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Hello, and welcome to The Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And in this episode, I tackled the topic of why we are in the worst metabolic health crisis we’ve ever seen and how to fix it. And I’m here with some people I got to meet in person and loved their mission and what they’re creating in the world, which are Brett and Harry. And they have such a fascinating story. They are the hosts of the Meat Mafia podcast, which addresses fundamental problems in our food and healthcare systems. And their principles are simple. Eat real foods, buy locally, and cook your own meals, which I know many of you listening can resonate with. They are advocates themselves of carnivore and animal-based forms of eating. Brett himself used a carnivore diet to heal his severe ulcerative colitis and IBS. And they also co-founded a company called Noble Origins, which I’ll link to in the show notes, which is a once-daily animal-based form of nutrition that blends the most nutrient-dense foods into a delicious and convenient powder. Like I said, I’ll link to that as well. But we get to talk about a lot of these aspects of why we’re seeing these metabolic changes and the markers that relate to them, even the grocery store crisis, and our food supply issues from the really system down level, and so much more. I really enjoyed this conversation. So let’s join the Meat Mafia guys. Brett and Harry, thanks so much for being here. Welcome.
Harry: Thanks for having us. We are really excited to be on your show.
Katie: Well, I’m really excited to tackle what I think is a really important topic with you guys today. And for a little bit of background, I feel like your stories actually illustrate some of the important points we’re going to be talking about today. So for anybody who isn’t already familiar with you guys, can you share a brief background of, kind of your own journey and how you got to the point that you are now?
Brett: Yeah, definitely. That would be great. It’s also amazing to see you virtually. We were fortunate enough to connect at the SunLife Organics Smoothie Shop right in South Austin when you were in town. So it was great to build a relationship with you and we appreciate the support and we’re excited to do this. But yeah, just to give you some context into what we’re doing, Katie, and for your listeners, I’m Brett Ender. This is my business partner, Harrison Gray. We are the co-host of The Meat Mafia Podcast, which we’ve been doing for about two years. We’re about 265 episodes deep into it right now. And then we’re also the co-founders of Noble Origins, which is a beef-based protein powder that was founded right here in Austin.
And really how we got into the space is really, it’s based of our own personal experience. Harry and I met about a decade ago. We were both healthy college athletes. We played baseball at Babson College, which is a small division three business school outside of Boston. And I think we both started, we graduated from college and really just felt like there was something to be desired from a health perspective. Heading into my senior year of college, I got diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. I was so inflamed that I was literally going to the bathroom 20 to 30 times a day. I lost 30 plus pounds. I was hospitalized and was basically told that I was going to be on expensive drugs, medication, steroids for the rest of my life. The cost of my medications was $400,000 per year. So you think about the millions of people around the country that have these incurable autoimmune conditions, what they’re costing the medical system, because I cost the medical system a few million dollars while I was on these expensive drugs.
And what’s fascinating too is, you know, I kind of had this intuitive sense that maybe diet and lifestyle had something to do with it. Because I had a pretty unhealthy lifestyle in college, even though I was an athlete, I really wasn’t taking care of myself the right way. And my doctors pretty much told me that diet and lifestyle really had nothing to do with it. And I was really just going to be dependent on the drugs and medications for my entire life. Really, my turning point moment was 2019. And I was 24 years old. And the reason why I say that that was my turning point moment is that was the first time that I discovered the carnivore diet. So I was fortunate enough to listen to Dr. Shawn Baker go on Joe Rogan’s podcast. And the episode was actually recorded in 2017, but somehow I stumbled into it on 2019. And he was talking so much about the rise of autoimmune diseases and people that were effectively eating an all-meat diet and curing these diseases, which everyone is told are incurable. So for me, being a 24-year-old person, not wanting to be dependent on getting an infusion every eight weeks, I said, why would I not try this? You know, if there’s some benefit that I can gain from it, it could be life-changing.
So I went to the local Whole Foods Market, got a bunch of steak, chicken, fish, eggs, cheese, and just committed to doing this for as long as I needed to get some benefit from it. And Katie, literally within the first two weeks, my stomach significantly improved. I dropped, I think I was going to the bathroom like one to two times a day, which for me was life-changing. And you know, a lot of young men are affected with ulcerative colitis, and it’s embarrassing to talk about. But your life pretty much revolves around going to the bathroom. So to be able to get that relief and not be dependent on that, that was life-changing.
