Debunking the Worst Medical Advice You’ve Ever Been Given | Dr. Ken Berry, MD

What's one of the biggest myths that doctors are still falling for? Food doesn't really matter. The majority of chronic disease in America today is directly caused by your diet. If you want to lose fat, you've got to cut the carbs. That's just as simple as it gets. So if everything that you've been fighting for is right, does that mean that millions of Americans have been made sick by official medical advice? Absolutely. The USDA, the FDA, the AMA, the ADA, the AHA, all of these organizations are complicit. When I took the oath, I meant it. And I had been harming people by giving them the ADA medical advice. I had been making diabetics sicker, pushing them closer to kidney failure, closer to the amputation by the words coming out of my mouth. Today's guest is a doctor who says that he spent the beginning of his career making people sicker instead of healthier. Not because he didn't care, but because he trusted the medical guidelines and the science that he was taught. He now believes much of that guidance was driven by weak evidence, industry influence, and a healthcare system built to manage, chronic disease instead of prevent or reverse it. Joining me today is Dr. Ken Berry, a board-certified family physician, best-selling author of Lies My Doctor Told Me, and co-founder of The Proper Human Diet. Today, we're talking about whether we've been misled about cholesterol during pregnancy, why you have rosacea, why your retina keeps detaching, how to become osteoporosis-proof, why women are struggling with insulin resistance, what the change from PCOS to PMOS means, why you're on the same diet as your friend, but you still can't lose weight, and how there is more freedom outside of health insurance than with it. Watch this episode on Culture Apothecary via Spotify or Real Alex Clark on YouTube. Please welcome the legendary Dr. Ken Berry to Culture Apothecary. If tomorrow you became America's Surgeon General, what is the first piece of nutrition advice that you would delete from every government website? Whole grains are in any way a health food. Why do you say that? Because bread is made up of starches and inflammatory proteins, and some people can eat bread and they don't really have an inflammatory reaction, but the carbs, the starch that breaks down into sugar, that counts for everybody. Now, there are less bad versions of bread. So if any of your viewers at home are making their own sourdough bread, if they're grinding their own grain. Oh, yeah, we're all about that on this show. Yeah, so definitely that is the least bad bread option, but I've been studying nutrition for years and that study has taken me into the fields of anthropology and archaeology and history. And bread, without exception, has always been a poverty food. It's always been a starvation food. Never in human history has bread been a health optimization food. So when people say something like whole grains are so nutrient-dense, they obviously have never looked up the nutrition in bread. There's a long list of foods that are much more nutrient-dense, and not only nutrient-dense, but the nutrients are actually available to be absorbed by your body. You are a medical doctor. How much training on nutrition did you get in medical school? And how did that compare to pharma training in medical school? Yeah, so 99.99% of my training in medical school and residency was pharma training. We did, at the University of Tennessee, have one nutrition class, unlike many medical schools, and this was back in what 1998, jeez, that was a long time ago. And so for one hour a week, two days a week, for half a semester, we had a nutrition class. But 99% of that class was teaching us how to treat somebody who had been in a house fire, and they were in the burn unit, and they couldn't eat, and so we intravenously fed them. Or somebody who had been in a vehicle accident and smashed their face and couldn't eat. So we had to feed them intravenously. But to your point, as far as just the feeding of a human out in the wild, maybe one hour out of the entirety of medical school. Why do you think so many doctors believe things that aren't true? I say this and people think I'm being flippant, but doctors are just dudes and chicks. And what I mean by that is, is they're not demigods. They may have a little bit higher IQ than the average person. They may be a better student than the average person. But there's nothing special about a doctor. Many of my classmates did not have a higher IQ. They were just hard workers. You can be a doctor with an IQ of 100. There's no special, like, you know, holy grail of getting into medical school other than just being willing to work 23 hours a day and sleep every third day. And so doctors are just as susceptible to misconceptions, to fallacies, to misinformation. And there are certain styles of misinformation. And there's certain types of misinformation that people who are educated are actually more susceptible to. What do you mean? Somebody who's got a Ph.D. or an M.D. or some graduate degree, when they hear a proclamation from a regulatory body or like the American Diabetes Association, they're much more likely to just accept that at face value, accept it blindly. It wouldn't even occur to them that maybe they have some financial disincentives. And so, therefore, they've slanted their message. It doesn't even occur to a doctor. Whereas, you know, just a regular person, if they say, "Oh, the ADA just said that you should eat 11 servings of whole grain a day," they're like, "Okay." You know, the doc's like, "Take it to the bank. I'm sure they did the research." And the regular person's like, "That's a lot of bread." What's one of the biggest myths that doctors are still falling for? Probably the biggest myth that the average doctor might believe, but very often it's an unconscious belief, is that food doesn't really matter, okay? First of all, the majority of doctors in America got no nutrition training. So, you understand the implication is we didn't even have a class in med school on that. So, obviously, that's not important. You see? Yeah. And so, then when you're doing your residency training, nobody talks about diet. My friend, Casey Means, actually, when she was on my channel, she said that she brought up a diet in her residency training, like maybe they're eating too much of this and all the other. Residents looked at her like she was from Mars. Like, obviously, diet has nothing to do with this. Why would you even bring that up? When the truth of the matter is, is that the majority of chronic disease in America today is directly caused by your diet, by what you're eating and sometimes what you're not eating. That's the predominant cause of chronic disease. So, what do you think all these doctors thought when this announcement was made within the last couple months from the administration that if your hospital is serving this crap food, and not adhering to the new dietary guidelines, you're going to lose funding? I think that the average doctor probably thought that was a little bit kooky and a little bit conspiratorial, because they believe, either consciously or unconsciously, that diet is really irrelevant. Humans can eat whatever, and then I'll just, I'll medicate them. I'll send them to the pharmacy for a pill or an injection or an infusion, and you can eat pretty much whatever. That's not a big deal. So, if everything that you've been fighting for these last several decades is right, does that mean that millions of Americans have been made sick by official medical advice? Absolutely. By official nutrition advice coming from the U.S. government, also from the ADA, the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. All of these organizations are complicit. Now, do I think there was a huge conspiracy? No. I think there were some incorrect assumptions made early on in American medicine and nutrition, and they've just kind of multiplied and magnified over the decades to kind of land us where we are now. Now, do the big corporations want to make billions of dollars a year? Of course. Big food and big pharma, they've got to make their billions, and so they're going to do whatever it takes to make those billions. But the people who were really tasked with protecting the Americans, the American public, the USDA, the FDA, the AMA, the ADA, the AHA, are guilty of dereliction of duty. Was there a study or a patient that you came across that kind of made you rethink everything and thought, "I've got to leave the conventional medical complex"? I can tell you exactly what did it. So, all of my life, I've been very slender, very athletic, and so I go to medical school, I'm in residency training, I'm working full-time in the emergency department, full-time in the clinic, and just eating whatever because I had that assumption. I can eat whatever, it's fine, I'll just take a pill if I need it. And I lived in scrubs, which have a drawstring at the waist. I'm very tall, and so I had to wear extra large or 2X scrubs, so there was plenty of drawstring in the middle. And so I knew I'd gain some weight, but I didn't have time to jump on a scale. One day I jumped on a scale and I was 297 pounds. Whoa. And now I'm 6'3", I like to think I carried that very well. But I did not, I'm sure. I was a fat doctor. So, I got some labs done. checked, I was pre-diabetic. Now, here's where the epiphany comes. I was like, dang it, because I'm a Southern boy, if you can tell. I don't know. The accent's very subtle. I thought you were from Boston. Right, right. And so things have to make sense. One plus one is two, even if it hurts your feelings. That's kind of how I was raised. That's the patient population that I work with. It's very disingenuous if a fat doctor comes into your room and says, now, Alex, you're a little overweight. You need to lose a few pounds, okay? And I think the women who watch this show are very familiar with the eye shift that men make, right, when they're talking to a woman. I was getting the eye shift, but it was going to my belly. When I would say, you need to lose a few pounds, they would look at my gut and be like, okay, I'll get right on that, doc. Thanks for that. So I took home the American Diabetes Association handout that I gave to all of my patients who were newly