were infants we've outgrown this as soon as any mammal gets weaned we lose the ability to produce all these enzymes.
- [36:25]
A
But then so to play devil's advocate couldn't somebody say well that's proof that we're not supposed to drink milk forever.
- [36:31]
B
Then i could say that about almost every ingredient i could say that about wheat and rye i mean literally there's there's no plant that we put in our body that doesn't require some sort of processing to fully unlock its safety and nutritional repertoire for our digestive tracts one of the cool things if you look into the past about animals and plants in our diets and the role of technology in getting food right almost every single technology we invented about animals has to do with getting the animal overcoming our physical limitations and you know bows and arrows and nets and fishing hooks and traps and all these things to get an animal once you have an animal all you need is a sharp edge and you don't even have to cook it you have incredible safe nutrition in front of you that our bodies can really access very easily so almost all the technologies our ancestors invented to include animals in our diets have to do with getting the animal we don't need to do much afterwards but plants are the exact opposite it doesn't take much to get a plant maybe a sharp edge or you could pick a berry get or whatever all the technology we've invented to deal with plants in our diets has to do with making them safe to eat and unlocking the nutrients but in all cases we need to do something we can't do it on our own we have outgrown our digestive tracts so that argument i hear the argument but i would say that we have no business eating a cow without technology we have no business eating a grain without technology we have absolutely no business eating most plants without some sort of a technology to make it safe and nourishing so that argument doesn't hold up for me for milk okay especially if we're fermenting it because we're replicating the same process.
- [38:10]
A
After a long training session i got a dm from one of you guys complaining about bloating and gut discomfort well at my recommendation this girl added cowboy colostrum to her post workout smoothie and said it's settled her stomach it helped her recover faster the next day too that's the beauty of cowboy colostrum it's sourced from the first four to six hour milking of grass fed us cows capturing the highest levels of immune and natural growth factors and proline rich peptides all shown in scientific reviews to support gut integrity immune modulation and tissue regeneration cowboy keeps their colostrum whole no stripping of fat or cain so you get the full nutrient profile and fluffy yellow tinted and nutrient dense scoops nothing like the skim style powders floating social media okay calves always come first after they're fed cowboy then collects only the surplus maintaining ethical standards and high quality at three grams per scoop you can take one for daily maintenance or two to three scoops when pushing through tough workouts or immune challenges stirred into coffee or shaken to smoothies its creamy vanilla taste enhances recovery and energy while nourishing from the inside out they also have unflavored cowboy colostrum is the smarter more ethical way to support recovery gut health and overall vitality learn more at cowboy colostrum dot com comma use code alex for twenty five percent off that's cowboy colostrum dot com code alex for twenty five percent off let's talk tampons because apparently some of y' all are still putting arsenic and chlorine bleach in your hoo ha every month like it's eighteen forty seven and we're curing things with leeches garneau said nope they make tampons pads and menstrual cups that are one hundred percent organic cotton no forever chemicals no heavy metals and absolutely no mystery ingredients that you can't pronounce if it's it sounds like something that you'd find on a periodic table next to plutonium it's not in garnu tampons they even use sugar cane for the applicator which means yes your vagine gets a sweet tweet and listen this isn't just about clean period products when you use garnu you're also supporting feminine health education and female entrepreneurship for girls in nepal and brazil who are vulnerable to sex exploitation so not only are you buying something actually good for your body you're fighting human trafficking while you do it join the girls only club get fifteen percent off your one time or subscription purchase i recommend subscription because our period comes once a freaking month okay so why wouldn't you do that use code alex at checkout g dot com g a r n u u dot com code alex because you deserve better than bleach in your vagine girl if sourdough is making you bloated is that because it wasn't properly fermented.
- [40:39]
B
That could be one of the things so we have at our bakery we have as of two weeks ago eleven medically diagnosed celiac customers that are one hundred percent fine on our bread now we have several celiac customers that are not and celiac like so many things are there's a spectrum right but eleven medically diagnosed celiac that are fine on our bread one is an eighty six year old woman that eats a slice of our bread every single day how.
- [41:04]
A
Can somebody who is one hundred percent celiac eat your sourdough because it is.
- [41:08]
B
A different food like i hate these terms like bread and milk because within that category of bread there are things that shouldn't you know be related to one another wonder bread and what we're producing are completely different foods most of the sourdough bread on the shelf at the grocery store and most of the sourdough bread i would i would suggest almost all of the sourdough bread you would buy at most restaurants unless they tell you what bakery they're getting it from is fake sourdough as well but.
- [41:34]
A
What is fake versus real like whether.
- [41:36]
B
It'S through the bacterial fermentation okay like i mentioned so if it has both the yeast and bacterial fermentation happening side by side that bacterial fermentation so the reason we call it sourdough is because the bacteria are eating the available sugars and producing lactic acid there's a lot of chemical and physical changes that are happening but it's that production of the lactic acid that is causing a tiny bit of sourness which the term sourdough would come from we can control that if we know what we're doing when we're baking we can control it but one of the things that's not getting talked about in the sourdough world that i wholeheartedly believe in is we have got to reach a ph and i know it's going to sound technical for a minute but of four point six in order to call something sourdough so seven is neutral seven is water as that bacteria just think about this if the bacterial fermentation is happening bacteria are eating the available sugars producing lactic acid the more acid that's produced the lower that ph is right it's actually an indicator of the amount of fermentation that's taking place the magic number is four point six if you hit four point six then it activates an enzyme that totally starts destroying the gluten like turning it into something that our bodies can actually handle it is a different food so there's a lot of nuances here but the point is if the bacteria are allowed to do its job put in the right environment by the right human hands that know what they're doing they are turning that bread that comes out at the end is a completely different food what tool do you have.
- [43:04]
A
To buy to test the four point.
- [43:06]
B
Six or whatever yeah you can get a ph meter for thirty dollars off of amazon ph meter the little probe we use something called a yicmic but there's a lot of other ones and it has to at some point in its fermentation reach that number and if i showed you my phone right now you know we have our team of bakers that are baking right now every half an hour my phone's going off they're taking ph readings all the time we track that because the reason we're doing sourdough it's not because of nostalgia it's not because i mean we love the flavor we love all those things the reason we're doing it is about.
- [43:35]
A
Health so what are the health benefits of sourdough bread like quickly there's no.
- [43:39]
B
Nutritional need for bread in the human diet like we do not need bread to survive we do not need bread to be healthy we just like it and there's other things the cool thing about humans and food and the complicated things are there's so many things food is food is a part of everything that we do like literally everything that we do involves food at some level and to be fully nourished as a human it's so much more complicated than another animal another animal needs to eat the right nutrients in the right way break it down and we need to do that and we need to meet our cultural needs and for some of us our religious needs and for some of us our political needs for some of us our family needs and socioeconomic all of these things because food is such a part of everything that we do so to be fully nourished as a human is much more complicated i mean we could have this entire conversation and talk about the macro and micronutrients of all these foods and then end the conversation but we're only scratching the surface some of us love bread some of us remember eating bread with our grandmother and the fact that if we eat the right kind of bread and even though we don't need bread but it brings up that memory i would argue we're more fully nourished than if we didn't eat that bread even though we don't need it so it isn't necessarily that we need the bread nutritionally but if we're going to have that bread and we're going to use that bread to meet an emotional need we need at the time which are very we don't talk about enough but it's a very important thing what is the safest most nourishing bread you can possibly have and the answer to that is one hundred percent fully fermented sourdough bread now from a nutritional perspective there are things in those grains that are nutritious but they're not unlocked to us unless we put it through the right process.
- [45:15]
A
You'Re saying that the safest most nourishing form of bread is sourdough what about like sue becker who came on my show who's talking about just freshly milled flour to make regular loaves of bread.
