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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
This podcast is sponsored by Hiya Health. It’s a company that I love for my younger kids because typical children’s vitamins are basically candy and disguised. They’re filled with up to two teaspoons of sugar, unhealthy chemicals, or other gummy junk that I personally don’t want my kids to ever eat. And that’s why Hiya was created. It’s a pediatrician approved superpower chewable vitamin. Now, while most children’s vitamins contain sugar and they contribute to a variety of health issues, Hiya is made with zero sugar, zero gummy junk, doesn’t have the artificial colors, flavors, additives that we don’t know where they came from, but it tastes great and it’s perfect even for picky eaters.
Hiya is designed to fill the most common gaps in modern children’s diet to provide the full body nourishment that our kids need with a taste that they actually like. It’s formulated with the help of nutritional experts and it’s pressed with a blend of 12 organic fruits and vegetables, then supercharged with 15 essential vitamins and minerals, including Vitamin D, B12, C, zinc, and folate, as well as others to support our kids’ immune systems, their energy, their brain function, their mood, concentration, teeth, bones, and more. It’s also non-GMO, vegan, dairy-free, allergy-free, gelatin-free, nut-free, and free of everything else you can imagine. It’s designed for kids two and up and it’s sent straight to your door so parents have one less thing to worry about, which I appreciate. We’ve worked out a special deal with Hiya for their best-selling children’s vitamin. Receive 50% off your first order. To claim this deal, you must go to hiyahealth.com/wellnessmama. This deal is not available on their regular website, so make sure to go to hiyahealth.com/wellnessmama and get your kids the full body nourishment they know they need to grow into healthy adults.
This podcast is brought to you by Jigsaw Health, who you might have heard me talk about before. But today I want to talk about their new collagen. And in my house, we go through a lot of collagen. I consume quite a bit for keeping my joints and tendons healthy as I get older and work out a whole lot. And also for the potential anti-aging benefits as I’m now aware of this as I get older. Theirs is really cool and unique because it uses three clinically tested bioactive collagen peptides that are clinically tested to promote the growth and healing of new cartilage. They’re clinically tested to support mobility in healthy individuals. They’re clinically tested to have a positive influence on cartilage tissue regeneration, bone density, and to stimulate healthy skin metabolism and promote firmer and smoother skin, which is one of the benefits I’m after. And they’re clinically tested to promote growth and health of fingernails, which I noticed very rapidly when I started increasing my collagen production. I love that theirs is unflavored and dissolves really easily. So it’s easy to put into almost any food or drink or even my morning coffee. And it has 17 grams of protein per serving. It’s of course grass-fed, and it includes hyaluronic acid, which we’re seeing increasing studies talk about from an anti-aging perspective. I keep a canister of it in my kitchen and my kids will add to smoothies or to food. I add it to most drinks that I consume. And you can find out more or get your own by going to wellnessmama.com/go/jigsawcollagen.
Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this episode is all about why regenerative agriculture is so important. And I’m here with Dr. Anthony Gustin, who I’ve known for quite a while. He’s a former sports rehab clinician turned entrepreneur, author, podcaster, investor, and now amateur farmer. And he’s currently working on some new projects to help save our food system and scale regenerative agriculture. He last founded Perfect Keto to help people with metabolic dysfunction and Equip Foods to provide people with whole food nutrition supplementation. He runs a podcast called The Natural State podcast that I will link to in the show notes. But I loved getting to go deep on a lot of the misconceptions around our food supply and food chain, especially related to meat and agriculture. And he explains a lot of this in deep detail, as well as things like collagen and colostrum and separating the myths from the truth on a lot of these things that are now being talked about so much. So let’s join Dr. Gustin. Anthony, welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Dr. Gustin: Thank you so much for having me.
Katie: I love our conversations and I’m excited for this one because we’re going to get to go deep on the topic of regenerative agriculture, which I know there’s a lot of information from the plant-based community in today’s world. And I feel like this is such an important perspective for people to hear and to understand because there is a lot of misinformation floating around for one. And also, this could actually be a big solution to a lot of the problems we’re currently facing. So I know it’s a broad topic. I would love for you to sort of start off by maybe walking us through some of the current problems in a lot of the existing supply chain and defining what regenerative agriculture is.
