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News topic du jour:
Why the Bastardization of the Scientific Method Is so Dangerous
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Podcast Questions:
1. Brain Fog [30:01]
Ryan says:
Hi Rob, I’ve been noticing more over the past few years the phenomenon of brain fog. It seems to most often set in after eating breakfast which is a rotation of Eggs, Sausage, and Cheese with the occasional bread and Oatmeal. Plain eggs is the most frequent breakfast. My question is: Are there other foods besides gluten known to cause this fatigue/fogginess (like eggs and dairy) and how long does it typically take to set in? Most mornings when I experience the fogginess it is accompanied by an irritable mood. Important to note that this was never an issue until after high school when my diet changed to include significantly less breads, often going a week or more between consuming glutens and obviously getting older too.
Thanks
P.S Maybe I see you at Costco sometime.
2. The Next Generation – Veganism [35:32]
Janeen says:
A topic I do not hear addressed much is that with veganism on the rise, what is going to happen to the children born to vegans? I have a friend who is an RN and is an internationally certified lactation consultant (or some such title) and she says the babies of vegans are smaller, have lower APGAR scores, do not seem to thrive as well as non-vagan babies. But this type of information never makes it to the news. Those babies were denied so much nutrition while developing, and once born, the mother’s breast milk is less than ideal. Will these kids not be able to reach their full potential despite the lack of nutrients that was in their diets? Our 32 year old daughter has been a vegan for 4 years or so and is about to get married. She believes the vegan line that it is a perfectly fine diet. I have a degree in anthropology and there has never been a healthy vegan society since we came down from the trees. My daughter does not believe me. I am and NTP, all I know about nutrition is wrong, according to her. She feels my course was taught by pro-meat eaters and therefore they had an agenda. What will happen to our society if there are not enough intelligent people left to do be able to make the hard, philosophical decisions that need to made to keep this ship floating?
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Transcript:
Download a copy of this transcript here (PDF)
Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help one million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to The Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary, or fitness change. Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney+.
Robb: As Jim Carey might have said, all righty then. Welcome back folks.
Nicki: All righty then.
Robb: Welcome back wife.
Nicki: Welcome back. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Healthy Rebellion Radio. What shall we talk about in our opening segment here, hubs? Do you want to talk about Harry Potter and the ways that
Robb: Oh, yeah.
Nicki: … Harry Potter leads to-
Robb: Magic is real, folks. Magic is real.
Nicki: Yeah. We are currently on the fourth book of Harry Potter, which is the Goblet of Fire. We recently finished the Prisoner of Azkaban. And for those of you who are Harry Potter fans, you will know that one of these spells that Harry learns in the Prisoner of Azkaban is how to repel a Dementor, and which is like these soul sucking-
Robb: Monsters.
Nicki: … monsters that guard this prison, and anyway.
Robb: Don’t give away too much for the two people that haven’t followed the books.
Nicki: But he learns a spell toward them off because he’s particularly sensitive to these Dementors and the spell is, Robb?
Robb: Expecto Patronum.
Nicki: Expecto Patronum. So, this was… What was this? Thursday?
Robb: Thursday. Yeah.
Nicki: Last Thursday. And we drop the girls off at jujitsu and then we go and usually lift or do a sauna at the Montana Athletic Club while in their jujitsu class for an hour and a half. And we dropped them off and we were driving-
Robb: It was a very snowy day.
Nicki: It’s literally like three miles away.
Robb: Yeah, it’s not far, but legit snowy day. Like one of the snowier days we’ve had.
Nicki: Yeah. And so, we’re driving, we round this one corner where we’ve seen several people in this one ditch and there’s a gentleman there who his car is in the ditch, and he’s on the phone and we stop and we’re like, “You okay?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I’ve got someone coming.” So we’re like, “Cool.” We drive on. And then we’re on this very straight, straighter than straight road, and we’re 500 yards from the turn to the-
Robb: From the promised land. Yes.
Nicki: From the turn to the club. And Rob goes… He simultaneously-
Robb: Well, I have a tendency to out of nowhere grab Nicki’s quad, and I pinch between the vastus lateralis and the VMO, which is some spectacular tickle.
Nicki: Trying to make me laugh.
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: He goes-
Robb: I did this while canting, Expecto Patronum.
Nicki: Expecto Patronum, and he grabs my thigh, and I’m like, “We’re going off the road.” He veered the-
Robb: The car just went-
Nicki: … ever so slightly off into this super fresh powder, and it slopes a little bit. There’s a little bit of a ditch. Not very steep, thankfully, but we’re floating in this powder, and yeah, we ditched the car.