- [45:25]
B
I'M not downplaying how important freshly milled flour is and it's and it's important not only from a nutritional perspective from a safety perspective but also for all those other things that are important if you're using freshly milled flour you're probably supporting a local farmer probably a lot fresher there's all sorts of wonderful things about it but remember this what we talked about earlier grains nuts seeds and legumes are the babies of the plant they are highly protected through all sorts of chemical warfare like there's all sorts of things happening whether it's freshly milled or not it has all of those problems with it too so then you.
- [45:58]
A
Definitely want organic you definitely want organic.
- [46:00]
B
Grains but the but the toxins that i'm talking about are not put there by humans they're in the plants themselves already okay and the way to get around those toxins is through some sort of detoxification in this case the answer would be sourdough so this i'm not suggesting that freshly milled grains is not important but i do believe the fermentation process done properly is more important than the freshly milled grains however the gold standard would be freshly milled grains that are put through a sourdough process okay okay another and this is i know this is complicated but it is important for people to understand and all listen we can sit here and talk about this all day long the best thing somebody can do is educate themselves and make a loaf of bread it is going to make so much more sense as soon as you even make that first loaf of bread it doesn't matter how ugly it is and if nobody's going to eat it but that first loaf of bread will show you bring to life a lot of the things that we're talking about the most nutrition in the grain is in the germ and a lot of it's also in the bran which is the coating on the outside the germ is the baby essentially going to be the embryo of the new plant and the bran on the outside and the rest of it's the endosperm the starch from a nutritional perspective if you want nutrition you need to have whole grains more nutrition comes through the whole grains but more toxins come through as well which makes it even more important because it's the outside bran and that germ where most of those toxins lie anyhow so if you're doing sourdough is even more important if you're using whole grains than it is if you're just using bread flour because the bread flour have a lot less toxins because a lot of the parts of the the of the berry the wheat berry that have those toxins have already been sifted out okay sourdough is.
- [47:41]
A
Incredibly important you're not anti sugar but you're anti stupid sugar what is the worst sweetener in ninety percent of homes right now fake sugar what is fake.
- [47:52]
B
Sugar erythritol or or splenda or those sorts of things i think refined sugar corn syrup all of those things are horrible i think the chemical version of those things are even worse and we don't need any of them like we literally don't we have an entire full restaurant full bakery we do pastries we do desserts we do all of those things and have no fake or refined sugar anywhere in the shop if you're.
- [48:16]
A
A baker and you need to buy sugar at the store are we looking for one hundred percent raw organic cane sugar like what should we buy i.
- [48:23]
B
Think i could argue that there's no in most cases no nutritional requirement for sugar in our diets at all again it's an emotional thing it's a cultural thing it's a or a holiday thing right there's right so i don't want to downplay how important those things are unfortunately they get downplayed too much in these conversations those are very important needs that we many of us have to meet the sugar that we have access to refined sugar is nothing but pure carbohydrates it can wreck all sorts of havoc havoc so refined sugar is literally just the epitome of empty calories and a food system where the people that are doing the hard work are not getting the money right too many layers too big of mega industries too much shipment around the world it's stripped of everything that has any kind of value to us other than the sweetness unrefined sweeteners maple syrup raw honey things called muscovado there's a couple examples muscovado is the one that we use these are completely unrefined so you're talking about if these are the kind of sweeteners you use there's several things that are advantageous to it number one is there's other flavors coming in but just pure sweet which if we learn how to deal with them right we love the second thing is that any sort of enzymes or minerals or anything you could argue that were beneficial in that i mean the sugar cane plant has things that are wonderful maple syrup has all sorts of things that are wonderful there is a compound in maple syrup that is highly studied right now to help with cancer i mean and it's solely in maple syrup raw honey has all sorts of wonderful attributes to it so anything that you could argue that could potentially be good in a sweetener is coming through with that along with the sweetness and so it's not fully empty calories the other thing is that food chain is so much shorter like one of the most important things we can do if we're trying to learn how to feed ourselves listening to podcasts reading books all those things are incredibly important but at the end of the day you need to inform yourself you need to take those steps and continue taking links out of your food chain what does that even mean taking one step closer to your food so if if in terms of sweeteners instead of buying you know pasteurized honey from costco or bj's you go to the farmer's market and meet the farmer and grab their honey all of a sudden you're talking to that farmer you've taken like twenty links out of the food chain and you're and you're steps closer you've informed yourself your your money your hard earned money is going to somebody that's actually in your community like all one hundred percent benefits and that food is better for will one of the places in our food system where i think we really have to take links out of the food chain is with our animals right we have spent thirty or forty years of this creation of an industry that is trying to hide what it's doing with their animals from our site under the guise of oh you shouldn't have let us worry about that you don't want to be burdened you know to the point where you wouldn't even have a conversation about an animal while you're eating an animal i mean how bizarre is that right right but behind you know the screen for thirty forty years a meat industry has been created that is criminal if we paid attention for those and we were tuned into it it would have never been built one place that we need to reconnect and take links out of our food chain is with our animals and i know for some of us it may sound really weird like we've gone to extremes like we started slapping half of pigs on our counter you know years ago.
- [51:43]
A
When our kitchen extremes he just told us he drank blood and had goat eyeballs on the the of top top of a mountain and ate the cheese from its stomach you have gone to.
- [51:51]
B
Extremes so maybe that's not as extreme but you don't have to do that so taking a link out of your food chain is a very simple step that it could be just something simple like if you go to the grocery store now and buy how weird is it we can go to the grocery store and buy a chicken breast and never see another part of a chicken so instead of buying a chicken breast buy the whole chicken that is not a huge that is not an insurmountable step or if you already go to the grocery store and buy a whole chicken then you know what go to the farmer's market and buy the chicken from the farmer and meet the farm those are very meaningful steps that don't take a lot of work bring your kids with you right it's not like we're taking them on foraging foraging trips you know forty thousand years ago bring them to the make sure they go into the grocery store with you instead of sitting in the car on the ipad and that's a huge step and if you're not doing that bring them to the farmer's market bring them to the farm those little steps are huge and that's removing a link from the food chain so to answer your question about the sugars unrefined sweeteners maple syrup raw honey and unrefined sugar at muscovado are what we restrict ourselves to in our home and also in our restaurant.
- [52:56]
A
What is your opinion on stevia i.
- [52:58]
B
Stay away i'd rather use monk fruit than stevia but in both cases i don't cook with either one what is.
- [53:03]
A
Going on with potatoes and french fries.
- [53:05]
B
That would blow our minds we already know about the issue with nut and seed oils and the frying of of it so one thing is obviously we should be frying them in the right kinds of high quality animal fats like lard or tallow or duck fat but this would blow your mind every single ancestor to potatoes and most of the heirloom varieties of potatoes are so incredibly poisonous they would kill you or land you in the hospital if you ate them most of them are still under domestication so in the areas so bolivia and peru or the area altiplano lake titicaca area in the andes that go into the peru that area was the center of domestication for potatoes i remember mister schuman's class in eighth grade he would talk about oh my gosh when the early european explorers came over to the new world they found between three hundred and five hundred different varieties of potatoes under domestication it was five hundred years ago oh my gosh that's amazing but what mister schumann didn't tell me was that every one of them would have killed you unless you processed it properly one of the things i focused on in my research for for a long time for twenty years has been how do we use traditional ways to process plants to make them safer and more nourishing for us and i was convinced even then that those secrets would also unlock you know technologies that we can use in our kitchens in our home and in our restaurants to make these plants you know even today's plants even safer and this is a great example so i went to spend time with an aymara indian family in bolivia and with a quechua indian family in peru in both cases they still grow these incredibly toxic potatoes and they process them in several different ways to make them safe and what i had learned was that today's potatoes like a russet potato in the grocery store the kind of you can just buy off the shelf still have those toxins in them they've just been bred to the point where they're much lower levels so what i'm going to say in a moment i'm not trying to i do think there's an issue we scare people a lot in the food industry right now people are scared they're making decisions because they're scared and i don't want to scare anybody with this but i do want to empower you to make a couple of changes in the way that you deal with something like a potato in your own home because they make all the difference if you eat a lot of potatoes eating one potato a baked potato with some butter and eating the skin and not processing it all is fine doing that every day can become a problem over time and with the amount of potato chips and french fries that the kids in this country are eating today it's important to hear this part of it so i traveled down there and spent time with these two families these two communities and learned how they process these potatoes and i'm telling you the potatoes that they're processing and eating on a daily basis are incredibly toxic still with the aymara family in bolivia we did two things one is we engaged in something called passa if you want to think something's crazy passa and i read about it in graduate school i couldn't imagine they eat clay with their potatoes so their potatoes are so incredibly poisonous why even eat.
