Ex-Vegan (2.5 Years): I Almost Died & My Daughter's Teeth Were Rotting

Watch on YouTube · 2018-09-09 · 37 min

0:00 yeah man so if you want to start then would be cool if you could talk about how you got into it and when that was exactly and then what happened and why you quit and when you quit yeah all right it's like therapy um all right so i guess in to get started i i grew up with asthma and allergies so i had stuffy nose i'm still neurologically i'm not used to breathing through my nose so i uh

[video] 0:28 Yeah, allergies, asthmatic, scoliosis. When I was 13, I was diagnosed with scoliosis. I don't think that that was genetic. I think it's a lot like dental caries and stuff like that. When you're sitting in class all day as well, poor habit. Just hunched over a desk all day listening to lies from your teachers in the public school systems. So lots of autoimmune type stuff. Never really thought that I had issues with digestion. Until I started trying to eat healthy. So in 2009, my wife and I met this guy. He was a friend of mine from the university, but he didn't go to this university. And he was a friend of mine and he was wild. He just had kind of it was like a pirate kind of character. He didn't go to the university, but he would like hang out there. And I'm pretty sure he was a shady guy.

[video] 1:27 So he used to sell like acid and stuff. So he was like this edgy, hippie kid from like a multi-generational hippie family. And he had a lot of charisma. So there are a lot of people around the Santa Cruz area who are into veganism and stuff. And I was exposed to veganism like as a 12-year-old, but only in the context of knowing somebody who was vegan for attention, you know, like a young teenage girl, like daddy, give me some attention. I'm a vegan. Um, beyond that, this guy that I met was the first, like really into health. Um, first person I met that was really into like the health aspect of veganism. So he started telling me how he would recover better from, I was really into skateboarding at the time. So he was like saying that he was, you know, he would skate better. He would recover better. He would be here to have better endurance, um, feel better mentally and everything when he was eating. a vegan diet.

[video] 2:23 Um, so I wasn't really fully sold on it, but my buddy started, he would make us smoothies. Like he would come over to our house and he would bring blueberries and chocolate and bananas. And he would make us these like cacao blueberry smoothies. And they were pretty good. You know, I started feeling a little bit better than when I was on a standard American diet. And this was right after I'd finished. It was right when I was about to graduate from university. So in the, in the United States, like the university system, it's kind of After high school, it's this new place where you go to be malnourished and sleep-deprived and brainwashed after you're done with the high school phase of the whole indoctrination thing. So my university days definitely didn't eat very well. I was eating Burger King, Ben & Jerry's, lots of ice cream, beer, Mexican food. That's kind of what I grew up on. I didn't know how to feed myself. I didn't know what good food was. I don't think anybody... I don't think any of us in the 90s really knew.

[video] 3:21 In the 90s and like early 2000s, I don't think people were really concerned with food quality. It was just, you know, eat when you're hungry and, you know, eat what's at Costco, just mass produced junk food. So I started feeling better, started playing around with these smoothies and stuff, got interested in the health aspects of it. Now, I wasn't really fully sold on it. And what's funny is, thinking back, I got I got sucked into a vegan diet, and I never really fully bought into the ideology, right? So it's like a lot of people, they watch Earthlings or something like that, but this was kind of, I'd never seen that, I hadn't seen that film. I hadn't seen a lot of the vegan propaganda. All the vegans that I knew were very sickly, but I always thought that that's just because they're doing it wrong. I always kind of, like I semi-believed in the,

[video] 4:14 Dietary aspect of it didn't really buy into the ethical veganism thing because most of the vegans that I knew were like very unethical people In fact the guy that introduced me to veganism who I mentioned he was a shady guy He ended up in prison. So that the guy that introduced me to veganism About a year later. He ended up in prison for robbing a bank and he got arrested at cafe gratitude which is I don't know if you know about cafe gratitude the owners of Cafe Gratitude, they used to be vegan. They stopped being vegan and all these vegans started freaking out and sending them death threats and stuff because they started raising and slaughtering their own animals. So Cafe Gratitude, out of all places, that's where my buddy Scott got arrested for robbing two banks. Just the first example right there of the vegan, the only vegan I knew, it should have been a huge red flag that this guy was involved in risky behavior, this guy was Completely unhinged in several ways.

