Transcript
Dr. Benjamin Bickman (0:00)
If only people were sitting around on a Friday night listening to us chat and thinking, oh, I really want a stick of butter. They want something sweet and gooey. We crave carbs. And they have myriad metabolic effects, one of which is to spike insulin.
Jordan Peterson (0:14)
What happens to type 1 diabetics if they eat nothing but fat?
Dr. Benjamin Bickman (0:17)
The fat cells get big. They get so big that they have to tell insulin, I'm done. A government issues a mandate telling its people what to eat and boy, they got it wrong.
Jordan Peterson (0:25)
All those vegetables and fruits have been genetically altered to a degree that's just beyond comprehension.
Dr. Benjamin Bickman (0:30)
A purely plant based diet is so deficient in nutrients, it is utterly incompatible with human survival. Studies in men have shown that if man stops eating meat, his testosterone plummets, his sperm production plummets.
Jordan Peterson (0:42)
Listen to that man. Hello everybody. The first thing I think I'll tell you is that I'm on tour again from February through June through the out the United States, in Canada and in Europe. And if you want more information about that, go to jordanb peterson.com and check it out so that you can come and see me and my wife. And if you're inclined to do that, I'm talking today to Dr. Benjamin Bickman, who's a professor of cell biology at Brigham Young University and a lecturer at Peterson Academy. He's done three courses for us. And we are talking today primarily because I'm interested in, and not me only obviously in the rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement. And I've been talking to the people who are integrally involved in that movement and trying to determine, strategize about the direction. And that's very complicated thing to do. And one of the things I want to do is figure out where the most bang for the buck might be had with the least amount of trouble. Almost every problem's like that. There's lots of causes of a given problem, but there's one or two causes that are 90% of the problem. And you want to focus there and maybe have a chance then. And so I talked to Dr. Bickman today about insulin resistance and really, to put that in more simple terms, excess carbohydrate intake. And that's the carbohydrates that are rapidly transmuted metabolically into sugar. And that's pretty much all carbohydrates, by the way. And the fundamental problem with America's health is an abundance of carbohydrates. And so we discussed insulin resistance, which is a metabolic condition that arises as a consequence of too much carbohydrate. Intake. And then we discuss the multiplicity of cascading catastrophic health effects that produces type 2 diabetes being particularly well known, let's say, as a secondary consequence. But cancer, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, reproductive dysfunction, more generally, high blood pressure, you name it, immunological disease, depression, anxiety. There's almost no serious medical condition that's widespread, that can't be traced to excess of carbohydrate intake. And so obviously, it seems to me, that's where the focus should be. And so we walk through the biology, we walk through the practicalities, we walk through some hypotheses about how that problem might be redressed at the government level, but also at the level of individual behavior. And so this is very important. There's likely nothing you can do that will improve your life more, both in the short run, but even more importantly in the long run than to modify your diet away from high carbohydrate intake. And so we walk through why that is. So join us. So, Dr. Bickman, I've been talking to the Maha people about their plans, and it's clearly the case that Americans, Westerners, more broadly, but particularly Americans maybe, are suffering from a slew of unfortunate medical conditions. So what I'd like to know from you to begin with is if you had to rank order the magnitude of the medical problems that presently confront the west, let's say, particularly the U.S. how would you do that? There's a very specific reason I'm asking.