phil escott carnivore
So what's the deal with the carnivore diet? Many high-profile individuals have been talking about dropping everything but meat and fat from their diets and report miraculous healing benefits. Autoimmune conditions, diabetes, depression, arthritis, skin problems, weight loss - the benefits of going zero carb seem to be limitless.

Today we're joined by Phil Escott, health writer, blogger, personal trainer, novelist, drummer from the UK and author of the book 'ARTHRITIS - The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me: Healing the pain of psoriatic and rheumatoid arthritis and how autoimmunity can heal your body and soul'. Due to a crippling bout of inflammatory arthritis in 2010, which he reversed by natural means including an ancestral/seasonal low carb diet, addressing EMFs and circadian mismatches and emotional balancing, further intense study revealed many secrets of healing normally hidden behind the misleading conventional medical and health dogma. Phil's healing journey eventually lead him to the carnivore diet and he hasn't looked back since!

Join us on this episode of the Health and Wellness Show, as Phil tells us about his own path back to health, with the many steps along the way, and the benefits of a carnivore diet for health and well-being.

Running Time: 01:41:55

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Elliot: Hello and welcome to the Health and Wellness Show. Today I'm your host, Elliot and I'm joined in our virtual studio from all over the planet by Doug.

Doug: Hello.

Elliot: Today we have a very special guest. His name is Phil Escott. So Phil is a health writer, blogger, personal trainer, novelist and drummer from the UK who has spent many years in the health and fitness industry running a gym, writing for many magazines and training hundreds of clients successfully. Due to a crippling bout of inflammatory arthritis in 2010 which was reversed by natural means including an ancestral and seasonal low carb diet, addressing EMFs and circadian mismatches and then emotional balancing, further intense study revealed many secrets of healing normally hidden behind the misleading conventional media and health dogma. Reversing so-called incurable illness has taken him to knowledge he would never otherwise have discovered. It has deepened his relationship with himself, his loved ones and his fellow human beings in general and given him a deep confidence that all is very much well with the world.

It takes some time to discover that illness on any level is a true gift which modern society tells us to ignore by blotting all of the painful but essential symptoms with dangerous pharmaceuticals. Through illness we can breed all we need to know about what we need to heal at a deeper level than just physically. Phil's aim now is to share this knowledge with as many people as possible to help them attain their health and happiness goals too which he does by public talks, YouTube videos, Skype consultations and his website at pureactivity.net. He has also published three books including an Amazon Kindle bestseller on healing autoimmune conditions and his own journey in detail called Arthritis: The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me with a forward by well-known neurosurgeon and medical visionary Dr. Jack Kruse.

So welcome to the show Phil.

Phil: Thank you very much Elliot. Thank you.

Elliot: So just to start off Phil, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and little bit about your story. You said that you had an autoimmune condition. Where did that really all start for you?

Phil: Well you know, quite often we get something serious and we think that's where it started but if you look back over the years or the decades you can often see that it started a long time before that. So when I look at it I think probably it all started about the mid-80s in my early experiments with long-term vegetarianism when things started to go wrong and then the early '90s when I was in a band and my wrist started to be so painful I'd have to put it in a bucket of ice in between sets. This sort of came and went. At the end of the '90s I took over a gym and ran that for about four years. Before that I was doing a lot of mountain biking and stuff and writing for the magazine doing route guides, doing a lot of exercise.

When I joined the gym I got into really abbreviated training and got quite big and whatever and thought I was quite healthy but still I had a lot of joint issues. And then coming off the more "healthy" post-vegetarian diet onto your sort of pizza and pasta type thing through the 2000s and up to 2010 I put on a lot of weight and all sorts of issues started to come up, all sorts of digestive issues, skin issues, always overheating. I was definitely very inflamed the whole time, couldn't take the sun, ended up with fatty liver, liver cysts, kidney stones as well as the psoriatic arthritis that hit at the end of 2010 when both ankles really inflamed and my knee and everything went. And that's where it got really bad.

So yes, the end of 2010 I was in a proper mess and because of my vegetarian brainwashing, mostly coming from the spiritual side of things, being a long-time meditator and yogi if you like, I thought going even more vegetarian must be the answer so I ended up vegan and then raw vegan. I lost a lot of weight but it was also most of my muscle and I ended up coming down from 15 stone which is something like 210 pounds to about 9 stone which is 125 pounds. I was really emaciated.

Actually the last 15 pounds of that just disappeared on low carb and cold thermogenesis which ripped everything off me. But most of it was lost on just tonnes of fasting because every time I ate anything I'd have horrible reactions however healthy I thought it was. All that juiced spinach and oxalates gave me the most horrendous kidney stone that got stuck in there for three months. It was in my ureter. It was only actually really painful for a day but that day went on longer than the rest of the three months.

I had to have that lasered out and then they said I could never eat meat again, well, never eat much protein again. Of course no kidney stones since then and living on pretty much 100% meat. So I started to notice that a lot of the conventional wisdom was nonsense which I kind of always knew. But then I started to notice that all this stuff that I'd studied was mostly nonsense as well, the way that they'd interpreted Ayurvedic medicine and thinking that's a vegetarian science. And then getting too hung up in diet and not realizing there are other aspects to it as well.

But anyway, eventually discovered low carb and ketogenic diets and that really helped and pretty much got rid of it. But in the last three years of being fully carnivore, things have improved again so much. There was nothing overt really symptom-wise, but just energy and well-being and everything and just being able to stay lean just by stuffing my face and all these extraordinary things that I wish I'd known decades ago. But there we go and that sort of brings us up to the present where I just Skype people and help out and continue to study hours and hours a day. It's a never-ending quest isn't it? There's so much more to learn all the time. So there we are. That's where we are now.

Elliot: Certainly. What I would really like you to know - and I'm sure the listeners would be interested to hear as well - you said that you went onto the ketogenic and low-carb diet and this is really quite common now, but what was it that gave you the idea to completely cut out vegetables as well? Because typically on the low-carb and ketogenic diet they really do emphasize lots of fibre, lots of green vegetables, spinach, kale and whatnot. So what was it that spurred you on to really take the leap and go just on the pure meat diet?

Phil: You know, I'm not really sure exactly what it was. It was just a few things that I started to find like the Anderson family and they've been on ribeye steaks for 20 years now or whatever and how well they were doing and looking at Owsley the Bear Stanley who's the Grateful Dead's sound engineer and made all their LSD and whatever and he lived on meat only for 53 years I think. I just started to wonder if these little niggles that I've got left are anything to do with vegetables. I've never liked vegetables really. To me they've just been sponges for butter. If I cook up some broccoli and eat it without anything on it, it really doesn't taste very nice and I doubt if anybody really thinks it takes that nice. I might be wrong but most people say you need a lot of butter on it.

So I just thought I'd drop them out and I noticed the days when I couldn't be bothered to cook vegetables I felt better. So over a period of a couple of months they just kind of fizzled out. And it was such a relief. I found them very boring to cook and annoying to shop for and you always had that compost drawer in the fridge where things were going gooey at the bottom. {laughter} And I was glad to see the back of them really and just felt better and better. And after I started to really look into it and all this stuff came up with Georgia Ede and the poisons in vegetables and how people with autoimmune conditions the starch in vegetables can take all those anti-nutrients further down into the gut where they might activate klebsiella bacteria which have such a connection to autoimmunity.

I started to realize that when I was really sick, if I had a load of vegetables I'd feel horrendous but if I ate a bar of chocolate I didn't feel anywhere near so bad. There wasn't really a reaction. That's not saying a sugary bar of chocolate is that good and to a diabetic I would say that it's probably more important to cut loads of chocolate out than it is to cut the vegetables out. But if you're autoimmune I'd say it's the other way around. Obviously it's best to cut both out but it wasn't causing the reaction of the fibrous veg. Although my digestion was an awful lot better than it was when I was vegetarian, even on the keto diet it wasn't anywhere near as good as it is now on an all-meat diet and that I think is something that we're seeing in an awful lot of carnivores, is just how wonderful the digestion is, how perfect your turds end up {laughter} after years of just exploding several times a day. And the relief of that is marvellous.

If you search really well you can find these things on PubMed you can find these things. There's a study with 64 people that shows that constipated people, when they cut all the fibre out of their diet, expecting them probably to explode and all of a sudden all of their digestive issues are disappearing and it was pretty much all of them. It wasn't just "Oh look, a couple are okay. Maybe it's okay for some people." They were saying "We're going to have to really reconsider our thoughts." The World Journal of Gastroenterology was saying that and if they're reconsidering all their thoughts about fibre and the results that we're seeing, I know that you and I are on at least one group in common, my group. You're probably on many others like I am too.