[video] 5:13 But, you know, I mean, at the time, I was a young kid. I was impressionable. And, yeah, it seemed like something that was interesting to me still. Even though I should have seen the red flags there with Scott being so crazy and, you know, being willing to freaking rob a bank and put himself and other people in danger and traumatize other people to try to get money.

[video] 5:38 That being said, it's funny because thinking back, to going to the farmers markets and stuff around Santa Cruz, most of the vegans that I knew were kind of, you know, the ethical vegans would regularly shoplift from small farmers at the farmers market. I thought that was a pretty interesting kind of phenomenon, the underbelly of veganism. There are lots of shoplifting I noticed, lots of justification of it. Oh, we're just trying to get healthy. We're fighting the man. It doesn't hurt anybody because it was just, There was all sorts of justification and lots of criminality in that little subculture there. But anyways, I started gradually sliding into a vegan diet just through feeling better from eating more plants. Let's see. I'm trying to go in chronological order here. So 2009, got introduced to it, started playing around with it. Started hearing about raw veganism and how a raw diet might be better. You might be absorbing nutrients better.

[video] 6:38 if you're eating foods raw. So I started playing around with that.

[video] 6:43 That didn't really work out very well at all. I feel decent on kind of a raw diet, but what I ended up doing was like a cooked whole foods vegan diet with intermittent periods of doing raw and doing some fasting type stuff in there every once in a while. Like doing just coconut water for maybe, I think I did all coconut water for a week one time. That was here in Ecuador. In 2010, we moved to Ecuador from the United States. At the time, we were in and out of a vegan diet. We would try to be vegan for a long period of time, we being my wife and I. My wife, she was my girlfriend at the time.

[video] 7:25 So we would do all vegan and then we would be craving meat. we'd be craving fish. And I had a friend who worked at a farmer's market and he would give us these salmon collars and we would get them for free. So he'd give us a bag of like the head of the salmon and we'd bake those and we'd eat the fatty fish and we'd feel a hundred times better. So another red flag right there that I should have just thought, well, this is making me feel really good. And I feel very deprived without it yet for some reason or another, whether it was stubbornness, I don't even know what it was because I didn't fully believe in the the health aspects of it either because of what I was seeing around me. I was almost trying to prove to myself that I could do it right. I knew all these other people. They're doing it wrong. That's why they're failing. That's why they feel like shit. But I can do it right because I don't know what it was. It was a hubris. It was really dumb, but I kept pushing. And the longest I ever went on a full-on vegan diet was about a year. At the end of that year, it was 2011.

[video] 8:24 So this was about two and a half to three years of dabbling in this vegan So I'd say from 2009 to about mid-2011. In the middle of 2011, I got so sick. I was so depleted. I think my immune system was so trashed and I had no idea. I caught a flu or a virus or it could have been a bacterial infection. Whatever it was, it knocked me out for about a week. I couldn't eat food. I couldn't drink water for about a week. I actually thought I was dying. I never thought I was dying before. but I remember telling my girlfriend that I thought I might die that week. I felt my liver swelling up. I should have gone to a hospital, but I didn't want to deal with the medical system at the time. I thought maybe I'll recover, maybe I'll recover, but then it seemed miraculous.

[video] 9:18 By the seventh day of not eating any food and vomiting up any water I took in, something switched and my body was able to deal with whatever I had. And I came out of it. And the first food that I had, and I started craving this food like three days before this. But I had heard that chicken foot soup was what they use in China after people have a flu. So I told my wife, let's get some chicken feet. That's the first thing I'm going to have. I want chicken foot soup. So we bought a bunch of chicken feet and organs and stuff. We put it in a pot. And that was the first food I had. after being sicker than I'd ever been in my life, feeling like I was going to die after about two and a half years of dabbling in and out of a whole foods vegan diet. Now, at the time when I got sick, it was we were eating a lot of quinoa, rice, beans, fruits, vegetables, basically a whole foods, whole unrefined vegan diet.