diagnosed. Pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes. And I'm like, I can't be that doctor. I can't be a fat doctor telling people to lose weight, telling people blah, blah, blah. So I take that home and I commit to it for 90 days. I stop eating bacon, which really broke my heart. I cut down on saturated fat, red meat. I ate lots of whole grain bread. I had fruit juice smoothies, lots of fruit and berries. Oh, you probably started gaining weight. Oh, you're going to steal my thunder. Okay. And so at the end of that 90 days, I literally followed the PDF from the American Diabetes Association. Association handout because I had pre-diabetes and I started jogging two days a week. And let me just tell you, I hate to jog, but I did it. You might say, okay, what happened at the end of that 90 days, I'd gained three pounds and my A1C, it actually went up a 10th of a point. That was my epiphany as a doctor, because doctors, this will be great. Your viewers will love this, that your doctor thinks that you're full of crap. Okay. Your doctor thinks, oh, I told Alex what to do. She didn't do it. That's why she got fatter and sicker. Well, I had this three months of personal experience because I live with me. I kind of know what I did. I knew that I had stuck to this 100%. I knew that I was out there on that country road jogging, trying to listen. Back then it was, it was not an audible, it was a CD player. Yep. And I would just strap it to my arm and try to jog listening to a medical journal or something. That didn't work well, but also I hate to jog in general. And so it did not work. Now I'm faced as a doctor. Am I? I'm a special snowflake that somehow this advice didn't work for me. That makes no sense. Maybe this advice is just wrong. Maybe all of my patients who I'd been secretly thinking they're not compliant, they're not doing what I'm saying, tell them to do. Maybe they were listening to me. Maybe this is just junk advice. And so that's when I started reading outside the box. I started looking at anthropology. I started reading. I read the Paleo Diet by Dr. Lauren Cordain. I read, uh, Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution. You know, just whatever I could get my hands on. And all of these were saying, yeah, you got to cut the carbs. So I tried that for 90 days. I was maybe eating a hundred total grams of carbs a day. Still a lot by keto and carnivore standards, but I had cut it from 300 grams a day on the ADA diet down to a hundred grams a day. Immediately my A1C went back to normal. Three months, it was back to normal. I had lost 20, 30 pounds. I was feeling better. And then things that I didn't expect as a doctor, like my arthritis pain got better. That's weird. You know, it wasn't my knee arthritis. It was shoulder arthritis. That's odd. How does that work? Also, my heartburn got better. How does that work? Also, my rosacea went away. Then when I started recommending a ketogenic or a ketovor or a carnivore diet to patients, and they would come back in and say, well, I lost 40 pounds, but also my acne is better. My psoriasis is better. I didn't immediately discount that and think, well, they're crazy. There's no way, which is what the average doctor would think. Like diet doesn't have any effect on stuff like that, but I'd already seen it in my own personal journey. And I'm like, well, maybe. And so I kept reading and I kept referring back to the physiology textbooks and the pathophysiology textbooks, trying to figure out how, why is my but when I eat all the whole grain breads and all the skim milk dairy, my rosacea comes back with a vengeance. How does that make any sense physiologically? What's the mechanism? Then I would hear these stories from my patients. I had people who were on the surgeon's schedule to have a knee replacement. And after 90 days of keto or carnivore, they'd come back and they were walking with a cane, sometimes two canes. They didn't have their cane. They're like, I called the surgeon and they said, okay, because my knee doesn't hurt anymore or it's 90% better. Can I put that surgery off? And I'm like, heck yeah, you can put that surgery off. You don't need it unless you're having severe pain. And I just kept hearing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of face-to-face people saying, oh my gosh, I never dreamed that it would help this, that, or the other. And so that's why I'm so just on fire to talk about nutrition and diet and everything I've learned about it is because yeah, it can literally change your life. I tried this little ditty called the blue beauty drink the other day, and I swear it made me feel like a Disney mermaid who also does her taxes on time. Like my skin was glowing. My hair wasn't trying to escape my head. 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So for those of you who don't know, Vance does CrossFit, not once a day, twice a day. And he is genuinely the most incredible athlete that I know. I mean, the man is over there thrown around 400 pounds like he's loading groceries into the trunk, but his hands are absolutely destroyed. It's almost become part of our nightly routine where he walks in the door, holds his hands out to me, and he's like, hey, babe, can I use that active skin repair again? And every single time I'm like, sure. But what exactly is the long-term strategy here? Because tomorrow morning, you're just going to go rip them open again. I keep telling him to wear gloves, he refuses. It's apparently a matter of principle. He says it's super dorky, whatever. But active skin repair has honestly become our go-to for just about every skin issue. Cuts, scrapes, burns, sunburns, rashes. It's like my number one go-to gift for anyone who's having a baby. Basically, anything where your skin needs a little extra support. 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The very first apology, I just took a legal pad and I wrote, I'm sorry in big sharpie and posted a picture. Like, I'm so sorry because you're going to make me cry because when I took the oath, I meant it. I had been making diabetics sicker. I had been pushing them closer to kidney failure, closer to that retinal detachment, closer to that amputation by the words coming out of my mouth who I dedicated my life to helping people to improving their health. And I had literally been harming them. Now, it wasn't intentional. Of course. But does that make it any less bad for them? You think food also has to do with retinal detachment? A hundred percent. My mom is about to have her second surgery for that. Called diabetic retinopathy for a reason. The leading cause of blindness in the United States is the complications of diabetes. That's the leading cause. The leading cause of amputations is diabetes. The leading cause of kidney failure, diabetes. When you take diabetes out of the equation, and to be clear, 95% of cases of diabetes are type two. I know the people with type one diabetes feel like they never get talked about, but it's because it's such a tiny minority. But everything that I say to people with type two applies to people with type one as well. You say that chronic disease is America's biggest threat. So not fentanyl, not China, not terrorism. It's chronic disease. All those things are important. And all those things should be addressed. But if your question is to me, Dr. Berry, what is the thing that's killing the most Americans, that's disabling the most Americans, that's affecting the most Americans, American's mental ability and mental health, it's not the Chinese. It's not TikTok. It's not any of that stuff. It is the food that we're being sold and told, hey, this is healthy, or the implication, this is healthy enough, right? And so, yeah, you're eating Doritos, but it's the new protein Doritos. So, therefore, that's fine, probably. We don't know. There's no research, but I guess it's fine. And so, I could just go on and on for hours. But yeah, if you took the metabolic syndrome, the type 2 diabetes, the pre-diabetes, the fatty liver, the metabolic syndrome, if you took all that out of the equation, America's health would skyrocket. So, do you think that we have a healthcare system in America, or do we have more of like a disease management system? It's 100% a disease management system. And to be clear, Big Food and Big Pharma love that. They're totally fine with that. The average patient, however, can, they feel, this is not right. This is not anything that I want to be part of. When you're in the hospital and they bring you your cafeteria tray, and you're like, okay, is that food going to help me heal? That's a valid question. And the answer 99.9% of the time in any American hospital is no. Not only is it not going to help you to heal, it's going to probably slow your healing process. Are you still practicing like you have patients and stuff? Part-time. Okay. Do you take insurance? I do not. I have not for years. I've been trying to educate the audience on this. You'll be the perfect person to help me. And I've been talking about how you don't need health insurance. This is controversial. There's other things I like, like health shares and things like that. But paying cash is seriously going to save you money and get you better quality care and get down to exactly what is going on with you. So, can you tell us a little bit about that? Can you explain why health insurance is like a matrix that you got to escape? The incentives for a health insurance company are so misaligned with the actual health of their customer, which that's a whole other podcast we could get into. But what people need to understand is, is that if first and foremost, you fix the foundational thing of your health, which is your diet, it's my firm belief that 80% of chronic disease and 80% of healing in reversal of chronic disease comes from what you eat and what you don't eat. Okay? Number one. Number two, if you fix your food, then you're going to get rid of your prediabetes. You're going to reverse your type 2 diabetes. Your blood pressure is going to come down. Your fatty liver is going to go away. If you've got sleep apnea, your fatty tongue and fatty throat, which are literally documented things that no doctor ever talks about, they go away. Your sleep apnea goes away 90% of the time. You can sell your CPAP on eBay. Okay? Your skin conditions get better. Eczema goes completely away when you stop the grains and the beans and the