Robb: We did.
Nicki: But the funniest part, I was just laughing. We hit this, there’s a chained fence.
Robb: We had not even finished crashing, and I said, “Well, fuck, that didn’t work.” Because it’s supposed to ward off… It’s supposed to be like-
Nicki: Dementors.
Robb: … the thing. Well, it wards off ultimate evil. I’m like, “Dude, that didn’t work at all.”
Nicki: It was just literally the timing of it was like Expecto Patronum.
Robb: And we’re off.
Nicki: In the ditch, so we learned our lesson. Robb is no longer allowed to cast Harry Potter spells while driving.
Robb: So, now it’ll be spell less VMO vastus lateralis pinching from here on out.
Nicki: Yeah. So, anyway, that was our exciting news from last week. Scroll up a little bit. I want to… We have some announcements because our reset is coming up inside The Healthy Rebellion. Actually this Friday, the January 14th, which is the day this episode releases Robb and I will be doing the kickoff call for this winter 2022 reset. And then next week will be the seven day carb test for those who want to participate in that. Again, that one is completely optional for folks who want to see how their body responds to particular amounts and types of carbohydrates. And then the following week, beginning on January 24th is the actual 30 Day Rebel Reset.
Robb: And you should join that reset just to help celebrate my 50th birthday, which is also January 24th.
Nicki: That’s right. That’s right. So, anyway, the last day to join and participate in the actual reset is Robb’s birthday, the 24th at midnight. But if you’d like to participate in the seven day carb test and just all of the gear up stuff, then you’ll want to join now. And you can do that at join.thehealthyrebellion.com. We always have a really great group and lots of good stuff in store. So, that is about ready to rock and roll. Let’s see any other… I’m trying to think if there’s any other newsy stuff from inside the rebellion, things that we need to mention.
Robb: We have our cold shower reset going-
Nicki: That just wrapped up.
Robb: … or just wrapped up.
Nicki: And we haven’t announced our newest book for the book club, but that will be coming up as well. And I know we have some upcoming workshops with the Basis New York folks there and Grayson Strange. So, that’s coming up as well inside the rebellion.
Robb: Cool.
Nicki: What do you have for our news topic today?
Robb: It’s from a website called Fee, and it’s kind of a libertarian econ, politics, culture, history education. They cover a lot of different topics, but this one is Why the Bastardization of the Scientific Method Is so Dangerous, and the sub tagline, when married to power, an exultation of science can have disastrous effects. The author, a guy named Mike Roberts goes through and details some points out of history, including Nazi Germany, Stalin, Pol Pot, and others who have used science and a bastardization of the scientific method as a means of resting power and control away from the governed, the extended elements of governance, and to consolidate it into a very small group or single individual. He goes through and talks about what the scientific method is and is not. And it’s one of these things that I continually dumbfounded. Like when you see people say things like follow the science or the scientist is settled. There’s just-
Nicki: Or when people criticize me, they’re criticizing the science.
Robb: Or the flip side of that. Yeah. That’s a whole other just holy narcissist Batman ICD 10 level narcissistic personality disorder. But the very, very few things that science is settled on. I haven’t followed the inner workings of physics for a long time. And I don’t know if it’s been hammered out it that… So, we understand gravity. We can predict gravity with remarkable precision so long as the system isn’t super complex, you start getting above two or three elements and you start getting some error that’s involved in the whole thing. But gravity is pretty well describable as to what it does to the physical world, but we’re still, I think, and some of the physicists out there will correct me on this. Again, I just haven’t stayed up on this. There was some thought that gravity causes a deformation in space time. And that, that is kind of… It’s almost like a well, or a hole. When things roll downhill there’s a thought that there may be some sort of wave particle interaction with gravity.
Robb: There’s this thing that we so take for granted and that we can so precisely describe its effects on our world, but there’s still elements of it that we don’t fully understand. The science is not entirely settled. And depending on how the universe plays out for us, there may be pieces of it that we’re never able to fully peel back, that we’re never able to fully describe the why. We may be able to describe how it works and how it influences things, but the deeper question, well, why does it do that? We may not be able to do.
Robb: And so, this idea that any science is settled is just the most antithetical thing to science and the irony that there are whole movements of it proclaiming this. It would be hilarious. It would be kind of an idiocrasy type movie and funny were it not the fucking world that we are living in, and that where we have to share this planet with these idiots. But we do and continue to share it. We will, unless we all die or the planet gets wiped out. And so, we need to push back against this stupidity.
