shr #2691
DIALOGUE edit
The Fallacy that Only Adult Humans Drink Milk
with Guest, Joel Green

Carl Lanore: [00:00:00]
Any time I discuss milk with someone, inevitably someone says, well, humans are the only ones that drink milk as adults, the only species on the planet. But is that true? Do other species of animals also drink milk as adults?

We're going to get to the bottom of this today. I think a lot of feelings are going to be hurt. Joel green loves to talk about Baby Talk. Joel Green’s presence in the nutrition silo has really elevated discourse. Would-be gurus say humans are the only ones that milk cows. Yeah, I know. We’re also the only ones that have internet and a cell phone and all these other things. 

Let’s look at science for a second. We're going to look at whether or not humans are really the only ones that continue to drink milk as adults. We're also going to discuss the difference between opportunity and appropriateness in nutrition. Maybe if we really look deep enough in this, we'll find out that from an evolutionary standpoint we have actually been endowed with something that allows us to take grass and turn it into usable food. We can't eat grass, but cows can and ruminant animals can. They make milk and we benefit from it. 

[00:08:01]
Let’s jump into this. I'm sure you've heard this before. I'm not even going to distinguish between raw and pasteurized milk for this discussion, because we already know that raw milk is better than pasteurized processed milk, but there's a blanket statement that comes up by someone when talking about milk. Humans are the only ones that continue to drink milk as adults, meaning that it's inappropriate for us to do that. Do you cringe? Do you get angry when you hear that? 

Joel Greene:
We have a new word for stupidity. It's called scientism and you hear it all the time. It’s this idea that you're speaking something scientific when you're really not. That's a subset of that. I's very cringe-worthy. 

Carl Lanore:
I have evidence that other species, when opportunity presents itself, will consistently exploit lactating animals of another species for one reason or another. I want people to understand something: this is not something that's isolated. It's very well known along the coast of Mexico that both feral cats and birds will drink from elephant seal milk supplies, stealing it from the babies and actually impairing their growth. Each time they drink, they drink for one to two minutes. When you talk about multiple animals a day doing this, the babies are losing 2.2 kilograms of body weight a day; a significant amount of milk. They do it daily. The milk drips as the baby is drinking, and the bird is right there on the side of the mouth, sucking it out. The cats are licking it out. This idea that drinking milk after weening off whatever species you are is somehow inappropriate, it kind of falls apart when you see that other animals do this when given the opportunity.

Joel Greene:
I don't know how you found that, but kudos to you. That's fantastic. That just kills the whole sort of “let's make this real science” thing. You have two possible answers. One is preference. Animals have an innate preference. They just know things. They know milk is bad. Therefore we should watch what they do because they know stuff. Then the other would be availability. It could be an issue of availability. If it was available, they need it, which means that it's not preference, which would dispute people on the whole ‘only humans drink milk’ kind of thing. So yes, it seems to be the evidence is that it's a matter of availability. If it’s available, they flock to it, which from a survival perspective, of course they would. It’s energy-dense, nutrient-dense. For survival, it would confer significant advantages to consuming milk if it's available versus other foods. It's maybe the most nutrient-dense food there is. 

Carl Lanore: [00:11:54]
Let's take this word food for a second. The only thing actually made by nature to be food, to be sustenance is milk. In the case of mammals, everything else has been adapted. Well, it doesn't kill us. I kind of feel good. I think that's a good choice for food now. My point in this is cows weren't put on the planet to be food. Gazelles weren't put on the planet to be food for lions. We have adapted them to be food because, from an evolutionary perspective, we know this to be true. In paleolithic times, mothers usually breastfed a baby till three to four years old. It's only because of industrialization and modernization, like, no, you’ve got to get back to work. You can't be breastfeeding your baby for three years. We’ve got to wean that baby. You need to be freed up. From an evolutionary perspective, that is true as well, because at some point in time, the offspring becomes a parasite to the contributor to the group. The mom has to be able to do more than just breastfeed. At some point in time, the baby has to go find its own way. With that being said, lactase persistence is no accident. There seems to be evidence that lactase persistence was selected because during times of famine we had yet another food that we could survive on. Quite frankly, it’s only purpose is to be a food. It's not another species that we're going to kill and eat because it doesn't kill us to eat it and it seems to nourish us. Speak on that. 

Joel Greene:
There's some research from 2019, maybe 2020, that came out examining the dental work of paleolithic hunter-gatherers. It was able to show by the dental work that milk was actually a regular part of the diet. Going back several thousand years it seems to be that certain groups of humans have consumed milk as a regular part of their diet. I forget what the lactase persistent argument was in that study, but in terms of milk being something that makes a lot of sense to consume if you have it around, why wouldn't you? Again, the answer would be in modern times we’ve created all of this non-scientific sort of mythos around milk that you shouldn't because it's bad and it's bad for these reasons. Some of those reasons maybe are digestive in nature, but others are just more moralistic in nature because it's just bad. Then you kind of dress it up as science in some way. When you actually look at the evidence, the evidence seems to suggest very strongly the opposite; that it's always been in the adult human diet as far back as we can measure. 