other inflammatory things. Psoriasis typically improves by 95% on a proper human diet. And so now you're like, okay, first of all, you were going to the doctor six times a year for all of your medical conditions that I just named. Nine out of 10 of them are now gone. So you don't need all those specialists anymore. You don't need to go to the doctor for blood work six times a year anymore. You might need to go once a year. Right? And so then, yes, in that scenario, having health insurance with a low deductible, it becomes just a complete waste of money. You don't need that. Now, I think we all probably need some catastrophic in case you fall off the house or you get hit by a bus. Then you probably need some kind of, you know, safety net health insurance for that. Right. That's what I like. So I talk about CrowdHealth a lot on the show. I love that company. Like 99.9% of all their cases are covered of severe catastrophic events like that, like falling off a roof or some guy accidentally shot himself while hunting. It was like millions of dollars in medical bills. It was all covered by CrowdHealth. So that's an example. Sure. And so I'm not anti-modern medicine. If you fall off the house or you shoot yourself, you need a trauma center. You need modern health care. You need the intensive care unit. You need the burn unit. You need all that stuff. But the vast majority being practiced in American clinics and American hospital is chronic disease management and taking care of all the complications that came from the chronic diseases that are entirely caused by diet and entirely reversible by diet. And so you would break the back of modern American medicine if every single person took the new inverted food pyramid and read it from left to right, top to bottom, and focused mainly in the top left corner and just ate that stuff. You would break the back of big pharma. You would break the back of big food. And you would also encourage local farmers and local ranchers. You would destroy industries, but you would also create other more, in my opinion, more ethical, more God-loving industries that make sense if you really love planet Earth and you want to take care of it. You would literally change the economic landscape of America. And of course, big pharma and big food are not interested in that. And so they're going to fight this at every turn. But yeah, food is the answer. People that are like, well, I just have to have health insurance, traditional health insurance because of those catastrophic moments or whatever, are not considering the fact that I believe it's one in four claims gets denied. So this idea that like this is your like fail safe, like it's going to always be there for you is just not even necessarily true. You've got people filing bankruptcy due to medical emergencies constantly and they have health insurance. So this is a much of the chronic disease epidemic in America, do you think is political? Do you have a lobbyist in Washington that goes and argues your position to senators and congressmen? I don't. You don't. Nor do I. And I imagine most of the viewers, they don't have their own personal lobbyists that they can say, hey, go talk to Senator so-and-so and tell him to vote no on this bill. The average American doesn't have any traction whatsoever in D.C., not even much at their state house level. And so I think that it's a huge political problem because Big Pharma and Big Food and Big Ag and Big Medicine, they have all the lobbyists. And so they're able to lobby all the congressmen and senators. They're able to lobby the FDA and the USDA and say, you know, no, no, let's let's reword that or let's change that or let's kill that. That obviously perpetuates the problem. I think many people still perhaps naively think that the federal government should help the citizens. But increasingly, I don't think that's really the case because I think the federal government has been completely captured by the big corporations. And so that's why back in 2017, 2018, when I started this, I'm like, I'm not even going to try to happen at a legislative level. I'm just going to make videos to help people. And so each YouTube video is just me sitting, talking to a patient saying, oh, you've got psoriasis. OK, here's what you do about that. Oh, you've got PCOS. Oh, here's what you do about that. I still, to this day in 2026, do not hold out any hope, even with Maha being where it's at. I'm very thankful that that message is getting out there. But I don't think it's going to change any government regulations long term. I don't think it's going to change governmental laws at the federal or state level. My hope is, is that enough people like me and you and you just say, oh, so I should eat way more meat and eggs and way less of the package stuff that comes in plastic bags and cardboard boxes. And that will improve my health. Yes, do that. And then who cares what the federal government does after that? Because you're you are now healthy. True freedom is not relying on the government for anything. And as conservatives, we know this. It's so weird to me, like this is where conservatives start to to kind of fumble a little bit. They're like when it comes to medical advice, food advice and then anything having to do with pharma. It's like this is where all of a sudden we are nervous to. Take it back into our own hands. Right. And this is a conservative problem because liberals, I mean, they're wrong about ninety nine percent of stuff. But this is the one thing that they've been consistently right about until the pandemic. Now, all of a sudden they decided, I guess they don't care about these values anymore. But historically, it was the left that did. And so this is my favorite thing. And when people are like, well, is the do you ever you know, when a leftist asked me, do you ever think the left is right about anything? I'm like, yeah, you guys were right about not vaccinating your kids and drinking raw milk. And guess what? They all get real quiet. Yeah, you were right. About organic. You were right about go back to the land. You're right about a lot of stuff. Yeah. But then they completely lost the plot during 2020 because they had to tow the party line. And so now they've just diluted and destroyed the the only message that they really had that made any sense. Yeah, it was the only common sense message. Such a shame. What is the strongest argument against carnivore? If you think about it, there's really not one. And here's why I say that. So a carnivore diet sounds very faddish. Sounds very, you know, Instagrammy, Tik Toky. It sounds like influencers. This is the oldest diet that humanity has ever eaten. OK. And I mentioned earlier that my study of nutrition had had pulled me into anthropology, archaeology, paleoanthropology. And so if you ask an anthropologist, what's the oldest food that we can document that humans have eaten? It's meat. One hundred percent. So is that what you're doing? One hundred percent meat? Only? I'm happy to go into why I don't think everybody needs to be a carnivore. OK. But I think there is no proper. human diet that does not contain meat, eggs, and fish. Your diet is not proper. If you think a vegan diet is healthy and natural and ancestrally appropriate, you've been deluded. You're confused, okay? It is very clear from the anthropological evidence that meat has always been the go-to food for human beings. We are omnivores, definitely, by classification. But that doesn't mean that we are equally healthy if we're eating mostly plants, okay? And some people can tolerate way more plants. Some people cannot tolerate them. So for me, somebody who fattens very easily, develops prediabetes very easily, all carbohydrates break down into sugar, okay? Whether it's the carbohydrates from a jelly donut or the carbohydrates from cooked broccoli. A carb is a carb. Fructose and glucose are sugar. Broccoli can be a carb. A hundred percent, yeah. And so it definitely, broccoli has some fiber. Okay. And that's definitely going to slow down the sugar load that your body gets. The more you cook it, the more it just becomes a carb. And most people's grandmother cooks the broccoli to death, right? No, that's what I do. I like it literally charred burnt. Well, here's the thing. That's actually probably healthier. Oh, okay. Because when you talk about eating plants, you got to talk about two things. And a lot of people miss the plot on this. The first thing is the carb count. And so if you're somebody who doesn't ever, you never have a problem with your weight, then you can cook your broccoli like you like it, cooked and mushy and charred, and it's fine. The carb count goes up, but it doesn't matter for you because you're able to tolerate that level of carbs. But the other thing that doesn't get talked about, which is a very real thing, is the phytochemical content in every single plant that you eat. For some people, these are very inflammatory. Let me get this out of the way because I know I'm going to say it at some point. There's this thing in human physiology called a normal distribution curve, which means that the majority of people in the middle, if they eat too much of something, it's going to have a negative effect. There are people over on this tail that if they eat hardly any of it, it's going to have a negative effect. And there are people over on this tail, they could eat five pounds every meal. It's not going to affect them really at all, seemingly. Most people can eat a hundred grams of carbs a day. Doesn't really make them fat. Doesn't make them diabetic. They can tolerate that. Okay. And that's why low carb is on the, the left-hand side of a proper human diet spectrum. Some people got to cut the carbs more down to a ketogenic diet in order to lose the stored fat, in order to get rid of the fatty liver. Some people have, like me, I have to cut the carbs as low as I can possibly cut them. And so really what a carnivore diet is, is it's the lowest carbohydrate diet that a human can eat. It's not zero carb because eggs have a gram of carb per egg. A serving of liver has two grams of carb per egg. So it's not zero carb because eggs have a gram of carb per egg. A serving of liver has two grams of carbs per serving of liver. So it's not zero carb, although that's a pretty standard misnomer. People will call it zero carb, but it's not. But that's irrelevant. The