In addition to that, my skin got better. I was putting on muscle at the gym. And above all else, you know, any anxiety that I felt went away. The mental benefit was incredible. And I kind of would just pop out of bed every single day with like this great vim and energy and lust for life. And it really transformed who I was as a person. So that for me was kind of like my food is medicine moment. And the quality of dietary inputs that you put in can really change the outcome of your life. And as of 2021, I’ve been officially drug-free for over two years because I was able to clear out all my inflammation and micro-inflammation. And I’m the only patient in the thousands of patients that my GI has worked with where he was able to get a patient off of these biologic drugs. So that was really kind of like my inspiration spark plug moment where I was thinking to myself, if I could change this month this much, and I was following kind of like the standard dietary guidelines, and that kind of led me to getting sick, how many other people could possibly benefit from similar dietary and lifestyle measures?
Harry: Yeah, Katie, I would just add too. So, you know, my part of the story here, so Brett and I played baseball together in college and then I had my food is medicine moment. A few years after I had been prescribed some pretty serious medication for cystic acne. So in high school I took Accutane and looking back, I directly correlate a lot of the foods that I was eating with the inflammation that I was seeing on my skin. But at the time was led down the route of just, you know, really feeling that same similar place that Brett’s talking about where you’re desperate and feeling like you’re willing to do anything to fix the problem, especially when it’s something, you know, like the, like what Brett’s talking about where it’s really affecting you on a day-to-day basis.
And so I decided to take Accutane and go that route. And you know, at the time, very serious athlete playing baseball and football and dealing with some of the side effects of that drug. And then, you know, still able to perform at a high level really focusing on, you know, trying to play sports in college, got to college. And really started to tinker with my diet there. You know, in high school, I was eating whatever I wanted because I was working out. And I found like the next level of my iteration into performance was actually just improving nutrition. So I was the kid on the baseball team experimenting with paleo diet, trying to figure out like all the right foods I should be eating. And I noticed some pretty significant changes to my physiognomy and also just my performance in general, just based on the way that I was feeling myself. So, you know, I found that, you know, Brett and mine’s health journeys are very different, but we’ve both been empowered by the idea of just like taking the power back and this feeling of really getting the energy from food as opposed to, energy and vitality through food, as opposed to all the other ways that, you know, there’s these pharmaceutical methods to deal with our problems. Yeah, and we’ve been working on the show ever since. It’s been amazing.
Katie: Yeah, well, I love Khalil at SunLife, and I’m glad we got to meet there, like you said, Brett. And like you, I had a similar story. I think many of us in the health and wellness world research our way into it because of a struggle that we’re having. And one of the words that the medical industry gave me was Hashimoto’s, and I was also told it wasn’t curable and now take no medication and have normal lab ranges. And like you, that was a journey I learned by trial and error and experimentation on my own body, which is also one of the reasons I say so often that we are each our own primary healthcare provider. And we can work with amazing practitioners, and they’re great partners, but the responsibility lies within us. And I know that that’s a large part of your message, too, is helping people get back in the driver’s seat of their own health.
I also know, and I know you guys have talked about this as well, that upwards of 90% of people, depending on which statistic you go by, have at least one marker of metabolic syndrome or metabolic disorder, sometimes much, much higher, and that these are somewhat new. I mean, we’ve certainly never seen them to this degree. These statistics are rising. This is like becoming a pretty imminent health crisis. So I’d love to delve into that of what do you guys see as the reasons that we’re seeing so many people experiencing markers of metabolic disorder? And maybe give us a little bit of background of what that even means to have some marker of metabolic disorder.
Harry: Yeah, I think there’s a few different ways to approach the problem. You know, there’s obviously the individual level. You know, I think people are being equipped with information that is potentially leading them astray ever since the dietary guidelines came out. I think the standard American diet, the SAD diet that a lot of people have been basing their health and dietary decisions on over the last several decades have proven to not be entirely accurate when it comes to just supporting a healthy lifestyle.