Carl Lanore:
Let's look at other demarcation points where it was obviated to us that milk was actually bountiful in the Bible. They talk about the land of milk and honey, because both milk and honey were amazing foods, full of nutrition and being able to sustain life. In the Bible, when they wanted to paint a picture of a time where life would be wonderful and abundant, they talked about the land of milk and honey. Milk has been a symbol for abundant health and happiness. But today milk falls prey to the same thing that beef does: ‘Oh, it's bad for you. You shouldn't be consuming it. Humans aren't supposed to consume milk.’

Joel Greene: [00:16:20]
My big thing is a balanced, healthy diet is really the best diet. What's interesting to think about is the way that one nutrient will affect another. For example, there's the whole ‘plants are bad’ too, because plant lectins are “bad”.  Is that right? So, we've eliminated beef, plants, and milk. I don't know what's left. What's interesting is there's really good research on plant lectins and how they actually work in the gut. A lot of the early research upon which a lot of information was promulgated was based on this reductionistic look at plant lectins. They adhere to the gut wall and that's bad. They're mitogenic. They're tumor promoters. You could probably say that in isolation, reductionistically, but when you begin to look at balance in the diet, once you add milk in the diet, you see that there are factors in milk that neutralize plant lectins. So all of the toxic effects that you could have co described to plant lectins get neutralized by factors in milk. A, specific plant lectin, milk will neutralize that. There’s also others. At the same time, the combination of plant lectins and milk together feed the healthiest bacteria possible in the gut. They're feeding bifidob-acteria. So you get this kind of synergy going when you get out of the reductionistic look, and you begin to look at the thing as a whole; these things all work together in very interesting ways. There's a couple of foods that I look at as survival staples. There's the scarcity survival staples, and those two foods are deer meat and roots. Those are common to just about all societies. You look across the world, when things are bad, you can always count on there's a deer somewhere and there's roots. Deer being your first preference, roots being your second. You're not gonna necessarily thrive on that diet, but you'll make it. At the other end of that, there is the abundance survival foods, which are milk and honey. Those two together, you're going to do really, really well. You’ll live and you're not going to drop weight as long as you have an abundant supply of those things. All of these foods seem to work together. When you look at them, not just in isolation, but in aggregate, they do the opposite of what a lot of the scientism of the day says. The scientism of the day says, well, those are bad, but when you begin to really break them down, how they work when they work in groups of other foods, like the way milk can work with plants, they're actually beneficial. When you look at plant lectins, there's this argument that they're cancer promoters because, they're mitogenic, so they can actually promote advancement of the cell cycle clock. However, if milk is present, you can see sort of the opposite happen. You can see plant lectins get neutralize. You can see lectins themselves can actually feed the bifido-bacteria, and then the milk can do the same thing. Then you get the surplus of bifido-bacteria and you have the exact opposite effect: instead of being tumor promoting, they're actually tumor protective.

Carl Lanore: [00:19:56]
One listener has an interesting question to follow in on that. He says, ‘do you need to consume them together, plant lectins and dairy? Or is it adequate just to have them at different times of the day?

Joel Greene:
You don’t need to consume them together. That is a very interesting topic. We should do a show on that sometime. It's probably more interesting to look at consuming them at certain times of the day. For me, dairy, like raw unpasteurized, grass fed milk is my go-to post-workout. Nothing beats that.

Carl Lanore:
I agree. The listener makes this statement: guts were optimized for milk and honey, how do we know that? Today may not be so healthy given how much gut dysfunction we have. What do you think? 

Joel Greene:
I think it's a moving target. The state of the gut is rapidly modifiable.

Carl Lanore:
By diet.

Joel Greene:
I'll tell you what I see a lot of right now. I released my fat loss course. It's been doing great. I’m seeing the very beginnings of the post keto carnivore wave and everybody has insulin resistance.

Carl Lanore:
I'm suffering from it. I have developed hyperinsulinemia. 

Joel Greene:
It makes perfect sense. What never got explained during all of that is that you can look at both of those diets for their dyslipidemia related factors. Take the carnivore for example. Sustained high protein animal diets will elevate serum GlucaGen. So in diabetes, what you have is sustained high-protein diets are gonna get elevated GlucaGen, you're gonna get elevated glucose, fasting glucose, and then you're gonna get elevated insulin. You can get all three. With high protein animal diets sustained over time, you’re not going to get the elevated insulin, but what you will get is insulin resistance because fatty acid oxidation from the liver flux goes through the roof. Glucagen is going to stay elevated. They don't get the insulin resistance and I'm seeing it everyday. It's very real. 

