Dr. Shawn Baker | Could Eating Plants Be Hurting Your Health? How The Carnivore Diet Is Reversing Chronic Disease

Have you been told to eat more plants to be healthy, only to feel worse, not better? What if the advice you’ve been following isn’t serving you at all—in fact, what if it’s actually harming your health? It’s a bold idea, but one that today’s guest, Dr. Shawn Baker, breaks down with science, expertise, and real-life transformations.

Dr. Shawn Baker isn’t just anyone. He’s the Co-Founder of Revero, an orthopedic surgeon, a world-renowned expert in treating chronic disease through medical nutritional therapy, an Amazon best-selling author, world champion athlete, international speaker, podcast host, and a trusted consultant. Oh, and did we mention? He’s one of the world’s leading advocates for the carnivore diet—a way of eating that’s helping reset health for so many, particularly midlife women like you.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Are plants what they seem? Dr. Baker dives into the surprising ways plant-based diets can trigger inflammation and other health challenges—especially in midlife women. 
• The carnivore diet explained—what it is, how it works, and the science behind why it’s reversing chronic disease and reigniting the health of so many.  
• Real stories, real results—hear inspiring stories of women who’ve transformed their health by adopting a carnivore lifestyle. 
• Hormones, weight, and energy—discover how this diet can support hormonal balance, sustainable weight management, and vitality in your middle years.  
• Practical advice just for you—Dr. Kyrin and Dr. Baker offer actionable tips to help you start implementing the carnivore diet today with confidence.

Why This Episode is a Game-Changer for Midlife Women

Struggling with chronic inflammation, weight changes, or hormonal imbalance? Feel like nothing works, no matter how “healthy” you eat? This episode might just be the light at the end of the tunnel. Dr. Kyrin and Dr. Baker explore how the carnivore diet restores health through simplicity and science, challenging conventional “healthy eating” norms. Wondering if cutting plants from your diet could actually be the answer? You’re not alone, and you’re about to find out why this approach is turning heads—and changing lives.

Tune in Now and Take the First Step 

Your health deserves clarity, truth, and transformation. Don’t miss this empowering episode of the Hormone Prosperity Podcast! Click play to listen, learn, and discover how this unconventional approach may be the missing key to your midlife health.

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► Revero & Carnivore Diet by Dr. Shawn Baker

 

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Together, we’ll empower each other to ask the right questions and find answers that lead to lasting health and happiness. Let's stop the madness and start a movement towards hormonal prosperity! 🌟

 

❓HAVE A QUESTION and want my advice? You're invited to write to me at hello@kyrindunstonmd.com.  

I select e-mails with a clear question around hormone poverty (such as symptoms of Midlife Metabolic Mayhem, diseases caused or exacerbated by hormonal poverty, accelerated aging, early death, etc.) and achieving hormone prosperity using the two hormone prescriptions needed (one written and the other not) that are of reasonable length and detail and of interest to significant numbers of the audience. I regret I'm not able to answer all messages sent.  I appreciate your willingness to contribute to the community.

 

Podcast Episode Transcript:

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (00:00):

Would you follow the advice of a doctor who said you should only eat meat in order to be healthier? Here's one who's got the data indicating that you should consider doing just that.

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (00:12):

Greetings friend, welcome to the Hormone Prosperity Podcast with me, the hormone prosperity coach, Dr. Kyrin. Here's where intelligent women over 40 go to get credible guidance and inspiration on getting out of hormonal poverty and into hormonal prosperity and the joy and vitality that brings. Go from asking disempowering questions like, what's wrong with me? To ask empowering questions like, what would hormonal prosperity do? Hashtag WW HPD. Join me as we dive into today's episode and get started on your journey off the couch, into your genes and back into life because bliss is your birthright and a healthy body filled with hormonal prosperity is the vehicle that gets you there. Welcome. Let's get started.

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (01:01):

Hi everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Hormone Prosperity Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today as we talk to Dr. Shawn Baker about a very interesting and controversial topic. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this about the carnivore diet. Dr. Baker is an orthopedic surgeon. He is a champion athlete, international speaker, author, podcast host consultant. He's got a huge social media following where he primarily teaches and is a proponent of the carnivore diet. He has an upcoming company getting ready to launch that will assist people in reversing chronic disease and inflammation, partly using the carnivore diet and other tools. And he'll tell you a little bit about that. And on the show he's joining me today because I had heard about the carnivore diet, but I really hadn't had anyone on the show to talk about it. Some of you have asked me about it and I've just said I'm not an expert in it.