And you know, that kind of ties into the second part, which is like the systemic issues that we see where a lot of the incentives in the food system are driving more and more food-like substances, highly processed foods to be created because they’re cheaper. They’re more profitable for businesses. And a lot of times actually doing the hard work in terms of putting high-quality food on the table takes more time. It’s more expensive. It’s harder for people to get access to because we have fewer and fewer farmers. So we’ve really replaced a big portion of the food system with highly processed foods. So now if you’re not really informed and equipped properly in terms of walking into the grocery store or, you know, going to the place that you go to get your food, whether it’s a farmer’s market, grocery store, ordering directly online, you really are in a situation where if you don’t have the right information, it’s easy to kind of go and buy things that have toxic ingredients in them. And I think over several decades with this system in place, this is kind of like where we’ve gotten to. More and more of these highly processed foods are available. People have less and less connection with their food. And so we have almost lost this ability to understand what we should and shouldn’t be eating, which is crazy.
Brett: Yeah, it’s a great explanation. And just to piggyback off that, Katie, I have it pulled up just because I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget. But there’s five markers to your metabolic health, which are one, your blood sugar levels, two, triglycerides, three, HDL cholesterol, four, blood pressure, and five, waist circumference. And from what I’ve been told, waist circumference is actually the biggest indicator of your overall metabolic health. So that statistic that you rattled off, it’s pretty astonishing to really think about that, that 88% of Americans fail those metabolic markers to be considered healthy. And so we’ve really normalized a lot of things that shouldn’t be normalized.
And another statistic that I go back to is the fact that 70% of Americans are overweight or obese, and now 40% of our children are overweight or obese. And I think it comes back to, if you don’t have this blueprint of how to be healthy as a parent, I would imagine it’s very difficult to also help your child maintain that same blueprint. And so when Harry and I started the podcast, we kind of viewed ourselves like investigative journalists. And I remember going into a grocery store with this mindset and just looking at all the different aisles and all the different colors and boxes and different types of marketing. And I’m like, this really isn’t even a grocery store where you can buy food. It’s like a grocery store that’s just ridden with food-like substances. And a statistic that we come back to a lot because I think it’s very indicative of the health crisis that we’re currently in, is that there’s 40,000 products at the average grocery store.
And those 40,000 products are controlled by about 10 companies. So we think a lot about centralization in tech and these fang companies, but there’s kind of this silent monopolization that’s occurred within our food system where it’s 10 large publicly traded companies that are effectively controlling all the processed foods in the inner aisle of the grocery store. And really what they’re doing is they’re just kind of combining subsidized crops like corn, wheat, soy, sugar, vegetable oils, et cetera. And they’re spinning up some nice little fancy marketing on them, making them super hyper-palatable and addictive. And I think it’s, you know, no wonder why we’re in the, in the current metabolic health crisis that we’re currently in, you know, it’s really a far cry of how things used to be where you would go to the food store, and it was meat, fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, water, coffee, maybe some soda with some natural cane sugar.
And we’ve really come so far from that to now it’s like we have the most technological advancements we’ve ever had, but the average person really doesn’t even know the right foods that they should be, should be eating. You know, there’s still a lot of people that think saturated fat is terrible for you. And they’re opting for like the low-fat potato chips or the low-fat yogurt. And really what they’re doing is they’re pulling the fat out of it and then they’re just going to add sugar for some energy source too. So, so that’s been our big message with all the shows that we’ve done, all the research that we’ve done is that if we can just teach people what real foods actually are, which are primarily found in the outer aisle of the grocery store, and then teach you to kind of take it a step further and actually connect with your local rancher or farmer, who’s the actual person that’s procuring and sourcing your food, we can just keep this really simple and you can have the best health that you could ever imagine just by doing those things.
Katie: Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like the good part of this message too, is that because of these lifestyle diseases, these metabolic issues are actually lifestyle caused, that actually means we have a tremendous amount of power to affect change in those areas and that they are largely within our hands to prevent and to change and to choose a different outcome.
And I think of all the messages that we’ve probably gotten wrong over the last several decades of avoiding sunlight, avoiding salt, avoiding, like you said, saturated fat, avoiding meat. And we’ve taken out these things that are so vital for human health. And the thing at the end of the day is it’s not death by a single blow. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts. It’s that bucket analogy of no one bad food choice is certainly not going to kill you in most cases, but thousands of them compounding over time makes a tremendous difference in our health. And I know it’s a large part of your message. And I would love to kind of dissect some of the messaging around meat, because I do feel like, like you mentioned, saturated fat and especially animal products have gotten demonized in modern society to a large degree. And I would say falsely demonized and that we are actually doing ourselves a disservice by avoiding those foods. But that there, of course, are caveats within that to understand about quality and sourcing. And I echo everything you said about finding your local food sources. I think there’s tremendous power in connecting with where our food actually comes from. But can you break down and kind of dissect maybe some of the myths surrounding meat that are still pretty prevalent in today’s society?