Carl Lanore:
I'm suffering from it. I've finally realized that what I'm dealing with is hyper-insulinemia, or insulin resistance, right? Because my blood sugar is great in the morning, but my body is pumping out a lot of insulin all the time. I'm rebounding from my keto carnivore ways of a decade. I've been doing this for a decade. Way before the fad started, I was intermittent fasting and eating a lot of salmon, beef, chicken, and eggs, and limited amounts of of carbohydrates. I thought ‘this is the answer’. I realized that I have actually made my body respond to an anticipated environment of not a lot of carbohydrates, so now if I have carbohydrates, my insulin goes through the roof. 

Joel Greene:
When I came on, I think it was the first show I did on the Immunity Code book, and I talked about that related to time, there's usually a benefit upfront, but then over the long-term you're going to see negatives to anything. You're always going to see that inverted sign wave. There are two great inverted sign waves right now that the public at large is dealing with. This is the first time anybody's talked about this stuff anywhere. Two big ones we’re in the jet wash of right now is the negative end of the probiotic boom.

Carl Lanore:
People have literally created microbe farms in the wrong places in their intestines. 

Joel Greene:
Almost everybody that comes to me has some form of resistance. The other one is insulin resistance. We're seeing spikes in both of those coming from these fads that were popular three, four years later, which is exactly what I talked about. You get that short-term benefit, then over the long-term you get the negatives. Now we're in the negative part of the sign wave for those two things. I see it every day. 

Carl Lanore: [00:24:44]
Another listener says he lost faith in Arnold when he said milk is for baby cows and recently he's gone completely vegan. He advocates a completely plant-based diet. Remember, he's a politician. He just goes wherever he thinks the wind is blowing. During that same period of time, in the bodybuilding world, when Arnold was saying on pumping iron that milk is for babies, bodybuilders don't drink milk.

Joel Greene:
We should just do a show where we both do it in character doing our Arnold accents. I had a couple of pages in my book I left out because we all love Arnold, but there's some things that are illustrative from his journey. Arnold championed the whole sort of fitness thing to the masses. Arnold and Joe Weeder, through the eighties and nineties, were really chiefly responsible.  Then Bill Phillips later. What's interesting to me is how all that worked for Arnold, but once Arnold got a real job these pictures started circulating with Arnold just totally flabby and out of shape on the beach. The reason was that the thing that he promoted and championed worked really great on a beach in Southern California, but it didn't work so well in real life for a lot of people. It didn't work for him. If it didn't work for him in real life, it's not gonna work for most people over time in real life. Take that with a grain of salt. It doesn't mean you don't love the guy. We all love the guy, but in terms of advice, take it with a grain of salt. 

Carl Lanore: [00:27:15]
Let's plug your book real quick. The new book is called Immunity Code. Where could people get it? What's the website?

Joel Greene:
It's on Amazon, so you can get it there. A second edition of it just came out, which has a couple of pages added and you can get it at Veepnutrition.com. You can also get the companion piece, which is the Immune-centric Fat Loss Course. I would've put it in the book if I could. It would have been twice the size. I broke it up into two, but they work together. 

Carl Lanore:
If you're going to take advice from anybody about nutrition, take it from Joel. The reality is that you're a critical thinker first, and you've never positioned yourself as a health guru at all. You just look at nutrition from a scientific standpoint and you assemble things scientifically. You don't have a supplement you're selling. Well, at least not now. That doesn't mean it can't happen someday. 

Joel Greene:
I'd planned on it, but when I got to printing the book I realized there were a lot of supplement recommendations and I didn't want anybody coming at me thinking I’m just trying to sell stuff. So I really decided to hold off for the first year or so on selling supps. It's really worked out, so no complaints. There will be a few coming out here pretty soon. The way I would describe myself is just embittered consumer. I'm someone who took advice for decades and decades, and a lot of those advices didn’t work out for me.