relevant thing is it's the lowest carbohydrate option. It's also the diet lowest in phytochemicals. Okay, because phyto means plant. Animals have built-in defenses. They have claws, they have teeth, they can kick you, they can run away, they can bite you. Plants don't have that liberty. They're stuck in one place. And so what plants developed during their life cycle is chemical defenses. Now, this is not talked about because the ADA is very plant-based, diet-centric, right? And so they're never going to talk about phytochemicals. They're never going to say, oh, you know, the reason that you're on five different medicines for your eczema and it's no better is because you're eating all the grains. That's why your eczema won't get better. People with psoriasis, same thing. People with rosacea, same thing. Acanthosis, nigricans, acne. The average teen or 20-something with bad, I mean the bad scarring acne, it's skim dairy and it's grains and beans. Once you eliminate that and eat way more meat, eggs, and fish, your acne is going to not go completely away because if you have no acne, that means you're old. So when you get that pimple, you should praise that pimple. It's like, see, I'm not old. I'm still young. I've got one now. I'm like, yes, see, I still got it. But your acne is going to improve by 80 or 90%. You're not going to need that depression-causing Accutane anymore. You're not going to need that four trips a year to the dermatologist for the special medicine for your acne if you get the phytochemicals out of your diet. And so a lot of people, when they first hear this, it's such a paradigm shifter that they can't hear it. And another thing that modern medicine in America has done is made people start to define themselves by their illness. So if you have multiple sclerosis and I say to you, hey, we've actually got about 10 case studies now of documented MS that is in complete remission now on a carnivore diet. It's going to be a case series published soon. Not only do they not hear that as, oh, there's hope. They hear that sounds. It's offensive to them. Like, how dare you imply the same thing for mental health? Yeah. Depression, anxiety, OCD. When you say it's at least worsened by your diet. Right. Oh, they hate that. It's not caused completely by your diet. Who really hates hearing that your food is causing a lot of your. American Psychology Association, for one. Well, definitely for one. But also, it's Gen Zers online. Hate that. It's because they've been taught, Alex, that that's part of who you are. And it's part of their identity. And it's not their fault, but it is their problem. They like having their problem. Maybe. I don't know. I'm not a Gen Zer, so I don't know. But I can tell you that I have interacted with Gen Zers who, when they get past being offended by what I said, then they're like, oh, so you're, are you saying there's hope? And I'm like, yeah, that's what I'm saying. There is hope. And it's not from buying some product for me or some kind of supplements for me. It's just fix your diet and keep it fixed. That's going to make your mental health issue less severe. And for most people who have severe depression or another mental health issue, if they can fix their diet and improve their symptoms 90%, you don't think that's a win? That's a victory? Of course it is. But 90% of them just get offended and tune out. It's like, no, how dare you say that? What is the biggest mistake that people make when they're trying to become carnivores? So the biggest mistake everybody makes when they try to improve their health through diet is what I call the false choice. And so you go from eating Doritos, even the high protein Doritos, which just cracks me up. It just makes me want to slap somebody, right? It's like, hey, let's take utter junk and add some casein protein and then act like it's a health food. But if you're living on jelly donuts and Doritos and Pepsi, and you're like, dude, I'm fat and diabetic and I feel miserable. I got to clean up my act. Good. Yes, that's correct. But then they make this false choice because it's so ubiquitous in modern society. They're either going to say, okay, I'm going to start eating Mediterranean, which is predominantly plant-based and high carb. Or I'm going to eat the ADA diet or the AHA-diet, which is predominantly high carb and plant-based. Or I'm going to start eating lots of whole grain bread instead of just the cheap white bread. And nothing happens. They spend a ton of money. They buy this line of supplements. They join a program. They maybe go to their doctor, get a prescription. And they really expend all of their willpower and a lot of their wallet power and nothing meaningful changes. Now, what do you do in that situation? You say, it's me. It's my genetics. I'm just big boned. I'm whatever. I'm big boned. Right? You know, it's like, I just give up. And that's the thing that on my YouTube channel, I'm like, no, I know you think you've tried everything. You've tried every diet, but you have not because you've been sold a bill of goods. And the people who have told you eat plant-based Mediterranean, eat vegan, eat vegetarian, they're not trying to trick you. They truly believe that that's a healthy intervention, but it's not for the vast majority of people. You know, 88% of adults in America have at least a healthy diet. And they're not trying to trick you. One marker of metabolic illness. Wow. And, and so it's not a high carb plant-based diet. That's not the solution for you. You've got to cut the carbs and keep them cut if there's any hope for you. And so don't make that false choice of, okay, I'm going to switch from the, the, the jelly donut diet to this plant-based diet. You know, Oreos are vegan, right? That's not, that's not an improvement in your health. Uh, you've got to cut the carbs and keep them cut. What do you say to somebody who says, I feel really good, including vegetables in my diet? Then keep doing that. Uh, if you fatten easily, or if you're 20, 30, 40 pounds overweight, you need to count your carbs and keep your carbs under a hundred to start with. If that works great, if it doesn't work, cut them down to 50, then 20, then 10, then as close to zero as you can get. But if you're like, no, I'm, I'm, I don't have visceral adiposity. I don't have that gut. I'm not overweight or obese. Uh, and I'm, I eat a lot. lots of vegetables, keep doing that, that's fine. I need to say something because I see this in my DMs every single day. Alex, I want to get my health together, but I just don't know where to start. Or I'll do it later when I have more money. You know, I've heard every version of this and I get it. The system is confusing on purpose. You go to a doctor, they check like five things. They tell you you're fine. They send you home. Meanwhile, you're still feeling exhausted, inflamed, just off. So then you do nothing. You wait and waiting becomes your health plan. This is why I'm really excited about what Jevity just did. They launched a completely free tier, not a trial, free. You go to gojevity.com, upload blood work that you already have from any lab, and they give you a personalized longevity blueprint that analyzes over 90 biomarkers and actually shows you what's going on. When I saw my blueprint, I didn't just want to know. I mean, I saw all that info and I wanted to fix it. And if that's you, after finding out about what's going on with you, you can do the Jevity Plus membership. You get an actual functional clinician who walks through. Your results and builds a plan around you, not a template. They build you a plan and they don't stop at just testing. You get access to supplements, peptides, hormone optimization, nutrition, help real protocols based on your labs. They test over 90 biomarkers retest every six months, adjust your plan. And you have a care team. You can actually message go to gojevity.com use code Alex. Again, go to gojevity.com use code Alex. I love when people say I don't take creatine because I'm not trying to look like the rock. Really? Neither am I by that logic. I shouldn't drink water because I'm not trying to become a whale. People hear the word creatine. And then they start picturing some guy named blade screaming at a squat rack while dry scooping pre-workout and punching drywall. Meanwhile, there's actually a ton of research looking at creatine, not just for physical performance, but for cognitive function and mood too. At this point, I'm interested in anything that helps me remember why I walked into the kitchen. That's why I started taking Puree Creatine Plus. What caught my attention is that they combine five grams of creatine monohydrate with 400 milligrams of taurine in every serving, both support energy, during high intensity workouts. And there's exciting research looking at their role in supporting cognitive performance and mental clarity too. But honestly, the biggest reason I trust them is that Puree for creatine publishes the third party testing results for every single batch, looking for heavy metals or anything else weird that you want to avoid, just scan the QR code on the back and you can see exactly what's in your product. They're also the only supplement brand with the clean label project transparency certificate, meaning every batch is independently tested. And the results are published online use code Alex at puree.com that's P-U-O-R-I puree.com code Alex to get 32% off your first order when you start a subscription, that's more than $23 in savings. That's puree, P-U-O-R-I.com use code Alex at checkout for this exclusive offer. I have some women's health questions. Yes, let's do it. What are some of the biggest lies women over 40 are being told? The biggest lie is your food doesn't really matter. Just go see your doctor. That's, that's the lie from big medicine. The lie from big food is, oh, you've got to cut your saturated fat and you've got to cut your cholesterol intake and you've got to really avoid that red meat. See the big food companies in order to make millions, billions of dollars a year. You can't sell meat and eggs and fish. That's not how you make billions. The way you make billions is you make stuff out of three ingredients, a grain, wheat, rice, oats, corn, soybean. Okay. Grains and beans. And increasingly they're using soybean and pea protein to make the junk food. Because they can have a higher protein count