Dr. Gustin: Yeah, I think it’s something that we are growing up in a Western world thinking all of our food comes from a grocery store. And our food actually comes from the earth and from the soil to some degree, no matter what we’re eating, no matter how processed it is. It always has its roots in soil. And when you start pulling back a lot of the problems around health and nutrition and the food system, you realize that everything has grown. And there’s effectively two different categories, plants and animals that people put them in. But it’s much more involved than that. It’s a complex ecosystem. And there’s no ecosystem on earth that doesn’t involve animals to create resilience in it.
The way we’re growing food to put in the grocery store currently is extremely extractive. It’s like if you have a bank account and all you do is spend money and take out credit card debt and load up credit card debt and then take out more credit card debt. And we’re on this sort of death spiral. That ends at some point. At a certain point, you can’t pay your bills, you have too much debt interest, and you go bankrupt. And we’re sort of at that point, or getting close to it with the way that we’re farming. And so what we’re doing is creating all this chemical fertilizer, all this chemical herbicide, pesticide to extract even more of the soil. And if we were to do this in a natural way, we wouldn’t be able to be making food currently.
So what regenerative agriculture is a very opposite end of the spectrum. It’s a way to produce food that actually restores and builds up resiliency and output of the soil. A sustainable food source is just doing the same thing and not having it degrade, which is great. But if you are in debt and you’re spending more money than you’re making, and you sustain that, that’s not good either. So regenerative is effectively making more money than we spend. We’re putting carbon back in the soil. We’re increasing water holding capacity. We’re increasing biodiversity in land. We’re increasing the ability to extract minerals from the soil, breaking down the rocks and the small things in the soil. And for a lot of areas, you can actually start producing way more food per acre. So it’s a way to effectively, I mean, humans need to eat several times a day. And if you start switching over to a food system that actually improves, we have to eat, and so if you eat from a system that improves the land and creates more food, this is just a more resilient and more healthy outcome than we can imagine for the entire food system.
Katie: And I feel like it’s at least worth touching on the importance of meat in a human diet as well. I know this can be a little bit controversial of a topic, but there seems to be a lot of information from the more plant-based community suggesting, what if we just remove meat altogether? Wouldn’t that be better for the planet and for humans? And if you’re willing, I would love for you to kind of delve into those two topics about why this is important for not just us as humans and our nutrition, but also for the planet versus the story we often hear about these things being damaging to the planet.
Dr. Gustin: Yeah, like I said before, no ecosystem on earth has ever thrived or even sustained itself without animal involvement. And so plants and animals coexist. And when you have animals on land they eat plants and then they end up pooping, peeing, stomping all that stuff around. That creates a fertilization in the plants so that the plants can actually exist. So I got really into this stuff and I started actually farming myself on a small farm. And I was doing animal agriculture. I was doing plant agriculture, sort of separate like most people do, just to see like, what is the difference here? What are the inputs involved? And the plants that I have would die without fertilizer. But where does the fertilizer come from? It comes from animal inputs. So you can’t just make fertilizer out of thin air and have plants grow themselves. You need animals for plants to exist. So that’s just a very basic sort of ecological point of view. You must have animals on the land.
So if we want to produce food long-term, we have to have animals involved. And if we’re not eating animals, what are we doing with them? They don’t just live forever in perpetuity. And so just like we eat plants, we also need to eat animals to be able to improve the way that we’re doing this. And it must be done in a species-appropriate way. A lot of the research looks at intensive confined animal feeding operations where it’s the feedlots, the stuff that we see in the horror films of animal agriculture. This, of course, is not good. So when people reduce this to carbon in, carbon out, is this bad for the environment? I would say for sure it is. But so is massive monocrop, industrial wheat, corn, soy, et cetera. These are also very bad for the environment.
So on either end of the spectrum, whether you’re talking about animal or plant agriculture, if it’s grown in these enormous industrial applications, it’s going to be terrible for the environment. We’ve lumped all of this into just animals are bad for the environment. And I don’t know if this is like conspiracy from governments or if it’s just corporations pushing an agenda or where it comes from. I think that as long as people have intentional choices about where they’re eating and thinking about how is this food being produced? And actually think about what farm is this coming from? Again, all food comes from soil to some degree. And so if you trace that back you have some awareness around where your food comes from, you’re going to be able to sell some of that stuff. But when you manage animals on land and do this, what’s called regenerative agriculture, which is speech is appropriate. They rotate, they have different, sort of, grazing patterns, they have different forages. They’re not all just thrown in a pen and fed corn and soy that is where we see increase in carbon in the soil and also increase in the ability to hold water capacity, as well as so many other ways to improve the ecosystem and build back the land that we’re losing so rapidly.