But you're seeing this story many times. People criticize it as anecdotes but when they get into the hundred and thousands you've really got to take notice. So it was that really, just realizing veg aren't really necessary. Now, are fruits and things necessary? I don't really have a problem with them. Maybe they're great for circadian signalling at some times of year. I don't think they're necessary particularly, particularly in the north, particularly in the winter. It's all down to light and seasons. Perhaps we only ate fruit because it was for the benefit of the bushes and the trees to spread their seeds. I can't remember the last time I saw an apple tree growing out of my toilet. {laughter} I don't think we really have that advantage anymore.

So I don't know. My kids eat some fruit. They don't eat any grains. They don't have any vegetables. We don't have any vegetables in the house. But I've got absolutely no problem with them while their healthy eating fruits. I don't think fruit would break anybody. But when you're really sick I think it's one of the things you have to back up on. I don't think they have the poisons that vegetables do but they're not particularly necessary and definitely delay gut healing.

Elliot: As I'm sure you know, what you're saying Phil is, to anyone who has any training in nutrition, this is a heresy.

Phil: Yeah, absolutely.

Elliot: Both Doug and I have training in nutrition and what we both were taught is completely opposite of what you're saying but as you said, rightly so, when there are hundreds if not thousands of people who are saying the same thing over and over again, we have to start to take note. Just for the listeners who aren't familiar, we're talking about toxins in plants. So could you just talk about some of the toxins that we're aware of because people generally think of green vegetables as the ultimate superfoods and health foods. The toxicity of these things generally gets overlooked or is not very well known. So could you just go into some of the things that might be problematic for someone when they're eating lots of these vegetables?

Phil: Sure. Well they're considered a superfood aren't they? But I guess that's the only way anyone's really going to eat them because they taste pretty horrible. I don't mind some of them. I suppose they're alright. But trying to munch your way through a plate of kale, I really don't know how anybody ever did that. It's awful. It's just horrible, fibrous nonsense. I'm not up on all the poisons but there's lectins which are tremendously bad. You take in a lectin when you've got arthritis and you see how that feels. It's horrendous. There's salicylates, oxalates that cause the kidney stones so much that people are blaming on the meat and so they give up meat and then they end up on kale and rice and they just get kidney stones for the rest of their lives. Spinach is full of oxalates.

I think that there are quite a few in there. I'm not really up on all of them. I think if anybody wants to look into that, have a look at some of the talks by Georgia Ede. I forget all the terms of all the different toxins but I don't know exactly what they're doing. There's all kinds of things hidden away in there, anti-nutrients. The old theory is that plants have these defence systems against being eaten and they have to have poisons in there. They can't fight the predators off.

So I think we always ate root vegetables. I don't think there's the same toxins in those. In potatoes maybe, there's nightshades which you get in a lot of other vegetables too. But the nightshades are pretty bad when you've got something autoimmune. But yams, sweet potatoes, things like that that probably people have dug up for millennia and they were okay. But are they necessary? Are they absolutely necessary? I don't know.

The leaves and fibrous stalks of plants, I'm not sure we ever ate them. I don't think those vegetables ever existed when we were foraging around for stuff and I think we'd have pretty much ignored them. They're just things that have really been bred to eat for us. So cauliflower and broccoli are something you're very unlikely to come across foraging around in the north of England 10,000 years ago. It's not something that's natural. And the fruits are also bred for the sugars now.

So most of these fruits and vegetables are kind of man-made things. They're not really anything particularly natural. And then you've got all the pesticides and whatever sprayed on them. So to me they seem to be a hotbed of toxins. Now do I think nobody should eat them? Not really. The way I look at it, I have this sort of vision about the gut. I don't know how scientific this is. It sort of seems to tie in with what people are researching, but when I use my intuition about what's happened to me, I get this feeling. Imagine if somebody's got gut integrity of 100%, their gut's absolutely fine. They might eat some vegetables, some cauliflower and some broccoli and spinach and all of this stuff and maybe it sort of shaves off one or two percent of that integrity and by the time they've had their next meal it's probably back to 100% again.

So they never notice it. They never think that there's anything wrong with these vegetables and for them there probably isn't. But then if you've already destroyed your gut and your gut integrity is maybe down to one or two percent or whatever, if you destroyed them with all the grains, pizzas, pasta, all the nonsense and the non-dietary stuff like wifi and artificial light that they might come onto, all of these things wreck the mitochondrial functioning and cause a leaky gut. You're gut's already leaky and then you take in a whole meal of broccoli and cauliflower, you notice it. It scrapes your gut right back to nothing.

And this is probably not exactly what's happening but in my mind this is kind of how I visualize it. So then somebody is really going to notice that and as they're showing at the wonderful clinic with Zsรณfia Clemens and Csaba Tรณth in Hungary, Paleomedicina and their incredible results for healing up leaky gut, they're showing gut permeability tests. But the gut never truly heals in someone who's really sick when they still have plant matter left in the diet.

So I think this is the problem. Now if somebody really misses broccoli and goes absolutely wild for it, {laughter} which I've never known, I'm sure if you re-establish the gut integrity you can go and hit the broccoli again. But if I want to have a few vices I'd rather they were a bit more entertaining than broccoli so I can't see it coming back. Nobody's convinced me that it's necessary. So until I have some kind of health marker that shows me that broccoli might be the antidote I'm not getting any, all I'm feeling is increased health at my horrendously old age. And things seem to be just getting easier and easier.

So there we go. A bit of a roundabout non-scientific way of explaining it. I keep an eye on all the science and I really do take it in and look at it loads but then I have to sort of turn it around to how it feels for me inside, having had a really trashed gut and how it feels to heal it. And I don't think that somebody who eats a good ketogenic diet, and they're really healthy is ever probably going to notice the problems with vegetables.

Having said that, when I started that Facebook group for just 10 friends in January, it's grown to five-and-a-half thousand people. It's amazing. But I only started it for a few friends and in the first month when it started to grow to a hundred or a couple of hundred I started to notice people who were doing this carnivore diet just to support their partners who were sick - 'let's get vegetables out of the house for a month. It can't kill me. I'll go with you' - I started to get posts by them saying "Wow! I thought I was healthy but now my digestion is so much better. My focus is so much better. My energy levels are more stable. I've lost that last bit of lower belly fat." That kind of thing. I started to get more posts from the people who were healthy. So who knows? It's not going to make them overtly sick I don't think but they might just be really surprised at the results. And I always say "Just try it for 30-90 days. Even a vegan diet isn't going to kill you in that time."

So there you go. It's interesting that we can thrive so well without these vegetables after all the brainwashing.

Doug: Yeah. Actually getting into the brainwashing because that's something that I had a couple of questions about. So the common objection to this that you get from people is, probably the most popular one would be "Where are you going to get your vitamin C? Why are you not dropping dead of scurvy?"

Phil: Well I should be dead long ago, shouldn't I?

Doug: Exactly.

Phil: Because I haven't had any overt vitamin C since 2015, something like that. Hang on, I know why I'm alive, for any vegans listening. I had a handful of blackberries about two months ago that I found behind me in a bush when I was out in the sun fishing, out with my feet on the ground in the sun and the blackberries were in season.

So I thought I'd eat some. So that's probably what saved my life. {laughter} It's funny, that's what they say about the Inuit, don't they? That oh the only reason they're still alive is because they eat berries in the spring and they search through the caribou stomach contents for vegetables and they get all this sludge out. Did they really do that? I don't know.

It's a funny one but as far as I can see - and again I'm no scientist - I'm not seeing anybody coming down with scurvy on a carnivore diet. There is, as far as I can see very quickly, that vitamin C competes with glucose in the body. So if you're not having glucose you need very, very little vitamin C, if any at all. Yes, there's some in meat but is it enough to ward off scurvy? Traditionally no. So what's happening? Well I don't know. I look at all the science but it's really hard to tell. I don't put science really above anecdotes.

When you get an anecdote like something like Stephenson's book - Stephenson went out there and lived with the Inuit in 1910 or around that time and he lived for I think 10 years with the Inuit - and his book is fascinating. He's got no agenda. There were no diet wars back then. He just really observed what they ate and they weren't really eating any plant matter. Sometimes they'd go at least nine months with no plant matter at all. Nobody was getting scurvy. Back then it seems that the ship's captains knew this as well. If you had access to fresh meat you never got scurvy. The business of lime juice and "let's cure scurvy with lime juice", that came up an awful lot even around then and it's kind of pushed the meat knowledge out.

Really interestingly, in Stephenson's book he says "This is why Scott's expeditions to the Antarctic failed from bad medical advice to not get onto a local diet". But if you see Stephenson's accounts of his expeditions, the ones who got scurvy were the ones who wouldn't go onto the local diet and who were eating the stuff that they brought with them, which contained a lot of plant matter. So up in the Arctic they were getting scurvy very quickly on plant matter and when they changed to a local diet because they didn't have access to vitamin C up there, they changed onto a local diet of fresh meat and fat and the scurvy went away. It didn't only prevent it, it got rid of it.