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (02:08):

I can't, I can't comment. But it did kind of go against my sense of being correct and it just sounded not correct. But we talk about in the episode how your belief system is really something pretty solid. It can prevent you from being open to new, particularly around your health, but new information that might benefit you. So I'm a big proponent of having an open mind in every area. I wanted to have Dr. Shawn on to open my eyes and my ears to the truth and he cites on a really powerful studies that have been done, including at Harvard, that have documented the wow extreme strength of the carnivore diet in reversing chronic disease and inflammation in very impactful ways. Individual and collective societal level. I think you're gonna wanna hear about this because he is probably speaking to you too. We all in the list have some degree of chronic inflammation and disease or we're working on it whether we know it or not.

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (03:19):

Hopefully you are taking steps to get yourself tested and not guessing and just thinking because your mainstream doctor pokes you and listens to your lungs every year and does some blood week work and says you're fine, that you're actually means you're optimally healthy. 'cause It doesn't mean that. And if you have been listening to me long enough, you know that's a fact. So I'll tell you a little bit about Dr. Baker and then we will jump in with him. He's a medical doctor and like I said, orthopedic surgeon, world-leading authority on treating disease with medical nutritional therapy. Amazon bestselling author, world champion athlete, international speaker podcast host consultant and his company is Rivero. He'll tell you a little bit more about that. He's a proponent of the carnivore diet and educates people on social media about this powerful tool to reverse and heal chronic inflammation and disease. Welcome Dr. Shawn to the show.

Dr. Shawn Baker (04:11):

Thank you for letting you have the opportunity to speak to your audience. Appreciate it.

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (04:14):

You have so much experience in so many areas that you could speak to. But what really intrigued me about having you on the show was to talk about a topic that I heard you talking on J'S podcast about, which is the carnivore diet. I have a lot of women who ask me about the carnivore diet and I'm not an expert in why people are proponents of, well I know they say decrease inflammation is one of the biggest things. And I actually know a woman who killed herself. She has a very famous TED talk that they didn't publish <laugh> where she talked about healing herself. I believe it was an autoimmune disease using the carnivore diet and they did not publish it, but she was able to get a copy and publish it and it's very popular and helped a lot of people. So there is I think, some validity to it and I'd like to dive in with you because women have the question, well, why might I consider a carnivore diet? What would I get out of that as a physician, it's not really something that we are taught as physicians as being a healthy, balanced, rounded diet in this what I call the sad diet standard American diet. So how did you come to be a proponent of the carnivore diet and see that it had usefulness?

Dr. Shawn Baker (05:31):

Yeah, first I think the person referring to is named Mikala Fields. She had ju juvenile, rheumatoid arthritis, ended up with a hip replacement of knee report or an ankle replacement like as a teenager. She clearly had issues and, and she was having some depression and anxiety and used the diet to put that into remission. Basically, she saw me on Joe Rogan's podcast way back about seven, eight years ago and then I inspired her and so on and so forth. But my own personal experience was, I'm almost 60 now and when I was in my forties, my health was not quite where I wanted it to be. Sorry, I was an athlete. I've been a world champion athlete, I've been a world champion in three different sports now. So I've been athletic my whole life and pet competed, trained. Even while I was practicing as a surgeon, I still made the time to to train, but my health was not where I wanted it to be.

Dr. Shawn Baker (06:16):

And so I said, lemme just play more with nutrition. And I went on this low fat calorie restricted diet, lean protein, lots of vegetables thing that you might normally hear people say. And I was able to get leaner. I was at that time I was the world champion in Highland games and you have to big guy. I'm, I'm six foot five, about 2 85 at that time. And I dropped down about 2 35, got really lean, this really lean, I was hungry. <Laugh> tired, hurts the hospital. Like we like the fat doctor better make it way, way better. 'cause You're, as I, I did not like being that hungry all the time. So I knew that wasn't sustainable. So then I just delved into different sort of diets. I got into Pale Paleolithic Diet for a while, started, you know, reading some of the low carb literature and then started to adopt that.