Harry: Yeah, I would say that the three that kind of stand out is one around just saturated fat in general. And saturated fat is correlated with heart disease. The subtopic of that is cholesterol and that cholesterol is just generally bad. And then the third one is fiber. You know, like, don’t you need fiber? I think this is kind of like taking more of like the carnivore stance, but like, don’t you need fiber? Can you live off mostly meat alone? And a lot of the arguments in the first two cases just around heart disease, you know, cholesterol is this life-giving molecule, and it comes in a few different forms. But 80% of the cholesterol that we use in our body on a day-to-day basis is generated by our body in itself. And the role of cholesterol is, it’s like this utility player in the body. It’s huge for hormone production. It’s in all of your cells. We need it to live.
And so, there was in the 60s and 70s, you know, Eisenhower had this heart attack. And I think this is a very common and popularized story in our space. But Eisenhower had this heart attack. Ancel Keys, who’s a scientist and researcher popularizes his study on the seven countries study, which essentially finds correlation between eating red meat and heart disease. What he didn’t really dive into in his findings around heart disease, trying to prove why Eisenhower had this heart attack, was that he left out a bunch of other countries in the study. So he cherry-picked seven of the countries to come up with his findings. And that ultimately led us to this understanding that red meat is bad for us. People started to really become convinced of this. He was this bombastic and charismatic guy. So his messaging was really powerful. And a lot of people were fearful. I think at the time, there was this rising risk of having a heart attack and heart disease and much of that, there’s many co-factors, but I think much of that could be linked to other lifestyle things that were happening at the time. Particularly smoking, very popular for people to be smoking. And I think that’s ultimately one of the things that got Eisenhower was he was still smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, even to the day he died.
And so, for a little bit of the nuance on just the cholesterol piece. It’s, you know, you can go out there and look into all these different studies pointing to what your blood markers should and shouldn’t be in terms of HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol. But at the end of the day, I think the simplest framework is around just knowing that this molecule is intended to give us life. And if that were the case, then how can it be this molecule that’s killing us and giving us a heart attack? And so I think that forces us to press a little bit deeper in understanding, you know, if the arterial wall of the heart is being clotted by cholesterol, what’s causing it to clot to begin with or this plaque to build up to begin with? And a lot of the science that I’ve seen and think is compelling talks about how it’s really a product of metabolic dysfunction and how these dietary choices that we have today are centered around how we process foods in the form of sugar, oils and grains that aren’t really healthy for us. And our body has a hard time actually turning those highly processed foods into energy. And ultimately it ends up irritating and disrupting the arterial walls of all of our veins, particularly around the heart. And then that allows the cholesterol molecules to get stuck within the artery.
So, you know, I think that red meat has really taken a bad rap. And honestly, there’s so many different studies out there around red meat that, when you look at them, a lot of the negative ones, they’re looking at highly processed meat that generally isn’t great for you. Like they’re looking at like the worst type of meat. If you’re talking about farm fresh meat, that’s minimally processed, that’s raised the right way, you’re talking about a whole different category of food. So I think that’s an interesting caveat to throw in there as well.
Brett: Yeah, I think the only thing I could add to that is to Harry’s point, which he touched on, is that we’re just battling decades upon decades of misinformation around meat. And it’s easy to see why meat is demonized, right? It’s delicious. It’s red. It’s powerful. It’s bloody. But then when you actually do the research and look at the data, it’s very interesting to me that we’ve scapegoated red meat as the root cause of chronic disease. When you look at all these other dietary and lifestyle factors that Harry alluded to, I would encourage anyone to check out the book or documentary Sacred Cow because that’s something that we read and watched early on in our journey. And it was extremely informative to us. And one of the statistics that they mentioned is that we’re really not eating more meat than ever before. The actual statistic is that the average American only eats two ounces of red meat per day, which is way lower than a lot of the assumptions that most people are talking about.