Katie: That makes sense. And I love that wording, a species-appropriate way, because hopefully nobody is arguing for feedlots. I think that’s an area where everybody hopefully can agree, and certainly people who care about finding regeneratively farmed meats can agree with the vegan viewpoint that feedlots are not great for the environment or for the animals or for any aspect of what we’re talking about. But I love this perspective that when it’s done in a species-appropriate way, it actually is beneficial for humans, for the planet, and kind of across the board.
I know you’ve also talked about, a lot with the meat industry and even sometimes things we think are really high-quality meat products like grass-fed beef might not be what they seem, especially if they’re coming from maybe some of these more commercial standpoints. And it seems like you have the gold standard, which is that you farm and you have these on your property. But for people who aren’t able to do that, what do we need to know about even grass-fed beef if we’re buying it in a grocery store and where it might be coming from?
Dr. Gustin: Yeah, I don’t want to scare people from trying to make a decision. So I know people are limited with their time. They’re always trying to do their best. They can only squeeze in an hour a week at the grocery store, maybe. But this is where we’re looking for things like regenerative at a grocery store is going to be the cream of the crop. Brands like Force of Nature do a really good job at this. But grass-fed has become sort of the new organic where you go to a really large organic, you know, any produce type of organic field. And most of them actually look like wastelands, they are technically organic because they’ve checked certain boxes, but they’re not places where you want to actually eat food from. And the same with grass-fed beef. Just because it says grass-fed, I mean, most grain-fed cattle are fed corn and soy, but a lot of grass-fed meat can actually be fed alfalfa pellets and a bunch of artificial vitamins, minerals, et cetera, and be kept in the feedlot the same way but instead of corn and soy, they’re basically felt fed the grasses before they go to seed.
And so that’s the difference between grain-fed and grass-fed in the commercial standpoint is pretty much the same exact environment. The animals are confined. They don’t have area to move. They’re being fed processed feed. And a lot of that actually looks the exact same when you look at it from a metabolomic standpoint, you look at it from nutrition of the animal, the genomics of the animal, grain fed, and some of this quote unquote grass-fed looks the same. And this is where, you know, consumers want cheaper prices. And the market is very smart in trying to find corners to cut to be able to make the cheapest possible product. But when you go to a grocery store and you see grass ed meat, you know, quote unquote grass-fed, it’s being able to be sold for three, four or $5 a pound, it’s just, it’s not very common that that is able to be done. So I launched this new business. It’s called Lineage Provisions, and we’re making regeneratively farmed meat or liver heart beef sticks. And we were sourcing for these, for the supply chain, some of the grass-fed sourcing that we got was a couple dollars a pound. We asked them, what are your practices? Can we go visit the farms? What’s going on here? And none of them said they would let us go see the farms. The question is like, what are they hiding here? And this is what, if you look at, you know, I don’t want to throw any names under the bus, but some of these very large meat stick companies or any meat snack companies, and they have really, really, really low price points, but they say they’re grass-fed, these are the same confinement animals that you’re going to see elsewhere.
We actually went with as a regenerative sourcing was about three times as expensive as this quote unquote generic grass-fed. They don’t let you see the farm. They don’t let you go there. Because they’re trying to shroud something in secrecy. And this is not how I want to feed my family. It’s not how I want to eat myself where I have no transparency into what’s actually going on. But yeah, it’s just same thing with pasture-raised pork and chicken, which I could get into, but these just obfuscation of the food industry at large is very confusing. Again, I don’t want to confuse anybody and make it hard. The best thing you could possibly do is go meet local farmers in your area and shake their hand, talk to them, go to the farmer’s market. Not everyone has that time. So, again, look for a regenerative if you’re at the grocery store to make it very simple. But, yes, it can be very complex and confusing.