Dr. Shawn Baker (07:02):

I noted for my own personal self that I did really well on a low, low carb hydro diet. My appetite was much better regulated, wasn't hungry. And then the interesting thing was we were challenged with as an orthopedic surgeon was replacing a lot of people's knees and one of the populations we were replaced were a lot of O obese patients. And so the obese patients had higher risks for blood clots, infections or healing, slow healing and on. We were trying to see if we could get these patients to lose weight before going to the operating room. And there was no real guidance. It was like, hey, do your patients are in your BM 35 20 <inaudible> the or. And so you could send to a tric surgeon, have a get bypass, which was practical. There was no way he could keep up the demand. So I had said, Hey look, why don't you guys try a lower carb ketogenic cell diet, see how it goes.

Dr. Shawn Baker (07:49):

And not everybody would do it. Maybe 20, 25% of people would actually try it. But the interesting thing for me was that people would come back a couple weeks later because I would, you know, have come back in a couple weeks, see how, how things were going with weight loss. And very commonly they would report that the knee that I was gonna operate on because of severe pain didn't hurt anymore. Which was really just mind blowing to me. I was like, wait a minute, you've got an x-ray that literally looks like it took your knee and fed it to a dog and let chew on it for a couple days and stick it back in there. It was a horrible x-ray, but they said the knee doesn't hurt. I'm like, well you know what, if your knee doesn't hurt and you don't mind staying on the diet, then there's no reason to to do the surgery right now.

Dr. Shawn Baker (08:22):

So I end up canceling a lot of surgeries. Believe it or not, the hospital was not thrilled about that <laugh> they liked, they liked the high volume, just crank that, cranked that wheel and like that. So it got me a little bit jaded around how medicine is practiced in general. I was doing this low carb diet and I came across this group of people that were just eating all meat. I thought they were literally crazy. It just makes no sense. You gonna be, where's your fiber? Where's all this? You're clearly gonna flog your arteries up and die. But I had a more of a curiosity that I was following, but I was seeing these pretty incredible transformations. Yeah, it was a group of 2000 people. It wasn't what it is today where there are the last a hundred, 2000 people have now done this. I was, they had some pretty legitimate science backed research that they could point to and up to the point where I said, we're just gonna try it, see what happens already.

Dr. Shawn Baker (09:06):

A little car, no big deal. And I did it. This is back in 2016, so I do it and 30 days. And I was like, this is the best I've felt since maybe my thirties. And I was 50 at the top and I was like, this is pretty darn impressive how, how little inflammation I have. The chronic knee pain that I had had gone away. My gut was so like there was no issue with my digestion. You know, I, I had come to accept normal, a little bit of bloating, a little bit of discomfort was normal digestion. Most people accept it and it just went away. It's like nothing. If you have, God forbid you have heart pain and then there's something wrong or if you have back pain, there's something wrong. But if you have gut pain, <inaudible> a little bit of food, no big deal.

Dr. Shawn Baker (09:42):

That's how it's supposed to be. I would argue that's not how it's supposed to be. You shouldn't have bloating, discomfort, pain with digestion. If you do one or two things is going gut is broken or you're eating wrong food. So I think most of the people is just eating wrong food. So I did this and I was a little bit on social media and I had a Twitter account at the time, a few thousand followers. And I convinced a hundred people to try it. Let's do it for 90 days, see what happens. And we recorded all their data and we found that the average person within 90 days, a hundred people, the average person lost about 30 pounds. The resting heart rate went down by about 10 beats, eight centimeters off of the waist. We had them track their heart rate. We had them subjectively rate, how's your sleep?

Dr. Shawn Baker (10:20):

How's your cognition? How's your mood? How's your libido? How's your digestion? All of it got better. And I was like, this is neat, this is cool. So I was putting this out there and, and then I got picked up on the Joe Rogan podcast, go do this. Back in 2017 that led to a lot of eyes on what I was doing. I was asked to write, write a book by the publisher and it was called a zero carb Diet at the time. To me that wasn't a very good name. It's called the carnivore 'cause you're basically a bunch of meat like a carnivore. And that's what stuck. And then it became very popular. And so now I've been advocating for this really as a therapeutic tool. I don't necessarily say you need to eat three for the rest of your life. Humans are carnivore. I think that's a little bit over the top when it comes to disease mitigation. It has been incredibly powerful. And we're talking like things from diabetes to obesity to all kinds of autoimmune disease, to mental health disorders, to all kinds of inflammatory issues. Just really tremendously effective at that stuff. And that's where I'm at today.