Robb: There are certainly topics, and I’ll piss somebody off with this. Topics like homeopathy where there’s a claim around an effect on the world that we of in, and science has… Put it this way. There are things that are claimed of which there is scant evidence to support the ideas. Maybe homeopathy is a good one to pick on in that regard. There have been studies that look at it, can’t really find an effect. If it were to work, it would be completely counter to any and all understandings of the physical world that we have. There’s this idea that water has this kind of memory depending on what stuff has been in it. If that’s the case then all the water that we consume has been feces and urine at some point. And so, I don’t know how you detangle that from your sore throat tincture that you’re putting together, but there are some things that we… Absence of evidence doesn’t prove that something isn’t true, but you start bill building ever better cases with better probabilities and whatnot around like, okay, well, this idea is probably not accurate and whatnot.
Robb: I’m not too sure what my point is above and beyond that. This is a solid accessible piece written more from the economist perspective, but definitely delving into the broader scientific method. And Mike Roberts is both a chemical engineer. I believe he has a Masters in both chemical and mechanical engineering from Ivy league schools. So, smart guy, really understands scientific method, and is also a solid student of economics. And so, I think that this is one of these pieces that if you are floundering around with, well, how do I push back against this idea that the science is settled? This is a good place to build that basic understanding. And if you have somebody that is banting that idea out, this is a good one to nudge into their inbox or social account, or what have you for them to peruse and most likely dismiss out of hand. But if they happen to be that 30% within this mass formation thing, which Nicki found an article that was hilarious, Reuters has dispelled the notion that there is a mass formation.
Nicki: Reuters has, they found a couple of scientists to claim-
Robb: Fact check.
Nicki: … to fact check it, and it’s fact checked to be false, which I think is-
Robb: Which is so meta. It’s like this mass formation psychosis suggested this whole cross section of society is seeing the world in an inaccurate way. And then you have a fact check that says that that’s inaccurate. It’s just… It’s incredible.
Nicki: I haven’t read this piece that you were speaking about here, but do you think that if somebody shared this with somebody… What it’s occurring to me, and I can’t remember who shared this in the rebellion, but somebody was mentioned lots of people have had different gatherings over the holidays, and meeting up with family members and relatives that they haven’t seen in a while. And one woman related that she was having a conversation with her mother and her mom just threw up her hands and said, “Well, you and I just believe in different facts.” And so, I’m just wondering would… Given that you’ve read it and I haven’t, would somebody be open to reading this or do you feel like this would be another, well, that’s just your facts, and I don’t believe your facts. My facts are different.
Robb: I’m going to anger some people who are probably more my tribe than not. So I’m going to throw something out here and ideologically, and I think epistemologically, I am now probably more in line with most people who are religious Christian. I just seem to have value systems that overlap with folks like that. But some of the things like the creationist museum where this guy Ham hoarded all this money and made this replica of Noah’s Ark and when our contemporary animals were hanging out with dinosaurs and stuff like that. It’s pretty preposterous. The science doesn’t really support that, and I don’t want to attack folks’ religious beliefs, but the Dalai Lama had a statement, which was when our religious beliefs don’t comport with science, then the science has to win.
Robb: I think that that’s a pretty reasonable thing, and it’s not from a value perspective. The thing about science, it doesn’t provide values. It provides facts and descriptions of the way the world works. And then we have to figure out what we value. Do we actually value freedom? And do we value the life that is worth living when we have a world that is a little dangerous and there aren’t completely nerfed edges to everything. I was seeing some back and forth on this continually, like the fact that COVID is a contagious disease in so many people’s minds changes everything, and my rights stop because somebody… If I get COVID, then somebody else could potentially get COVID and die. I just see a lot of problems with that. I could kill somebody driving. Somebody else could kill me while driving. It’s a really dubious, slippery slope.
Robb: So, again, back to this. There are folks that insist that the planet is 6,000 years old, and they will radiocarbon dating and microwave background, echo of the big bang, all the stuff somehow gets explained away. And there was a book Darwin’s Black Box where these folks that were intelligent design people suggested, well, there’s irreducible complexity. Like when we look at living systems, you get to a point where the motor element of a flagella apparatus can’t be any simpler than this, and it was 142 amino acids. And then they found one that was 140 amino acids. And then one that was 138 amino acids. And then they found another procaryotic organelle like structure that looked a lot like subunits of parts of the flagella motor unit. And then there was this other thing that had some other stuff.
Robb: So, there were pieces of both these things that existed in simpler organisms. And this stuff seems to support more of an understanding of the evolutionary process. Now, the evolutionary process, in my opinion, does not outright say that there is no God, and man wasn’t created out of the soil, and whatnot, but it might have been on the timeline of hundreds of millions of years and through an evolutionary process. And not exactly like this straight out of the book of Genesis type of interpretation.