Katie: Yeah, I second what you said about if you’re able to find a local rancher. We have one in our area we call affectionately Cave Man Tony, and we’ve been able to visit the farm and the animals are raised in the way that you’re explaining. And it’s a local source. But for people who don’t have access to that, I think you’re right, balancing that viewpoint and not leaving people in fear. I know Diana Rogers does a great job of explaining that, of even if it’s not the sort of top-of-the-line grass-fed regenerative meat, for many people, even conventional meat might be the most nutrient-dense thing they’re consuming. And so like not to scare people away from that, like obviously there’s a gold standard, but we don’t want to avoid necessarily the nutrition and meat, even if we can’t always pick the perfect option.
I know another area that comes into this conversation often is the shipping of meat, especially like across the ocean for sale and people wanting to avoid that because of the potential carbon footprint or the energy expenditure of that. Can you speak to the times at which actually shipping internationally can be beneficial?
Dr. Gustin: Yeah, another crazy thing about the meat supply chain is trying to really assess out what is the net impact on the planet. So there’s all this stuff, so iI thought for a long time okay regenerative meat but it’s being produced in one area of the world and shipped to the other area of the world, is this truly regenerative, does it net out is it actually good for the environment or not? I mean I think that the best you can always do is like can you go drive to your farm and pick it up, that’s always the best, 100 percent. When we’re talking about stuff that you get at a grocery store, things that come in packaged products, like talking about when we were building up this meat supply chain for lineage provisions, and I talked to Robbie Sansom from Force of Nature. He’s the CEO over there about a lot of this stuff where if we’re, so our manufacturing is on the East Coast.
And if we’re shipping meat from the West Coast, so good grazing only happens in a few areas of the United States. It’s not as abundant as people think. I just moved to Oregon, the high desert here, and there’s not a lot of grazing time throughout the year. And so compared to California, for example, or the southeast. There’s just not a lot of availability for really good regenerative farming. It can be done for sure. And it’s really good for ecosystems. But the cream of the crop where a lot of the volume comes from, comes from certain grasslands. So if we’re sourcing from California and shipping to the East Coast on a truck. We loaded a semi-truck up, and the friction that driving from the West Coast to the East Coast, a couple thousand miles across the United States, is about a thousand times more carbon demanding than if I were to put meet on a tanker ship, a cruise, like a big sea freight, and ship freight from Australia or New Zealand through the Panama Canal to the East Coast and then from there, go to our manufacturer. It’s about a hundredth of the actual carbon footprint to do that, which when I started digging into this and doing the math, it actually blew my mind.
I think, okay, they can put thousands of these containers on this and it’s such a more efficient way to ship something. Then obviously air, like I would never ship air, and then this is why you had a lot of, quote unquote, regenerative farms that are forced to play the direct-to-consumer game where they’re shipping frozen meat online via air freight across the country. And I think that’s by far per pound the most, if you’re looking at carbon emissions, et cetera, the most energy intensive way. And by sea and by freight from Australia and New Zealand is actually way more efficient and better for the environment than even trucking across the United States. So it’s a very big misconception that international is necessarily, or as bad, and domestic as always better. It’s a very nuanced topic.
Katie: I had no idea the numbers were that staggering. But again, it’s like a check for if you can get it local, that’s going to, of course, be the gold standard. And if not, what to look for sort of an order and why international can be a good option. I also know, talk about the human health side a little bit of all this. With Equip Foods, you guys sell things like collagen and colostrum. And there’s been talk of how a lot of the American diet, especially a lot of the meat is primarily muscle meat. And that we’ve moved away from a lot of the more traditional preparations and things that would include other things that we would get from an animal. Can you speak a little bit to that, especially to the collagen side? And we can talk about colostrum separately.
Dr. Gustin: Sure. Yeah. Collagen and gelatin and just eating nose to tail, that’s such a good compliment for a variety of reasons. Your body’s made up of very different amino acids. So if you took a composition of yourself, you’re not just muscle and bone. And even with the bone, like you need different types of collagen to make the bone matrix than just the amino acids that are found in the muscle meat per se. That’s become a very popular thing again. We’re born into this world. We go to a grocery store. We see, oh, I eat animal products that are this meat thing. And that’s just what food is. Whereas, for, you know, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve killed an animal and eaten the entire thing. That includes the bone marrow and the collagen and the skin in the, I mean, all the connective tissue. Which again, if you look at what we are as humans, and you’re trying to build something, same as if you have a Lego set, you want to have all the constituent parts to build that from scratch. Your body can convert some of these things inside. But my opinion is that if you can get all the raw materials in the same form that you’re trying to build, why would you not do that? I mean, we’ve seen this come up in research also around different types of collagen being so important for again, blood vessels, hair, skin, and nails, bone matrix, et cetera. Like again, we are so much more than just muscle tissue for our body. So we for sure need to consume those different sources.