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (11:15):

Okay, great. And what would be the big difference between a paleo diet, which has a lot of meat and a carnivore diet?

Dr. Shawn Baker (11:24):

If you eat some eggs, there's a little bit of carbohydrate and an ago egg and it's half a gram of carbohydrates. Do you have any dairy products which variably some people can tolerate? Some can't. That can be a little bit of carbohydrate there, but it's very low carbohydrate. But I think the biggest differentiator is really the lack of vegetables and fruits and things like that. There's no fruits and vegetables. So people are horrified when they hear that, oh my God, how do you live without phytonutrients? And all the fiber is so important, believe it or not, you don't need fiber to be healthy. You don't, I think fiber is conditionally beneficial. I think when we look at all the, the mountains of epidemiologic data that shows that higher fiber diets are associated with less heart disease and less cancer and all. I think it's all basically compared to what it's like, what is the fiber replacing?

Dr. Shawn Baker (12:03):

Often it's replacing refining processed foods and therefore you have an overall better diet quality score. But it's not essential. You don't need it to survive. Clearly if you did, I'd long be dead because I don't consume any. It's, it's like we have so much, I don't know, just this preconceived bias on what we think is healthy. And then when you step far outside of that paradigm, it's very upsetting to people. It 'em off. They believe in what we've been taught and and they believe the science and it's, there's some holes from the science. We haven't really asked the questions that would really be germane to what we're talking about here. This upsets a lot of people. There's no doubt about it. We hear red meat is bad for us. The average American eats around, and this is not an exaggeration. The average American eats around one ounce of unprocessed red meat today, one ounce.

Dr. Shawn Baker (12:49):

I consume anywhere between two and a half to four pounds of it a day. I'm a big guy, 250 pounds. I'm a big man, but wow, I eat literally a hundred times more than the average person. And if red meat were killing us, then I should be a beast. I should be diabetic, I should cardiovascular disease, I'm almost 60 years of age and instead I'm breaking world records. I'm pretty darn fit. This doesn't, and it's not just me, it's I'm some genetic outlier. There are now thousands and thousands of these testimonials over and over again. We've published a number of studies now. We've had Harvard University published a study in 2021 looking at 2000 people in their diet. Universally, everyone got better. We had diabetics, we had two, oh I think it was 226 or 229 diabetics in that cohort. A hundred percent of 'em came off all injectable medications excluding insulin.

Dr. Shawn Baker (13:33):

92% came off all their insulin. 84% came off all their oral medications. This is like a a, a big lever. It's not common to just see that they're coming off the GLP ones and the SGLT two inhibitors and <inaudible>. But they were coming off all these medications. We've had a case series published on inflammatory bowel disease. So Crohn's and Ulcer colitis completely cured off all meds. We've got case series on anorexia published on this. We've got case series on mental health disorders, anxiety and depression published on this. We are in the middle of publishing a series on multiple sclerosis that's coming out. We'll have some intervention trials primarily starting with diabetes. So we've got a lot of research that's that's evolving this stuff. And it's, it's just something that I think we should consider as a therapeutic intervention three to six months for most people.

Dr. Shawn Baker (14:16):

Most people get better. It helps with food addiction because we have a lot of people who are food addicts. I think if you're treating a chronic medical disease, probably in some form or fashion have you need to be treating the nutrition. And a lot of times there's this psychological addictive stuff, sub behavior. And our food system is such a horrible situation that we have food companies that have intentionally made food addictive. And I've talked to the two chemists that have done this. They've literally told me that my job is really to make people addicted to these products. Yeah. And they know how to tickle our neurons to, we can't get enough of them. It's really challenging for somebody to moderate. So Shawn Yeah, go ahead. You brought up so many great

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (14:50):

Points. I wanna just ask you to go a little deeper on this. You cited many studies that have pretty profound outcomes of improvement, but you said you think it's best used as a therapeutic intervention for three to six months. Where, so that people should use it for therapy for three to six months and then go to what and what informs that opinion?