And the other thing too, Katie, is we’ve kind of lost this ability to look at food not as mouth pleasure or caloric value, but actually the nutrients that we’re able to derive from those exact foods. And when you look at red meat compared to so many other foods that are out there, there’s really no comparison. It’s essentially a multivitamin in food form. And there are a number of vitamins and minerals that are in meat that can’t be derived from plants like heme iron, creatine, vitamin B12, vitamin D3, the list goes on and on. So I think for us, we just come back to the fact that why would we demonize a food that we’ve eaten for 2.5 million years? All of a sudden health statistics start to get really wonky the last century, really the last 50 years. And you look at all these other dietary and lifestyle habits and you start to realize that, oh, wow, it’s pretty clear that meat is being demonized on accord of all the other things that we’ve kind of messed up with modern society. You know, I mean, there’s people like Stephenson, who was an Arctic explorer that did the famous Bellevue study in the 1920s, where he ate nothing but a red meat diet and was in the Bellevue hospital. And his health markers improved over that year. Or people like Dr. Salisbury that was treating Civil War soldiers on a hot water and red meat removal diet. So it’s like all the information is out there we really just need to do a little bit further digging and really understand what makes us feel good versus what are actually the real things that are causing metabolic dysfunction in this country.
Katie: Yeah, I agree. And going beyond just the headlines we see and actually looking at the data, that’s what blew my mind when I started delving into it. Like you said, is A, most of our cholesterol is made in our body. And if our body’s making a disproportionate amount, the question becomes, why is that? And when you kind of get back to the first principles of that, it’s often tied into inflammation. When people actually start looking at this, like you said, we have all these inflammatory foods, our body’s always on our side and it’s trying to help us. And so why is it creating this cholesterol that we think we don’t need? Let’s go deeper on the problem.
Same thing with, I noticed many of the studies, like you talked about, that demonize red meat. They were claiming it was the red meat that was the problem, but their sources of red meat were things like lasagna, which is certainly not red meat in isolation. There’s a lot of other inflammatory things happening when you make lasagna. Or when you look at the data, like you mentioned, our red meat consumption in the US is actually proportionately very low compared to places like Hong Kong, that some statistics show they eat as much as a pound or more of red meat per day. And they have some of the best longevity in the world. And some of the best health outcomes. And so I think it’s like moving beyond the headlines and really looking into what does the data actually say? And more importantly, what does my own body actually say when I start experimenting and changing the variables? Because that’s always our best data is from our own body.
I do feel like one objection people have when it comes to eating healthier and understandably so is the cost of it. And there certainly is the perception that it costs much more to eat healthier. And I know from experimentation, there are certainly ways around that and to mitigate that. But I would love to hear your your perspective on the cost side, because I know, especially in today’s environment, budget is a big concern for a lot of people. So for someone who’s wanting to make really good choices, but budget concerns are an issue, what advice do you have there?
Harry: Yeah, this is a really tricky topic. And Brett and I go back and forth on this a lot. I think, you know, historically, healthcare costs and food costs have taken up about 30% combined of the average American’s budget. And historically, we were spending about two-thirds of that 30% on foods, and one-third on healthcare costs. And we’ve actually seen that switch over the past several decades. And so that, that switch of us now spending two-thirds on healthcare costs, and one-third on food is kind of I think, where we kind of start the argument where it’s like, if you want to avoid spending more money on healthcare costs, investing more in food is really the right place to start.
It’s a challenge, obviously, like everyone’s situation is different. And where we come back to is a lot of the times when you look at somebody’s and audit somebody’s expenses and budget, and how they’re, how they’re spending their time and money. A lot of times you can pull apart things that really like are driving them away from health. They’re spending money on you know, fast food is still expensive. Like, you know, the dollar menu at McDonald’s is no cheaper than going to any grocery store and getting a $6 pound of ground beef and cooking that up or, you know, get two pounds of ground beef, cook that up. And, you know, that’s a full meal for you and your family. And, you know, I think for the most part, you could probably create really highly nutritious meals for under $15 a meal. It’s a challenge, though. I think the cost of living in the U.S. is continually getting, you know, harder and harder to make it convenient and easy and affordable to eat really well. So it’s almost becoming a little bit of a luxury, unfortunately. And so I think equipping yourself with the knowledge that, hey, like this is my number one priority when it comes to my spending and my health. It’s a roof over my head and the food that it’s on the table. Like those are things worth spending money on.