[video] 10:16 Every once in a while, there's a little bit of goat cheese there at the end, but I would feel like I was cheating because it was all vegan except I had some goat's cheese. It was so funny. It was so stupid thinking back because I'd have that goat cheese and I would love it. It would feel good. But then mentally, I had told myself a story that I'd be healthier without it or I don't need it. It was so sickening. Thinking back at how dangerous it was, what I was doing, it's almost embarrassing to speak about because it's like – I feel like it was self-destructive. And I thought that I was being constructive. I thought I was helping myself. But I nearly freaking killed myself with it. And I had no idea it was coming. I look at pictures. I was so skinny. You probably saw there was a video of me. I know you had the link.

11:03 Can I link it in the description? You can link it, man.

[video] 11:06 Link it in the description. Cool. Viewer beware. Extreme malnourished vegan in that video. But that was about three months or four months before I got sick. in that video right there. So it was like the end of the honeymoon phase. It was like, and you could even hear it in some of the things that I said, because I had listened to Daniel Vitalis and him talking about his journey with veganism. And I was still telling myself, no, I feel good. Like I've been about a year without any animal foods and I feel great. I feel good. And you can even hear it in the way that I talk about it. Like I was still battling it. I was battling in my own mind. Is this really good for me? Can I do this? And part of me was like, yeah, fuck yeah, you could do it, you could do it. And another part of me was just, every time I smelled chicken or meat, I was craving it. I made my dog chicken soup. This might be why I was craving chicken foot soup, because we were making chicken soup for our dog. It was this little puppy at the time. And the whole house smelled like chicken.

[video] 12:04 And it was just, it was calling to me. I felt like it was taunting me. And I took the soup. I put it in my mouth. But I didn't want to swallow it. I was just like, oh, just taste it. That's how bad my body was craving these animal foods. And I just put it in my mouth, and I was like, oh, no, I don't even need it. It's all good. Maybe it tastes good, but I don't need it. And it was just sickening. Because even when I got into it, it was like, I don't believe in veganism as a religion. These people, all the vegans I knew were really wacky. But I somehow still got caught up in the I can do this right thing. And yeah, it kind of fucked me up for a good few years after that. My digestion was messed up.

[video] 12:47 All the supplements I was buying, I was using spirulina and chlorella and algaes. I think the algaes are pretty cool. But at the time, I thought these would help balance me out. Nutritional yeast, vitamin B12 patches that you put on your neck supposedly puts the B12, so I'll be fine. I don't need the B12. What else was I doing? The Sun Warrior protein powder, which was like a hemp protein powder, I think. from, I think it was from Health Force Nutritionals, Vitamineral Green, like all these good organic supplements, whole food-based supplements. Thought I was feeling great. Felt better than I did on a standard American diet in the beginning, but man, after about a year, it became apparent that I had lost a lot of lean muscle mass, which I'd never had a lot of anyways. And I was still kind of skinny fat, even at the end there. I thought that was funny. Even though I got leaner, I still...

[video] 13:44 I still always had belly fat, which never went away. So yeah, that's the skeletal outline of it. Two and a half years of battling myself, and I didn't even realize how stupid I was being until the very end when I nearly died.

14:05 Would you say that the supplements are also pretty expensive? Spend a lot of money?

[video] 14:09 For sure. That's why I brought the shoplifting earlier. Everyone I knew used to shoplift supplements. And these vegans, they thought it was so cool. I don't know, man. These people were talking about ethics and saving the planet. But at the same time, they're stealing from organic farmers at the farmer's market. Several people that I knew, and I witnessed them do it. At times, I was shoplifting supplements. It was bad. It was a sketchy, sketchy world. Out of all the criminal underbellies I dabbled in as like a teenager, you know, growing up, hanging out with shady individuals, the vegan world, the vegan underworld was probably like the most sickly of all of them, right? You know, you see crackheads and stuff when you're living in San Diego. You see the people that get into meth. You see heroin addicts. But dude, like the vibe in the vegan community, it was just, it was so much sicker than even like junkies that I knew as a kid.