Robb: My whole point to that is that there’s almost easier… Although religion is pretty emotionally charged, but there are folks on both sides of that equation that it doesn’t matter what you throw at them. They’re entrenched and dug in. I came at that intelligent design thing, really, really looking for, desperately wanting to find the spark of God somewhere someplace because the heat death of the universe is a big fucking buzz kill. So, I am not the person going into that in a Charles Dawkin-esque way trying to just be a dick to creationists, but I’m just incapable of bamboozling myself if the evidence seems to point in a different direction.
Robb: Now, it doesn’t mean that I’m right about everything, but if I’ve just been… If the trail is leading in a particular direction, that’s just where it goes. And so, I know, again, that was a long drawn out deal as to the dinner table conversation. I don’t know if this is going to convince somebody, but it walks through… I guess something to do would be to walk through this because it walks through what is the sign scientific method, and what isn’t the scientific method? And then what can the scientific method delineate for us? And what are the different layers of understanding, and knowledge?
Robb: There’s a whole group of people that… And it’s funny, this has existed within nutrition for a long time and the evidence-based nutrition crowd. If there’s not a randomized control trial on something, then it’s complete bullshit because it’s just anecdote. The existence of the universe is anecdote. We don’t have a randomized control trial on it. We’ve pieced this stuff together via inference from the microwave background radiation, and the apparent expansion of the universe, different points in the night sky moving away from us for the most part. And some things moving away from us at greater than the speed of light. These are the realities that we have to deal with.
Robb: I don’t know that they’re inarguable, but it’s the… What’s up for debate is what does it mean? What’s our interpretation of it? But there’s clearly some sort of background radiation that would be consistent with the energy leftover after a rapidly expanding singularity. And even the singularity idea of the universe beginning is changed. But anyway, I’m just fucking rambling now. So, Nicki’s looking at me like I’ve lost my mind, and I probably have.
Nicki: No, no, no.
Robb: I think that at a minimum, this is something to start having a conversation around. It’s like, this is some really basic scientific method stuff, how it works, when it doesn’t. It details historical examples, and it’s always funny because whatever side of the table one is on, it’s always the other side of the table that the Nazis exist on, of course. I think the kind of woke mob branch COVIDians I think are pretty Nazi-esque as to, as far as I can see this because from my perspective I just want people… Like really, the vast majority of this stuff boils down to, I think people should have choice around things. And there are other people who are saying, “No, you don’t get to have choice because your choice is too potentially injurious to the people around you.” I guess in some ways that’s a valid and powerful position.
Nicki: No, it would only be valid if we had a sterilizing vaccine.
Robb: True.
Nicki: But the fact that these vaccines are leaky and you can acquire-
Robb: Well, there are people though that are like, even if there’s that dumb and dumber thing. So, you’re saying there’s a chance. If there’s some scintilla of a chance that disease burden would be decreased, that the potential for death or illness would be mitigated so we don’t overwhelm these hospitals, and our dear medical workers, and I’m being facetiously dramatic here. They will push back on that and say, “Anything to save a life,” Nicki. And this, again, turns into this-
Nicki: We don’t know that it’s saving any-
Robb: We really don’t.
Nicki: All cause mortality looks to be increasing.
Robb: There are some concerning things around that.
Nicki: I know we’re rambling here, but there was another member of The Healthy Rebellion that I believe lives in Quebec, and she shared that Quebec is looking at taxing unvaccinated people extra because of their disproportionate cost to the medical system, but that’s… And the whole comment thread that ensued was there’s a lot of health and lifestyle circumstances, which increase cost to a system. And so, why are we choosing this one arbitrary thing because it’s the popular thing to jump on right now. If you’re unvaccinated you are the other, and the that one-
Robb: The star-belly sneetch.
Nicki: The star-belly sneetch, and anyway, I know we’re going off on a tangent, but this ties into, I came across… Actually, I’m making my way through Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Can you scroll up please? The other direction. Thank you. The other up.
Robb: Oh, you know what’s funny about that. Your mouse is set the opposite of mine.
Nicki: Are you serious?
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: Okay. So, when I say up, you go down, and when I say-
Robb: Yes.
Nicki: Okay. Well, that explains it.
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: But anyway, this quote from Carl Sagan’s, Demon-Haunted World, which I’m only, gosh, probably a third of the way in, but it’s just talking about… And this was written-
Robb: ’97.
Nicki: ’97, just about the scientific illiteracy that-
Robb: And again, this was 1997.