Dr. Shawn Baker (15:12):

Certainly, like I'll mention our company Rivera. So we do this, we bring people, we bring them to the level of elimination. Not everybody goes carver, some people do. And then we, because we've got data on thousands and thousands of patients with disease x, disease Y and we know that these patients tend to do better with these types of food. This is stuff that nobody really has studied until now. We've been looking at this stuff pretty intensely. No one's gonna go back to eating a pure junk food diet. That's just not even human food. That that's literally human pet chow. It's recreational drugs is really what these foods are. I mean, so we just, you don't do that. But you can go back to some form of whole food diet. So it might be that you include some fruits and vegetables and things like that back into your diet.

Dr. Shawn Baker (15:47):

Typically the, it's reintroduction phase where you, let's say, you know, I like strawberries, I don't see how strawberries do. And you just reintroduce 'em. You do a couple trials to see how you do. And if you consistently get no negative response, then that's pretty safe to say that you can probably tolerate that food. You just build your diet back. Some people, a lot of people honestly like myself and hey, I like the simplicity. I just like eating steak and I don't really care. I don't miss that stuff very much. It's, it's a real concept to have because we have grown up in a, in in such a environment of sobriety and surplus that that never really existed. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> in humanity. I mean if you look at even 150 years ago before there was refrigerator, before there was mass transport, you couldn't get a banana in January in, in Minnesota like you can today.

Dr. Shawn Baker (16:28):

But today we've got all this stuff in not that long ago mean it would be like what grows locally? What can I kill? And that was the food supply. Right? Going back to something along that is probably the most effective for many people. I've seen people, like I said, even with Crohn's disease where they, they come off their meds, they come off their biologics, they, they completely go asymptomatic. All their markers are normalized. They do it for maybe six months a year and then they start adding a few things back in there. And this is how most people say they're still eating a lot of meat. They don't go to a vegetarian diet after they typically are, you would call it an animal base or a meat based diet. But majority of the nutritionists come from meat. And if you think about we, what is a physiological necessity for us to eat, we need essential amino acids, we need essential fats, we need a source of energy, vitamins and minerals.

Dr. Shawn Baker (17:10):

And you get that in very good efficiency with me. I know it's what about phytonutrients? Most people don't realize that beef has phytonutrients and beef has something like 70,000 nutrients. And there was a nice study that the Stefan Van Lee at a Duke University did back in 2021 where they compared the phytonutrient content of beef. And they said basically, certainly depending on how the animal is, is finished the phytonutrient content of beef rivals that of plant foods and it's more bio available. So it's not like you're missing out on polyphenols and all these things that you think I gotta eat my blueberries and cranberries, whatever the antioxidant foods. It's just not something that you miss. And I guess the proof is in the pudding. But we've got people that have been doing this diet for as long as 65 years when there was an 82-year-old woman, this rancher up in Canada, she's been doing this for 82 years.

Dr. Shawn Baker (17:54):

She's 82 years old. She looks like she's in her fifties. She's jacked, you know, <laugh>, she's still learning Spanish at 82. She still works the cattle. She's pretty amazing. I've seen people 20, 30 years I've been doing this, I'm in my eighth year. But my main interest as a physician is let's get people that are sick and make them much sick anymore. A lot of people are like, we're gonna talk about longevity. That's nice to talk about. But the practicality of it is, who knows? There's not a single longevity guru or proponent that's ever produced 150 year old healthy human. This doesn't happen. So I'm like, that's nice to speculate about, but what about we take these sick people, we got plenty of them. Well let's get healthy. Yes, you can do that and that's a good goal.

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (18:34):

Yeah. And I all the time talk to women I work with about their belief system and what they believe, how health is created and what a healthy diet is. Some of my beliefs. And when you're saying that beef contains all these phytochemicals phytonutrients, 70,000 of them and inside I'm my, my brain is going, no, that can't be true. So we all have these ingrained biases and I think you're right. Nutritional science with the sad standard American diet really has been a proponent of, oh, what a healthy quote unquote diet is. And we know where that's gotten us. But I almost wonder if maybe part of the problem is that the majority of Americans, the majority of westerners really are eating a lot of junk in general. So it almost doesn't matter if you made them eat all fruit. 'cause I've heard of people who are fruitarians and they get healthier and if you made them eat only vegetables, vegetarian, they get healthier. If you eat anything that's a real food as opposed to the crap that is put forth as food in our Western society, aren't you gonna get better <laugh> is my question.