[video] 15:06 You know, I mean, it was because these people were believing that they were healthy, that what they were doing was good. Whereas at least the junkies I knew were just like, yeah, you know, my life's fucked right now, but it is what it is. They were honest about it. But the sickness in the vegan world, it was like, it was really weird. And it was a strange little world. And seeing, we know a lot of people who raise their kids on a vegan diet. And actually one of the main things that, interested me in really looking into why a vegan diet might not be ideal after I had my own personal anecdotal experience was our daughter. So our daughter was born six years ago. When she was a year old, she started getting dental caries. Right when her teeth came out of the gums, dental caries are when your teeth just chip away. So our little girl, her teeth started chipping off. At the time, we were still doing mostly plant foods, some animal foods.

[video] 16:05 We just thought, you don't need that much meat. You need some, but you don't need that much. As soon as we took notice of her rotting teeth, we started looking into it. We came upon nutrition and physical degeneration, started learning about Weston Price. We started giving her cod liver oil, raw beef liver, raw heart, lots of butter. and animal fats and the dental caries stopped within months. And then our second kid, who was born a few years later, normally each subsequent birth is harder on the mom. The mother gets more nutrient depleted. So usually the later kids have more health problems. But our son, his teeth are totally fine. So it wasn't a genetic thing. It was more of an epigenetic type situation and malnourishment in the mother.

[video] 17:02 can definitely cause dental caries, can cause autoimmune conditions in kids. And all the vegan, we see a lot of vegan families here where we live. We live in Ecuador in this little community where there's a lot of hippies that raise their kids vegan. They don't bring them to doctors or anything, so none of the kids would ever be diagnosed with autism. But you see a lot of the failure to thrive type symptoms, real pale skin, kind of behavioral issues. weirdness is with the kids. I see a huge link between that and feeding kids a vegan diet. I'm not sure if that's just my experience, but it seems like other hippie communities might have similar stuff going on.

17:46 What about the vegan friends you had? Do you still have any contact? Are they still vegan?

[video] 17:51 What happened to them? The first vegan friend I had, like I mentioned, he's in prison. Rob Banks. So there was one red flag right there. I should have saw maybe this diet can lead to some aberrant behavior and poor decision making. Other vegans that I knew at the time, we moved from Santa Cruz in 2010, so we kind of had two different groups of people that we would know as vegans. I still live around quite a few vegans, many of whom still are vegans. still are kind of friendly with me. I wouldn't say I have very many vegan friends. But if I had a best friend, it'd be vegan. No, I'm kidding. I don't really care if you're vegan or not. You can be friends with me. But it seems like most of the vegans that I knew are really running into a lot of health issues now. And the ones that are still stubbornly clinging on to veganism are... I don't know.

[video] 18:51 You see a lot of arrested developments. in those people that I was hanging out with some people that I knew that were, that were vegan at the time. And some of them are giving their kids vegan diets and their kids are having massive issues with their teeth. Um, but yeah, it wasn't in an ethical vegan community. I always kind of, I always kind of got annoyed with those groups because I didn't buy into the ideology. So I wasn't into vegan activism per se. It was more the health aspect of it. But every single vegan I know is now an ex-vegan or their health is still falling apart and they're trying to fast more or do this or that. It's really sad. You see the emaciation going on.

19:33 You already talked about this a lot in your videos, but in short, what do you think is the future of veganism? What's going to happen approximately? Oh, man.

[video] 19:42 I go back and forth, man. It's because you see, all right, so if you just watch YouTube, YouTube veganism, it just seems, it's so weak and it's so ballist and it's so effeminized. It's a real castrated movement. You see a lot of really broken people who are sickly, that look like corpses who are telling people how to be healthy. So I think that aspect of it really reveals itself to a lot of people. But the actual people that are adhering to the ideology and the ones that are really vulnerable, like these, I don't know, I feel like gamers are real vulnerable to it. You know, like kids who grow up in a bubble in cities playing video games. You see a lot of them getting into vegan gains type fans. So I think you're going to see a lot of these kind of autistic type people gravitating towards it and looking for something to latch on to. Looking for some belief. People right now, it seems like we don't have...

[video] 20:42 Most cultures are kind of being broken down from the inside out. So people don't really have cultural coherence. People don't really have families.