Nicki: Yeah. And so, let’s jump forward a couple decades and here we are. But anyway, the quote goes, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this. If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge even to ourselves that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” So, I don’t know. I came across it and pasted it in here because it just seems very relevant to all the things.
Robb: Well, it’s one of my favorite books, and it’s one of these seminal science literacy, and really critical thinking books. The interesting thing is for its time, again, circling back to the religious topic. For its time, a lot of what Carl Sagan, and people like Richard Dawkins really railed against interestingly was some of the, what I would consider to be the anti-science position of the religious right. Particularly, within the United States. And interestingly to me over say the last 30 years, as far as I can tell the religious right has mellowed for the most part with many, many, many of these positions.
Robb: When I was in high school, it used to be the really religious kids that would finger wave and well, you’re going to go to hell if you don’t do this, that, and the other. And now it’s the woke mob that because I’m white and male and heterosexual then I’m just literally the ultimate evil and I have visited untold horrors upon all of humanity, and et cetera, et cetera. So, what’s fascinating to me about Carl Sagan’s warning in this book. I think so much of the concern around the religious right is gone now, the for now. And this is something that I’ve talked about also is that if the world can continue to bludgeon, and push in this weird progressivism to alienate people, then you could have a resurgence of really a nasty flavor of religiosity. But at this point, what I find is that most people just want to have their religious faith and they want a free place to do it.
Nicki: They want to be left alone.
Robb: They want a modicum of autonomy around that. And they just want to love each other and love their families. And the vast majority of the friends that we have are quite religious and wonderful people. I’m frankly a bit jealous of their worldview because it’s a little more easy to go to bed at night with this idea that there’s something good awaiting all of us at the end of this lifetime versus at some point the universe is just a hair above absolute zero, and it was all for not.
Robb: That’s a pretty buzz killing of a proposition there, but it’s interesting that all of Carl Sagan’s warnings as far as I can tell are still true, but they ironically now largely apply to the woke progressive mob who has lost its mind and has turned science into a religion and wields it as a cajole in a way that these weird science creationists like Paul Ham with The Creation University could have never done because they were never on the inside. They were never going to be on the inside, but we have people like Tony Fauci, and the CDC, and the FDA, and all these August institutions the appeal to all be in on all this stuff ranging from suggesting that nine year old boys can have periods to all kinds of other stuff that is just anti-science and is… There’s no reason to be mean and nasty towards people because of the way that they want to live, but at the same time, there will be hurt caused by suggesting that there’s absolutely no biological difference between men and women, and on and on and on. This isn’t the topic of this conversation. So, we’ll skirt around that. But yeah, I mean, the Carl Sagan piece, and if y’all have not read The Demon-Haunted land-
Nicki: World
Robb: … or world, I would strongly recommend it.
Nicki: Okay. That’s our lengthy intro.
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company, LMNT, and LMNT wants to help you say thank you to the heroes in your life with a gift of salt. So, think about someone in your life. Someone who’s been there for you when you needed them. It could be a teacher, a mentor, a coach, a first responder, maybe even a parent who helped take care of your kiddos when you had something urgent come up and needed quick coverage, maybe a coworker who covered a shift for you so you could be with someone who needed you. These are just some examples of everyday heroes. You can nominate them at drinklmnt.com/giveasalt. That’s drinklmnt.com/giveasalt. You nominate them and LMNT will hydrate them.
Robb: Did you make that up?
Nicki: I wrote that.
Robb: You nominate, we hydrate.
Nicki: No, no, I didn’t do that.
Robb: Oh, okay.
Nicki: That was-
Robb: That’s pretty slick.
Nicki: I don’t know who that was, either Kristen or Mike. I don’t know.
Robb: Okay. Somebody smarter than us. Okay.
Nicki: Somebody smarter me. Yes. All right. We’ve got two questions this week, folks. The first one from Ryan on brain fog. Hi, Robb, I’ve been noticing more over the past few years, the phenomenon of brain fog. It seems to most often set in after eating breakfast, which is a rotation of eggs, sausage, and cheese with the occasional bread and oatmeal. Plain eggs is the most frequent breakfast. My question is, are there other foods besides gluten known to cause this fatigue/fogginess like maybe eggs and dairy, and how long does it typically take to set in. Most mornings when I experience the fogginess, it is accompanied by an irritable mood. Important to note that this was never an issue until after high school when my diet changed to include significantly less breads often going a week or more between consuming glutens and obviously getting older too.
