but I think the biggest thing for me that I've changed my mind on since I wrote the book in 2019 was carbohydrates and then in connecting with that the ketosis and ketogenic diets so when I wrote the carnivore code and this is humbling this is what we all do is we write books and then you put your thoughts into cement you freeze your thoughts in Kryptonite and then you change your thoughts and you think oh the book it's just not a living document so but when I wrote the book I was of the opinion that
carbohydrates were not great for humans and we're sort of looking at the literature differently and over time I learned personally in my own life doing a carnivore diet of meat organs and fat and salt for a year and a half that including carbohydrates in my diet improved my health from there so my whole story is that I was eating kind of a paleo diet had really bad eczema which I'd had my whole life getting rid of vegetables and all plant food significantly improve the eczema so much so that in the last four and a half
five years since I've been on this more specific path I haven't had any flares of the XML that are significant at all that's a big deal because I had massive eczema on my elbows my wrists my hips so much so that I really couldn't even wear pants easily it would get on my shirts I couldn't do Jiu Jitsu because I had eczema on my knees and it was getting infected so getting rid of vegetables really helped with my Eczema but then I learned after a year and a half that I was getting such bad muscle
cramps heart palpitations sleep disturbances my testosterone is kind of going down right now it's around seven or eight hundred I've been on I've included carbohydrates in my diet for the last two and a half years but at that point it was going 450 500 significantly lower and my sex hormone binding globulin was creeping up so I had electrolyte issues and what I realized was that I'd been thinking about insulin wrong I've been thinking that I needed to keep my insulin low all of the time and to be fair on a carnivore diet My fasting insulin
was low 3.5 3.0 and I thought incorrectly that if I ate carbohydrates my insulin Spike that would be a bad thing right after today's video I want you to check out Bub's Naturals if you're consuming collagen protein which honestly you probably should you want to have ones that are clean and simple the thing I like about bubs is there's no flavorings it's simple it's instantized it mixes epically well but they are also all about a good cause okay 10 of all of their proceeds go to charity so the whole idea behind bubs besides providing good
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off whatever you want from bubs Naturals again the code is Thomas 20 and that link is down below in the top line of the description what I realized and I wasn't taught this medical school was that insulin spikes after the carbohydrates are actually healthy for the human body for a variety of reasons so insulin is probably something else I've changed my mind on carbohydrates and Insulin what I realize now is that your body needs an insulin signal after a meal when you eat carbohydrates to signal to the kidneys to absorb and hold on to minerals
sodium potassium calcium magnesium so the massive profound electrolyte problems that people get on long-term ketogenic diets are almost certainly due to a lack of insulin signaling at the level of the kidney there are various levels of kidney physiology upon which insulin is going to act but people in the ketogenic space I think are well intentioned and they're trying to hold on to minerals by including massive amounts of salt in their diet but it just doesn't work because you need an insulin signal level of the kidney to hold on to those things so the first thing
I did when I sort of transitioned off a ketogenic zero carbon carnivore diet which include honey in my diet and the first couple of days I felt a little weird because I was physiologically insulin resistant and then your body kind of adjusts to this my blood sugar spikes normalize and you know if I eat honey today or a few years ago after I had adjusted to having the carbohydrates back in my diet my blood sugar might go in 130 140 150 milligrams per deciliter but I don't worry about that because if you look at the
actual uh the actual shape of that curve it comes back down to a baseline very quickly within the hour for sure so this is normal human physiology and we should not fear glucose spikes in a metabolically healthy individual it's going to go up it's going to come back down that's normal and that insulin signaling is healthy for humans at so many levels it's healthy for our hormones it's healthy for our brains it's healthy for the production of glutathione and the resorption of minerals so that idea of insulin being all bad all the time and including
carbohydrates in my diet that was a huge huge thing and now we know I mean there's tons of research that I just didn't see at that point that I was sort of blind to about carbohydrates for athletes carbohydrates post exercise I mean we just worked out I have holes in my shorts now from the uh the weight belt you know this weight that I was using has ripped a hole in the front of my shorts here and carbohydrates post exercise are so clearly shown to improve performance carbohydrates overall are starting to improve all sorts of