[video] 20:51 So I think they want to feel like they belong. I think we're going to see a lot of weirdos get attracted to these movements. You'll probably see some really dumb things done that will bring negative publicity to it. But I do think when you look at all the money that's getting put into it, there's a major agenda by these grain companies, Cargill, Monsanto. A lot of these multinational corporations, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, you see this push for lab-grown meat. They call it clean meat and the Beyond Burger and all this. I think you're going to see a lot of dummies get sucked into it and hopefully push back. That's why I appreciate what you do. I appreciate that people are out there actually speaking against it and talking about the negative aspects of it, whether that whether it's in a nice way or a more confrontational way. I think it takes all sorts of action.

[video] 21:49 I think it's funny that Vice Entertainment, I don't even know what they call themselves, Vice did an article on your stunt where you're eating the heart over there. I think that's good. It brings attention to some of these issues. Even if it seems like it's negative publicity for people speaking out against veganism, I think in the end people are going to see these movements for what they are. And a lot of ex-vegans are coming out now. A lot of people that are suffering on a vegan diet are realizing kind of the error of their ways. So I mean, I'm hopeful and I'm also skeptical. So I don't know. You see billions of dollars being pushed into this. So I think it's going to continue to grow. But if enough people are able to kind of point out the weakness, the incoherence, the

[video] 22:42 the kind of ideological retardedness of the movement, this whole vegan movement, plant-based food movement, then it can stop it. You're never going to feed the whole world on freaking soy and wheat and corn. It's impossible. And less than 3% of the world population identifies as vegan. But it seems like 50% of the internet identifies as vegan. But I think we're looking at a few thousand people out there who are just really loud and you look at most of the, uh, the trolls and like the vegan YouTube thing, you probably have them all banned already. I think I have most of them banned. That's like, there's like 20 or 30 that'll Insta dislike my videos, but every video I put up, there'll be a new troll comment and you ban the troll, the vegan troll, and you get less and less of these comments. So I think that there's, there's a very vocal minority on the internet that, uh,

[video] 23:36 likes to larp and pretend that they're doing something but in the end it's really it's it's weak and it's kind of castrated anything specific you would like to say to any vegans who are watching anything else any experience something you learned well i think i don't know for me the most uh the most important part of it was my kid was like when my daughter's teeth were rotting out and just thinking about the long-term consequences of this you know i mean when you look at other cultures that have lived without wheat and corn and soy and all these grains and stuff like that, you see people with good healthy teeth. You see people that are not degenerating. You see people that have meaning in their life. They do stuff. They're involved in raising and slaughtering their own animals. When you look at our food supply now, we've been so disconnected from it and it's so easy to brainwash us into feeling guilty about it.

[video] 24:35 you know, easy to brainwash people that are living in cities into thinking that meat is murder and that, you know, animals are like people too. You got Disney movies and, you know, people think they're killing Bambi if they're eating meat. It's, you know, it's really silly. So I think there's a lot of cultural programming and people just need to, look, I mean, if you're doing it for the animals, you're being misled. If you're doing it for health, you're being misled into a pit. If you're doing it for the animals and you don't care about your own health, you want to be one of them, at least they're honest. But if you're trying to be healthy and you're trying to be happy and you think that a vegan diet is going to do that for you, just try to be objective and look at what's really going on. You shouldn't be detoxing for years. You shouldn't feel like you're detoxing for more than a few days every once in a while if you get sick. When you eat a meal, you shouldn't be bloating and farting and shitting. You shouldn't be shitting like a ruminant every 20 minutes. We're not meant to do that.

[video] 25:34 If you've been vegan for a while and you feel trapped in the ideology, you've got to realize there's so many people, all those people around you that are desperately trying to get you to cling into their little cult, all those people are going to be ex-vegans in the next 10 years anyways. We need to stop looking for other people for approval and Just really figure out what works for you. There's life after veganism. There's a lot more life after veganism. The detriment that you can do to your health and to your children's health is not worth the silly experiment that you're being duped into thinking is safe or even enlightening. People think it's spiritual to starve themselves. It's sad. We're afraid to eat raw meat even. When I started eating meat again, It took me like a year or so to even get over handling it. I still thought it was weird and dirty when I held it, like I want to wash my hands afterwards.