and like protein Doritos. Now it's healthy. So grains or beans, number two, sugar and number three, vegetable seed oils. And this is all stuff that is subsidized by our government. So it's cheap. Oh, wait. Now you're getting very conspiratorial here, Alex. Yes, that's correct. All of the things that you use to make a commodity. I want to eat food. I don't want to eat commodities. Okay. But grains and beans are subsidized. Vegetable seed oils are subsidized. And yes, sugar, sugar beet, sugar cane is subsidized by the federal government. Why would they do that? Why don't they subsidize broccoli? Why don't they subsidize chicken eggs? Why don't they subsidize local farms and small farms? They just want to subsidize the commodities that they can ship to other countries. This is kind of random, but you know what I found out yesterday that really blew my mind? So in the state of Florida, sugar controls everything. Big sugar. Yeah. So that's like a massive sugar state, sugar, whatever, I don't know, farmers and stuff. So the sugar people are the people that control the fruit and vegetable association there. I mean, so they just, they're in everything. You literally, you're like fruit and vegetable association. It's owned by big sugar. It's crazy. So that's like a whole thing I kind of want to deep dive into sometime. The one thing that they don't own is the local rancher near your house. Yeah. They don't own him. Yeah. They don't own him. If he's raising sheep or goats. Or cows and you buy from him, you are literally starving big sugar, big ag, big pharma. You're, you're starving them. Okay. But if you buy something at the supermarket in the middle of the middle aisles where the, that's where they put the biggest markup. Cause that's what I was getting to. If you make something out of grains, sugar, and vegetable seed oil, it's shelf stable for years. Rats won't eat it. Bacteria won't eat it. Fungus won't eat it. So they can call it fresh, even though it's three years old. They can make it in China, ship it over on a cargo ship, put it in a warehouse for six months, put it on the supermarket shelf for three to six months and still say, oh, it's fresh. This is an exclusively American mindset thing. Anywhere else you talk to a European, you talk to somebody, you know, that's from France and you say, you know, my bread can last for months. They are so grossed out by that. You want mold and fungus and rats to want to eat your food. If it doesn't, then it's not food. Exactly. The Americans come over here and they're like, this is disgusting. You know, what is this bread? I mean, they are really grossed out by the bread here, not to mention everything else. But it's very culturally normal to, you know, every day or two, you go to the market that's near you and you pick up your local, your bread and your fruit and your vegetables, whatever. And yeah, if you don't eat it, it goes bad. And then guess what? You have to replace it. But the idea is you eat it. You're not supposed to have this stuff that lasts for months in the fridge. Correct. Correct. But that's what big food is interested in. I'm telling you, because the final brick in building this wall is that when you make something out of those three ingredients, you can make a 1000x profit. OK, because all the ingredients are subsidized, so they're essentially free, right? They're shelf stable, so there's no loss like, oh, it molded, oh, it went bad. There's none of that. And you can charge a 500%, a 1000%, a 1500% markup on it. You can't do that with fish, eggs, meat, real bread that are actual human made. You can't make a 1000% markup. So Kellogg's and Kraft Heinz and Mondo's, they're not interested in that. OK, they want shelf stable forever, essentially free ingredients. You know, they're super cheap and I can source them from anywhere and then it'll sit on the shelf for two years and I make a 1000%. Yeah, I'll take that deal. Right. But they're not interested in a local range. They're not interested in a local rancher or local farmer. They have no interest in that. And that's why increasingly people who really want to take charge of their health are buying everything they can from as close to their home as they can. What do you say to the woman whose blood sugar is so trashed? She's like a snackaholic. She feels like she has to constantly eat snacks throughout the day. So the first thing I would say to her is there's no such thing as a healthy snack. Period. What about celery? Right. So if you're snacking. In between meals, you didn't eat enough during your previous meal, which tells me that you've fallen for the false choice again that, oh, if you're trying to lose weight or get healthier, you've got to eat smaller portions. I was an animal biologist before I went to medical school. And so animal biology, mammology, I've been studying that stuff for decades. There's not a single animal on planet Earth, Alex, that stops eating before it's full. Somehow animals without nutrition degrees and without medical degrees, they know what to eat, they know when to eat, they know how much to eat, and they know, importantly, when to stop eating. Humans are the most intelligent species on planet Earth. We run the planet, but we don't know what to eat or when or how much or how often. We don't know. We don't know any of that stuff. That's not because we're dumb. We're very intelligent. It's because we've been tricked. And there's a profit motive. There's a profit motive that's behind the trickery, okay? And so if you're snacking in between meals, then it's either an emotional thing, you're either upset about something, your cortisol's high, and you're snacking to kind of, you know, calm yourself, or you just didn't eat enough in the last meal. You didn't eat enough actual real food. Many people will, you know, they'll try to eat a bunch of rice cakes, and they'll eat a bunch of, have a big fruit juice smoothie or something, and then wonder why they're hungry an hour later. It's like. There's no nutrition in that. You need fat. Fat is good for you, not bad for you. You need protein, real protein that comes from meat, eggs, and fish, not from Doritos. You need actual real building blocks of a human body. Then you're not going to be hungry every two hours and having to snack in between. And then the second thing I would tell her is you've got to cut the carbs. It is not the fat that's making you fat. I know fat in your food and fat on your body, they rhyme. It's the same exact word. So therefore, eating fat has to make you fat. Oh, that's. bill of goods you've been sold by the big food companies. Eating too many any carbs makes you fat. The simpler and the more processed the carb, the worse, absolutely. But for some people, they got to cut almost all the carbs. Even that broccoli has got to go for some of us if we want to attain our ideal body weight, okay? And this comes from a previously fat doctor. I was severely obese by the medical definition. And the only way I can stay at 225 is carnivore. Even if I eat keto, 50 grams a day, I'll gain five or 10 pounds and my A1C will start to creep up. Now, not everybody's that way. So our woman we're talking about, she probably doesn't have to be carnivore, but she needs to cut the carbs down to 100, maybe, maybe 50, maybe 20. Somewhere on that proper human diet spectrum, the excess fat is just going to start to fall off. She's not going to need Ozempic. She's not going to need any of this stuff. She's going to stop. Stop the snacking in between meals because she does like every other animal on earth. When she's hungry, she eats until she's full. And then she stops eating. Revolutionary. It sounds revolutionary to say it, but it's like, well, every other animal does it and does just fine. They just changed the name of PCOS to PMOS. What does that mean? So this is polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome now. And that's much closer to the truth because polycystic ovarian syndrome is a complete misnomer. The cysts have nothing to do with PCOS. The first doctor who ever described it, he saw the cyst and he's like, "Oh, okay, that may have something to do with it." We now know definitively that every woman has cysts during certain times of her monthly cycle. You may have a cyst right now. You don't need to go see a doctor for that. That's normal. The cysts come and go. Now, when you're metabolically unwell, this is basically type 2 diabetes of the ovary. And that's normal. That's, that's normal. So when you have type 2 diabetes of the ovary, PMOS, used to be called PCOS, then you do have more cysts and you have bigger cysts, but it's because of something called hyperinsulinemia. When you're eating too many carbohydrates, which break down into sugar, that's going to spike your blood sugar. Your pancreas does not like you to have high blood sugar. It's bad for you. So it's going to secrete a lot of insulin to pull your blood sugar down. That gets your blood sugar back to normal, but it also makes you hungry again in two hours because you ate a high carb meal. Now you're snacking. Even if it's on celery, you're snacking and then you're eating again. And that, that cycle every day, you're keeping blood sugar spikes going. You're keeping insulin spikes going. Insulin is a growth factor among the hundreds of other things it does. It tells those cysts to grow and they can get big enough to become painful. They can rupture all the things. But the main problem with PMOS, used to be called PCOS, is that your blood sugar is going to go down. It's going to go down. It's not going to go down. You're going to have hyperglycemia, high blood sugar, that comes and goes or stays. You have high insulin levels, which come or go or stay, and you have high levels of inappropriate chronic inflammation. That's the three things that cause what we used to call PCOS. That's what causes it. And so that's one of my first YouTube videos that I made was about PCOS. And I actually said, this is basically diabetes of your ovaries. When you cut the carbs and keep them cut, your ovaries go back to normal. So what do you say to the girl who says, "Sure, Dr. Berry, I get it. Everyone tells me I should go keto. So I did, and I didn't lose anyway." Again, that false choice, because for a lot of people, keto got super popular, right? And so every, some of the big corporations now, big food, they're making, I