Katie: That makes sense. Can you elaborate some on the different types of collagen? Because I feel like for a long time, it was just there was collagen powder in the grocery store and now we’re starting to understand the different types. But I feel like this isn’t talked about as much. So can you walk us through how many types there are and maybe what the different ones are more beneficial for?
Dr. Gustin: Yeah, we’re finding tons of different types all the time. And I’m starting to get into sourcing now and thinking about there’s trachea and scapula collagen that have types 9, 12, 13, et cetera. Most collagen you get from bovine, either avian or fish, are one through four different types of collagen. I think this is where it starts to get very confusing for consumers. And I always try to like, how do we make it as simple as possible? And I think like, can you, a really good way is just making bone broth or buying bone broth, like using the whole animal chunks. So that way you don’t have to worry about like, oh, am I getting eggshell membrane with type 11 or type 13 or like. The more we use this reductive way to think about nutrition, I think that the more we actually lose the wisdom of nature and what comes in real foods.
So whole animal stuff, eating the skin, obviously if you have things like chicken or even different parts of pork, for example, and other animals, and just eating a variety of cuts, putting them in the Instant Pot, which is like my favorite hack of just throwing it in there. And then two hours of magic happens and it comes out perfectly done. I don’t know how it happens every single time. Bone broth gets that. Eating just a variety of different animal products and fish products and things like that are going to get you what you need. But thinking about that instead of protein is just protein. And I mean, people like Ray Peat, who have become popular now, talking about the balance between, for example, glycine, methionine, different amino acids. I just, I like to remove this sort of, again, obsession about the details and make it as simple as possible. Just think of like, am I getting a variety of different parts of the animal? Yes or no. And then making it very easy from there.
Katie: Yeah, I’ve seen this recurring theme in the last, I would say, decade of being in the health and wellness world is science continues to confirm sort of getting back to the simple things that are often over or underestimated because of their simplicity. But it truly is about going back toward to those simple things like sunlight, like sleep, like getting our nutrient density from food when possible. I know that was a mental switch that was really helpful for me after years of chronic dieting was to shift away from even thinking in terms of calories or macros and thinking in terms of how can I just maximize the nutrient density of all the foods I’m going to consume. And that led me very much to these foods you talked about, like bone broth and animal products and incorporating those in a balanced way into my diet. I know right now colostrum also seems to be having its sort of moment in the sun. I see it all over social media all the time. And I feel like this topic is people are interested in right now. So can you explain what the what colostrum is for one and what the benefits of it are?
Dr. Gustin: The colostrum is known as sort of like the first fuel, so to speak, where it’s the milk that comes from mammals before most milk for the infants. It was the first milk that comes out. Full of so many different peptides, immunoglobulins, et cetera, that it is, the feedback I’m getting from people of taking colostrum, even in a powered form, is absolutely insane. I think that the best way to get it, as always, is like real food fresh from the source. A lot of people have a misconception where, oh, you’re stealing colostrum from, you know, baby calves, if you’re taking it. Well, cows actually produce an enormous excess of milk and colostrum. So, all of the colostrum that’s effectively sourced for things like supplements or even, you know, from, if you’re, if you can find a raw colostrum where you’re at, the calves are always getting fed first and a farmer wouldn’t deprive a calf of colostrum or milk, because then that calf would be malnourished and die. And then they’re losing their herd. Like it’s just from a, from a business standpoint, from a farmer, like they would never do that. And so just know, like the calves are getting fed. Don’t like, don’t worry about it. You’re not stealing from the calf.