Dr. Shawn Baker (19:47):

Yeah. We do have, if you look at the so-called standard American Western diet, it's 60, 70% ultra process food. We have a lot of people that are suffering with obesity. They're actually malnourished. They got plenty of calories, but they don't have any nutrients in bodies. They have this un insatiable hunger. If you eliminate these ultra processed junk foods, which they're ubiquitous, then you're gonna improve your health. There's no doubt about it. Now the question becomes like, for instance, if you go to a plant-based diet and a lot of people are advocates of a, you know, wholely, plant-based diet and you do see people that lose weight. And the reason for that really is that yes, you've eliminated all this junk, which is clearly a good step. I think everybody should do that re regardless of what diet you end up on, then you're on this plant-based diet and you have a harder time absorbing nutrition.

Dr. Shawn Baker (20:28):

Fiber binds up certain nutrients that you end. It just ends up in the toilet. You have bigger bowel movements, more frequent bowel movements, you lose a lot of nutrition in the toilet. Things like phytic acid phytates and things like that you find in grains and legroom and so on. And so again, binds up all these nutrients. There was a study out back in, I don't know when it was seventies, eighties, but they were looking at stool composition and looking at macronutrients in the stool, they found that people on a high fiber diet double the amount of fat, carbohydrates and protein that they excrete, which means they didn't absorb it. So again, it goes back to why, why do I eat in the first place, which presumably to get nutrition into my body 'cause my cells need them. If I'm on a plant-based diet, that process is hindered significantly.

Dr. Shawn Baker (21:06):

So I I maybe I can eat more, I can just shove more roughage into my gut. For instance, a gorilla who is about the same size as me eating some gorilla anyway, but that gorilla is going to eat something like 40 or 50 pounds of roughage a day, all these plants and leaves. Whereas I'm eating three or four pounds for the same amount. And so it's much more efficient way to be nourished. A lot of people that go on these plant-based diet talk about the fact that they are eating all the time and they're often hungry. 'cause They're constantly trying, trying to just eat to get nutrition. I eat once or twice a day and I'm good. I don't, I'm not eat, I'm not hungry at all. It's, it's a very different experience in many ways. I think in my view, as someone who's approaching his sixties, it's important to have a decent of muscle mass.

Dr. Shawn Baker (21:46):

I think it's incredibly important for men, women, doesn't matter. Functional. You wanna be able to run, jump, sprint, pick up heavy things, high, higher quality protein certainly lends itself to that. It's not that you can't get protein on a plant-based diet, but I use the analogy of let's say you wanted to build a brick house. You had over here you got a big pile of bricks and over here you got a bunch of straw and mud. You'd rather have bricks make it life a lot easier. And that's, that's really the difference. You can still do it outta straw and mud, but it's gonna take more work, more effort. Of all the animals that have ever been on planet earth, about 80% of them have been carnivorous just because it's more efficient, so much more efficient to assimilate. Like you said, if every one of my cells is an animal cell, what do animal cells need to grow and, and, and, and maintain themselves from animal cell products?

Dr. Shawn Baker (22:28):

We, we get 'em from an analyst, not a coincidence that every essential amino acid that we need is found in the exact ratios. We need them in meat. It's not coincidental. It's I think by design by the way. And so it's just more efficient. Like I said, you can do it, but it takes supplementation and eating a lot and a lot of people develop digestive issues. You see a lot, particularly women, they're shoving all these salads down there and then they got IBS or they're starving all the time and then they're binging at night on ice cream because they're starving all day. It's just not, it's not a pleasant experience.

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (22:57):

So I there are about three things that come to mind, but I know our time is limited. The first, I don't know if this is something you've considered or thought about or talked about, is the, the chi or life force in food. So I'm here in Thailand studying at the Dallas retreat about life force energy, which is the energy that innervates us. We're given a certain amount when we're born and then when it's depleted, we're gone. There are things that we can do to improve it and that can increase it or decrease it. Dead animal protein really doesn't have a lot of life force energy where live plants do. Part of the argument I've heard for consuming more vegetables and fruits and live foods is this life force that you get from them, is that something that you've thought about or talked about?