mean, SlimFast came out with keto SlimFast. Keto bread, there's no bread that's keto, okay? By definition, if it's bread, it's not keto. So they went out and filled up their shopping cart with all these keto products, and they tried that for 90 days. And they didn't make the true choice to go back to real food that's low in carb. What should their plate ideally look like? It looks a lot like the plate your grandmother used to make for you. It's meat and two, or it's eggs and bacon. It's literally that, it's that. And so if half your plate's covered with meat or eggs or fish, and then half your plate's covered with low-carb vegetables, maybe a few berries for dessert, a few nuts for dessert, that's keto. That's it. That's what keto is. Keto is not keto bread and keto shake and keto pie and keto pancakes and keto pancake syrup. None of that's keto. If your daughter was diagnosed with PMOS tomorrow, what would be the first thing you would do before considering medication? If she was willing, because I'm not a dictator, right? I'm just a dad. I would say, hey, as a doctor who studied nutrition for a long time, darling, I highly recommend you go overnight carnivore. Let's get it under control. And then you probably don't have to stay carnivore. After 90 days or 180 days, we can go back to low-carb. We can go back to keto. We can add back some vegetables, some berries, whatever your favorite plants are. We can probably add those back. But right now, you need to get this under control, because you are my daughter. You're in charge of whether I have granddaughters or not and grandsons or not. And so I want a bunch of those. So I need you to fix your PMOS so that you can get busy with my grandchildren. Let's talk about pregnancy, but when it comes to the men. So should men be preparing for pregnancy and be focused on nutrition just like women should? Absolutely. 100%. If a young wife is over here eating keto or Ketovor to try to increase her fertility, and they're having fertility problems as a couple, and he's sitting over there drinking his Pepsi and eating his Ding Dongs, he's the problem. Because about half the time, it's the sperm motility, sperm fitness, sperm count. That's the problem. That's why a young couple is not getting pregnant. He needs to be keto or Ketovor or carnivore as well. So when you've got a guy who has like zero sperm count, I mean, it's like completely missing. Is it possible? Have you seen it possible where they can get that back just by completely reversing diet trends? Absolutely. A lot of it's diet. I would say 80% of it. Now, there are medical conditions. There are genetic conditions. There are injuries early in life that can leave a man with a very low sperm count, and that's not his fault. But the majority, I'll just tell you, I've got friends who are fertility specialists, and they always talk to the prospective mother as well as the prospective father. It's not just a woman issue. You've got to get them both in there, number one. And number two, sperm is the problem half the time. And number three, more and more fertility specialists are talking about, you need to go keto, you need to go carnivore. And no smoking weed. No. No smoking weed. Weed's going to lower your testosterone. Yes. Because in order to make a baby, you actually have to have sex. Yeah. And if your testosterone's sitting over here at 150, because you're smoking weed and living on junk food, you're not interested in sex. Wow. Yeah. Why did she marry you to start with would be my question. But hey, let's not go there. That's another episode. There is a huge number of pregnant women who are on SSRIs. Yes. Because it is impossible. You know, we now know about how severe SSRI withdrawal is. And so, you know, these women are on SSRIs since they're 14 years old. They get pregnant. You can't just stop taking your antidepressant because you'll just have horrific withdrawal. So the doctors are now telling them, well, I think it's safe. You can be on an antidepressant while you're pregnant. What is your opinion on that? What should they know? I'm very opposed to that. All the SSRIs are pregnancy class C, which means that we've got enough research on them to know that they're not going to cause a monstrous birth defect, or they're not going to kill your unborn baby, right? We have enough research to know that they're relatively safe. But here's what we don't have any of. We have no long-term data showing that if a pregnant mom is taking Lexapro while she's pregnant, what's that going to do to that unborn child's mental health 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years from now? Nobody knows the answer to that. And obviously, nobody cares. Well, I did an episode. I think it was Dr. Adam Jurado. Am I thinking right? Maybe not. I might have the doctor wrong. But anyway, if you just Google culture, Pothcary, pregnancy, SSRIs, I have a whole episode on this. It was shocking, the research and the effects of SSRIs on unborn children. And so I have a hot take on this because I know that there's women in my audience and they've been like, you know, well, this is ridiculous. I'm not going to not take my SSRI while I'm pregnant. Then guess what? You shouldn't get pregnant. I tend to agree. Until you go through, and it could literally take you two or three years, until you go through getting off the SSRI, do not get pregnant. Don't even try to get off the SSRI until you fix your diet. You got to fix your diet first, because if you're still eating the junk, you're not going to be able to get off of it. You're going to have a relapse and you'll have to go back up on your dose. The vast majority of the SSRIs, you have to wean them very, very slowly. You cannot just stop taking them. And so if you're like, you meet the perfect guy, you get married, now you want to have a baby, but you're on Lexpro, there's no quick fix. I'm sorry. Now, here's the true villain. And it's not even a villain because he didn't know better. The doctor who started her with 16, 17, 18, maybe 12, maybe 22. Maybe seven now. Did that doctor say, hey, you don't want to be taking this when you get pregnant? Yep. Did that doctor say, hey, some people, it takes years to come off this. Yeah. Like they have to go to micro dosing. They have to. get a liquid version and count drops. And it takes three years to get off this. And so my question to anybody watching this who's taken an SSRI is, did your doctor tell you that before you started taking this? And if your answer is no, and I know it's going to be no, so don't lie. Did you make an informed decision? You didn't. You weren't given the option. So did that doctor lie? Is that doctor a villain? Right? He probably doesn't know. He doesn't know better. He's being told by the pharma rep that it's completely safe to take while pregnant. So he's telling you what he knows. So he's in the same boat I was in when I was telling people, here's the ADA handout. Eat this way now that you have diabetes. He doesn't know better, but he's still causing harm. Yeah. What do you do with that? How do you assign blame in a situation like that? He believes he's doing what's right. She trusts him. Now you've got this woman who she's married. She wants to have a baby. Now she's like, but I'm taking Paxil. What do I do? I don't know. And I tried to stop it. Oh my God, I couldn't. Now what do I do? Well, you're going to have to wean off that. You guys may have to wait a year or two or three to have that baby. Yeah. This is why I'm so thankful to get to do this show and talk to people like you about things like this, because maybe there is a mom who found herself in this situation and now she's in this mess. But eventually when she's got a teenage daughter or whatever, or you have a teenage daughter right now currently, and she's going through it and the doctor's telling her, to put her on SSRIs, you've now heard this information and you can say, hold on before we take that. Do you understand how hard it is to get off this drug and how you're going to have to maybe put pregnancy on hold because you're going to have to wait to take the time to do this? Do you understand the severe withdrawal symptoms, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, that's what I like about the show is it's giving people the opportunity to finally get that informed consent that they weren't getting. One person at a time. Yeah. One person at a time, because you're not going to change that. You're not going to change that. You're not going to change the American Medical Association. Let me add, while we were talking about pregnancy, let me add this, gestational diabetes. Oh yes. I wanted to ask you about that. Is completely caused by what you're eating and is completely reversible without medication by fixing your diet. And so if you had gestational diabetes in a previous pregnancy, you can, you can have subsequent pregnancies and not have gestational diabetes. You've got to cut the carbs for the average woman in her, in her late teens, twenties, early thirties, who's pregnant. And it, and they're like, oh, your blood sugar's going up. You got gestational diabetes. If you will cut your total daily carbohydrate intake to 100 grams a day or less, it'll go away in 90% of you. The other 10% will have to cut them down to 50 total grams. If you're in late thirties, early 40 pregnancy, you may have to cut down to 50 or even 20 total grams, not net grams, total. Grams. Very important because the big food manufacturers, they've caught their wise to the carb thing now. And on the front, they'll say only three grams of net carb, but you turn it around. It's got 20 grams per serving of total carbs. You got to count total carbs. And so gestational diabetes without exception is completely reversible. If you have it, you can reverse it. You do not need to go on insulin literally within, within two weeks, you can have normal blood sugars. If you cut the carbs long enough. And a lot of women are like, yeah, but what about, I've got to, I have nutrition to feed the baby. Yeah. The most nutrient dense foods are the lowest carb foods. And isn't there another option? You don't have to drink that yucky drink. Yeah. Yeah. And so any pregnant woman ask your OBGYN or your midwife, I want to wear a CGM. I'm not drinking 75 grams of carb, of sugar. I'm not doing that. And isn't there food dye in that? It's worse than a Coca-Cola. If that's even possible, it's worse than a Coke. Just tell them I'm not doing that. Don't even say, may I not do that? Just say I'm not doing that. I'll wear a CGM. I'm not trying to keep you in the dark, doctor. I want you to know what my blood sugar is, but I'm not doing that to me and to my baby. Is the fear of cholesterol during pregnancy misplaced? 