And again, just from people, even with the powders, which blows my mind, because I always think like, again, best form you can get is the real food. Does it always translate to the supplement form? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. And some of the things that I’m seeing for, for example, for Equip, we have this colostrum product and one of my friends texted me a couple of weeks ago saying his mom had gut issues for 13 years, 14 years, and she had this big flare up over a decade ago. He sent her some colostrum and within three days, she was having normal bowel movements for the first time in over a decade. Absolutely insane.
My friend here, his daughter had a very traumatic injury in her, in her hands. She had to take antibiotics because she had a pretty massive surgery. Her gut was really messed up from the antibiotics. She took colostrum. Within two days, her gut was totally fixed. People are taking it and finding from the immunoglobulins with the immune system, seasonal allergies are completely disappearing. It’s absolutely mind-blowing how powerful this stuff is. So yeah, there’s, it’s in this weird state where like the, I don’t think there’s as much research as there probably will be in the next five, 10 years. It’s an ingredient and it’s putting to use and there’s tons of testimonials. Like, I also like, don’t like going out and say like, making these crazy claims is why I’m saying like, this is what I’ve seen from reviews. And I’m not saying like it’s going to do X, Y, and Z and have it be a magic pole of sorts, but it’s been pretty mind blowing to see what people are finding from it, from, from using the product.
Katie: Yeah, I’ve seen it anecdotally in my kids for allergies and especially for the gut health. And I’ve heard from people who have taken it in pretty big doses to try to help with food intolerances and allergies and had resolution in that area. But an interesting anecdotal side effect I’ve heard from a few people now, and I’m curious if you’ve heard this too, is that they grew, even in their 20s, they actually got a little bit taller, which to me kind of makes sense since this is their first food for baby cows in a high growth phase of their life. But have you heard any of that or seen any data about why that might be?
Dr. Gustin: I have no idea. I have no idea why. What type of dosing are you looking at for the food intolerance stuff?
Katie: A couple of them had like really severe or like down to only a couple of foods they could eat. So they were consuming like a pound a month of collagen. So this is, I mean, colostrum. So this is like massive doses. And only notice they grew when they started like bumping into ceiling lights that they didn’t use to bump their head on and things like that and then measured themselves. So it was an entirely unintended side effect. But I know a lot of women are also using it for skin health and hair growth. And I would guess like the combination of that plus collagen could be really helpful for those as well, especially for people who aren’t getting enough of those nutrients in their diets.
Dr. Gustin: Yeah, I mean, it shows very clearly how much it helps the gut lining. And I think that so much of health in our modern world where we are bombarded with all these crazy chemicals that lead in food stuff that leads to gaps in the gut lining that that leads to then all these issues downstream like don’t have a healthy gut don’t have high gut integrity like have a lot of problems after that. And so just from the basic standpoint of does it fix the gut lining is like this is clear that it does for sure. When that happens like so many other things just end up correcting themselves in in human health. So one of these like very easy fix this thing and everything else sort of resolves around it. And again, like, don’t mean to talk about it as a panacea or a magic pill it is definitely not that but it’s just it’s just really cool to see something that’s a natural food product, instead of a lot of these, like super reductive forms again like real food always the best. And then from that you have like real food ingredients and supplements. And then down the line you have these like, ultra processed reductive single ingredient forms of things that have been really wildly taken out of context, and we see how that sometimes is like very bad when we’re talking about like, even vitamin D when not taken in the right form or with different, without having calcium, some of these other things can actually be problematic. And vitamin K2, same thing. And so, I think it’s really important to get things as close to the whole and real food forms as humanly possible.
Katie: Absolutely. And we’re going to get to talk about vitamin D and sunlight in our next episode. So you guys keep an eye out for that one. I’m curious, I agree with you, if any time possible, real food first. I’m curious what this looks like from an implementation perspective, if you’re willing to share on a personal level in your life, kind of what your first principles are of living healthy or your own personal 80-20 of the things you focus on, especially any tips that would be helpful from a family perspective when we’re trying to optimally nourish our kids during their phases of rapid growth during childhood.
Dr. Gustin: Are you talking about just like any health stuff or nutrition or what are you thinking?
Katie: We’ll definitely go deep on some of the lifestyle factors in the next episode. So especially nutrition, but if you want to work in lifestyle stuff as well, like what would you put as sort of the biggest needle movers or starting points for parents to focus on especially?