metrics in humans testosterone recovery sleep all kinds of things so those are two big ones for me from the outset on the cramping side I've got a question as far as because I've experienced that when I'm where I'm low carb right I'm very very prone to cramping which as someone that does a lot of endurance stuff it's problematic like if I'm back country or anything like that I was just doing a long Trek and ran into a huge cramping issue even though I'm not super low carb anymore I guess I'd still low-ish carb and I
would argue that it actually takes time to actually like recover from some of that insulin issue that you have with the kidneys but the question that I've always had and maybe you know the answer since protein is insulinogenic can you get some resorption of the minerals through the insulin Spike with protein or does the glucagon cancel that out in that case I mean you get some it's just nowhere near if you look at the amount of insulin and the level of insulin you get with carbohydrates it's much it's much higher than it is which is
protein I mean you get some of protein it's just not the same as a carbohydrate Spike and so people in communities that are fearful of carbohydrates will say look at how much insulin you're getting and that's that's good you know you need that and so so people understand this also like when you don't eat carbohydrates you become insulin resistant this is not the pathological insulin resistance of diabetes which is different physiology that I can describe this is the insulin resistance of physiology basically historically evolutionary this is starvation insulin resistance meaning that you are physiologically insulin
resistant your body is saying hey spare the glucose any glucose you're getting spare that for the brain the adrenals and the gonads and maybe the red blood cells don't put it in the muscles that's physiologic insulin resistance and that's what you see in people who are low carb or zero carb or keto and that's why the first time someone like that eats carbohydrates they may feel very strange or the blood sugar may go up this is why a woman who is low carb will fail a glucola test in her pregnancy because that is physiologic insulin
resistance and that's I actually have come to believe that's not a good thing I don't think we want to be physiologically insulin resistant it is a historically evolutionarily adaptive thing for extreme situations but I think that humans do better and I've come to see carbohydrates as a signal of abundance I mean if you go to spend time with ahaza or the Maasai or the samburu or the koisan I mean these tribes invariably seek carbohydrates and they celebrate it they don't think oh I've had a hundred carbs today already I'm not going to eat this they
when I was with the hadza we found a beehive and they just went ah they just went off on this thing I mean they were giving I got a big chunk of beehive and ate it with the larva in there and the honey and it's amazing and the other three hearts of guys that I was with were probably eight sixty seventy percent of the honey in this Hive and then shared a little bit with their comrades when they came back say hey we found a hive here's a small for you guys but they'd eaten a
ton of stuff so historically I think humans had massive exposure to carbohydrates whenever they could get it as much as they could get it yeah yeah they didn't fear it at all I would agree I mean I definitely feel like you know to say that carbohydrates aren't evolutionarily correct is uh is invalid I mean it's I think there's there's always access to them at some at some point one way or another so and humans are seeking them if we don't have them we're seeking them if we can't find if we can't find them in berries
I didn't mean to cut you off but if we can't find them in berries if we can't find them in honey we're going to find them in Roots like we it's like it's a piece just like I mean it's interesting it's just so intuitive and simple we're looking for animal protein we're looking for nutrients and organs that's clear we're always eating the whole animal but the next thing I think in tandem with that we're also seeking carbohydrates as wild humans we've forgotten what wild humans look like because we all except for maybe a couple thousand
people on the planet today live as semi-domesticated humans um but it's very clear I mean if you look at the hadza so there was a PhD researcher who actually spent a lot of time with them and gave them surveys of these nomadic tribes and said what are your favorite foods and there were five foods that were their favorite so there was there were there was meat there were berries there was Baobab there was tubers and I forget the last one I'll think of in a moment but honey was invariably the first thing that they wanted
both men and women ranked honey as number one one and mem said meet as number two women ranked berries uh Baobab and tubers I think all about the same but in both groups the The Roots were sort of the last thing that they wanted to eat wow man that's wild but both of them really that was the favorite thing for them was honey want me to make sense it's delicious they celebrated it more than anything right and if you look at these people there are tons of studies of them of their cardiovascular health they're not
they have insulin sensitivity which is amazing which is exemplary they're not insulin resistant they're not diabetic they're not obese so I mean my own anecdotal experience I don't eat an abundance of carbohydrates but I've added honey and fruit in and my insulin sensitivity has improved on my lab work so I mean it's by fasting insulin yeah which is perhaps the most clear metric you could ever use so I mean unquestionably an improvement in insulin sensitivity