100% misplaced. Guess what the human brain's made of? Cholesterol. Fat and cholesterol. Okay. When you're building up another human brain, you need to be eating copious amounts of fat. You want to eat high cholesterol foods. Okay. You want to eat lots of protein. Your baby is literally built of protein and fat. That's what your baby is going to be built of. Your baby is not going to be built of carbohydrates. Okay. It's not going to be built of plants. It's not going to be built of fruit juice smoothies. It's not going to be built of any of that. Your baby is built of protein and fat, just like you are. Every nerve in your baby's body is wrapped by fat. That's how they are insulated. That's how they conduct so well. Every cell membrane in your baby's body is wrapped by fat. Every cell membrane in your baby's body has a lipid bilayer, lipid. It's literally surrounded by fat. That's how the human cell works. And so if your doctor tells you to eat low fat, you need to ignore your doctor. That is ignorant advice. Your baby needs you eating lots of animal fat and animal protein. That's how you're going to build a beautiful, healthy, intelligent baby. It's summer. Nobody wants to wear a full face of makeup. And I am not contouring in 97 degree humidity so that I can look like I'm melting into a puddle by the community pool. That is why I've been raving about the brand new sun serum and lip and cheek tint from Primely Pure, which I have on right now. It is my favorite non-toxic skincare brand. This is my entire summer personality now. I've even got my makeup artist on board. She's like, okay, this actually slaps. The sun serum is basically skincare. Okay. It's SPF 30 and your complexion all in one. It is so excellent. It makes your skin, you can put that on at the pool, right? So you've got your sun protection, but you still look like you have makeup on. And then I throw on this lip and cheek tint and suddenly I look like, you know, I've been drinking enough water and I'm making good life choices. It is so stunning. I'm wearing the, I believe this is pomegranate. It's kind of like a corally tomato-y light reddish peach color. I don't know. That's like a terrible description, I guess. But you can see what it looks like on the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Apothecary on Spotify. You can jump in the pool and this doesn't immediately slide off my face. And at the end of the day, I just use a little micellar water before cleansing. It comes right off. I'm telling you, beauty is finally getting smarter. Fewer products, better ingredients, less looking like you're preparing for a Broadway production at 10 a.m. I also love that Primely Pure is female founded and formulates without synthetic fragrance, PFAS, or a bunch of unnecessary junk. Use code AlexClark to get 15% off your Primely Pure purchase. There is so much good stuff too at PrimelyPure.com. That's code AlexClark for 15% off any thing at PrimelyPure.com. You guys know I'm obsessive about the foundations of health. And one thing most people completely overlook, especially in the dark winter months, is light exposure. Humans evolved with sunlight, okay? When winter hits, days get shorter, we spend more time indoors, and we lose exposure not just to visible light, but to red and near-infrared light, which play a real biological role in how our cells function. Red and near-infrared light have been studied for their ability to support mitochondrial function, which helps drive cellular energy production. That matters for all of us. So, if you're interested in learning more about Primely Pure, go to PrimelyPure.com. Tested and safety certified. That is critical because there are a lot of fake devices out there using the wrong wavelengths with zero testing. Oh my gosh. Please be careful when you're ordering online. I personally have used Juve daily for, oh my gosh. It was like during the pandemic, I got my first Juve, maybe 2021. So, it's been like five years, all right? I use it in the morning, about 10 minutes, and sometimes I'll do it at night to wind down. Literally, 10 minutes. There's a timer on there. I can read my Bible. I can do my devotions. I can also sit in silence. You can sit, close your eyes, listen to a podcast. It's become one of the easiest, most consistent tools in my wellness routine. Also, put it on and have it on you and your baby as you are breastfeeding. I also love that Juve offers a wide range of options, whether you want targeted treatment or a full-body setup in your house. If you want to support your health at the cellular level, especially during winter, Juve makes it simple. Go to Juve.com slash Alex. It's J-O-O-V-V.com slash Alex to get an exclusive offer. In your checkout, Juve.com, J-O-O-V-V.com slash Alex. Some exclusions apply. How come sometimes you could have two different women who are eating the exact same thing and one loses weight and one doesn't? That's that normal distribution curve I talked about earlier. One of them's on this end of the curve, the other's on this end, okay? Now, it doesn't mean that, oh, she needs a different diet. It just means she's able to the carbs, the phytochemicals, the whatever. The food diet. She can tolerate that more than her friends. That doesn't mean that she's able to optimize her health on that diet. It just means that the negative effects of that way of eating are less noticeable in her. That must be me because I lived off ultra-processed food my entire life, but I didn't gain weight. So did I. So did I. Until I got about 30, 32, that stopped. No, I had other symptoms. I wasn't symptom-free. It just wasn't weight on me. Exactly. for a lot of people, it's not weight. And you can be very slender and have just gestational diabetes. You can be very slender and have PCOS, PMOS now. You can be very slender and have severe acne that's being caused by hyperinsulinemia and chronic inflammation. You can be very slender and have type 2 diabetes. You can be super skinny and have fatty liver. The majority of people in India and China, although they're slender, they have fatty liver because they live on rice and beans. They all have fatty liver, but their genetics, they don't fatten like a Caucasian does, right? It's really hard to make somebody with their genetics obese. And so, they're slender. And so, unless you check labs and check the insulin level and check the HSCRP and check the ALT, AST, GGT, and all the other stuff, they look healthy to you. You don't know that they have prediabetes and fatty liver. Women are terrified of osteoporosis. Good. They should be. I remember being a little girl seeing commercials on YouTube like, oh, I don't want to be like that when I'm old. A hundred percent. Yes. Have we become too focused on calcium and not enough on overall metabolic health and strength training and protein? One hundred percent, yes. Okay. Okay. Let me give you a little primer on what the human bone is made of. It's 50% protein. Okay. Eat your meat, eat your fish, eat your eggs. That's what bones are built of. Now, in the protein matrix, you put minerals, calcium and other minerals in there, and that's what makes your bones rigid. But if you're eating a low-protein, plant-based diet, you're going to have osteopenia, if not osteoporosis, in just a few years because you're not getting enough high-quality protein. Now, there is protein in plants. There's even protein in Doritos, okay? But it's not the most usable, absorbable kind that your bones can really put to good use. You've got to eat the meat. I'm sorry. That's just how it is. And so, if you're taking a calcium supplement, you're going to have a lot of protein. You're going to have a lot of protein. You're eating a plant-based diet, you're literally doing nothing to prevent osteoporosis. What is the biggest diet mistake that postpartum breastfeeding moms are making? Somehow believing that they're magically going to make nutrient-dense milk if they're not eating a nutrient-dense diet. Now, the human body is miraculous, okay? Your body, if you're a lactating, a breastfeeding mom, your body will literally rob your body blind of every vitamin and mineral and put it in that breast milk. And you can see evidence of this in moms who have had three babies back-to-back. And the mom literally looks like an empty shell. And each successive baby is less and less healthy, okay? That doesn't have to be that way. And it's correctable. So, don't think, oh, gosh, I've screwed my other two kids. No. It's all correctable, but it's only correctable with diet. And so, if you're breastfeeding, you've got to eat the meat, eggs, the seafood. You've got to learn to like liver because your breasts are going to make nutrient-dense milk. And if it robs your bones and robs your liver, it will. It will rob you blind because your body wants that baby to live and be healthy. Coffee before breakfast. Medical research has tried for over 100 years to prove that coffee is unhealthy or bad for you in some way. And we still haven't done it. But before you eat a meal, though? It's irrelevant. Now, caffeine is an appetite suppressant. So, you might not eat as much for breakfast if you drink your coffee first. But as far as long-term health, as far as the bone, leaching your bone, that's all foolishness. None of that's true. Intermittent fasting for women. Intermittent fasting is a huge leverage lever for improving your health, especially if you're overweight or obese. If you have chronic inflammation, you need to be doing some degree of daily intermittent fasting. It's a big deal. Every day. It's dumb. We're all taught that fruits are full of vitamins and minerals, right? This is, it's just provably false. You can say, okay, go to, there's a federal government website, fooddatacentral.gov. You can go and put in eight ounces of mango or papaya and eight ounces of cheap ground beef. The ground beef is going to kick the mango's butt every single time for virtually every single vitamin and mineral except for vitamin C. Literally every single time. Soy. Soy