So there's something we're not understanding there. And the vegans are always saying the Inuit are sick and this and that and they've got heart disease and they only live to 50. Well if you get an old Inuit - and there were plenty - they didn't have our modern diseases and they were living in a harsh environment that took loads of them. There were accidents, animal attacks, probably drowning or freezing to death, the infant mortality, that kind of thing. And the studies that vegans quote were pretty much done in the 50s and 70s long after the grains came through the trading posts and now the Inuit are as sick as anyone else.

These guys didn't even have a tooth cavity before the western foods came in. It was unheard of. So they go on about some thickening of the arteries in the heart and this happens with a lot of indigenous tribes. So did they actually die of this heart disease? I don't think so. I think that some people have said it's due to smoke inhalation in confined spaces but it looks to me like something like their wrinkly, weathered faces. It's probably just as harmful as that, but they're not getting the plaques and whatever flying around and sitting in the artery walls like we are from our diet.

So the fact that meat causes any problems or you're going to die of scurvy from it, the vitamin C is a fascinating one. I think it's a really easy one to show because we're just not getting anybody getting scurvy on a carnivore diet. It's not happening.

Elliot: What's really interesting about this I think is that the way that science operates now is that people try to fit observations into their current theories. The recommended daily allowance, the nutrients, there are so many holes in that because like many have already pointed out - I think you've spoken about this Phil and so has Dr. Shawn Baker and whatnot - the recommended nutrient allowances or the recommendations are based on a primarily carbohydrate-based diet. The only thing that we know about the quantities of nutrients that we require is on a modern day diet. So all of these nutrient deficiencies and these various illnesses that come because of nutrient deficiencies, the recommended allowances apply to that. They clearly apply to that.

But when you turn the tables and you go back to this primal pure meat-based diet, no one really knows what you need. I think that the problem is, is that when people start applying these nutrient requirements to this other kind of diet, the carnivore-based approach, things start to fall apart because, like you said, you haven't had vitamin C in almost three years and you haven't got scurvy. So clearly there are things that we don't understand. And so it's kind of like science is really quite limited in that respect. I'll say I'm a member of your group on Facebook and just for the listeners it's called 100% carnivore and beyond.

Looking through the various testimonials it's quite amazing to see some of the beneficial effects that this is having on people. And I'm sure you're much more familiar with all of the accounts on that. But could you explain some of the benefits that people have had from taking this approach to their diet and some of the reversals that people have experienced?

Phil: Yeah sure. I'll start off on your point about science because the main criticism I get is there's no science behind it. Where's the science? You're just a shill for the meat industry, all that kind of thing, the attacks that I get on YouTube. I wish there was someone paying me to do this. That would be great. But there isn't. So I take a different view of science I suppose.

A lot of people look at science and then they try and see how this is working in the real world. Well I do look at the science. I really do. I love looking at it but I look more at results I've had, results other people I'm having and then you go and look at the science and say "How is it explaining that?" And very often if you do it that way round you can find a lot of things that are already there or a lot of things that are already written up that are very suspicious.

I haven't looked at all the studies like Nina Teicholz has or Ivor Cummins. I think Nina has looked at 10,000 studies and realized that only 50 of them sort of half held up and then under closer scrutiny they don't really. So all this business about meat being carcinogenic, saturated fat causing heart disease, I've seen arterial plaques disappear on a really high saturated fat diet and I developed those arterial plaques on a grain and vegetable-based diet. So I think that if you look at the science with a view to explaining what's already gone on and also if something in that science is pointing towards nature.

This is why I love Jack Kruse so much. He's an extraordinary character and upsets a hell of a lot of people. But his view to this is how does nature work? How does it do it? And then he goes into the science to explain how nature is already doing stuff instead of trying to bend nature to some kind of weird theory. And then you end up with people doing this and measuring out that and RDAs and taking thousands of supplements and all of this trying to say "Well the bloods say this and the bloods say that." Instead of that, why don't you figure out what happened ancestrally and what happens to people who don't have these conditions and then take away all the things that we've added since then and see how the body responds?

If you can fool the body into thinking that it's back in caveman times in a sort of temperature, light, diet and emotional, electromagnetic issues, you know, take all those away and you find that the body heals very, very quickly. It throws off things that medical science is baffled by. So you make these claims and people who haven't actually seen it, people who haven't actually been on groups like that seeing things reversed, don't believe it. And then of course they get very angry with you because you sound like a real snake oil salesman. "Drink this potion and it's going to cure everything."

It's not like that at all. It's taking away all the shit that caused the problem in the first place. So what I'm seeing on the group, god I can't think of stuff I haven't seen. I've seen so much autoimmunity reversed. I've seen thyroid conditions reversed. A lot of people say keto diets are dangerous for thyroids. I'm no expert on this but I've been keeping a particular eye on the treatment of a couple of people by Paleomedicina in Hungary and how confident they are, where they just say "throw the thyroid medicine in the bin".

I can't say stuff like that but they are and they're totally confident, even when the thyroid markers go right up afterwards to the point where anybody would panic and any doctor would say "You are insane for following this diet". Then if you push through that point, suddenly it all balances out and there's obviously some kind of reaction, some sort of Herxheimer, some kick-back thing afterwards.

But thyroids seem to be sorting themselves out. Diabetes I think is a fairly simple one now. You can do that pretty much on a reasonably low carb ordinary paleo diet with a few veg. I've seen cancer. One of the most amazing ones recently was my mum's case. She died earlier this year of two bouts of pneumonia. It was nothing to do with the breast cancer that she had. She was 92, 93 when we found she had breast cancer. She died at 94.

But we put her on an all-meat diet. We tried a load of things, cannabis oil, but she was getting a bit too stoned and at that age she was getting a bit fed about with that. But we were seeing the tumour reducing. Then we took the cannabis oil away and it sort of stabilized but then it came back again, sorted out her light environment, this and that, bought one five quid bottle of iodine and gave her an iodine protocol and that reversed the tumour.

Doug: Wow.

Phil: I've got a talk on YouTube with pictures of that. She let me put these pictures up. It was a talk that I did at the World Health Innovation Summit earlier this year with some health professionals and stuff. And you can see the thing disappearing. Of course the vegans say "Oh well, it was actually the other way around" or "You photoshopped it" or something. You see this again and again. Paleomedicina are having tremendous results with cancer. They're reversing the tumours, they're stabilizing the tumours as long as people are 100% compliant.

There's Andrew Scarborough.

Doug: Yeah.

Phil: I don't know if you've interviewed him or whatever. He's keeping it all at bay with this. He's great, Andrew. He's eating brains and worms and stuff and crickets. He's hard core. He eats some tremendous stuff. What else have I seen? Of course the Crohn's and digestive issues. That's amazing. I was speaking to a lady just last week and she's had terrible trouble. She's had terribly bad Crohn's and she's had her - what's it called when they actually take a whole section of the bowel out?

Elliot: Bowel resection.

Phil: Yeah, yeah. She's got tremendous obstacles to overcome. She was in the middle of a huge Crohn's flare-up, absolutely desperate and I thought "Wow, this is going to be a real difficult one" because all the advice against it, she was just about to go on to Humira and I got a message from her yesterday and it was just "I've been able to avoid this Humira shot. I can't believe it. It's just calmed right down. It's three fucking days!" This message just saying "I cannot believe this, that it's reversed this Crohn's flare". And yeah, lots of things I'm seeing.

The weight loss is one. That doesn't always happen, particularly if somebody's been starving themselves with a caloric deficit for a while, the muscle density and bone density can come up so the scales can go up. But the body composition is always better. God, I could go on and on. You see all these wonderful stories and then people say they're just anecdotes but they're just not seeing what we're seeing.

They're not seeing the thousands of them. Shawn Baker's always talking about this on his "Meat Heals" thing where he's collecting this evidence and the Zero Carbs Zen site. That's Esmรฉe La Fleur's site. You see these beautiful stories and you just can't ignore them. They're not all lying. They're not all meat shills. {laughter} It's a wonderful thing that's going on. Yes, we're ahead of the science at the moment and nobody's really particularly motivated to do trials on this. So you've got to do that.

But I think what people forget when they say "This could be just a short-term thing" or if you tried something else, most people who come to carnivory have been through everything else. It's the last resort. Because of the brain washing they've been through everything else. They've been vegan. They've been vegetarian. They've tried macrobiotic. They've been keto even and still I see great results over and above a keto diet when the last of the veg go.

Rhonda Patrick did this interview with Joe Rogan yesterday and she was saying "Yes, but the long-term thing, all your red blood cells are going to blow up long-term" and all of that. I don't know. Maybe they will show some disadvantages long-term but the thing for me is it's quality of life over quantity and if this is just ripping people's' symptoms away that fast and their blood work seems to be fine and they feel great and they're not having any other issues coming in to replace the original ones, apart from a few digestive issues in the first month as things turn themselves around, maybe the gut microbiome re-establishes itself in a different proportion. I don't know what's going on there. Nobody does actually. Some people pretend to but nobody really does.