- [56:02]
A
Them in the first place you know.
- [56:03]
B
That'S a great question why do they.
- [56:04]
A
Go through all this but that's aside.
- [56:06]
B
No think about no it's a great question but i'm going to throw farming completely on its head right now in the statement the things that are there in these plants are there to protect the plants so if you plant one hundred potatoes that have all these toxins that are there to protect it you're going to get one hundred percent yield period think about how crazy it is i'm thinking at our house right now on our walkway we have dandelions growing we have all these weeds growing all the time and we're doing everything we can in the front yard to get rid of plants and in the back where our garden was we would do everything we can to get these defenseless plants to grow and we're weeding and we're some people put all kinds of those plants are defenseless because we've bred these toxins out of the plants and they won't grow without a whole bunch of intervention and meanwhile the weeds which are you know completely well adapted to protect themselves fully with all these toxins are growing even where we don't want them to grow there one of the ways we could go about it is what the modern world has done we've taken all these plants that did great on their own we've domesticated them through the domestication process bred out a lot of these toxins and now we have to hit them with you know all sorts of insecticides and fungicides and all these things to get them to grow and they're worried about what the harvest is another way to approach it is leave the toxins in there get an one hundred percent yield and then go through a traditional strategy to make them safe to eat instead of breeding them for thousands of years to be less toxic they process them in a certain way but they get one hundred percent yield i mean their food resource base is less fragile than ours is because they're always going to get one hundred percent yield unless there's some sort of you know major devastation so they would take these potatoes and between every bite dip them in the special clay and eat it between every bite and the clay binds with the toxins and passes through the body and the body gets you know nutrition they also make something.
- [57:50]
A
Called the clay is acting like a.
- [57:52]
B
Binder the clay binder yeah the clay binds this particular clay binds with the toxins in the potatoes and it puts it in a state that the body doesn't recognize and it passes through the body and the nutrients that are in the potato get absorbed by the body and and they eat it and i will tell you i know it sounds disgusting again that context was important but what blew my mind at the end of doing this and it was an all day thing because there's no trees we're well above we're at sixteen seventeen thousand feet there were no trees well above the tree line so we built this oven and fired it with cow patties that was the fuel for it and roasted these potatoes and ate them and prepared the clay and did all this at the end of it there was a little bit of clay in one of the bowls and the daughter the youngest daughter of the family is the same age at the time as my youngest daughter alyssa was and my youngest daughter loves mayonnaise and if there's left mayonnaise left in the bowl she's you know going like this with her finger at the end of that experience the potatoes that girl picked up the it looked like i was looking at my daughter picked up that bowl of clay and went like this with her finger and ate the rest of the clay i mean it was not something that they were like oh my god this something that was a part of their culture that that she enjoyed eating she actually went out of her way to eat a little bit more of it at the end in peru they did something called chino blanco too where they leach potatoes for like six months in the water and then did a freeze drying thing but then in peru they would make something called tocash where they would dig a huge pit i mean a massively huge pit and fill it with thousands of pounds of potatoes fill the pit with water and ferment it and at the end of it they would make this traditional dish with these again again very toxic potatoes so we took that part back to the shop and the fermentation part was important to us so we started fermenting our potatoes let me back one other important part of the technologies that i saw there was that in every single instance that we ate a potato now we lived in ireland for a year and they ate a lot of potatoes in ireland does not a fraction of the amount of potatoes they're eating in bolivia peru especially in the andes i mean the amount of potatoes that one single person consumed in a day would blow your mind now some of the potatoes didn't have as many toxins some of them did there was a lot of potatoes prepared a lot of different ways i spent a lot of time down there both up in the mountains and also in the city like lima including i went to a place called restaurant central which two years after i was there one restaurant best restaurant in the world like nomalet it actually beat noma for the best restaurant in the world so i was in that kitchen and i was in all these other places eating potatoes every single day every single potato that i saw prepared except for one time was peeled and i know that maybe doesn't sound like a very big deal but these heirloom potatoes many of them didn't if i gave you a russet potato and a vegetable peeler and said peel it it's okay and twenty seconds later you hand me a peeled potato that's because that potato looks like a football these potatoes look like you know this like more like a a droop of grapes than a big to peel them potato peelers don't even work like you have to use a knife because nothing about it is smooth so the effort that goes in to peeling a potato was massively more than any of us are used to it was a very intentional act to peel these potatoes and in every instance the best restaurant in the world to you know the middle of nowhere up on the altiplano by lake titicaca i asked why do you peel the potatoes and everybody said because that's where all the poison is most of the poison most of the toxins in the potato are.
- [61:19]
A
In the skin in america we always keep the skin on potatoes and french fries like those are the good fries if they have some of the skin.
- [61:27]
B
Left i will never intentionally eat a potato skin the rest of my life and if you do one so the only time why because that it's true and i just wrote an article it was in the wise traditions and nourishing traditions wise traditions the western price journal about potatoes and about this entire experience and i have the numbers not only the numbers the amount of toxins that are have been lowered through domestication but also the ratio of toxins to the skin of the potato to the inside of the potato and it makes sense i mean think about why those toxins are there they're there to protect this incredibly important part of the plant it doesn't make sense for most of those toxins to be in the root it makes more sense that they're on the barrier between the root and bacteria or insects or predators or whatever it happens to be so in most cases the majority of toxins in and around a plant part are on the outside because that's the role that it's playing as a protective mechanism it's not true that the most amount of nutrition is in the potato skin but even if it was the toxin load in the potato skin makes it not worth it to get those nutrients but to make it even worse oh the only time we didn't peel it was when we ate it with the clay and i asked them i said why aren't you peeling this potato now because those were also the most poisonous potatoes i ate the entire time was that instance and they said because this is so powerful that clay does such a good job we don't need to but every other time so number one my big takeaway here is no matter what potato you get peel the potato always peel it okay you know if you go to a restaurant and you're sitting there and the potatoes come out and they're the small potatoes you know and they and they're cut and they're you know whatever the red potatoes and you're eating that's not a very big deal but if you eat potatoes on a regular basis this is when it starts to become important peel them all the time also and this is really important potatoes are not dead potatoes are dormant like they're still alive because you can take a potato cut it up and put it in the ground and it'll make new potato plants so the chemical reactions in that potato are still happening even when it's sitting on the shelf even when it's sitting in your basement or in your refrigerator if that potato senses danger it's going to produce more toxins so an improperly stored potato and what i'm talking about here is mostly if it has access to light will start to turn green every one of us has seen it you get a little bit of green on the outside of the potato.
- [63:44]
A
Sometimes you see that on your lay's.
- [63:45]
B
Chips it don't ever eat those ever.
- [63:48]
A
Eat those wait we should never eat the green lay's chips in the bag.