Robb: Yeah. I mean, I’ve talked about this a little bit. So, there’s several things that can cause brain fog, like general dysbiosis, fog map issues. Some people with just some of these lectin issues with specific foods or protein, but it definitely seems to be in this mass cell activation pro-inflammatory process. And this is finally what drove me to mainly remove eggs from the rotation because I had assumed for years that despite eating low carb, and feeling generally better, I would just have these periods of time where I just felt terrible. Ironically, it was usually after breakfast, and it would hang with me for about half the day and then not infrequently we would have lunch or dinner was also some sort of an omelet frittata. And then I would feel bad after that, but I started suspecting that eggs were a problem. And then I pulled them out, and felt better.
Robb: And then I think I’ve told the story of introducing duck eggs and I felt better for a while. And then one day ate duck eggs and spent the better part of six hours on the can just like the Moctezuma’s Revenge type deal. And so, I’m super reactive to eggs. I’ve worn a continuous glucose monitor to look and see if this is a blood glucose issue, and it’s definitely not. It’s not altering my blood glucose, but there’s definitely a brain fog associated with this. And again, I don’t know what branch of the immunological process is happening here, but I think dairy is a possibility. Eggs are a super high possibility, nuts are a possibility, and eggs are just so easy for breakfast that I think it’s one of those things that we easy to overuse them, gut issues can set in then. And so-
Nicki: And they’re in a lot of things, too. So like if you’re eating meals that have… Like meat loafs or casserole, they’re a very common ingredient in things. But Ryan, it seems like a really easy experiment for you to do would be to take a couple weeks and just ditch the eggs and either have leftover meat from the night before, or maybe make a batch of hamburger patties on a Sunday then you can have those throughout the week along with if you want to have sausage with it, or just sometimes we’ll just do hamburger patties for breakfast.
Robb: And you know Nicki hates me for this. She doesn’t eat many of them, but I will get one of the Costco sleeves of pre-pattied frozen hamburger patties because I don’t have to thaw it out individually.
Nicki: Because Robb doesn’t like taking the time to patty the patties in the morning.
Robb: Well, Robb cooks 95% of our meals and-
Nicki: You do. That wasn’t a dig. It was just a statement.
Robb: Okay, Doctor Vouch. So yeah, to streamline that like a chunk of fish, just having things handy that is an alternative to eggs. We will do pork chops.
Nicki: Pork chops are a nice breakfast.
Robb: A good one, the kids eat them well, hamburgers. If I’m on the ball, and I remember to take the hamburgers out the night before, or I’ve got enough time to thaw them out, but a brick of hamburger that is like minus 32, it takes a while for it to get up to a spot where I can thaw it out properly. So those pre-pattied burgers although not the tastiest in the world can be handy in the pinch.
Nicki: But it’s also where you can make them in the night before or make them on a Sunday and make two or three pounds of them. And then you have them to eat on throughout the week.
Robb: Although folks who have a histamine problem when you cook in bulk ahead of time, that is oftentimes a problem. So, it’s-
Nicki: That’s true.
Robb: Aha, I win. But yeah. So, Ryan, yeah. I mean, I would do some… At the end of his question, I think he was alluding to I should have just continued eating the glutens. I don’t know, man. Maybe you should have. I generally don’t see it super benefit most people, but I think that over consumption of egg is definitely a problem, particularly in this paleo low carb ancestral health space. I fucking miss the days of just eating a bowl of cereal, but I don’t really miss the blood sugar dysregulation I had from that. So, yeah.
Nicki: Okay. Our next question is from Janine on veganism and the next generation. She says a topic I do not hear addressed much is that with veganism on the rise, what is going to happen to the children born to vegans? I have a friend who is an RN and is an internationally certified lactation consultant. And she says, the babies of vegans are smaller, have lower Apgar scores, do not seem to thrive as well as non-vegan babies, but this type of information never makes it to the news. Those babies were denied so much nutrition while developing and once born the mother’s breast milk is less than ideal. Will these kids be able to reach their full potential despite the lack of nutrients that was in their diets?
Nicki: Our 32 year old daughter has been a vegan for four years or so, and is about to get married. She believes the vegan line that it is a perfectly fine diet. I have a degree in anthropology and there has never been a healthy vegan society since we came down from the trees. My daughter does not believe me. I am an NTP. All I know about nutrition is wrong according to her. She feels, my course was taught by pro-meaters, and therefore they had an agenda. What will happen to our society, if there are not enough intelligent people left to be able to make the hard philosophical decisions that need to be made to keep this ship floating?