Maybe there's a few problems in electrolyte issues in the first month, but past that, there just seems to be these tremendous miracles. I can't ignore it and obviously somebody like Rhonda Patrick is suspicious of it but what I find is the people who criticize it are the people who've never tried it. That's what's happening. If people have tried it they go "Hang on a minute! There's something here."

Doug: Yeah. There was a Joe Rogan podcast with Chris Kresser on and a vegan doctor of some kind as well and they also expressed a lot of scepticism about the carnivore diet. What I've found anyway is that it seems to be the people who are really, really immersed in the science, reading a lot of the studies and that's where they're taking all of their information from, those are the people who seem to be quite sceptical because you haven't seen a lot of science on people who have eliminated everything except for meat. You don't really see academic studies being done on this. So I think it's a filter or a bubble for them. 'If it's not in the literature then I'm sceptical of it'.

Phil: Yes, you do see a lot of that but of course they get the credibility because they have science behind them. It's not scientific, it's not this, it's not that. But for millennia we got by without science really. But the thing is, they say that the science is behind it. They're just not digging enough. It's scientism. They're looking at the stuff that makes it to the big publications or they're looking at the stuff that gets to the tabloid press, if they're vegan/vegetarian or whatever, the people who take notice of that kind of science and trust the establishment.

But there is real science. If you look at what they're doing at Paleomedicina in Hungary. Look at what's coming out now with Ivor Cummins and Nina Teicholz, the new research that's coming out that's really pretty much debunking a lot of this stuff. And what's really exciting me at the moment is perhaps the biggest elephant in the room that's always been there. It's been a glaring hole in this theory. Now we realize that most diseases are not genetic or just bad luck or whatever. They're mitochondrial. And then you see exactly what the researchers into deuterium are showing. It seems to tie in with absolutely everything that the carnivores are finding and that the biohackers are finding.

I'm just starting to listen to one podcast and it's Laszlo Boros and Que Collins and these two are really leading deuterium researchers. It's on the Lifestylist podcast. You should get Laszlo on. He's a funny guy. He's on the group. But he is a researcher. He was paid to research into deuterium. He was very sceptical. He didn't want to do it and he found out that it was really, really reversing cancer. It's depleted deuterium in the system. I'll mention quickly what deuterium is in a minute but he ended up curing his own cancer when his twin brother also adopted, died of his.

When you see that perhaps it's just taking away the things that are stopping the mitochondria turning themselves over and clearing out the cell and this autophagy and apoptosis and just making sure that the body can clear its own crap up, this seems to be illustrated beautifully in the theory of deuterium which is a stabilized type of hydrogen. I don't really understand this. I'm repeating this parrot-fashion. But I do understand that it's something that clogs up the cell and the less of it we have the better in most circumstances, not always. When you're a child and growing up, that's why they like fruit and whatever, get some deuterium in them is fantastic. But when you're fully grown, you have too much deuterium you still carry on growing but you grow fat or you grow cancer.

And this is what's happening with deuterium overloads. And you see people even on ordinary diets when they get on deuterium-depleted water, they're clearing up their cancer. Dr. Que Collins has been showing this for a long time. Laszlo Boros is showing it. It ties in with the Paleomedicina stuff although they're not mentioning deuterium. But animal foods are very low in deuterium. So to me this is where Jack Kruse nails it beautifully because it's all about light cycles. Why are people totally healthy eating all these wonderful plant foods and fruits and everything on the equator and yet they get very sick and die of scurvy if they eat grains and stuff in the Arctic? Because they're not depleting deuterium. It's more difficult to deplete deuterium without sunlight, without getting your feet on the ground, without good water.

It sort of ties everything in. When you start to look at the science that's tying everything in with nature, it blows your mind because it is there. It was always that simple. I reckon you can probably explain to somebody how to stay healthy in about five minutes but you've got to unwind all of this brainwashing, all of these layers and layers of science that's happened over the years that points to something different. But you can explain it to people when you say "Hey, we've got all this artificial light, wifi. Obviously that's disrupting our mitochondria and it's making it more difficult to deplete deuterium. We can't stay healthy on the grain-based diets that even our grandparents were staying healthy on in this environment now. We have to be more strict with our diets.

You can tell people that the light is affecting it. They go "Oh yeah, that makes sense. The lights going in and it's messing around our circadian biology." You can tell them about wifi and you can say "Well you understand that this can disrupt things at the cellular level. "Oh yeah, that makes sense. Oh and I do feel so much better when I'm outside and when I go on holiday and I'm in the sea and I've got the sun. Of course the sun. Yeah, that makes sense." "And then why don't you try just eating meat?" "Oh piss off!" {laughter} You know? Because there's so much crap built up around the diet stuff that you've got to unwind it and unwind it. This is why I find it far easier to work with someone who's been on McDonalds and fries and Coke because you say "Hey, eat steak with butter on it all day long" and they go "Great. That sounds good."

Doug: Yeah.

Phil: But if you try it with a vegetarian or a vegan you've got to spend a month unwinding everything and sending them alternative science and sending them all of this to show them "Look, it was probably nonsense in the first place."

Elliot: I've spent quite a lot of time, as you were saying, delving into so much of the science, especially with the circadian biology, learning all about life cycles, their effects on various hormones and everything like that. But when we really get down to basics, it's just like using common sense. It's just looking at how human beings evolved to live, how we evolved throughout potentially millions of years of evolution.

You live with the cycles of nature. You eat the food that is in the local environment. So who would think that you could get access to bananas in January. You're living in the northern hemisphere, say 20,000 years ago, how would you have access to these foods? Would you have artificial light on 24 hours, 7 days a week? No you wouldn't. I can completely understand what you're saying. It seems going back to basics really does most of the job in terms of reversing these conditions.

I work with people who want to improve their health and to explain something like this, especially on the diet front, there are so many barriers to overcome. It's like undoing all of the misinformation, all of the brainwashing, especially with these smoothies and the nuts and seeds and kale smoothies and all that. We've somehow been deluded into thinking that this is somehow healthy. But when did human beings ever have access to these things all year round?

I'd just like to say the Paleomedicina clinic that you were talking about in Hungary, looking at some of their results - and I would recommend all listeners to go onto their website and to look at some of the articles and studies that they've been doing - and the amazing reversals, it shows that what we think that we know about nutrition and about health and lifestyle is so far behind and there's clearly so much that we don't understand.

I think at this point, like you said, looking at people's experience, looking at anecdotal evidence, this is going to give us far more useful information rather than waiting for the peer reviewed scientific literature to catch up because people just don't have time. If someone's in chronic pain...

Phil: Exactly.

Elliot: ...like yourself, if someone's suffering chronic pain they just want to get better. I think this is so important. Just to ask you about your experience again because you were diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis and you were told that that was incurable. Could you just tell us about where you're at with that right now? Do you still have psoriatic arthritis?

Phil: I don't know what would happen if I ate pizza for a couple of months. I don't really know where that would land me. I think it's true that the body never quite forgets how to have those reactions. But do I have psoriatic arthritis anymore? I'd say no. I have one knee that has a slight niggle but it's not even in the joint. It's kind of in the front of it. So I would say it's more bursitis. But I think it's just from the years of inflammation. The bursa got a bit thickened. My worst joints were my ankles. There's no trace of it whatsoever in there. It would leap around different parts of my spine. It's not in there anymore. It was in my neck. It was in my wrists. It was in my jaw. I had one finger that was like a massive sausage. All of this has disappeared. There's no pain anymore. All of those joints 100% gone back to normal, no damage, no nothing.

But this is a real interesting point that I'll bring up. How can I explain this? When you get a diagnosis of something, you get told that it's incurable. You get told that this is "the condition". But you see, there is no actual line. It's just made up. There's some line. "Oh, you have psoriatic arthritis whereas yesterday you didn't" or something like that. It's an imbalance that's been going on for a long time. It gets exacerbated and it comes through into the body when the gut's broken and then your genetics get expressed. It's not due to genetics. Your genetics just say what's going to happen if you cock-up, not what's going to happen. It's just a little blueprint.

And so the docs say "You have this psoriatic arthritis" but there are so many things they don't know. They say, "Okay you have this HLA B27 antigen" or whatever and so that's why you've got psoriatic arthritis. So then you go Google for five minutes and go "Yeah, yeah, okay. That's why I've got arthritis." But then you Google for 10 minutes and you find out that 80% of the people with this antigen don't have psoriatic arthritis. They never get it. So it's not to do with that. It's to do with environmental factors.