Dr. Shawn Baker (23:46):

I've certainly heard that argument before and I'm just wondering how you quantify that. I wouldn't be a accept socially accepted thing. I mean, but again, to me, I hear people have vibration levels and energy and things like that. And I have not seen where that has panned out in, in way that I, I I can verify it might be there are some people will feel better. A lot of times it becomes a, I think in many ways some of that is I just feel better ethically. I I have a moral belief system and when I feel better what I'm doing, I might get a positive effect. 'cause It's a mental state thing. But then you ignore the fact that if I eat a bunch of tomatoes, there were probably thousands of small critters that were killed for this. And what happens to their life force. Is that somehow transferred into the plan or is it just somehow immune from that? I don't know. So I can't say that I've seen anything in my view that is mm-hmm. Shown a significant impact one way or the other with that stuff. But it might be maybe mm-hmm. It'll be something that comes out with this, but I don't know how to say that everything I eat has recently died. That's just the way it is. Or relatively recent Right. Food. So it's hard to, hard to get on now. Yeah. To eat live stuff.

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (24:53):

And the, the other thought, two other things come to mind. One is about the environmental impact. There's a lot of discussion about trying to reduce the amount of animal protein consumed because it has a huge carbon footprint. I think it's that there is no right diet for all of us. It's very individual. If you do almost any intervention better than what most people are eating, they're gonna get better in three, six months, 12 months. But that long term sustainably, it's most probable that the majority of humans need something different. And that it's not that we all will do well with a carnivore diet or a paleo diet or a vegetarian, probably there's a lot more biochemical individuality than we would like to admit. Certainly

Dr. Shawn Baker (25:41):

It's fortunately we live, most of us live in free societies where have our choose, you know, forced to give a meal Korean or something like that and forced to eat whatever gonna give you, but, or in a prison or something like that. So we have, we certainly have choice. I know there are other people that, that are proponents that will make the argument that we think humans are carnivorous and that's a preferred diet. I'm not here to make that argument. I'm here to say this is a therapeutic invention. I've seen some very good results with this that, that probably exceed any other medical invention that I've seen as a, as a surgeon, as a physician over the, over these last several decades. And so the environmental argument is certainly one that I'm very familiar with. I'm certainly very familiar with the counter arguments to that because we, a lot of the arguments have come from animal activists that feel that we should not be eating animals.

Dr. Shawn Baker (26:24):

They think that's horrible and they're, it's an, it's an equivalent to a animal slavery or a holocaust or something along those lines. We use that language quite a bit. And then what I see is that when we look at how most of our food is produced throughout the world, whether it's the United States or Europe or probably even Asia, a lot of of it has to do with massive industrial chemical inputs which are causing complete ecosystem destruction. When you grow a field of strawberries, you've literally killed every animal that could possibly live there. Any animal that could live in that area is dead. Any animal that gets in there is gonna be killed. So we have tremendous animal death, death and suffering from an ethical standpoint, not from the sort of the greenhouse gas emissions. We're seeing a lot of people now understanding that a lot of these arguments have been made, like, let's say, how many calories can I get for, for each greenhouse gas output?

Dr. Shawn Baker (27:14):

How much car carbon equivalent or carbon dioxide equivalent. Right? And part of that argument falls apart when you say, when we talk about calories, one of the most environmentally friendly things to grow is gonna be sugar. Sugar provides tremendous amount of calories for very little input. So we said we should all be much of sugar when we start looking at nutrition. What about qual? What about indispensable amino acids and proteins and things like that? What about things like zinc and lysing, things that we can't live without? Then we start to see that beef becomes much more efficient. And then we start talking about, we often hear about water. It takes a swim swimming pool of water to, to get a pound of beef. You always hear that when you look at the reality, is it like 95% of that which falls regardless if the cows there.

Dr. Shawn Baker (27:54):

Most of the cows water comes from the grass it eats and then it urinates it all out. And so it's not like it's disappearing. It goes back into the water table. They fail to make those calculations. We're also seeing particularly multi-species grazing and and regenerative style ranching. That's, that's growing in popularity that not only is not producing excess CO2, it's actually sequestering quite a bit. And so you can actually, there's a guy named Alan Williams who is at out of a university. He's in Alabama at Joyce Farms. He's done calculations saying if we can convert around 40% of the US grazing area into more of a regenerative south, you can offset all the carbon, not just the carbon from the agricultural sector, but the transportation sector. The energy sector can all be offset just by cows on the ground. It can be the solution.