And, you know, even if you are paycheck to paycheck and living below your means or like really within your means, it’s a challenge, but if you’re just focused on those core principles of like, these are the things that I need to be investing into to live a really healthy life, to see growth in my life, to see growth in my business, my relationships, this is where it all starts. Then you see it more as an investment than something that’s just like a line item.
Brett: Yeah. And I would say, Katie, you and I can both confidently say that, you know, we’re costing the medical system far less by not being on the drugs and medication that we were that we were currently on. So, you know, luckily, the biologic drugs I was taking was covered by insurance, but that was a $400,000 expense per year. So I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have good health insurance. And so literally, by changing the foods that I was eating, I was able to get off these drugs that were costing the medical system millions of dollars over the course of the six years that I was on those drugs. So no matter what anyone says about the percentage of my budget that I spent on food, I know it’s far cheaper than whatever I was doing before.
And I also think a really good mental model around food is just viewing a lot of these costs and prices is just a reallocation of funds where it’s like you have the choice to pay a little bit more for this great quality food upfront that will ultimately prevent a lot of long-term disease and hospital bills down the road. Or you can defer that and eat the cheaper, industrialized processed food upfront, and therefore you have a much higher likelihood of accruing really high medical bills over time. So I think that’s a really helpful mental model.
And I also think, especially when it comes to meat and these animal products that are a little bit pricier, we kind of go by the good, better, best model, which was taught to us by the Warrens that own Holy Cow Beef, which is an amazing regenerative ranch out of Lubbock, Texas. And so any red meat, even if it’s the cheap outer aisle of the grocery store, is considered good because even the cheap grain-finished meat is far better for you than the processed crap on the inner aisle of the grocery store. Better is actual grass-fed meat, and then best is regenerative grass-finished meat that’s probably grown by your local farmer. So obviously, at the best approach, you are going to be spending more money. But for us, Harry and I focus on how good we actually feel and how we fundamentally transformed who we are as men because we got our diet fixed, our hormones fixed, etc. And that’s really what we focus on. I mean, we can both confidently say that, you know, we’ve launched three businesses over the last two years, and none of those things would have happened if we didn’t take control of our food, our hormones, and our overall health.
So I think for someone out there that’s worried about price or budget, which is an extremely fair concern, I would focus on the best way to do that. I would focus on if you eat these foods over a long enough time horizon, you will have the energy to be better at your job, which could make you hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars over a long-term time horizon. And then there’s also the priceless investments of actually having more energy so that when you get home from work, you have the capacity to play catch with your kid or, you know, play with your daughter or something like that, or be there for your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren. Now we’re talking priceless investments.
So obviously, it always does come down to budget. And we both, we are both confident in the fact that we’re willing to pay more of our budget up front because we focus on how good we actually feel from those foods. But there are also some ways where if you can only afford the cheaper quality products in the outer aisle of the grocery store, that will still get you like 80% to 90% of the way there. Like when I first went carnivore and I was 24, I was, could only afford the cheap budget cuts of meat at the grocery store. And that still got my health into amazing, into an amazing level, and I was able to get off all the drugs and meds that I was on. Very nuanced topic, but I think there’s different approaches to take that can help get you there.
Katie: Yeah, that’s a great point. And I know when I had Diana Rodgers on the podcast, she echoed that as well as like, there’s the gold standard, but if that’s not possible, still just choose the best of the options available, even if that’s conventional beef, because you’re still getting so much more micronutrient density per ounce from that than you’re going to get from any processed food. And one of my personal theories is that’s part of this obesity crisis is that we are micronutrient deficient. So our bodies are craving food because they need those micronutrients and we aren’t giving them the micronutrients, we’re just giving them the calories. And like you guys said, it sometimes takes a little bit more work or at least being a little bit more intentional, but often you can find a cow-sharing program from a local farmer or rancher and buy beef in bulk. And that helps mitigate the cost. Or I know like I have ducks at my house and we have duck eggs from our ducks and my dad keeps bees and we have honey from our bees and we garden. Like there are ways that require a little bit more work, but they get you so much more in touch with where your food comes from.
And a whole topic we didn’t even get to go deep on is also the nose to tail part of eating meat and honoring the animal and eating all the parts of it, which we’ve also moved largely away from in modern society. But I know this was a thing that you guys were focused on helping to correct that problem and helping to make that barrier of entry easier for people who aren’t used to eating the whole animal. So can you briefly talk about Noble and what you guys have created there?