So you take down the environmental factors, you no longer have the tendency to it. I'm sure I still have the tendency to it. I'm sure I could put myself back in that agony again if I spent 24 hours under artificial light and ate pizza all day long, I'm sure I could put myself back into a terrible state. So then people go "Oh, it isn't cured". But then again, smash yourself in the head with a hammer and then your skull heals up. Are you cured? Does that mean you can smash yourself in the head with a hammer and your skull's not going to break again? {laughter} You know? It's a funny old thing. It's a funny old concept.

But you see, why is it that the rest of my body is perfectly sorted out? Fatty liver gone. I had rosacea. I had kidney stones. I had a great shopping list of ailments. They've all reversed. So why is it I still have a niggle in this knee? Well this is where it gets to the most interesting for me. Would I call this psoriatic arthritis? No because it's in the bursa. It's probably the same kind of process although it doesn't hurt. It's not inflamed but it kind of niggles. That's it. When my knee was at its worst this is like on a bad day it'll be five percent of what the knee was when it was really affected. But it's the only joint affected.

So what's happened here? When you say to a rheumatologist, "Why have I got it in this knee and not that knee?" they have no idea. None. Zero. They have no theories, nothing. "It's just luck. It's just where it goes." "Why do I have it in my ankles and not my elbow?" No idea whatsoever. So this is when you get into the woo-woo. But nobody really believes this until they've experienced it. Louise Hay started writing about this. Was it in the 50s or something like that? Healing your body by finding out emotional imbalances, how they manifest in the body. And this incredible book as well that somebody once explained to me was like Louise Hay on steroids. It's Inna Segal's The Secret Language of Your Body.

These just list the various thoughts, fears, emotional imbalances, stuff like that, that can manifest in different areas of the body. Now when I was living in a house with my mum - since my dad died in 2003 we'd been looking after my mum so we lived in the same great big house. She had the middle floor, we had the top floor and the bottom floor. We were sort of separated but not really and she was a difficult old bat, my mum. {laughter} She was very, very difficult to live with and it was driving me nuts. It was definitely something that I was looking to try not to run away from. Eventually I found a solution where she went into a flat, we went into a house here and we still looked after her. She was nearby. But I didn't have that sort of influence all the time. That was 2013. My ankles were still pretty bad.

Now when we got in here there was no change in anything else, but my ankles healed up completely and utterly never to return with even a twinge within two weeks. And that was when other joints were affected. Now what happened then? Most people would say it's just luck or rheumatologists would say probably that's impossible because if you've got one joint affected sometimes one gets worse and the other one gets better a little bit. It sort of goes around the body a bit. But you never get a stage where one joint completely and utterly heals and another one doesn't, particularly two. So why was that?

Well you look it up and you can see references that it's trying not to run away from something. This would affect the ankles. The knee is to do with moving forward in life. We're in a position now where finances are difficult. We had a bunch of money. It's run out. I'm having a point where what I'm doing now is just picking up. Consultations are coming up and money's starting to come in but it's been a very, very difficult time for a few months. This feeling of not moving forward in life, where am I going, what am I doing, I've got to figure out what at 56 what am I going to do when I grow up? This kind of time. So that sort of feeling will create something in the knees. And I've seen it time and again with people I work with and you see different areas of the body being affected.

So this is probably the only issue. I am so satisfied with life. I have an amazing life, a great family, fabulous relationship, hilarious friends, great musicians I work with. I've seen different areas of the body heal up as different issues like that have fixed themselves. There's still a bit of a niggle, a little bit of a worry on the financial side and this and that so there's a little bit of a niggle in the knee. You see, I was chatting on the group about this emotional thing and Zsรณfia came up from Paleomedicina and said "There would be no emotional effects in the body if you just were on a Paleolithic ketogenic diet like we're doing". Yeah, probably, absolutely right. But this is what I keep trying to say to people, the blessing of illness, the blessing of when you are that sick you can find all these things that bring down the symptoms and then you can say "Okay, where was all this? Where was it in the body? Let's look back at the emotional side."

The amount of growing up I've done as a human being in that time I was sick and in the time of fixing it, has blown me away. I've had to look at issues that I really didn't want to look at, areas of my life where I was a complete child or a complete wanker. And you've got to fix this, things where you're just frightened or have some problem with this or that.

So I don't see any black and white. I don't see any line where you cross and you go "I had this disease. I don't have it anymore suddenly." It's all grey areas. It's all a very fluid process, this business of healing. I don't think it ever finishes because even if you get better than you were in some respects like I am - I feel a lot healthier than I was before I got sick in 2010 when I had no diagnosis as such - even in those areas there's always the possibility to go forward. Life is a constantly unfolding process of awakenings and self-improvements and you've got to go with that. The diagnosis seems to be like trying to fit a lake into a matchbox. There's so much more to it. It goes so beyond that.

Doug: Yeah.

Phil: So yeah, I would say the long answer is that. The short answer, no, I don't have psoriatic arthritis anymore. I have a very low CRP, very low inflammatory levels. I don't have any of the horrendous symptoms that I used to have with psoriatic arthritis. What's happened to this knee? Is it to do with these emotions? Is it just that it was so damaged the only joint luckily of the many that I've got any actual damage in, is it just every now and then this bursa is now swollen up and it rubs against something and it gets a little bit inflamed or is it this emotional thing causing that anyway? It'll be fascinating to see in the long run where this ends up. This is my only little health journey I have left and it's such a tiny niggle I never really think about it. I just sort of look at it and I think "Yeah, that muscle's a bit smaller than it used to be and I probably better go train". But the funny thing is, however much I used to train and didn't lose weight, now I find I retain muscle mass and feel so good on a carnivore diet I get so lazy with my training. But one day I've got to really think "Okay, let's have a real concerted effort in bringing that slightly wasted left cord muscle up from when the knee was so inflamed all the time.

So yeah, do I have any overt inflammation? Do I have pain when I walk around? Does it stop me from doing anything? No. I have boundless energy. I play in bands with people younger than me and I can just do it all over again when we get to the end of a gig. I feel absolutely fine so I think in the traditional sense I don't have psoriatic arthritis anymore. But in the traditional sense I don't think psoriatic arthritis even exists. I think there's only one disease and I think that's mitochondrial disruption.

Elliot: What you're saying is actually really fascinating and again, it's an area that's overlooked. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Dr. Gabor Mate...

Phil: Yeah.

Elliot: But it's similar things. I guess the problem with the conventional medical model or the way that we look at things is that we see symptoms as bad and we must suppress those symptoms. But I guess this is what they speak about in naturopathic philosophy and other kinds of philosophies; these physical symptoms may be manifesting not just due to nutrition and inflammation, but rather these symptoms may also be a way of the body communicating certain messages, not just due to physical health but also emotional and psychological well-being and various things that we have not dealt with psychologically or emotionally may manifest physically. I think that really is amazing. It's a really understudied topic but it shines light on how amazing the human body is and how it's this dense communication/information system which really don't understand much about at the moment.

But another thing that I wanted to speak to you about, you were saying that you were a vegetarian for a long time and you went vegan as well. But in some of your videos and the content that you've written, you've spoken about the journey that you took spiritually and overcoming the notion that eating meat was in some way spiritually detrimental and whatnot. There's lots of these ideas that are promulgated, as you've said, in the Ayurvedic tradition and whatnot and I think there's a lot of misinformation. So could you speak a little bit about that; some of the ideas that underlie vegetarianism and the reason why people might be vegetarian and why you were vegetarian and how you've grown since that point?

Phil: Yeah sure. I was never vegetarian from the environmental side of things. I believed that it was better for the environment so I always felt kind of smug that it was, but I was never manic about that. I went vegetarian just because ill-informed Indian gurus told me that it was the way to go and it was the least violent and the most pure for the body and allowed you to reach enlightenment and all that.

How deep can I go on this one? Shall I really go for it? {laughter}

Doug: Absolutely.

Phil: Alright. Well I think my life has been really a spiritual quest. This is where I come from. It's funny to be labeled a meat guy now because it's really not been a focus of mine as such. My whole life has been 'what is awakening? What are these higher states of consciousness? Where can you get to?' All the way from when I was a kid and I had all sorts of strange experiences of sort of unity consciousness all the way through to massive and irresponsible experimentations with huge amounts of psilocybin mushrooms, probably in about 1979-80 holed up in Wales next to a huge field full of the little buggers.

That's just what I've been looking for and my introduction into the whole transcendental meditation movement in the early '80s and then moving up here where I live in Skelmersdale now which is the whole centre of that sort of thing for England. They have this dome where they do all their yogic flying and whatever in the morning. I haven't had much to do with it for about 10 years now but I used to, very passionately.

When I was sick was the time where I really started to notice so many misconceptions about diet, as many as there were about spirituality really. There was a moment in 2006. We'd moved back to the dome site if you like, the place where all the meditators lived. We'd moved there in 2004 and I hadn't really been into the dome and I almost had this religious guilt thinking that I really should be in there, I should be meditating, I should be getting my health back up again. We'd moved back there because my eldest son was living near there. I'd taken my mum who was tagging along then.