- [63:53]
B
You should never eat the green part of a potato whether it's in a lay's chip or on your counter why so when that potato root and i know this is i know this sounds crazy i know it but look this up after you listen to this podcast it is one hundred percent true if you look national geographic did a great article several years ago about the number of americans that land in the hospital after eating potatoes that have had a little bit of green on the outside oh my gosh so what i used to think i knew the green stuff was bad i used to think that was the toxin and that okay you get a little bit over on the end here and you hit it a little harder with the potato peeler till you get through the green and then you're fine that is not true that green is proxy it's telling you it's an indicator that that potato is loaded with more toxins than it ever had before but that isn't the toxin it's throughout the potato if you see any green on the outside of your potato then get rid of it don't feed it to your animals don't do it.
- [64:45]
A
Just get rid of it it's not even good enough for animals i would.
- [64:48]
B
Suggest it's not it's loaded with glycoalkaloids all sorts of nasty toxins okay so this isn't a fear thing it's a traditional way so i went to study in that part of the world potato processing because those people that they've been dealing with potatoes for ten thousand years incredibly successfully that i think has the largest history of people with potatoes so they would know they would know they always peel the potato so my takeaway from this is always peel i don't care if it's a russet potato or not peel your potatoes number two always.
- [65:19]
A
Buy organic i would say organic is.
- [65:22]
B
Helpful but again there's amazing things about organic the only reason i'm resisting it a little bit is because we have farmers by us that haven't got it that we love the way that they're farming so organic we're talking about grocery store purely organic is amazing do remember though that we are peeling the outside of it it so that helps so if all you can get i love the way sean baker talks about meat because i am if i can get grass fed grass finished ribeye amazing but a lot of people can't afford it and he's well him and ken actually ken barry just says something about it too your grocery store ground beef is still going to be more nutritious than not eating it i say the same thing so if the potato isn't organic do remember you're peeling it if it's green get rid of it and if you can ferment it that you are really taking steps to neutralize a lot of those other toxins on the outside of it and it's very easy to do it.
- [66:14]
A
You ever get lab results back and feel like you need a phd in cryptic symbols just to figure out if you're okay like is my alt right is c reactive protein good a red flag or a dj jevony fixes that i use them to get my labs done from home no driving no awkward waiting rooms no fasting until you're dizzy just book it online and a licensed medical pro comes right to your door ten minutes it's done and then you actually get real personalized insights not just a pdf with thirty lines of numbers in zero context they walk you through what it all means what's optimal for you and how to improve it i do this every few months to check my hormones inflammation and nutrition levels because i want to know what's going on in my body before something becomes a problem if you've ever looked at your labs and thought cool no idea what this means jevy is your answer go to gody dot com use code alex for twenty percent off that's go dot com code alex feel better because you understand your health finally you know what's not normal kids struggling with poor sleep snoring bedwetting or adhd like symptoms yet these are things that many parents just accept as normal but here's the truth our kids faces are shrinking their jaws are narrowing they're getting ugly and it's causing a silent mouth breathing epidemic that's wrecking their health do you want your kids to grow up ugly of course you don't you want your beautiful baby to be hot but later i just learned all this in my recent interview with airway dentist and tooth pillow co founder cali hale mouth breathing is linked to all kinds of problems chronic congestion teeth grinding crooked teeth and more these signs are red flags not just quirks that's why airway dentist doctor ben moralia doctor cali hale and doctor kevin goals created toothpillow a virtual dental program that gets to the root cause not just the symptoms no band aids here tooth pillow helps fix your child's airway sleep and developmental issues all starting with a simple virtual assessment if your child shows any signs do not wait it gets way worse and harder to deal with as they get older visit toothpillow dot com click is my child a candidate that's toothpillow dot com click is my child a candidate use code alex clark you will get a free video assessment your child's health deserves more than just a band aid it deserves tooth pillow go to toothpillow dot com click is my child a candidate and use code alex clark for a free video assessment today if you're ever lost in the woods or a jungle what are the first survival steps that you should be taking what are the first things you should grab to eat the.
- [68:44]
B
First most important thing you need to do is get control of your brain because if you don't settle down breathe deep and think about your situation you're going to make either decisions that are foolish or you're going to die because your brain has talked you into it i mean you literally have to take a step number two it's not about eating it's more about drinking so water is so much more important than food you can go weeks without food you can only go days it depends on the condition but sometimes not even that long without water so finding a source of water is a good source of water is utmost importance and then try to understand what you need to protect yourself from from i mean it's kind of like if you go anywhere in the world and look at houses houses are built differently based on two things one is what raw materials they have at their disposal and also what they're.
- [69:34]
A
Protecting themselves from oh yeah like all the houses in arizona are stucco and.
- [69:39]
B
What is in your parking lot out here not shade i mean shade you're worried about the sun and you're worried about heat here right but if you go to northern latitudes you're protecting yourself from the cold somewhere else you might be protecting yourself from water or from wind so understand what you need to protect yourself from and take steps to do that and it's very very very easy to do i mean you have to get over yourself and maybe get in a pile of leaves or be around bugs the other thing is your food resources it isn't worth spending a massive amount of time looking for food in the very beginning because you are going to spend a lot of energy in an environment that you're not used to two things that are really important one is bugs and i know bugs are a hot topic bugs were the original protein and fat source for the.
- [70:27]
A
See everyone's gonna say alex has somebody on that's telling us to eat the.
- [70:31]
B
Bugs it is see the conversation has gone to bugs or meat it's a.
- [70:36]
A
Silly transition i know what you're talking about and look they trust me so like here's what i will say i know exactly what you're gonna bring up and it's crickets cricket protein i know it and here's what's bizarre all of the research i've done all of the people i've interviewed and i've never brought this up on the show because i know for my audience this is gonna be so controversial because they think it's some like socialist propaganda a lot of it is but in this case cricket protein is one of the best forms of protein and when you talk to people in the food industry or the wellness industry they're like dude like all these protein powders out there like the number one thing if you want the best protein it's like cricket protein powder but no one will buy it because americans are so so freaked out that they will not buy it so it's a waste of money because i've been doing a lot of research looking into different things like if i were to start a product or whatever so i've just been looking into things that was what everyone said because i was like i said hard no i won't get into protein powder because everyone's doing it and there are people that have done it already amazing and i'm not going to try to it's like you know big fish small pond or no small fish big pond or whatever so i was like i'm not going to waste my time on protein powder they said the only way that you would stand out out and it would be incredible be cricket protein it would be incredible and i said there's no way in hell my audience would buy that there.
- [71:50]
B
Are probably a large number of your audience that are eating from an ancestral perspective or at least it's part of their mindset sure but either not necessarily in your audience a lot of my.
- [72:00]
A
Die hard hilda fans you're die hard hilda fans they're like on board with this they're tracking all right if if.
- [72:05]
B
They are truly and bear with me this is if you're truly eating ancestrally you can't just just cherry pick the things that make sense you know to your brain at this moment sitting in the context of the you know twenty twenty five like you need to embrace it all at least think about it all we were eating bugs well before we were eating meat and when we started to eat meat we were still eating bugs and we have been eating bugs the entirety of the time that we've been on this planet and there are still populations of this world in this world that are eating massive amounts.
- [72:34]
A
Of bugs have you ever eaten a.
- [72:35]
B
Spider no but i will would i've eaten a lot of bugs the dichotomy that's been created in social media is bugs equate to somebody attacking us eating meat and it's not that it isn't a bugs or meat to me if we're eating ancestrally if we're truly eating ancestrally it's bugs and meat bugs and.
- [72:51]
A
Meat okay now see that makes sense to me because you're not coming on here saying don't eat meat but eat the bugs and that would be like.
- [72:56]
B
Eat the meat and eat the bugs.
- [72:57]
A
Okay eat the meat and not me.
- [72:59]
B
But maybe you oh metal banging metal makes a sound that can travel a lot further than you could ever imagine if you have anything if you're trying to get somebody's attention oh to find you to find you if you can find i mean and and there's not many parts of the world you can go to now that you can't even find a rusty can on the ground somewhere on the side of a mountain like if you can bang metal the sound travels so incredibly far that it's a great way to be found one.
