Dave Asprey
Appearances
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Why is my cat not here? And I go in and she's eating my lunch.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
You need between 0.8 and 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. So I weigh 200 pounds, and I'm about 7% body fat. And that means I need about 200 grams of protein a day.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Yeah, it's ridiculous. As a guy who was the fat computer hacker from the first Jurassic Park... It's totally ridiculous. And in order to do that, if you're obese like I was, you might say, well, if I weighed 300 pounds, I had 100 pounds of fat. You really only need 200 grams of protein. You can subtract the extra fat from the number. But 200 grams of protein.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And protein isn't all the same. And this is something that the big food companies are trying to tell us. Cricket protein or gluten is protein. There's a company making keto cookies that are all protein. They're just gluten and canola oil. That is not food. So a while ago, the story was, oh, all calories are the same, so you can drink this high fructose corn syrup, it's just calories.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
As long as you keep your calories low, you can drink a Diet Coke and a Snickers bar, they cancel each other's out. It doesn't work like that. Protein's the same way. So different proteins send different signals to the body. And there's something called amino acid availability score. And it turns out that animal proteins score much higher than plant-based proteins.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And I say this as a former vegan, a former raw vegan, And you just cannot get enough protein from plants unless you're doing heavy industrial processing of the plants. And that comes at a cost.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
But even then, the highest quality plant-based protein powders don't hold a candle to dairy protein, which is vegetarian, or egg protein, which is vegetarian, or sort of the king of proteins is beef or buffalo or bison. As a vegan, I had a problem with this because I was a vegan. I was in Tibet at a monastery and Tibetan monks love to argue.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
They're trained since they're about eight years old or they have an eight-year-old sitting on the ground surrounded by older kids standing up, all arguing at the same time, doing these like aggressive things. And it's to teach you to be calm in the face of arguments so that you can still be at peace. And it's beautiful to watch. So I knew this. And so I'm kind of teasing the head llama.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
I said, well, you tell me no killing, but you have a yak skin on your prayer pole. So I think you're a hypocrite. And he starts laughing and he looks at me, he goes, one death feeds everyone. And I'm like, mind blown! Because I had been a vegan until I went to Tibet and I realized I cannot be a vegan in Tibet because there's just very little food.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And if there's some yak butter tea or there's a little bit of meat, you just eat it because there's just not enough food. So I really thought about it. And that led me to think about deaths per calorie. And as a guy who's built a regenerative farm on Vancouver Island and raised all of my own animals for most of the last eight years, I will tell you that a cow will feed you for an entire year.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And if it's grass fed and from a local farmer, no other animal died unless the cow stepped on a frog. I mean, it is literally one death. And if the cow was treated with respect and ethically, then you're killing fewer animals than an industrial plant protein.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Because when they do those, the tractor comes through and it chops up every creature that's there, including the bunnies and the mice and the butterflies and all the ugly ones like worms that no one likes that are important for life. So I feel really clean about it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
But the most important thing that I can say, if you choose to eat animal protein, which I do, is that practice gratitude before you eat. I believe because of my shamanic training, because of all the spiritual work that I do,
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
that humans our energetic field as a species made a sacred agreement with the animals that we've domesticated and they come here to nourish us in exchange for our gratitude so if you're going to eat meat you practice gratitude because that's the deal we made and if you disrespect the animal and you're eating industrial meat and you're eating it mindlessly, I don't think that's a good practice.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
But I do think it's ethical to eat meat because I'm killing fewer lives when I eat beef than when I eat plant-based protein. And since that nourishes me better, which gives me stronger energy and stronger bones, and it gives me more energy to put back into the world, including building better soil via farming of animals, I feel like it's a good deal and it's within integrity for me.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Birds are not that, they're all dinosaurs. So they're less like us. And the fat that's present in birds is similar to soybean oil. It's a lot of omega-6 that causes inflammation. And you would know this. If you're in India and you're not feeling well, your grandmother's gonna give you white rice and ghee, which is clarified butter.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
In the US, you get saltines and margarine or something and it doesn't work very well. But the reason is that ghee, that saturated fat, is very nourishing for you and that you actually need that. You don't get it from a chicken. And also, one chicken, to get the amount of protein, I'd eat a chicken a day. I'm killing 365 chickens a year. That doesn't feel very good.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
In addition to that, real chickens, the kind that I grow on my farm, take nine months to mature. And their fat is rich and yellow and full of vitamins, even though it's not the best kind of fat. But the chickens they're eating at the store take six weeks to get that big because they've been modified and bred to have these incredibly large breasts and they're terribly mistreated.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
So unless a chicken is pasture raised and a heritage breed, at which point it's not affordable. They're terribly expensive to raise. Chickens exist to make eggs. Eggs, if you're not allergic, are really a good source of fat and protein. And when you eat eggs, you want to cook the whites and leave the yolk runny. And then you get the most nutrients that way.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Are you plant based to the exclusion of dairy?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And it's working for you. And if you're from India, you probably have the genes that are going to support that much better. And so if you look at what your great grandmother ate, that's going to be an indication of what you can handle. And if you look at you, your skin is really good. And that's unusual when most people go vegan because they eat a lot of industrial processed seed oils.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
So if you're eating a diet that agrees with your body, and I totally support doing that, then what you want to do is you want to make sure that you're getting complete amino acids. And you can do it from rice and beans, but here's the issue. To get enough protein... It's definitely hard.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