Dr. Shawn Baker (28:39):

Now if we continue with high intensity industrial agriculture irrespective animal or plant, then that's the real problem here. So we have to come to this realization that no, we can't have strawberries in January Chicago because it's gonna require intensive gr growth in South America, wherever it's grown or Africa, wherever it ist reported. We've gotta get away from that. And the, and the other factors is we waste, 40% of the food we produce gets wasted. Most of it's fruit and vegetables and, and baked goods, typically that's what happens. It ends up in a landfill. It doesn't survive the transportation process. How many times are you taking these organic fruits and vegetables do you buy at the store and then they get mold on 'em? So the solution really is not everybody goes vegan or goes plant based. The solution really is let's stop wasting so much food, let's stop trying to have everything everywhere because that is just not practical.

Dr. Shawn Baker (29:27):

It may be that you just eat seasonally, I gotta eat that you're in Thailand where it's tropical. There's a lot of tropical fruits and stuff there, but most of us aren't there. I'm in Washington, there's some berries in the fall, a lot of animals running around. I get deer and stuff like that. But as far as what is locally grown and available, it's not mangoes and grapes and things like that, which are, are very seasonal. So I think that's really the discussion that needs to be had. And there's a lot more people having it. I know that Elon Musk recently came out and said, the cows are not the problem. He's got a big platform, obviously richest guy in the world, control of a lot of social media. So, so more and more people are realizing that this sort of vegan argument, which was really, by the way, it was propped up a lot by Silicon Valley.

Dr. Shawn Baker (30:05):

It was 20, 30, 40, $50 billion that were poured into fake meats and so on and forth. And what's happening is it all went belly up. Most of these companies have failed. They went under most all these venture capitalists lost a bunch of money on it, so there's less appetite to push that narrative. And that narrative was really, it wasn't so much a grassroots movement, it was more of an, we call an astro turf movement. So it's corporations that were driving this, we're gonna be altruistic and save the planet by having you eat ground up soybeans and dependence beef. That narrative has fallen apart. People are really picking on apart and looking into that. And a lot of studies have come out that showing that if we want to consider the environmental input pack of our food, then it's more not animals versus plants. It's just how we raise that stuff. Mm-Hmm

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (30:44):

<Affirmative>. I do wanna give you the opportunity to share with everyone how they can connect with you going forward.

Dr. Shawn Baker (30:49):

Yeah. So like I mentioned, if you're interested in physicians that will not just giving other pill or pills, potions and procedures and, and treat root cause and provide daily support rivera.com, we're open it all. We'll be soon, be open all, we're in about 40 states right now. We'll be in the last 10 shortly. So we're R-E-V-E-R-O rivera.com. I'm on social media, I'm at on YouTube, I'm on Shawn Baker, md. So S-H-A-W-N. Same thing on TikTok, same thing on Facebook on my Instagram. I'm Shawn Baker, 1967 for the year I was born. And then on Twitter, it's s Baker md. So that, that's where you'll find me. And I talk about this every day.

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (31:27):

<Laugh>, thank you so much Dr. Shawn for joining me. It's been very enlightening. You certainly have looked at all the aspects of this diet. I always try to stay open and to understanding new information, new perspectives and learning. And it sounds like you're a lifelong learner as well as a teacher. So thank you so much for the wonderful work that you're doing for having me. And thank you for joining me for another episode of The Hormone Prescription. So glad to have you join me here today. Would love to hear your thoughts about carnivore diet. Is this something that you are game to try? What are your thoughts? What do you think about that in terms of sustainability and health promotion? You know that I'm always interested in hearing your thoughts, so reach out to me on social media until next week, I'll see you then. Peace, love,

Dr. Kyrin Dunston (32:16):

And hormones, y'all, thank you so much for joining me on your journey from hormonal poverty into the promised land of hormonal prosperity. Loved today's episode. Share it with someone you care about. Love the show. Consider writing a review and help other women find it too. Remember, we're all in this together right now. There are well over 100 million women suffering in hormonal poverty without answers. Please be of service by sharing, rating and reviewing the show. Help us reach at least 1 million of these women this coming year from one previously suffering woman to another. I thank you. See you next week.