- [73:27]
A
Day i better hear that somebody's like life was saved from culture apothecary episode.
- [73:30]
B
And then you're gonna let me know.
- [73:31]
A
Bill schindler why are spinach and almonds like shards of glass on your liver.
- [73:36]
B
Spinach and almonds i believe are two of the most dangerous foods in our grocery store right now and this is the reason why the most dangerous plants in our grocery stores and in our diets are the ones that you know incognito slowly provide a toxin that builds up in our bodies over time and we can't equate because you know if you eat too much spinach you know too much of whatever almonds over time months or years later you start coming down with these symptoms that are showing up that are a result of months and years of consumption of this and it's hard for us to say oh it's because of the almond that can't be the almonds i've been eating the almonds for five years well that's exactly why you know you feel this way so for twenty plus years of studying traditional detoxification of plants right to make them safe in our diets the one thing i really haven't found and i'm looking very hard to find are suitable ways to get oxalates which are the tiny shards of glass a plant toxin that's there for several reasons including protection out of plants and right now since i had a huge oxalate issue and i know you had sally norton on before i had a five minute conversation with her six or seven years ago and she changed my life i had massive issues because of the amount of almonds that i was eating massive issues i stood up at a ketocon conference years ago at the end of my presentation somebody asked me a question and it was the room was loaded with people i had hundreds of people and i said somebody asked me on stage about almonds and i went off on almonds and then i got done i think and we had a booth christine and i had a booth for for the modern stage kitchen in the vendor hall and i'm thinking as i'm walking to the booth i just dissed almonds at a keto conference like i'm going to have an angry mob you know pissed off at me when i so i i'm walking towards a booth and i see a line we had the biggest line of everybody and i'm thinking oh my god they're going to destroy us and people the entire line were people thanking me for saying that some of them were probably four or five of them were in tears telling me their stories about oxley see i went.
- [75:41]
A
Viral before on social media for having sally norton on and she was saying almond flour stay away from it almonds stay away from them you're saying the same thing what were all these people coming to you in tears about almonds effects on their body saying to you.
- [75:57]
B
It was mostly pain mostly inflammation sometimes it was kidney stones sometimes it was pseudo gout there's five things that cause gout the only one we talk about is uric acid acid i would suggest right now the prominent issue that's causing gout right now is oxalates and it's being misdiagnosed as uric acid gout i had it it was horrible i have two corneal trans unrelated to this i have two corneal transplants from an eye disease keratoconus i got the transplants twenty something years ago but about i forget how many years ago eight or nine years ago i had a maybe longer i started to get incredibly light sensitive i couldn't see anything i couldn't keep my eyes open i was sitting two pairs of sunglasses i ended up with a medicine i went to my doctor my eye surgeon and he said there's nothing wrong with you i can't keep my eyes there were two full grown men holding my eye open so this guy could look into my eyes and he ended up giving me a drops eye drops i take no medicine this is the only time i've ever taken long term medicine in my life and he's like you need to take these eye drops they're called ketarolac they're not going to fix your problem but they're going to numb the symptoms so you can get through the day i want to get you off them as soon as possible seven years later i couldn't i still couldn't get off these eye drops and it wasn't until i talked to sally norton and after that conversation looked up one of the places where oxalates get deposited is in your corneas and then all the symptoms of cornea deposition in the cornea in the oxalate deposition in the corneas was exactly what i was experiencing incredible light sensitivity seven years i was taking these drops twice a day and i couldn't get off them he kept trying to get me off them and i finally when i took almonds and other oxalates out of my diet i have never taken a drop since years whoa never taken a job since i love almonds that was my go to snack i do too but the problem and this is one of the big i know we talked about plant toxins earlier and i know it can get very complicated with fermentation all this but here's a very easy takeaway there's we have taken away through technology and through mass production of food and the entire food system has taken away a lot of the limiting mechanisms that prevented us from over consumption a lot of these things in the past so for almonds for example when i grew up in the seventies we couldn't afford a bag of shelled almonds you barely even saw it at the grocery store i remember i would go to my grandparents house on christmas day they'd have a bowl of of nuts in the shell with a nutcracker i'd spend three hours cracking nuts to get a handful of nuts eat them and that was good but we couldn't afford shelled almonds nobody could it wasn't even the thing now you can go to costco and buy a bag of shelled almonds for you know ten bucks and everybody's telling us it's a superfood and we're trying to be low carb and this is what i fell into and we're popping it'd be impossible to do that thirty years ago we couldn't have afforded it it'd be impossible to have done that even earlier because you just didn't have access to this that spinach if you ate spinach itself isn't evil if you ate spinach for the two or three weeks out of the year that it would grow in your backyard maybe you get a high dose of oxalate for three weeks and then you're good the rest of the year but now we've called it a superfood we've taken away the limiting mechanism of seasonality we ship it all over the world we grow it in hoop houses you can get spinach and fresh spinach and frozen spinach all year long in the grocery store and i know people that are drinking a spinach smoothie in the morning and eating a spinach salad in the afternoon for lunch and it would have been impossible to do that so i know fermentation peeling toxins all these i know we're talking about if all you did as a parent or as an individual cooking for yourself or your loved one whatever eat seasonally like literally eat seasonally you immediately have gone into a situation where your diversity of diet over time is preventing you from in many cases of over consuming any particular toxin at any given time throughout the entire year year it huge that is huge then if you if you eat spinach in december because you're at a party and it's there at a restaurant it's not a very big deal that's a different thing than eating it every single.
- [79:52]
A
Day we weren't yeah we weren't designed to just eat all types of food all the time forever like we were only supposed to eat them different types you know different times of the year and so that's probably why we didn't see all these people have these extreme reactions to things because you're not over.
- [80:07]
B
Consuming it absolutely plants that are producing food in late summer and fall are the very high carbohydrate foods that are putting on weight fat for animals to overwinter right to get through the winter but if all we did was eat at least somewhat seasonally we'd solve a lot of problems and it also forces us to shop more locally and support local farmers i mean it's just a win win win all around the second thing is that i thought was brilliant is we have this idea that humans are supposed to be this ideal body weight and maintain it throughout the entire year and that is not true the mindset shift is different we have this like idea that okay we want to be at this percent body fat at three hundred sixty five days out of the year that isn't a very natural.
- [80:50]
A
Thing either is american corn driving people insane asylum level crazy it's not the.