There was a point in 2006 - I remember I was out in the back garden and I just let go of everything. I said "You know what? I don't want to go in there. I'm not interested anymore. Something's bothering me about this and I just want to let go of this whole quest of spirituality and everything." At that moment something happened and the whole universe shifted and it never really quite shifted back again. I've never really talked about this too much. I talked about it a lot on a Buddha at the Gas Pump interview I did with Rick Archer. It was quite an honour being on that but I haven't really spoken about it much on the group.

But this is what really fascinates me. This is what I think we're all looking for, is finding out what our essential nature is. There was a moment there where I had this absolute understanding of the whole unity of everything and then an understanding of how incredibly simple and basic that is and how it's not really an attainment at all and how it's our natural state and it's the ultimate expression of our ancestral heritage really. And all of this other stuff is just little bits and pieces that went along with it. There are probably tribes out there who are like this, have discovered this state or probably never didn't know it. They're all there. They understand the unity of nature. They understand how nature eats itself and how this has been what's been going on in the animal kingdom and among humans for millennia and they have no problem with taking an animal life to eat it.

Then when you come back from that kind of perspective, everything that people are saying about vegetarianism being compassionate, it being the ultimate diet for attaining enlightenment it just makes no sense anymore. There was a couple of years about 2006, 2008 where I was like a child again. I had to throw out everything I knew about everything and then I got sick in 2010 after throwing everything I knew out about health and nutrition as well. Whatever happened to me in 2006 was a massive help to me in 2010 when I was sick because it allowed me to say "Hey, I don't really know anything".

We're just a collection of our own false beliefs generally which manifests in disease and manifests in the idea that we're separate entities which is probably the biggest disease of all because then we get tremendous misunderstandings, whether it's through cruelty and evil, if you like, or through compassion, like the vegans who probably mean well. Well a lot of them actually don't. I think they're just probably angry people looking for something to be angry about.

But a lot of them are very compassionate and they do care about the environment. I just had a long email conversation with quite a well-known spiritual teacher, Rick Archer from Buddha at the Gas Pump, put me in touch with. He often gets me in these scrapes. {laughter} And he was coming out with the same old science that vegans do but at least he wasn't getting aggressive or anything. He's a lovely guy. I have a lot of respect for this dude. But unless you got really sick, you've probably never dismantled that vegetarian dogma.

The ones who don't get that sick and they just end up a little bit skinny and emaciated like so many long-term vegans and vegetarians, they don't dismantle that dogma so they go on believing what the gurus told them, that it's compassionate and whatever. It comes from thinking that you're killing an animal unnecessarily for your own gain. I won't get too much into this because the carnivore movement has expressed this an awful lot, that vegan diets and vegetarian diets ruin great swathes of land, destroy the soil, make species extinct. If you do believe in global warming from greenhouse gases and whatever, which I'm really not sure I do, then they're causing all sorts of problems with that as well. They blame it all on the fact it's fed to the animals, the soy and grain, which it shouldn't be anyway, so we all agree on that.

The whole picture of it is absolutely ridiculous and when you show it to them they can't see it and they can't see it and the cognitive bias comes in and they can't see the fact that my god, their diet has been doing this. When you see a vegan who actually gets sick enough and then they discover all this stuff as well they go "Oh my god!" And you see this massive facepalm and they go "How could I not have seen this for ages?!" But the spiritual side of it, to me it's a tremendously spiritual thing to have respect for that animal and take its flesh to sustain you. I just made a little video where I was just reading out my last answer to this guy. I won't mention who he is. I don't really need to I guess but this spiritual teacher, about this and saying "Really, where does non-violence begin? It begins in the home."

I've made my eldest son pretty sick bringing him up vegetarian. He had an aneurysmal bone cyst. He had to have a vertebrae removed from his neck. He was obese at 12. He's 28 now and he's really muscular and ripped and he looks fantastic but he's still dealing with a few health issues from those days. So now with my kids - I've got other kids three and 10, pretty great spacing of age of kids - and they're doing fantastically well and so healthy and I'm not risking sitting over a hospital bed like I did.

So knowing what I know, that my genetics can be expressed by plants, what if they've got HLA B27? Do I go and feed them grains because even if I thought that it was less violent, there's no way I'd inflict that violence on my kids, of putting them through what I went through. So what is compassion? Where does non-violence start? It starts in the home. It starts in feeding your kids the best, feeding your body what it is and alleviating suffering in your own sphere that you have passion for. Now there's plenty of people out there sorting out the environment like Joel Salatin, who have a much better view of it than the vegans do. But what about this business of non-violence about your own body?

I'm sorry vegans but you say I would rather get really ill than kill an animal and I'd die rather than - okay, wait until you have the kind of pain I did. You wait! You'd eat your own grandmother if it would make you better! Believe me! You'd be popping off neighbours and eating them in cannibalism was the answer. It really is. It changes your views on that when you are confined to a sofa and you can't even walk to the toilet. And the whole views are different. But it makes sense that if that's your natural diet, if that's your ancestral diet that heals you up, why shouldn't it be also the one that heals the planet up?

And it does! You look at it and it is! It's all falling into place. You need to scrape away so much bullshit to see how all of this ties in so beautifully and we could put the animals back on the land. They would bring back the soil quality. We could eat the happy animals. You wouldn't have any of these CAFO farms or whatever. It would be just a happy life, quick bolt to the head, a quick death. I have no problem with death. None at all. None whatsoever. It happens to us all. It's part of the universe recycling itself and when you see it as one entity, you have this view of it as one entity, you can see how this works. I have a problem with suffering. I have a problem with suffering among humans with their autoimmunity. I have a problem with battery chickens suffering although the CAFO farms are not as bad if you listen to a lot of the information that's coming out. A lot of it has actually been made to seem a lot worse than it is. I think chickens are pretty much horrendously treated. And we do have these awful things. I have a great aversion to that. I think we should sort our shit out there.

But if I could give factory farm meat to my kid to make sure that he doesn't get sick, of course I'm going to do it and that is where violence begins, to me. That is where compassion begins and you've got to have compassion for your own body because this is part of the universe. This is part of the great computer that we're all part of. You've just got to alleviate suffering within your own sphere and what your passion is. The people who are passionate about fixing the planet and fixing the soil and the land, that's beautiful. I'm right behind them. My passion is my knowledge about people who come to me with autoimmunity and when I see them come out of suffering, my heart bursts. It's beautiful and I get a lump in my throat sometimes with these messages I get of these people that I've helped out and people who've helped themselves out. It doesn't have to be me. The knowledge is all out there. They don't need me.

Does that make sense? A long, waffling answer there but yeah.

Doug: It's absolutely fascinating. The way I kind of looked at it, when you see these vegans rejecting the diet that is ideal for humanity, it's a denigration of life itself.

Phil: Yes.

Doug: It's like saying that this gift of life that we've been given, it's like shitting on it really and saying "I don't want to live in my ideal state", it's not necessarily a miracle and it is the ideal state, but it's more inline with the ideal state and it's just rejecting that and saying "The gift that I've been given is not worth as much as it really is".

Phil: Yes, beautifully put. Exactly. So because we have this false idea that we're separate entities and that we need to be tremendously compassionate to other people and put them first and put animals first, it's all part of the same thing. If you're really going to fulfil your destiny in life and do whatever it is that you're here on the planet to do, you need to be as healthy as possible. So you need to be as compassionate to your body as possible. And then you can help other people to do the same thing. So putting animals ahead of you is an incredibly short-sighted way to do it, particularly since all the people who put animals ahead of them - okay, not all but I would say 99% of people are people who are sitting in a apartment somewhere in a big city who've never been to a farm and they probably don't know any other vegans so they don't see the health problems going on around them. They don't know any other vegans. They know a few online. Their parents probably eat meat and they're having all sorts of battles with their parents and it's ruining the family too.

I have the fortune, I suppose if you can call it that, to live in a predominantly vegetarian community and as they get into their 50s, 60s, 70s, I'm seeing tremendous disease. I lost two of my friend on the same day last year to cancer. This is a small community and they're getting very sick with all sorts of things and they're dropping like flies. It's a high deuterium diet in the north of England that they're adopting because some guru told them to who has misinterpreted Ayurveda which got perverted by the Hindu religion of not eating cows when really the Brahmins were the last ones to stop eating cows and they always realized it was healthy anyway.

So the whole thing is a tangle of absolute and utter bullshit from start to finish, fooling people with these little half-truths that are much more dangerous than outright lies and it's making them all sick. I'm watching my friends drop like flies. Some of them stand in front of me claiming how well they are and those are just the ones that haven't got any diagnosis yet. When I look at them, they don't consider advanced tooth decay as anything wrong or a pot belly or grey skin. They're not seeing that as a problem. But I'm looking at them and my eyes and my nose are telling me that there are many things - god I'm sorry if any of my mates are listening here but listen guys, I've got to tell you. You've already got angry enough with me on my Facebook page when I call you out, but I just want to see you recover.