[video] 26:34 But now it's like I'll pick up, you know, I mean this morning I was, every once in a while I'll go through a period where Gattis will inspire me to eat a little bit more raw meat. I usually like cooking my meat because I like how it tastes. But sometimes when I'm real hungry, I'll pull some meaty bones out and I'll just pop the marrow out. I'll eat the marrow raw and I'll eat the meat off the bones. It's like I'm not afraid of it now. And I think that's a major issue is people thinking meat is unclean. When I got sicker than I've ever been in my life, I was eating nothing but whole food, plant-based diet, right? Nothing but plant foods. And whatever hit me was harder than anything that ever hit me when I was – you know, eating even a standard American diet. You know, my immune system was so trashed, even with all the B12, even with all the sunshine I was being exposed to here. I just couldn't handle it. So you're more likely to get salmonella or E. coli from lettuce or from greens than you are from meat.

[video] 27:33 So I think people need to not be afraid of the meat. Yeah, to me that was a big hurdle. And even like having, you know, how long can I have this meat in my fridge? Is this going to go bad? We start worrying about all these little things so much, but I think just eating a nutrient-dense, whole foods-based diet is a good idea, but you need animal foods. The human diet is not like plant foods plus some animal foods every once in a while. The human diet, in my opinion, is

[video] 28:11 fatty animal foods with every once in a while you're forced to eat some plant foods right in times of deprivation um and i think we've inverted it and uh yeah so yeah don't feel guilty about leaving the movement it's not i mean what what is this movement going towards and to me the the whole vegan movement you see it's like a revolving door for um the adolescent psychopaths who just want to find something to cling on to and find some reason to uh some way to project their hatred on the humanity. And it's really sad. You see a lot of anti-natalism, right? Like, don't have kids, castrate yourself. Not castrate, but vasectomy. It's like a rite of passage to get a vasectomy in veganism. So before you get sucked down that little rabbit hole, think about what you're doing. If you're 18 years old and you're considering getting a vasectomy because Freely the Banana Whore and Durian Rider said it's cool and enlightening.

[video] 29:11 I feel really bad. It's sad because some of these things are irreversible. They say that a vasectomy can be reversed, but it's very difficult and very expensive if you want to get those procedures reversed. I think people are going to be bummed out when they realize that they've been duped into kind of taking themselves out of the gene pool.

29:33 Yeah, that's crazy if you do it when you're 18. You can't comprehend it.

[video] 29:38 I wonder how many vegans have sterilized themselves because of this thing.

29:42 Crazy.

[video] 29:43 I wonder how many people who watch your videos, how many vegans have not sterilized themselves, right? How many kids are going to be born just because they saw some of your videos? I mean, it's crazy.

[video] 29:59 So yeah, but you know what's funny? This week I've been eating a little bit more raw meat. So I'm glad we got to talk. So do you like raw bone marrow?

30:08 I do. I do like chicken bone marrow. That's what I eat mostly, but it's not so much, but yeah, anything I can get. Sure. That's great.

[video] 30:15 I love beef bone marrow. It's weird when you get like a whole leg, there'll be parts of the marrow that are softer and more watery and buttery. And then other parts that are a little bit more dry.

[video] 30:28 I love the marrow. I probably, I bought like 40 pounds of bones last week and I've been eating the marrow every day and having a little bit of the raw meat off the bone. But I still have yet to ever go a whole day with raw meat. Although I've thought about it several times, I usually end up wanting a steak because there's something about searing it and the juices inside of it. But one of these days, I'll do an all raw meat day. But I think you say that you digest raw a lot better, right? Yeah. There could be something there. There could be something there because the last few days, I had raw brain. lots of raw marrow, and probably a third of the meat that I was eating was raw. And digestion did seem like pretty good. I don't know if better, it's hard to say better, But I think I might try a few days of all raw just to test it out.

31:24 Right on, yeah. Could you sum up the – oh, did you want to say something? Oh, go ahead, man. Yeah, like the top three reasons you quit veganism health-wise. Was it the digestion, energy, like the main reasons you quit?