- [80:57]
B
Corn it's the processing like everything else the hidden story behind corn is that we think it was domesticated somewhere around ten thousand years ago in the balsas valley of mexico we actually know what the wild ancestor is and it still grows it's called teosinte it was the staple of diets for thousands of years all over the americas like the staple i mean the aztecs for example not only was it a staple food it was the basis of their religion it was the basis of their economy it was the basis of their culture i mean basis of their art it was everything huge civilizations based on maize when the early american explorers came to america they saw corn for the first time like they the term corn actually means grain and it means grain of the local area so dominant grain so when you go to ireland and would see oats you would have called it corn because they were eating most that was the grain they were mostly eating or barley over here or if you went to asia you'd call rice corn right because that was the grain that was dominant so when they came to america and saw corn or maize they called it corn because it was the dominant grain that was being eaten they loved it it was easy to grow it tasted good it was filling it was cheap and they brought the corn back to back to europe and because it grew in very similar latitudes and you can follow the spread of corn or maize through europe with a disease in its wake called pellagra and it was first identified in spain in the seventeen hundreds not long after that it was identified in italy where it gets its name pellagra it was in eastern europe it shows up again at the end of the irish potato famine in ireland and then it comes to the us for the first time in the early nineteen hundreds the symptoms of pellagra are this red rashy skin parts of you would start falling off sometimes it's misdiagnosed as a leprosy aversion to sunlight bleeding from the mouth blindness and eventually death horrible disease and it's following maize all over especially in impoverished areas it shows up in ireland at the end of the irish potato famine because we started america started sending over massive amounts of maize as a famine relief food and what was crazy is that you know you have people that were dying from starvation that were now getting maize and they were getting sick and dying of this disease that they've never seen in ireland before it shows up in the early nineteen hundreds in american southeast georgia alabama the carolinas that area and it was such a big deal that we hired an infectious disease doctor by the name of joseph goldberg and he goes in to study it i mean and i mean massive hundreds of thousands of americans were dying and millions were sick from this disease it was a very big deal and this isn't that long ago it's one hundred years ago so he goes into studies and comes back and says hey this is really bad but i'm not your guy because i'm an infectious disease doctor this thing that's killing all your he wasn't a married thing that's killing everybody is is not it's not it's not infectious it has to do with food and i like like it doesn't have to do with food and don't even talk about corn you know corn is king in the south go back and figure it out so then he takes mental institutions and prisons a few of them you can't do this now but he did it then divided them in half fed half of them nothing but corn and the other half they were on whatever diet they were on but probably wasn't that good and the half that was eating nothing but corn started getting sick from the same fist palagra still didn't nobody believed them so he went to the extent where he would set up in these communities where it was prevalent he'd put a stage in the middle of the town square bring everybody up and he held these things called filth parties this was a disease that you were very embarrassed it was usually in impoverished areas it was associated with poverty and dirt and if somebody in your family got it you were very embarrassed so it was called the filth disease so he would bring somebody suffering from pellagra up on stage and as an infectious disease doctor he knew how and even then in the early nineteen hundreds how infected infectious diseases were spread so he wanted to show everybody it wasn't infectious so him and his wife and his partner would they take a syringe and they drew blood from the person that was sick on stage and they put it in their own veins then they took a cotton swab and they'd swab all the mucous membranes of the person that was sick and they take that same one and swab themselves and then they would actually take part of their bodies that were falling off and put them in these little gel cap like things and eat them and he finally made his case and they said great we believe you you it's corn what's the problem he goes i have no idea but this is your problem and it was until years later in nineteen thirty six where three scientists in the midwest that were studying a malnutrition disease in dogs that were able to identify that the issue that the humans are suffering from was also something related was the deficiency of niacin in the diet so it is a knee jerk reaction to that why every baked good in this country for years and many still today are fortified with niacin as a result of that thing there especially cheap baked goods but they still didn't understand what the issue was but all of a sudden pellagra essentially disappears because we're fortifying all these cheap foods with niacin here's the punchline people for hundreds of years we're talking millions of people sick and suffering hundreds of thousands dying from this disease this disease of malnourishment this disease of absence of niacin in the diet diet in the body while eating nothing but a food that is loaded with niacin they're actually eating nothing but a food loaded with niacin and getting sick and dying of a disease because they're malnourished yeah and the problem is it was unless it's processed right it passes right through the body there's only one way to make all the nutrients in corn fully available to the human body and it's that process of nistomalization that corn is probably the most difficult grain in the world for the human body to fully digest anybody who's eaten corn on the cob at a picnic and looked in the toilet the next day knows why i mean the whole kernels of corn right it is very difficult even if you grind that corn up even if you make cornmeal even if you make grits the nutrients some of the nutrients in it are not available to our body unless we process it properly remember that corn isn't put on earth for us to eat it's put on this earth to make a baby corn plant but it's a very simple process that's thousands of years to transform a food that if that's all we're eating can make us sick into something that can nourish us so the way it's done is in the past it was wood ash and water over a fire with the corn kernels simmer it for about a half an hour and let it sit overnight and that's it that's all you have to do we do it with something called cal or calcium hydroxide if you go to walmart and buy misses whatever's pickling lime it's exactly the same thing this process to make real tortillas real grits real pozole real hominy real masa real tortillas is very simple to do at home and it literally takes a half an.
- [87:23]
A
Hour how do you do it okay.
- [87:24]
B
So you take the maize and you put it in water and a tiny bit of this pickling lime or cow into the water literally simmer it for a half an hour turn off the pot turn off the heat let it sit overnight and the next day you have that raw ingredient that you can then cook as it is make nick's n make something very similar to a corn nuts it's very similar corn nuts but healthy you can then grind it up you can then use it as cornmeal you can then use it as as grits all of it that simple process that took a half an hour of active time sitting overnight transforms it completely and that's called nix or nishtomalization.
- [88:03]
A
It'S an ancient aztec word nishtomalization he told me and my masa chips ad reads when i talk about that i've been saying it wrong i had no.
- [88:11]
B
Idea yeah it is a literally a completely different food so here's a couple of tips for people first off i describe it really well in the book on how to do it at home we have classes all the time on how to do it it's very very very easy to do if you're shopping for something you want to make sure that it has actually been put through that process if you eat a lot of them again it's not a very big deal but if you eat a lot of the masa chips are nishtomalized our tortilla chicken chips are an one thing to be careful of though is believe it or not according to the fda to legally call this is insane to legally call a tortilla chip a tortilla chip it has to be fried in vegetable oil what look at look up the regulations the fda regulations oh.
- [88:54]
A
Okay so we need to change that.
- [88:56]
B
We need to change that it actually reads vegetable oil in order we're not allowed to call these tortilla chips what.
- [89:03]
A
Is wrong with ninety nine percent of peanut butter including organic remember so a.
- [89:08]
B
Peanut is not a nut it's a legume and legumes are inherently incredibly dangerous unless they're processed the right way so a great example is a kidney bean and the processing is very powerful but it's simple if i gave you three raw kidney beans and had you eat them you would end up in the hospital you'd be in intense pain and you would end up in the hospital but if we soak them overnight and then cook them we've detoxified them to the point that we can safely derive nutrition a peanut is a legume it is inherently loaded with toxins unless it's processed the right way now peanuts were originally domesticated in brazil they've been in south america for a very long time before they ever even came to north america if you look at any traditional preparation of peanuts they're almost always soaked overnight they're soaked and that soaking is power i know it doesn't seem like much because we're not actively engaged in something but the chemical and physical changes that happen with something as simple as as soaking or sprouting are incredibly powerful and same thing with the peanuts so our peanut butter that we make at the modern stone age kitchen we bring in raw peanuts we soak them overnight which is the essential part of detoxification then we dehydrate them then we roast them and then we turn them into.
- [90:17]
A
Peanut butter okay and this is it this is your peanut butter it just says soaked peanuts coconut oil local honey salt that's it chunky peanut butter and.
- [90:26]
B
It looks it looks the same but it is a different food and again if all you're doing is eating a tablespoon of peanut butter once a month it's not a very big deal but if you're feeding your kids peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every single day that's when something as simple as the soaking process can make all the difference in.
- [90:41]
A
The world do you sell this online or you have to only buy it.
- [90:44]
B
In person no we sell that online.
- [90:45]
A
You say that the ancestral diet isn't rigid that it's actually very freeing what is one ancestral habit that that a busy suburban family can easily adopt the.
- [90:56]
B
Basis of the ancestral diet is by default it is hyperlocal and hyper seasonal so i think the easiest thing and i know we already mentioned it is eating seasonally and locally is not they're not just buzzwords like that is that's what our diets were every single day of the year so powerful in every sense not only nutritionally but also from a community perspective from a ethical perspective from a sustainability perspective hyper seasonal hyperlocal as much as possible without killing yourself or you know mentally going to the point where it's it's becoming a problem and unhealthy i think that is the.
- [91:33]
A
First thing lately we're seeing two different narratives on seed oils you've got half the internet saying not only are they not bad for you but they're actually really healthy for you and then you have this other camp that are like stay away from seed oils at all costs where do you fall stay from.