And the ones who come to me, the ones who've adopted a lot of these principles, they're showing some real signs of improvement and some of them are really healing, but it's breaking through that dogma. They're very difficult people to deal with because they've had decades of all of this. As soon as the vegetarian dogma starts to crumble then they start to fall back on the food pyramid and "Oh well, you know the World Health Organization says it's carcinogenic. They can't be lying!" And you're like "Come on!" And you can't say it. And it's layers and layers of it to pick through. And they're going "Wow, you're looking so well." And so I say "Here's how I did it." "Oh I couldn't do that! Maharishi says that you can't eat flesh" and you're like "Well sorry, but fuck Maharishi on a dietary level! Let's listen to him for all his spiritual stuff and that was beautiful but please, he was no diet guru. Come on!"

So here we go. It's a real tragedy to me and it kind of frustrates me. In fact one of my big issues was letting go of all of that and really being so concerned about my friends and now I just see it as their life path. This is what's happening. A huge bit of my healing happened actually when I let go of that. It was a huge emotional block for me, being tremendously affected by how their health was being destroyed. And when I think well it's just part of their path. This is what's happening with the universe, my illness was probably the best thing that ever happened to me because it took me to all of this knowledge and probably it's going to be helping my kids to stay healthy through this soup of artificial light and wifi that we have on this planet now. I've been tremendously thankful for it.

So to let go of that real panic about how ill they all were was very cool. So I don't take it personally. I love it when people heal. My heart goes out to them when they're suffering but in what I do now I can't afford to be really, really upset about people who fail.

Elliot: That was something really interesting about your story actually, when you were saying when you let go of trying to change others, when you almost accepted that that was their path, that was their choice and respecting their free will, that was when you really made improvements in your own health. I think that's the case for many others as well, letting go of this trying to change other people and rather just offering help to those who genuinely ask.

Phil: Oh yeah! I've got only two message. Meat is not evil. Get rid of all the concepts that meat is evil so that you can try it as a healing modality if you like, but eat what you like and secondly, develop your intuition. Those are the only two things that I think are important - developing your intuition rather than blind adherence to dogma and all of those. So yeah, I still appear to be like that on social media, where I'm posting these things or whatever and people go "Oh well you're trying to force everybody into your own diet". No I'm not! I really don't care at all what any individual person chooses to do. When they come to me and they say "I think you've got a point and I'd like to try this out because I'm sick and I want to see it change," then of course I care and I care when they get better and whatever. But then if they don't or they can't adhere to it and they don't show results - although to be honest I'm not seeing much of that because it's bloody delicious and it works! So it's not like you're trying to tell people to eat kale all day.

So you do see a lot of success. I don't have the personal horror. Even when I'm talking to vegans either you play with them, if they get too offensive, too much death threats or whatever I'll block them, but I will play with them now and again and I'll explain to them this and that and then I'll have a bit of a laugh and maybe take the mickey now and again, good natured, without insulting the or being nasty because I remember what it's like to be deluded in many, many areas of life, not just diet. And it falls away. A lot of them come to me, ones that have argued with me, even for years, will often come to me and say "My thyroid's exploded" or "my arse is not working anymore". {laughter} Or it's working too much. You get all of these things and they come to you and they go "You know what? You had a point".

I won't say right because I don't like the idea of being right or wrong because I think we're all just evolving in our knowledge, but they come and they say "I think you've got something to offer here. Can I try it?" And I see tremendous results. Am I going to kill them five, 10 years down the line with my "carnism" as they like to call it, my eating of rotting flesh {laughter}, ingesting of corpuses? I don't think so and I think that even if someone's really sick and there are dangers in the long-term that you can't see, it's got to be in the meantime, one of the best interventions I can see and so it will give them a point of reset, five, 10 years maybe of reset, in which case other knowledge might come of how to mitigate the problems if there are any in different areas, probably to do with circadian biology.

I don't know. I'm not seeing it yet but I don't have a closed mind. I don't go "Carnivory is it. It's the absolute, ultimate thing to do." But it's having such fantastic results, the best I've found. It seems to be the best that a load of doctors and researchers have found so let's wait and see what the next amazing thing is. Hopping on one leg and smoking your neighbour's pubes. {laughter} I don't know what somebody's going to prove is better than carnivory but I'm there if they do.

Elliot: You've spoken about, and other researchers have spoken about it being almost like a reset diet when people have tried all of these other things. So many people on your group, you try the vegan, you try the vegetarian, you try low carb, you try macrobiotic, you try ketogenic and then they go back, almost like a very basic reset diet and it seems to be, for some people at least, the primary template almost. I'm not sure on your experience.

For some people it may not be effective but it seems that for most people that do it, it does seem to be effective. But what I'd like to know is if you could tell us a little bit about what you eat in a day? So say a typical day's food for you and then what sort of things do the other people on the group eat and what do you recommend to people who are interested in trying this out?

Phil: Well again, there's lots of variations within it. When people don't have results or they give up and they say it didn't work, I think you'll usually find that they've done that in the first month where they got freaked out by either diarrhea, what they perceive as constipation or constipation, or some issues with electrolytes imbalances. So it's all a matter of not preparing really. If you know how to overcome them and you expect a few issues with them, which some people don't get but some people do get quite severely depending on how broken they are beforehand, then they will turn back at that point.

But it reminds me of growing dreadlocks really. There's that first six months where they look like crap and you look like a rat's nest and then it takes a while for them to lock up. And then after a year you're all good and then they grow like crazy. Sorry, I had dreadlocks for many years. Carnivory seems very much like starting off dreadlocks to me. You're always going to be thinking you're the only one in the world whose hair's not going to lock up and you're not going to have dreadlocks. But yes, you do and then people cut it off at that stage and that's how they go with carnivory.

So they give up at that stage. But if they have some good support they get through it and they're fine and after 30 days or a little bit longer if they're very broken, then things tend to come right. Now what do people eat? Well there's this thing about going back to ruminant animals and water. So you go back to beef and water. For some people eat ribeye steak and water seems to be the thing. Say you've got diabetes, I think that anything from the animal kingdom's probably going to be fine. You're going to be fine, probably not with milk but double cream, heavy cream, butter, cheeses, pork, chicken, fish, all of that kind of thing you're going to be fine with and the spices that go with it and everything.

If you're autoimmune you're probably going to have some problems with egg whites. You're probably going to have problems with dairy, at least anything less fatty than butter. Sometimes people have problems with butter. So some people have to give up dairy completely for some time. It depends really what your issue is within those parameters but what do I eat? Well I do eat a lot of butter. I did have to give it up for a while. I put butter on a load of things. If a steak's not fatty enough I'll smother it in butter. I eat steak. I eat a lot of ground beef. We make that into burgers and one of my favourite meals is just ground beef done as burgers and then you cover that in egg yolks and salt and butter and it's so nice. You get a burger and butter it and then put egg yolks on top and then put salt on. God! Now that is just so good! You don't miss the fries. You don't miss the bun. You don't miss the toast. You don't miss anything. That's just too nice and it's all saturated fat. I'm the only guy in his 50s around here without a belly so hey, what's making them fat? It isn't the saturated fat.

I eat lamb. I like lamb. I think lamb's a great one for people because it's very fatty and sometimes the beef fat in steaks can freak people out a bit. So lamb fat, on a lamb chop or roast lamb is much more palatable for a lot of people so you don't have to go the butter route to get a really high fat diet. Lamb I think is great. I miss pork but I don't eat it much because I don't think it's really optimal. I think pigs are fed a load of crap. They're fed all sorts of rubbish, any old socks and old clothes and whatever they can find to feed them. {laughter} Just rubbish. So they're not optimal. And chicken. They're little dinosaurs. They're little carnivores and if I could find a chicken that had been allowed to attack mice and eat worms and bugs I'd eat it. I'd love it. I miss roast chicken. But I don't really eat it because it's full of corn. People say it's walking corn.

So ruminant animals I think are the safest. I eat them. I eat fish, not so often. I'm not really a fan of fish. When I was really into the Jack Kruse stuff and he was saying a really high seafood ketogenic diet and it did do a lot of benefits for me when I had neurological symptoms and a lot of brain fog. It almost felt like I had Alzheimer's and it completely reversed that going on a big fish fast of sardines and salmon and prawns and whatever. I like prawns in their shells. They're great. You fry them up with some butter and some salt and pepper and crunch them up with the shells and everything. That's beautiful. I don't particularly like the shop-bought cooked ones.