Dr. Gustin: Man, I mean, for nutrition, it’s just eating a whole foods-based diet is just so important. And I’ve found, and I’m starting to dig into all the nuance around local food, and science is starting to emerge. I mean, I’ve had this intuitive hit that eating local and seasonal is like the most important thing. I just came up with this paper the other day, for example, showing that out of season oranges lead to a rapid accumulation of fat compared to in season oranges. Absolutely insane. And there’s like all this stuff around is the food available in abundance in your environment? I’m starting to think of food more as a biochemical barcode that your body scans, instead of just raw nutrients that it’s intaking. Of course it has that, but there’s so much more to it than that.
And again, people obviously do the best that you can possibly do. And for some people, it’s very easy to get access to real foods grown around them. And some people, it’s not. And so there’s no need to seek for absolute perfection here. And if you’re eating whole foods from a Trader Joe’s, that’s going to be way better than eating anything packaged from a Whole Foods or anything else like that. So I always just try to prioritize real food for sure. Like I say, it’s number one thing. In my clinical practice all the way to just experimenting with myself, seeing friends and family it’s this is always like the number one pillar of once you start switching to eating nose-to-tail animal products and not being afraid of either fat or carbohydrates. Like I went through this big keto phase where I thought carbohydrates were the devil. And reverting to a mean.
There’s a top end and a low end to everything. You can overdo or underdo most things. And when you’re just eating real foods in a natural environment, there’s times where you have high amounts of starchy tubers and fruits and vegetables and this omnivorous real food diet. And just nailing that in the basics of it is so much more important than trying to obsess about, they’re very specific stuff. Like what exact macro should I hit every single day? What nutrients are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And just like focusing on like the 80, 20 and like, am I just day over day getting real food? And then after that, after you hit that and it’s a habit, it’s an ingrained, it’s what you do no matter what. And the Doritos and the Snickers are no longer things that you look at and you even code as food. Like I go to a grocery store somewhere like that or a gas station, and like, I look around if I’m in a convenience store, all the packaged food there looks the same to me as the motor oil or the toilet paper. Like I don’t, I don’t even like code it as like, this is an edible thing that I can put in my body. And until you get to that point, like you’re just obsessed about real foods, like nothing else really matters.
Katie: That’s such a great point. And we’re going to get to talk about some of those other factors and the stress side of the emotional health side as well in our next episode. But I think that’s an important point is like you could be eating that on paper, the quote unquote, most perfect diet in the world. And if you’re eating it from a place of stress and fear, it’s actually still not going to be as beneficial to your body as it could be. So I’m glad we’re going to get to go deep on that topic.
For now, where can people find out more about the different things that you mentioned, the regenerative meat sticks, and as well as the food-based supplements from Equip Food?
Dr. Gustin: Yeah, so lineageprovisions.com are the meat sticks. And then equipfoods.com are the supplements. And again, it might seem ironic for me to talk about a real foods diet and then sell products that aren’t in real food, whole food form. I think that you should always prioritize real food and like, don’t go buying packaged food or supplements if you can, like, if you haven’t mastered that point yet. So I got it. I don’t want people to get it if they haven’t focused on that.
And then as far as the supplements, with Equip. If real foods are the best, then supplementing with real foods is the second best thing to cover any basis. And the same thing with Lineage {roducts is we wanted to make sure people had access to organs and organ meats. And this nose-to-tail product. So we also have a beef collagen casing that it’s wrapped in. So that way you’re getting more amino acids, more parts of the animal. We’re using trim. We’re using the connective tissue that’s in the actual product. And we’re using organs. There’s no weird stuff in there. So for me to be able to feed that to my wife, to be able to sneak organs into our diet is nearly impossible. So to make a product that she actually enjoys and looks forward to eating, and we’re traveling tomorrow, for example, and we can pack that and not have to worry about all the trash. Flying from here across the country is not easy always to find real food. And so to be able to put it in forms like. I sort of built it for myself and my family, my friends and people that I love. So yeah, those are the two spots that I’ve been doing most of my work.
Katie: Awesome. Well, I will put links to those in the show notes for any of you guys listening on the go. But Anthony, thanks so much for the time in this episode. I look forward to our next episode to get to go a little deeper on some related topics. But for now, thank you so much for the time.
Dr. Gustin: Thank you.
Katie: And thank you for listening. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
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