- [91:46]
B
Sea oils at all costs why we have archaeological evidence that shows bones long bones intentionally busted open for marrow at three point four million years ago three point four million years we have animal fats in our diets for the entirety of that time but really getting boosted up about two million years ago the entirety of that time our fat consumption as fat like obviously if we're eating a nut there's some oil in it but the eating of just fat was coming in solely from animal sources the earliest plant based fat is olive oil at about eight or nine thousand years ago in just pockets of the world like small segments the next is palm fruit oil which i want to talk about in just a second the next is coconut oil and then much more recently is avocado avocado oil is actually very recent in our past every plant plant based fat i mentioned is fruit from fruit olive oil palm fruit oil avocado oil and coconut oil are palm fruit oils right i'm sorry are fruit oils they're not seed oils completely different foods nut and seed oils as you know have only been our diets for about one hundred twenty five or one hundred fifty years in addition to all the problems associated with extracting oils from nut and seeds hexane all the other solvents deodorizers deconditioners flavor enhancers all of those deodorizers all those things that we do just to get the oils out and get them in a state that we're fooling our senses to allow it to get past our nose right and our taste buds they've only been in our diet for a very short period of time we all know and we've all seen the charts that you know when we start introducing seed oils into the diets there's a whole bunch of health consequences that that are happening at the same time now there's a lot of there's a lot of environmental things happening in addition to the seed oils so we can't just say it's just the seed oils but they have been in our diets for a very short period of time one thing when we were in brazil one of the we were there to study how to process manioc but one thing that happened one day is we got to process palm fruit oil even though i'm in a rabbit hole all this stuff so i didn't understand the huge difference between palm fruit oil and palm seed oil and they get lumped together unfortunately both from a nutritional perspective but also from a sustainability perspective and they're different things entirely they're from the same tree they're from the same fruit the fruits come off they're not very big they have a very oily fruit on the outside and a huge seed on the inside i mean huge the seed on the inside is the size of like a hazelnut the processing of it is very traditional it's been around for at least six thousand years and you take these seeds and you put them in water you warm them up to sort of release the fat then you put them in a wooden mortar and pestle you pound it like this to release the oily fibers you put the oily fibers in water heat it up the oil skins that it comes to the top we skim it off i mean it is a beautiful thing harvested by hand small batch there's no solvents there's no chemicals it is a beautiful it is incredibly not only nutritionally rich and on the fat profiles are on the level of lard and tallow i mean the fat profiles are gorgeous and this is palm fruit fruit oil now they take all the seeds and they sell the seeds off to the modern industrial food system which has the chemicals and the machines to actually then extract the oil from the seeds that's a completely different thing so from a fat profile perspective and from a sustainability perspective they are different foods than palm seed oil and we are going to actually start introducing palm fruit oil into our into the restaurant.
- [95:13]
A
Is palm seed oil the one that they're getting and it's like destroying rainforests.
- [95:18]
B
Yes that's different thing the way this is produced is not destroying anything that what you're talking about is no better than the almond industry or any other sort of you know mass scale industry.
- [95:30]
A
So the thing correct me if i'm wrong but palm seed oil it's not it it is or isn't bad for you but it's just environmentally it's horrific how they get it oh it's both it's bad for you okay it's so.
- [95:44]
B
Bad for you it is a it is a highly industrialized process to even extract the oil from the seeds got it and on top of it it has all these environmental consequences so palm.
- [95:51]
A
Fruit yay palm seed nay and then definitely no to canola vegetable rapeseed grapeseed but you like butter tallow ghee lard love okay cool so your book eat like a human blends anthropology archaeology chef skills cooking i mean all of the things i love learning from you tell everybody about this book what you cover what it's about and then also i want you to talk about your restaurant and classes if you are a nerd for sourdough you have to take bill's class it is like a science lesson you can ask any question if you're like i don't know why it's not crusty enough on the outside it's it's it's caving in the middle it's really spongy it's like shredded like my husband's underwear something's wrong like he will figure out your problem during this class and it's happening in maryland like what an hour and a half outside of dc.
- [96:43]
B
It'S about an hour outside of dc hour and a half from philly a couple hours from new york yeah so.
- [96:46]
A
It is so worth it and to eat in his restaurant so worth it modern stone age kitchen so so tell us about everything the book the restaurant.
- [96:52]
B
The class so this book came out of twenty plus years of all the research we talked about today and learning how to feed my family and we wanted to just share it with the world so that book was we created it eat like a human eat like a human so that not only it's full of recipes it doesn't look like a cookbook it has seventy five recipes in it and it has all the context to make you understand why these recipes are important and where from a historic and traditional perspective you know how we have been processing foods and how to implement that into our own homes today we didn't know covid was going to hit we had no idea what was happening and the book launched in the middle of COVID and we also coming out of COVID our oldest daughter started a sourdough bread company and we brought that back into a building that was originally part of the college but now we have it and that book launched launched the restaurant so what's really cool about the recipes and the approach in this book is i can tell you from personal experience everything we do in that book is highly applicable and doable in a home setting for your family i mean this is coming from a family that has we had two careers three kids and it wasn't like we're living on top of a mountain and just homesteading we were literally they were running the soccer practice they were going to ballet we were doing all the things so in a modern context it works but it also became the basis of the restaurant so it works in a commercial sense as well and i'm really incredibly proud there's no two ingredients put together outside of our walls at our restaurant literally we make all of our cheese we do all of our butchering we do all the sour everything is one hundred percent guys and.
- [98:21]
A
Tell them about the chili and the restaurant is called the modern stone age.
- [98:24]
B
Kitchen you had the chili i forget.
- [98:25]
A
Yes so our approach and the olives the olives you had are the only olives i've ever liked in my entire life i do not like olives really you your olives i was like i could eat these like grapes that is.
- [98:38]
B
Really good to hear we were just launching those olives you had were actually launching right now so i'm so glad.
- [98:42]
A
You left oh yeah okay so tell.
- [98:43]
B
Us about the chili so since we're doing all in house butchering for everything and making all of our meats whether it's for a sandwich or something else we have the capability of implementing a complete nose to tail approach but some of the nose to tail stuff has gone a little bit far in the other direction for me i mean when we're eating no organs it was kind of silly and when we're eating nothing but organs it's kind of silly too so our approach has been typically in a traditional sense if an animal is killed it's eaten from one end to the other and then you go out and harvest another animal so what we did was the percentages that are in our chili and all these numbers are in the book percentage that aren't chili the percentages that are in our hot dogs percentages of all the organ meats that are in most of the foods that we create are the exact same percentages that was in the animal so so the meat the fat the liver the heart the kidney which are the easy parts for us to get sometimes we can get other parts we will but at least those parts we put in those end final products like the chili in the same percentage they were in the animal and i think that's a really the nice thing is i think that's a very good ancestral approach but it also you had it it's delicious it's not really tinny or livery.
- [99:51]
A
No it doesn't oh it was phenomenal it was incredible and like you can go in there and have the best breakfast of your life the best lunch of your life and then also it's like a bakery like you can go there to get your sourdough bread and stuff if you live in the area which what is that town called it's.
- [100:05]
B
Called chestertown it's a beautiful cutest really.
- [100:07]
A
Cute it's very like hallmarky like it's worth the worth the trip to go.
- [100:11]
B
There for lunch our goal with the restaurant was to create the restaurant that we would have wanted to take or been able to take our kids to so so i know we talk about blood and milk and insects and all these other things if you look at our menu everybody would recognize everything on the menu we're trying to make traditional food as nourishing as it can be using these ancestral principles we also have the non profit with the classes so it's called the modern stone age food lab and we do in person classes but here's something we this is i'm so excited because those in person classes i love to teach but i can only take about twelve people at a time we have classes almost every week weekend but we literally we've been asked for a very long time every now and then we've done some virtual things but we have just launched a community where every monday night we get together and cook and then do do so there's there's a cooking class every single monday night and then there's a bunch of q and a afterwards and a lot of communication in between and this is a great opportunity for anybody who's starting to dip their toes into this we're using the same sort of equipment you would use use in your house it's not the commercial stuff downstairs right it's the stuff in the food lab the same sorts of whisks same sort of spoons the same sort of stoves and we're going through everything in small bites from you know how to refresh sourdough mother to how to take apart a chicken to how to make cheese in your house all of those things and what i love about it is it's for everybody yeah your husbands will.