Robb: Well, like all turds, it will sink, but Janine, it’s funny. So, we talk about this a lot in Sacred Cow, and Diana Rogers talks a lot about it in the book, and there’s basically a compare and contrast between vegan, vegetarian, and then mixed diet children populations. And they have massive failure to thrive in these non-meat eating cultures. And even the cultures that have dairy consumption. Dairy isn’t a great substitute as a singular protein source for meat and seafood and things like that. It has a tendency to bind different B vitamins. It definitely binds iron. So there’s immunological challenges there. It combines zinc.
Robb: My position, and this is going to sound horrible. We had somebody write in about some of my comments about I just want to see the world burn down because it’ll affect other people more than than us. But my position on this has been everybody out there ready to pop out some kids go vegan, and go hard. Like super hardcore vegan, raw vegan. You don’t need to supplement. Dr. McDougall and T. Colin Campbell say so. You don’t need B vitamins. You don’t need B12. That’s all bollix from the supplement companies, and we just need five, six years of that, and all the bullshit will go away because there will be a trench of children that are so developmentally damaged that you won’t be able to play the smoke and mirror games that they do with standard epidemiological bullshit.
Robb: Janine’s daughter is 34 years old. She was raised with the benefit of living in a modern industrial society with both the benefits and the challenges. And now she’s basically taking an ATM card to her youth and extracting it via a vegan diet at an accelerated rate. And it sounds like she’s getting ready to maybe have a kid, which is going to double down on the extraction. The amount of omega three fats stored in her body are going to be a major determinant of how well the brain of her child develops, and if there’s inadequate elongated omega 3s, it just doesn’t happen. Ranging from zinc deficiencies to iron deficiencies to B vitamin deficiencies, there are milestones both in utero and once the child is born that if the proper nutrition is not provided, that’s it. They miss that milestone. It doesn’t come back. They don’t develop it later. They just never are what they could have been.
Robb: It sounds horrible, but this is just… There’s finally starting to be a little bit of pushback around the cultured meat topic. There’s a few outlets. Like Forbes had a piece. It was like, “This is absolute bullshit.” And Peter Attia had a piece where he had a systems engineer talk about how literally physics in the world we understand would need to change to make the lab grown meat work. But the whole idea of veganism in this “plant-based nutrition” and the narrative around climate change and ethics, and the social justice topics and everything. Everything, the pendulum is 100% swung in this direction that if you’re going to be morally upstanding, battle for this social justice righteousness, and support the planet, then you’re going to be vegan. And you can’t say plant based because that’s just a mealy mouth bullshit thing like say vegan. So, my hope is that lots of people do this and they go real hard. And then there’s going to be a retrospective study that looks at this, and unfortunately is going to be a bunch of really fucked up moms and babies.
Nicki: Well, and what you’re saying sounds awful. If somebody’s listening and they’re like, “Oh my God, Robb, you’re an awful human being for wanting that.” But I get where you’re coming from because then there would be this clear cohort to look at versus what’s happening now where-
Robb: It’s just a slow bleed right now.
Nicki: It’s just pervasive. And so, it’s this slowly creeping across society. And so, it’s not going to be as dramatically defined outlines of the cohort. So, it’s happening anyway, but you’re just saying it would be ideal if it happened in a very clearly-
Robb: There’s some sort of a… I forget exactly what it is, but it’s the trolley car scenario that they roll out in first year college ethics classes where there’s a person on a trolley car. The trolley car is going downhill and you have to either kill the person on the trolley to stop it. Or if you don’t kill that person, then the trolley is going to plow into a crowd of people. And so, it’s this basic ethics thing. And some people come out on one side and other people come out on the other, but ironically we’re in this age of COVID and everything where everybody’s supposed to do their part for the collective, and we’re supposed to look towards the greater good. I do agree with that to some degree.
Robb: So, my point here is that I would really like a concise punctuated exposure of this disaster to a group of people who choose to do it because they’ve got… Actually, you need the means to be vegan at this point and not have it just overtly crush you. So it’s actually not going to encompass much in the way of minorities and the poor and whatnot. It’s going to be wealthier, bougie white people who do this, and it’s going to leave such a mark that you can’t hide this epidemiologically. And then we’ll be able to look back at it and be like, “Okay, if you want your child to be underdeveloped, and lower IQ, and suffer from a host of developmental issues because of missing milestones related to zinc and iron and B vitamins and elongated Omega 3 fats, then eat a plant-based vegan centric diet. And if you want something other than that, then here are all these other alternatives that we can draw from out of traditional food stories.
Robb: But yeah, I mean, the thing is, and I’m glad you fleshed this out. I don’t think I’m a monster. Some people will think I am, but I’ll also be a little bit of a dick and say that the people who don’t get this, they just suck at secondary and tertiary thinking. They’re so mired in the MSN, Fox News, knee jerk reaction-
Nicki: Your soundbite.