is a poverty food. If you're trying not to starve to death, and I'm using poverty food not to be negative. That's an anthropological term. There are foods you eat when, in times of plenty that are, that. Like famine. That optimize your health. Soy, grain, any grain, corn, rice, wheat, oats, they're poverty foods. They're famine foods. That's what you eat to keep from starving to death. Even in scripture, we, we thank God for our daily bread. But that's because back in those times, you were in daily danger of starving to death or going hungry. And so you thank God for the food that kept you from starving to death. A hundred percent. You didn't even deign to ask for some lamb or some, some mutton or some beef. You just said, hey, just let me not starve. And I'll be thankful for that. Wine. There's no such thing as a healthy amount of alcohol. Okay. There for many years, medical medicine tried to save us from starving to death. But it didn't. It didn't. It didn't. It didn't. It said, oh, drink a glass of wine for your heart benefit. All that was stupid. It was, it was sponsored by big wine. And I'm not joking. You can look it up. Uh, there is no healthy amount of alcohol. Now, if you want to have an occasional drink, it's fine. It's not the end of the world, but don't pretend it's healthy. Protein powders. You're trying to make me curse. Trying to make me say a naughty word. Protein, eat your meat. I eat very, very clean. I also love a protein powder fruit smoothie in the morning. Okay. The key word there, you love it. Tastes really good. Right. So if you're drinking it for pleasure and it's not causing any negative health benefit, it's fine. Whatever. Drink it. But don't drink it because you believe you've, you've been sold the false choice. Like relying on that for your protein. I need a protein shake for my protein. No, you don't. The, you're never going to get as good a quality protein in a protein shake or a protein bar or Doritos. Never. Always the meat, eggs, and fish are the better protein. But if you love it, it's fine. What about collagen? So collagen is in all meat. Some cuts of meat are much higher in collagen. The collagen supplement that you buy, it's not going to hurt you, but it's completely unnecessary if you're eating enough meat, eggs, and fish. Oat milk. You're really trying to get me. No, no, no. Milk. First of all, this is, I could talk for two hours on this. Milk is made for babies. There's an age when you should stop drinking milk anymore. What about raw milk? Raw milk is the least bad option. Okay. Okay. But, but milk is made for babies. There's no other animal on earth that drinks milk as an adult, unless we give it to them. You just drink water? I drink water and coffee and tea. And every now and then I'll have some milk, but I don't think I've got to drink my milk for calcium, or I've got to drink my milk for protein. Milk is to help babies grow and gain weight as fast as possible. So if anybody's watching and you're trying to lose weight, refer back to what I just said. Milk is designed by the creator to make you gain weight as fast as possible. Birth control for acne. Oh, this is so terrible. So, so terrible. Does it work? Yeah. It makes your acne less severe, but there's 10 other ways to do that. That's not going to have the long-term hormonal potential disastrous complications. Hormone replacement therapy. I can't find anything wrong with it as long as it's bioidentical. Yeah. Yeah. Not synthetic. Yeah. Now there's an argument that's like, well, isn't menopause a natural part of human aging? Yes, it is. You know, if you're in your forties, fifties, sixties, and you're like, I want to age naturally, then don't do BHRT. But if you're like, no, I want to feel 30 or 40 while I'm 50 or 60, BHRT, 100%. Weightlifting versus cardio. The vast majority of the time, cardio, chronic cardio. Let me say it like that. I got that from Mark Sisson. I think that's a great way to look at it. So if you want to go play basketball, you can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can or pickleball or something where you get sweaty and out of breath. That's cardio. But you're, you literally went outside and played. That's good. Do that. But if you're like, I'm going to go and run a half marathon every day, or I'm going to go to the gym and jog on the treadmill or the Stairmaster for two hours. That's dumb. First of all, you don't enjoy that. That's why we call it working out. Go outside and play. But especially for women, as you get older, if you don't have strong muscles, you're not going to have strong bones. It's literally impossible. Okay. No matter how much Oskal and Caltrate you take, you're going to have weak bones if you don't have strong muscles. What is one health test every woman over 35 should know? Fasting insulin. 100%. Everybody watching this, the next time you go to the doctor's office and he's going to draw blood, ask for a fasting insulin. And what should it be and what's bad? Right now, LabCorp says anything between two and a half and 25 is normal. This is absolutely false. You want your fasting insulin to be 10 or less. If your fasting insulin is over 10, you have hyperinsulinemia. And that's causing some of the chronic medical conditions you have. And even if you haven't been diagnosed with anything, you know, those chronic aches and pains, that chronic thing that bugs you, that chronic thing that your skin does or your joints do or your hair does or your brain does, it's being caused by the high insulin. How can people work with you as a doctor? Do I've got about. 200 patients, I still go to their house. I see them for free. I don't even charge them. What? Because that's not, I'm not really interested in doing the one-on-one thing anymore. The way, if people want to ask me questions, the way you do that is become part of our PhD community. And it's 30 bucks a month, less than a copay. You can stay for a month or you can stay for five years. But you get to ask me questions for four hours every week. I'm on a Zoom with you and you can ask me all your questions. Like a group of people? Sometimes it's a group Zoom. Sometimes there's 200 people. Sometimes there's 20 people on the Zoom. So you literally can ask me question after question after question. You can tell me your lab results. You can tell me what medications you're wanting to wean down and stop. And you can get all your questions answered. Also, we have Dr. Barry AI in there now, which has been trained on every single video I've ever made. Cool. Every interview I've ever done, including this one, next week, it'll be trained on this interview and everything I said today. Every book I've written. Every book I recommend, Dr. Barry AI has been trained on that. What? This is cool. And so this is really great for people who live in Italy that's got a seven-hour time difference and they're like, well, none of your Zooms work for me. Yeah. Dr. Barry AI is going to answer exactly how I would answer because it's not ChatGPT. It's only been trained on what I have said and what I've written. That's really incredible. About a proper human diet. That's super cool. And so 30 books a month, you get all that, plus a community of thousands of people all over the world. And that's how I like to work with people because when I answer one question for one person, I've just helped one person. But when I answer one question in front of 20, 50, 100, 5,000, I'm helping every single one of them because even if it doesn't help them, they're going to go home and tell their mom or their dad or their next door neighbor or their son or daughter or their best friend, hey, Dr. Barry said, blah, blah, blah. See how it just keeps multiplying if I do it that way. Where can people find you on social media? So I've got a little YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and type in Dr. Barry and whatever medical condition you have questions about, whether that's fatty liver, whether that's PCOS, acanthosis, nigricans, chicken flesh, yeah, toenail fungus, got one about that, jock itch, got one about that, how to lose 50 pounds, anything, just Dr. Barry and whatever health goal or whatever health condition, I've got a video about that. I love following you on Axe. That's probably my favorite. Yeah, I get a little salty on Axe. I love that. No, I love it. And you're great on there. Okay, ask every guest this. If you could offer one remedy to healistic culture, physically, emotionally, or spiritually, what would it be? Work on your relationship with our creator is number one and foremost bedrock foundational. Without that, I think there's so many false choices you'll fall for just because you wind up believing false things. Have a proper relationship with your creator, number one. Number two, eat a proper human diet. Number three, live a proper human life. And if you do all three of those things, you are going to have optimal health physically, spiritually, mentally, and then for your progeny, for your children and grandchildren. Not only are you going to be setting the perfect example for them, but you're going to be feeding them exactly what they need to realize their best health. And so it just keeps compounding through the generations if you get those three things right. Dr. Berry, I've been wanting to have you on forever. And so thank you for flying out to Arizona in the heat of the summer. It means so much to the audience. I know it's going to love this episode. It's going to be a huge one. Thank you very much for coming on Culture Pop today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Before you go, here's something to think about. If the health advice you've been following isn't making you healthier, why are you still following it? New episodes come out every Monday and Thursday at 6 p.m. Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern, wherever you listen to podcasts. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Don't forget to leave us a five-star review right now on Apple or Spotify. Tell us that our hair is shiny and bouncy, that we smell like strawberries, or that you hate us, but you just love to hate us. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be taken as medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional regarding any questions or decisions regarding your health or medical care. I'm Alex Clark, and this is Culture Apothecary.