- [101:32]
A
Love it like it's really fun if.
- [101:34]
B
You are somebody who i want to make sourdough bread for this my life for my family this is the class for you if it's i just want to know more about bread so i know what to buy and how to buy it learning how to make a loaf of sourdough bread is the best way to get to that place to inform yourself and what i like to say is once you've learned how to make some of these foods from scratch whether you do it again at all or not you are a different person like literally when you walk into a grocery store all of the trillions of dollars of marketing and advertising you're immune to it you are an informed consumer like it's meaningless to you you will literally walk into the grocery store a completely different person and you will know if you're not going to make it again you'll know which one to buy without anybody else telling you because you can read through all that nonsense all the trillions of dollars of marketing and advertising that are there not for your health but to make somebody else a lot of money so i'm really excited for the opportunity to reach even more.
- [102:25]
A
People do you do sourdough pancakes actually.
- [102:28]
B
They'Re probably one of the healthiest sourdough things that we have have they are the longest fermented thing is our sourdough pancakes and sourdough waffles guys i'm telling.
- [102:34]
A
You make a trip to modern stone age kitchen in maryland if you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture physically emotionally or spiritually what would.
- [102:44]
B
It be it'd be connection one hundred percent connecting reconnecting with your food allows you to reconnect with so many other aspects of your life i mean we mentioned earlier how food is interrelated with everything we are as humans it permeates every aspect of our life in fact eating food is one of the most sensual things that we do i mean we use all of our senses when we're engaged in the act of eating when you reconnect with your food you are reconnecting with yourself you're reconnecting with your family you're reconnecting with your community you're reconnecting with all of these things in a very very beautiful way my life has been so enhanced when i started you know and all this happens in the kitchen and around the table i sign everyone on my book it all begins in your kitchen and around your table because that is exactly where it all begins reconnect take a link out of your food chain and it could be as simple as learning how to make a loaf of sourdough bread or learning how to make a jar of sauerkraut all of that is a very beautiful thing that has so many consequences ramifications to completely transform your life.
- [103:40]
A
Have you met hillary boynton from absolutely.
- [103:43]
B
Yeah she came out to the monstrous kitchen yeah she's doing amazing things i.
- [103:45]
A
Was gonna say you guys would be doing two peas in a pod i love hillary and she does school of lunch in southern california so kind of she does like her little class there you have that and on the east coast so yeah i figured i was like you guys need to meet if.
- [103:58]
B
You haven't met one other very quick thing i wanted to mention the true real experience of engaging with your food and everything that it takes to produce that food is incredibly powerful and one of the things we started doing a few years ago that we're continuing to do is we do trip trips abroad ireland is a great example where we do a trip to ireland oh so.
- [104:18]
A
I can go with you to drink.
- [104:19]
B
The blood well that's in kenya but we can get you blood in ireland too but it is a you know these trips are immersive it's archeology anthropology it's food it's chefs i mean the last meals were the two michelin ireland's first two michelin star chef were it's awesome but traveling has been so enhanced for us by getting to know real food and that's some of the experiences that we're you know we're trying to share as well oh cool you would.
- [104:42]
A
Love it so where do people like find out about all this is there.
- [104:44]
B
One website or anything one website modernstoneh.
- [104:46]
A
Dot com and where can they find.
- [104:47]
B
You on social media two places so my personal so what we've kind of done is divide not divided but most of the sort of research teaching stuff is falling under my instagram at doctor bill schindler so at drbillschindler and that plus all the things that have to do with the restaurant are at at the modern stone age we couldn't get modern stone age so it's hemodernstone age on instagram and facebook we have a really strong social media presence and we do do an email every monday there's a blog there's a ton of information in our email so if you sign up for email anything that any of the classes we're doing the community that i mentioned earlier any of the specials are running at the restaurant you'll get a weekly information about that the kind of things we talked about today we dive deep in those blogs things about the palm fruit oil for example was a recent blog post we did we also have a bed and breakfast next door so we as you can tell that town is super cute there's not a massive amount of places to stay and people are coming in they wanted to experience pizza night with us on friday then do the farmer's market on saturday and take a class on saturday and our brunch or whatever so we do have a bed and breakfast it's on the same website and i just have to put a plug in for pizza pizza is a junk food but just like everything else pizza can be a health food if it's done the right way and i think sometimes pizza gets a bad rap but pizza can be an amazing food so we right now we're only doing it once a week because it takes all week we make everything so we butcher the animals we make the pepperoni we make the sausage we make the cheese from local milk it takes three and a half to four days to make the pizza dough full sourdough it's a wood fired oven so if you think about that as a pizza it is again a completely different food than domino's or something else which would destroy your health this is something that that at worst isn't going to harm you but at best i would think of it as a nutritional and nutritional food but you can come in the same approach we have to food we're doing with alcohol one of the worst places for nasty things like artificial sweeteners and coloring agents and flavoring agents are coming in with the mixers so a mixed drink is a very dangerous place to be if you're trying to eat healthy right not just talking about the alcohol but that so we're making all of our amaros we're making our vermouths the reason that you had those olives we're making the olives for the drinks so we do have an alcohol program for i know there's a big piece for sobriety and it's a very important thing there's no reason to drink alcohol from a nutritional perspective.
- [107:08]
A
Your olives were so salty oh they.
- [107:10]
B
We ferment lie cured them and then.
- [107:12]
A
Fermented them that's why they were different man you gotta go there for the pizza for the olives for the chili the sourdough experience stay a couple days yeah a couple days the whole experience i just think it'd be so cool especially for homeschool families which are tons of my audience homeschool families i think.
- [107:27]
B
Would absolutely everybody in your family can find something to eat and you can sit there and feel good about what.
- [107:32]
A
They'Re eating yes yeah absolutely and i did doctor bill's sourdough class and we made a whole vlog about it it's very educational and very fun so you can see that at the real alex clark youtube channel if you want to get some more from doctor bill after this episode thank you so much for.
- [107:48]
B
Coming on thank you for all that you do.
- [107:53]
A
Don'T forget to go watch my vlog of me doing doctor bill's sourdough class it was so fun best bread i've ever had best lunch i've ever had and you're gonna learn so much about sourdough and what is going wrong every single time you're trying to make a loaf if you loved hearing from doctor bill on the podcast and you want to go even deeper deeper you need to book that flight to maryland their kitchen is well worth the trip at modern stone age and don't forget you can now learn directly from bill and christina schindler inside their brand new online community the ancestral table you're going to get weekly live workshops q and as on demand classes exclusive recipes and real behind the scenes access to how they raise their family to eat like a human it is everything that you wish you could ask in person now just to click away and for my audience you're going to get twenty percent off your monthly or annual membership for a limited time time you can join the movement to reconnect with food tradition and community one delicious nourishing bite at a time go to modernstoneage dot com click the word community and then use code alexclark twenty at checkout please leave us a five star review if you enjoyed this episode to learn something new what was the craziest thing that doctor bill taught you was it about the corn was it about the potatoes was it something else the drinking blood do you think your family would go on a family vacation like his did and everybody tried i don't know i don't i don't think that would have worked with my family growing up but i love how him and his wife have raised their kids to be just absolutely fearless about food that's an entire episode that i could do separately with him i think is just how do you get your kids to be fearless about food i think that's important subscribe to real alex clark on youtube and anywhere you get your podcast new episodes release every monday and thursday at six pm pacific nine pm eastern follow us on instagram at culture apollo apothecary or me at real alex clark we do put vlogs and all kinds of fun stuff on our youtube channel don't forget about that and i will see you next time it's culture apothecary and i'm alex clark.