Robb: Soundbite bullshit.
Nicki: You did a lot of inflammatory soundbites.
Robb: Yeah, and they’re terrible at stopping and thinking, “Well, what’s the secondary? What are the knock on consequences? What are the tertiary consequences?” The people who don’t understand what I’m talking about there, they’re not good at those secondary things. And that piece that I just mentioned about scientific method is a great place to start piecing that together. And you don’t necessarily have to agree with me. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but this is my idea around this is that Janine’s concern is legitimate. The irony is that in developing countries that don’t have adequate access to animal products, the deficiencies related to development, and this includes IQ and neurological function, height, physical development, they’re identical to what we see in vegetarian and vegan families. They are identical. We see a mitigation on that when the vegan and vegetarian families are able to supplement all the stuff and do it exactly right.
Robb: You don’t see it as severely as we do in these developing country scenarios where the folks are reduced to eating like an 80% starch diet from a mono crop of a starch, and they virtually never get access to any type of dense animal proteins and stuff like that. The type of deficiencies that we see are identical to the deficiencies seen in vegan and vegetarian diets. It’s just in developed countries, you’ve got a CVS or something that you can and go get your-
Nicki: Fortified this and fortified that and supplements. Is there a book? I feel like there’s a book, but maybe I’m making this up where the author compiles stories from lots of people who were vegan and vegetarian and their experience and how their health deteriorated?
Robb: Yeah. There’s some stuff out there. I mean, Leah Keith has some of that. There are some things out there around I that.
Nicki: I feel like there are many members inside The Healthy Rebellion community who were vegan at one point, and their health took a serious turn for the worse, and that was the thing that made them realize that this is probably not the best diet for me to continue following. I was vegan for two years when I met Robb, and had I not met you I probably… I mean, I was thinking I was going to be vegan and do the whole nutritionist thing and consult with pregnant moms. It is sort of a religion. I bought into the McDougall, diet for a new America, the John Robbins, and the whole thing, like hook, line, and sinker. Again, because I didn’t have a solid science background, and they make compelling arguments and cases for their position. And so, it made sense to me with my lack of a more detailed science background.
Robb: Well, even then the science background is tough. A lot of the challenge, veganism is as an intervention or a reset for a lot of people is probably a good move. You’ve been eating a standard American diet, and as a first whistle stop you do something like a minimally processed macrobiotic type deal. It’s probably a good move. It’s just over time, there will be nutrient deficiencies that pop up and god man, the GI problems that end up emerging in a lot of these folks. But as much as I’m railing against it, there are people who go from sick to healthier adopting a vegan diet. But then there’s a continuing timeline where they at 10 years, where they at 20 years, I forget-
Nicki: That’s the thing. I feel like a lot of people that go vegetarian or vegan, I don’t know the percentage, but I feel like a large percentage of them stop that at some point. Again, because health issues, they don’t ever… You’re never vegetarian then go back to eating meat, and then go back to being vegetarian. It’s usually like a one way street out of vegetarianism or veganism.
Robb: Right. I want to say it’s something like 1% of the US population each year goes vegan and then about 1% halts being vegan. And so, kind of it’s this stalemate in that regard. There is this reality that out in the world there’s this virtue signaling element around “plant-based”, and vegan. And so, you get status creds for purporting to eat this way. It is funny that there were some not well designed studies, but studies that suggested that when vegan college age, and a little older people go out drinking that they binge on animal products. They eat steaks and hamburgers and stuff like that. When their inhibitions are low they’re not doing some sort of bukake thing. They’re eating hamburgers. So, yeah.
Nicki: Okay. Anything else you want to say on that one, hub?
Robb: Nope. Probably not.
Nicki: Okay. Well, I think that is all for this week’s episode. Remember to check out our show sponsor LMNT for all of your electrolyte needs. Even though it’s wintertime, you still need to hydrate. You can grab your value bundle box by three and get the fourth one free. Go to drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drink L-M-N-T.com/R-O-B-B. And remember, if you have somebody that you’d like to nominate for our give a salt program, you can do that at drinklmnt.com/giveasalt. And I hope y’all have a great weekend. Remember to join us in The Healthy Rebellion if you’d like to participate in this year’s winter reset. The last day to join and actually participate in the 30 day reset is January 24th. And if you’d like to participate in the seven day carb test then you should join today because we’re doing the kickoff call here on January 14th. And to join, go to join.thehealthyrebellion.com and hope y’all have a great week, and we will see you next time.
Robb: Bye, everybody.
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