Harry: Yeah, so we created Noble Origins, and the idea really was spawned in April. And it was after a year of doing the podcast, the most common feedback we got from the show was what protein powders do you recommend? And the other feedback that we’d always get is where can I buy bulk beef from? So both of those were just reoccurring themes that we kept getting from our audience. And we’re like, look, we don’t really see anything out there on the market like this. This idea of a protein powder that has multiple different pieces from the animal that provide really nutritious aspects of each part of the animal. So we decided to come up with Noble Origins. It’s all-in-one protein powder. It’s beef based. It’s a beef protein isolate as opposed to whey protein. So a lot of the other animal based protein powders out there are dairy derived from whey protein. Ours is beef protein isolate. It’s really from the collagenous muscle parts of the muscle tissue. And then we have collagen. We also have an organ complex in there. And then colostrum, which is the first milk from the mother cow.
So really just trying to get this whole package, this whole scope of nutrients that you would get from the animal. And incorporate each piece so that people really can feel confident that they’re getting, you know, in one scoop or one to two scoops, everything that they need from a micronutrient perspective. And we know that from a lot of these studies, animal protein is so much more bioavailable, it uptakes much more easily than plant proteins. And a lot of the proteins that are getting put out on the market today are plant proteins. We recently got into Central Market here in Texas. And one of the one of the feedbacks that we had from the buyer who contacted us was, there’s nothing out there on the animal based side of things, all the new protein powder concepts that are coming out are all plant based or cricket proteins. And really, these are kind of a sacrifice to your health, they’re not going to be absorbed nearly as easily. Your body isn’t used to seeing that hot, that high amounts of plant protein in one scoop. And so we figured, hey, this is a great alternative for people who are looking to get really nutritious food in a scoop in a simple, convenient way.
Brett: Yeah. And I would say one of the easiest levers to pull, it’s like, you know, we can talk carnivore, we can talk paleo. I think part of the issue with the current health movement is there’s just so many complexities to it. And I think it could be overwhelming for a lot of people trying to come into this space and figure out how to make sustainable change. But something that’s worked for us and a lot of our customers is like, just start by eating a gram of protein per pound of body weight and everything else will take care of itself. Like if you can just do one thing, one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight, men or women, that’s an amazing starting point for a lot of people. But, you know, it’s easy for us, right? Because we’re both 200-pound men. We can eat two big whacks of steak a day and we’re good. It’s tough for women to get an adequate protein sources into their diet, which I’m sure your listener base knows far more than we do, Katie.
But that one of the things that we’ve noticed is there are a lot of moms, there are a lot of women that love taking this. And the fact that it’s actually from the protein is from protein isolate and it’s the muscle tissue of the cow. It’s extremely bioavailable and digestible compared to a lot of conventional whey proteins that are out there. So that’s one of the biggest pieces of customer feedback that we get is that it tastes really good. There’s a great nutrient profile in it and it sits super well in the stomach. And above all else, you know, this, this is a supplement. So like, we’re not saying, hey, replace your steak with this, you know, prioritize real foods, diet, lifestyle. And then if you need extra sources of protein and nutrients, I think we really have you covered. It can really help us with that too. So we’re excited.
Katie: Yeah, I love it. I got to try it at SunLife for the first time and love that you guys have created this. And I will echo what you said. I’ve learned and people who’ve listened for a long time have heard me say, actually, one of the hardest parts of healing for me was learning to eat enough food, especially enough protein. I had been sort of chronically under-eating for so long that I had to sort of like rehab my metabolism by giving it enough nutrients and enough calories and enough protein. And it was absolutely life-changing when I did that. So I’ll make sure there’s a link to Noble Origins in the show notes for you guys listening on the go, that always lives at wellnessmama.com. But I’m so glad we got to go deep on this topic. I think it’s critically important, especially because we’re talking to moms who are building the nutritional foundations for their kids that will hopefully last for a lifetime. And I love that you guys saw a problem and solved it and that you also really care about the education side. So I’ll link to your podcast as well. But thank you both so much for your time and for such a fun conversation.
Harry: Thanks so much, Katie. We appreciate it.
Brett: Thanks, Katie.
Katie: And thanks as always for listening. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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