[video] 31:39 Quitting veganism? Well, number one, almost dying.

31:42 Yeah, well.

[video] 31:43 So almost dying. So like a week – I mean this was a week of like dry fasting. So it was – I couldn't eat anything. Everything I ate would come out both ends. I couldn't even drink water. And the whole time I'm thinking, what the hell have I been doing to myself? I just knew I was malnourished. So yeah, all three of those I would say would be in one. It was my digestion, my health. Both took a really sudden and drastic turn for the worse. I wasn't able to handle exposure to basic flu or virus or whatever it was that hit me.

[video] 32:19 and but also it just the mentality of it i was so unnecessarily restricting myself like it became it became so silly and like i said like i wasn't ideologically married to it but i wanted to prove to myself that i could do it and it was it was just so silly you know so i'd say mentally i think that the malnourishment definitely was leading me to make poor decisions like that you know i mean if i was uh I don't think I was in my right mind. I thought I felt better, but looking back and looking at how much muscle mass I lost and thinking back on how I felt, I should have taken the signs, you know, the getting very fatigued during the day near the end there, kind of the blood sugar dysregulation that was going on. I'd say the reasons that I quit veganism were my health completely failing, digestive issues getting progressively worse.

[video] 33:16 thinking that I was just getting detoxification symptoms. And also, just ideologically, I was so sick of it. I was trying to make it work, thinking that my body would line up, thinking that it would get better because of the honeymoon phase that did initially feel better than a standard American diet. But also just seeing other people, seeing a lot of people in the vegan movement Seeing their health fall apart, seeing their families kind of suffering from their decisions they were making, all of that led me to really rethinking it. And the final straw was after our daughter was born. Now, we weren't vegan at the time, right? But seeing our daughter's dental caries and seeing the degeneration that she had to experience in her teeth because of her being conceived while we were in this, you know, just coming out of, this vegan phase.

[video] 34:15 So I think like expectant mothers, if you've been vegan for a long time, you're thinking about having a kid, I do think it's important to give your body like a few years to regenerate and to get the fat soluble vitamins you need to get your vitamin A, vitamin D levels up and just get all these other cofactors that are coming in animal foods from organs and stuff like that to improve your nutrition for a while before conceiving because your kids can definitely suffer the consequences. Yeah, I think that's it.

34:48 Yeah, anything else you want to add?

[video] 34:51 No, yeah, I think, I mean, now, like when you cut out of veganism and you're still afraid of meat, I think it can take time to kind of rearrange your relationship there, but just get into it. You know, I mean, eat the whole animal, eat the liver, eat the heart, you know, and go for the nutrient-dense parts of the animal that people are rejecting. You can save money that way. and feel a lot better. Eating a lot of animal foods is something that has just been progressively improving the health of me, my wife, and our whole family. Our kids love steak. They love eggs. They love butter, tallow, organs. We're really grateful that we do eat meat now. What's funny is even after six years It's been six years since we were vegan. So I started in 2009, stopped in 2011, early 2011, seven years later.

[video] 35:50 And I still love eating meat, like every single day. If I have a steak, it still tastes like the best steak I've ever had. It never gets old. I think it's so funny. It's like when I first got out of the vegan diet, I was eating whatever. I just ate whatever I wanted. Bread, wheat, pasta. All that stuff. But I've kind of found it like stripping it down, stripping my diet down over the years to the bare essentials. And what is unavoidably essential are animal fats, animal foods. And right now I eat basically just meat and some egg yolks. That's kind of been my diet. And fish for the last few months. And sometimes chocolate. I like chocolate. It's like the only plant food I eat. Yeah, don't be afraid of the animal foods. We're carnivores. We're not omnivores. or carnivores who can eat some plants, just like a dog can go out and eat a little bit of grass every once in a while.

[video] 36:46 You can go out and eat a little kale every once in a while, but you're not going to make a healthy diet based around roughage, kale, and foods that we would only eat if we were starving. So, yeah, that's it.

36:58 Yeah, that sums it up well. Thanks, Tristan.

[video] 37:02 Yeah, man. Thanks for having me on, Gattis.