It's like 300 grams of carbs to get 20 grams of protein. So then your best bet for plant-based proteins to have the highest amino acid score, it's actually hemp protein with the fat removed because hemp oil isn't particularly good for you. So then what you end up doing is saying, okay, I'm going to do that, and I feel good. I've also helped a lot of vegans.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
In fact, this was at David Wolf's vegan conference. I explained the virtues of ghee, where no animals die to make ghee, and ghee helps to escort the nutrients from plants into the body, so you make better use of the plants. So sometimes adding a tablespoon of ghee a day gives you a healthier skin glow, and it feels more nourishing. And people can choose to do that or not choose to do that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And people get mad because I tease vegans. Dude, I was a vegan. It's teasing, guys. It's not a disrespectful thing. In my case, it actually harmed me. And some things like spinach, kale, even raspberries and almonds are very high in oxalic acid, which I write about in the book. and it causes crystals to form. 70% of kidney stones are from plant-based compounds, not from eating meat and beer.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
30% are from meat and beer. And so you can overdo either direction, right? So I want people to say, choose the right plants when you're plant-based. And I would consider, if I was plant-based, adding hemp-based protein powder, even though it is a processed food, it's going to be a processed food that has the best amino acid score that you can get.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Or if hypnotism is real? But what's inside a black hole?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Dairy milk has been a part of human food for at least 5,000 years, and it's a convenient way to not kill an animal and to have it continuously produce fat and protein, which are the hard things for humans to get enough of, because carbs are relatively abundant in nature. What do you do?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Well, normally you would just drink milk but the milk we would drink was from a breed of cows that makes A2 milk and they ate grass and that works well with our biology. The kind of milk that you get now is from cows that are bred to eat grain and corn and soy and that milk has the wrong kind of fat and it has a kind of protein called A1 protein that's very inflammatory.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
So a lot of people who can't drink milk, which include me, because it messes up my gut royally, it just makes me stupid. Actually, my brain swells up from it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Me too. It's very similar. So sometimes you can handle A2 milk, but raw A2 milk is how we used to drink it. And in many states, it's still illegal. Yeah. Why the government thinks it has a right to tell you what you're allowed to eat, I don't know. They don't have that right. So it doesn't matter if they make it illegal. They didn't have the right to make it illegal.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
So therefore, it's not illegal in the world that I live in. Then again, if you're selling it, they might still try to arrest you. Then you got to go to court. But here's the deal. Raw milk for many people is very, very healing. And for some people, whey protein, especially if you're vegetarian but not vegan, it's a source.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Just get grass-fed whey protein because the animals are treated better and because it's a higher quality nutritional product. But let's assume you're not going to drink cow's milk because for a lot of people it just doesn't work, including me. I don't touch it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
butter and ghee usually are acceptable especially ghee won't trigger allergies and mucus like that for almost anyone well what about the fake milks right so these are all industrial products unless you make it yourself and what they figured out with almond milk was oh we can take leftover parts of almonds and you know the ones that are broken and unsightly and we can use those to make
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
milk and it's just a few almonds and some canola oil and some high fructose corn syrup some flavorings and we blend it up and we sell it for like eight dollars as a health food product it's not a health food product so almond milk is high in phytic acid that sucks minerals out of your bones you have to take more minerals and it's also high in oxalates which are the things that are causing kidney stones and things that are causing gout and joint pain when you wake up even
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
If you have really bad skin and you're eating a ton of these high oxalate foods like almond milk and kale smoothies and all, this can be why because it's making tiny razor sharp calcium oxalate crystals in your skin that are coming out. So I don't recommend almond milk. Also, if you're a vegan for animals, the number of bees, about a third of all bees die pollinating almonds every year.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
It is not a particularly clean product. So then we say, well, oat milk. That is the biggest scam on the planet right now. It raises your blood sugar as much as drinking a Coke. It is not a health food, and it usually has glyphosate, and it's high in phytic acid that sucks minerals out of your body. And I know you might not like hearing this, but... Do the math.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
There's a tablespoon of oats blended into a bunch of water and you spent six bucks on that. Like, are you dumb? Right. It's not a good move. Right. So what should you drink? There's two kinds of milk that are okay. One of them is macadamia milk, which is really expensive and you have to make it yourself because macadamias have the right kinds of oil in them.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
But the other one that's abundant and healthy is coconut milk. So if you're going to do it, use coconut milk.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
I know, right?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Here's the problem, though. If you say, okay, I don't like the taste of coconut milk, and I'm with you on that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Yeah, that's really the key. You don't need to drink a plant milk. It's a made-up product that you don't have a need for, but... If you say I'm going to do one of these other things, you're spending a lot of money, you're getting anti-nutrients, you're getting mostly water, and you're usually getting a toxic burden. So like why am I doing this again?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
The thing that milk has that's most important is it has protein. And the second most important is it has good fats. When you have a replacement milk, even coconut milk, there is no protein. So the coconut yogurt you like, it doesn't work because it doesn't have protein. So you have to take that and add whey protein or add scoops of maybe hemp protein if you're doing plant-based.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
But you've got to add a whole bunch of protein to it because... Normal yogurt has that. Most people tolerate grass-fed yogurt pretty well. I still don't. I can't touch cow's milk unless it's ghee for the most part, or I can do some butter. But if I was to have, you know, two tablespoons of regular milk, it messes me up. My gut's wrong. It's just not right. So that's an immune response.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
So I just want to tell you, you're not getting protein in your plant milks and you're getting stuff you don't want in your plant milks. So just don't do it.