I'm not a great fan of fish but I do eat a bit. I eat organ meats. I'm not a huge fan. I like liver. I think I'm going to start getting into brains having seen how nice people think they are. Paleomedicina say how great they are. I'm going to go and hunt some of those out. I cook my food. I eat a little bit of mince raw now and again but I don't think it's essential. Some people say they only find healing when they get to raw. I don't know about that. I think the high fish thing is probably great for somebody with neurological stuff. If somebody has MS I would probably say up the fish alongside the ruminant animals. I'm not really basing that on too much except what happened to me and what Jack said really. Paleomedicina don't seem to think that ruminant animals need to be added to, just get some brains and some liver in a couple of times a week.

People seem to be fine on muscle meats for a long time. I like to cover my bases and get some organ meats in. There we go really. And how often do I eat? A day's eating? Well I haven't eaten today yet. It's half-eleven in the morning. I might get my son. I might leave it 'til I get my daughter at 3:00 and then I might have - oh, I forgot, I'm got a lamb shoulder in the slow cooker which should be ready by about 3:00. That's what I'll stuff myself on today. {laughter} And that's all I'll have. I'll only eat once today. If I haven't eaten by 9:00 in the morning I'll only eat once. It'll be a big feast. If I eat in the morning, if I am hungry in the morning, maybe alternate days I might have two meals and it'll be maybe 9:00 or 10:00 and 4:00 or 5:00 but no later than that. If I can't eat by 5:00 I won't eat until the next day.

You can eat so much and get the nutrition in and then the hunger comes up and it's never a wild hunger so you can just go on and say "Hey, I can't find any food. I'm out. I don't need to eat crap. I can just go on 'til my next meal" because you've always got fat to burn and then you can shove in the nutrients on the next meal. You never really get caught out and have to have a sandwich or something. It doesn't really happen.

People say "What do you do when you're out and about? How do you find something?" Well it's pretty easy to eat in restaurants. The only difficulty is getting them to bring enough butter from the kitchen to do with the steak that they've trimmed the fat off and then on the third trip back there's always an overweight waitress who tells you you're going to get heart disease soon. {laughter} Depending on whether I've had any wine, I might respond to that. My girlfriend's head goes into her hands and she goes "Oh my god! Leave her alone".

There's no particular meal, like you have breakfast. It sort of amuses me thinking of cavemen waiting around for Cocoa Puffs to be invented. "We can't have anything in the morning because all we've got is this bit of meat from yesterday! Jesus! I can't eat that! I've got to have some toast and cereal!" You know, it's just eat what you would eat for any meal. Whatever you fancy. My body'll tell me. "Oh, it's a lamb day." It was today. I felt it coming on yesterday. I felt a lamb day coming on so I thought "Oh, I'll have some lamb shoulder in the slow cooker. That'll be great." And whatever your body wants within that area. The cravings for the other shit seems to go away and you get much more refined cravings, if you like. Your body tells you what it needs.

A little a while ago I said I don't eat chicken. Every now and again I do, maybe once a month, every couple of months. My daughter had a birthday party and I stuffed myself at Nando's. For some reason I was really hungry and I thought "I really want chicken" and I did. It was all there so I ordered half the menu and ate it and thought "I'm going to feel that tomorrow" and I didn't because my body told me that day. But if I ate it two days in a row I expect I'd get a tingly in that little bursa bit on the left knee and I'd feel just a little generally worse.

So your body tells you, "It's okay today. You can eat chicken." This is what your body tells you if we could only listen, if we could stop squashing the symptoms down with drugs and adhering to science. "Oh I can't eat that because my app says that I can't eat it." {laughter} You know? My body says I've got to put it into this program and so-and-so this doctor said that you have to have so-and-so grams of this a day. Ah look, just fuck off!; this information that we've got coming in! You just listen to your body. It's so simple. That's it really. That's kind of my message. Just refine things and take things back.

You said earlier that it's a reset diet, it's an elimination diet and it is. It is an elimination diet. But you try eliminating back to what most people eliminate to. "Okay, I'll take it all the way back to kale smoothies." Right! {laughter} I tell you what! I'll eliminate to everything but steak and water. You eliminate to everything but kale smoothies. Let's see where we are in two years! It's not sustainable.

So people are staying healthy on this meat thing for ages and it's a reset diet. So hey, it's got the best of both worlds.

Elliot: I couldn't agree more Phil. It's been absolutely fantastic having you on the show and I think we're going to have to get you on again at some point. Thanks so much for coming on. We're mindful of your time. We know that you need to go. So just before we close up, where can we find you? What are you doing? How can people find your work? Where can they find your book and whatnot? Could you give us a little bit of information on that?

Phil: Okay, yeah. I'm at pureactivity.net. Also philescott.com I think points to that as well. My YouTube channel is just Phil Escott. There's some videos on there. I do enjoy making them. I only started recently and sort of nervous about doing them but it's actually quite fun. I'm kind of enjoying them. I do them when I'm out fishing. I do night fishing once a week and sit there at the lake so it's always a nice place to sit and think about them and do them. I've got Twitter, Phil Escott and I've got that sort of thing. There's the group on Facebook that's fun. I think there's about five-and-a-half thousand people on it now. It amazed me. I only started it in January. It's a lot of fun. It's 100% carnivore and beyond. It's not for snowflakes. There's a lot of toilet humour, a lot of mucking about. If you've got a big sense of humour and a spiritual side then that's the place for you. And you like steak. It's a lot of fun. There's a lot of mucking about. People keep reporting posts to me and I go "What the hell are you doing? Do you know where you are? {laughter} This is a place for talking about all sorts of things that are a bit close to the bone." Pun not intended.

What else have I got? Oh, two things I'd love to mention if I can. I started off thinking I'll make an eight video course on autoimmunity for all of these aspects, from diagnosis to getting better and coming out better the other side, all the aspects and I did it over a couple of weeks fishing. And I sat at the lake and I kept coming up with more and more things and so it's 30 videos now, all of these aspects, on diet, on light, emotions, deuterium depletion, all of these things and loads of action plans and links to people who know ten times more about these individual subjects than me. I'm really proud of it. I think it's great and that's going up in about three weeks. It'll be on teachable or think, something like that. My marvelous web guy Martin Franklin is doing that, a great old friend of mine and he's putting that together for me and I can't wait to get that out because I really think that could be useful.

And the last thing is my lovely friend Lynn Hardy and I are organizing a carnivore retreat in Spain in April. It's at the end of April and it's at this beautiful venue and we've got some wonderful speakers. We've got Zsรณfia Clemens there from Paleomedicina. We've got Paul Mayberry the zero carb doc. We've got Dr. Jeremy Ayers who is also on the group. His vision of health is amazing. He blows me away. He's got everything all the way from carnivory to all the emotional stuff to everything. He's a doctor of naturopathy. He's an osteopath. He's got millions of letters after his name and stuff. We've got Graham Norbury who I think is the best at explaining all of Jack Kruse's stuff. He'll be into all the deuterium and light and that sort of thing. And then we've got me waffling on about my old nonsense and we've got Zahir Khan. He's like my brother. We've got his Buddha at the Gas Pump interviews. He's not your average awakened guru. He's very irreverent. He's hilarious and a one-to-one with him just gets to the root of everything. He's a lovely guy, very entertaining. So we've got that. We've got a great meat to eat. We've got some great people from the group who are going who are real good characters, very funny. So I think it's going to be a real hilarious thing. We want to do it every year. It's the 25-28th. There's details on the group or you can find out from the group. I'm about to put a video out about it that will be about the retreat, pretty much saying what I've just said there actually.

So those are all the things that I'm up to. I'm really looking forward to that retreat. I think it's going to be hilarious. There's some real funny people there. No snowflakes!

Doug: Will it be recorded?

Phil: Never you mind! {laughter} Yeah, we probably will. We're going to organize that and we might find some way to stream it. It's quite a way away. We're dealing with the technology on that but we'll see. Yes, I think they should definitely be recorded. I think it's going to be such a great event and I think a lot of people will make a lot of great friends. It'll be fun. I can't wait.

Elliot: Fantastic. That's great. And as I said we're going to have to get you on the show again because there's so many more questions. We have some questions but we just don't have time. I want to thank you again Phil because it's been really great to have you on.

Phil: It's been a pleasure. Honestly Elliot I've been looking at your stuff and your knowledge blows me away too and I'd love to hear more from you. So any time you want to chat it would be great. We're not far part. We should meet up for a steak sometime. That would be really cool.

Elliot: Yeah, certainly. So since it's that time, I want to thank all of our listeners for tuning into the show and make sure you tune into the other shows. We've got NewsReal on a Sunday and we've got The Truth Perspective on a Saturday. Make sure to tune into those and thanks again everyone. See you soon.

Phil: Thank you so much. Great to talk to you Elliot. Nice to meet you Doug.

Doug: You too.

Phil: And speak to you again soon I hope. Bye.

Doug: Bye everybody.