Carl Lanore: [00:29:43]
Welcome back. Talking with Joel Greene. We're talking about milk. People are so confused about milk? It's really fascinating to me how much misinformation there is about milk. Milk and insulin resistance. I'm drinking a quart of milk a day right now; raw unpasteurized milk from pastured cows. They haven't been tested for casein A1 or 2 or any of that sort of stuff, but they're all Jerseys. I like the taste of milk from Jerseys better. Ron Schmidt came on my show in 2006. He wrote the book The Untold Story of Milk, which chronicaled milk’s passage from the most wonderful food in the world to the demon it became after pasteurization. He talked about how pasteurization arrived, why it arrived, why we really didn't need it, but the distilleries had more money and they fought for it. He also talked about the fact that before insulin as a standalone peptide was discovered, the only thing a type one diabetic could live on was raw unpasteurized milk. An article recently showing that children were given raw unpasteurized milk to prevent scurvy, but once milk was pasteurized, they had to switch to orange juice. Milk was this amazing thing, and what Dr. Schmidt talked about on the show was that milk has everything in it that it needs to be digested, absorbed, assimilated, and utilized, including insulin. There are trace amounts of insulin in raw milk that allowed type one diabetics to live when they drank a diet predominantly of raw unpasteurized milk. This is amazing. So if I drink a quart of milk a day, that's just under 200 grams of lactose, which is a sugar. Should I be concerned about lactose? Is it a high-glycemic index carbohydrate? If the milk already has some insulin in it, is that offsetting the production my pancreas has to produce?

Joel Greene:
A lot of answers you might hear to that would be very reductionistic in nature. They would just be looking at the gram content and considering it a sugar. It just gets into the way that we're going to analyze what it is that we're looking at. It gets to this conflict that we keep coming up against, which is reductionism versus looking at the whole. When we just park that whole argument for a second and then look at milk as a whole, I think it's really, really interesting. In addition to what you talked about with insulin, what you find is that milk improves calcium channel signaling. You need calcium to pull glucose into the cell, so when the insulin receptor fires, you go through this big, long cascade of enzymes, and at the end of the day, what you're doing is you're mobilizing intracellular calcium to make milk work. The action of calcium and the way that we need calcium to work, milk is a very synergistic with and works on the ACE receptors. It actually inhibits the ACE 1 receptor. To understand how insulin works, the best way to think of it is you have four pipes: you’ve got the insulin receptor, the glut four receptor, the aldosterone receptor, and the ACE receptor. Then you have nitric oxide. You have all that together and all those things together in conjunction with helper hormones. All those things together are how insulin works. Milk stimulates the helper hormones around that and it helps the ACE receptor work in the right way, pushing things towards the optimal ACE profile. A whole bunch of things that are very synergistic with insulin working in the way that it should. The issue is, when we have large inputs of sugar by itself, or carbs that are without all these other factors, you're going to get insulin resistance and diabetes for sure. When you look at a whole food like milk that has all these synergistic factors, all working together in it, micro RNA and all these other things, the math doesn't work the same. It just doesn't work that way. I don't think you'd really have too much to worry about in terms of carb load and all that junk with it. I think if anything, it just probably puts some muscle on. That would be my guess.

Carl Lanore:
I've been doing a quart of milk now for the past few weeks, and I don't feel bad, but I don't notice anything yet. I am doing this purposefully to see if I can balance my insulin sensitivity. I have a funny feeling it's going to actually do that. 

[00:35:23]
We have a couple of questions. Let's see if we can get to them real quick. Bear said he just got his first gallon of raw milk this morning. It tastes great. No effect on his stomach. The question is did you have problems drinking conventional milk before with your stomach? I'd love to hear that. I don't know what to tell you, Robert, where you can get fresh blood like the Messiah. I guess you could bleed your own animals in your backyard if you want. Here's something that frustrates the crap out of me. Are there any supplements to help restore the gut, given the widespread dysfunction? Yeah, raw unpasteurized milk. It has everything in it. It has the microbes. It has the food to keep the microbes alive. It has transporters, enzymes and proteins to get the IGF1 across the stomach. We're searching for a supplement and a capsule. It's raw unpasteurized milk. Good, healthy food from heaven. When I talk about raw unpasteurized milk, I don't think people get it. This may be the best food, the only food, the best supplement, the best alternative, the best thing to reset your body when your body has been sent adrift for so long, because it saves babies. You know what I mean? But here's the problem: it's not conventional milk. I'm sorry. Conventional milk is roadkill in a jug.

Joel Greene:
Absolutely. It's the grades of food argument. I made an episode of Unconfused. Conventional milk does a lot of damage. Raw unpasteurized grass-fed milk is as super as a superfood gets. I've been using it as a post-workout for years and it gets you high. There are morphine derivatives in there. Also, you get milk oligosaccharides in human milk and bovine milk. Those milk oligosaccharides are naturally immuno-protective. They do a whole bunch of things that are very beneficial to the immune system. 

Carl Lanore: [00:37:46]
What are your thoughts on colostrum? I have some very strong opinions, but I want to hear yours first.

Joel Greene:
As a supplement, there's a lot of ground to cover, right? I don't know if you remember Yemeni Mesa from West Yemeni. Yemeni used to talk about during his bodybuilding days making a trip to Bakersfield once a week to get his colostrum. It helped him grow like crazy. Dairy farmers have tons of this stuff. There's kind of the anecdotal stuff like that. There's research you can look at where you look at human babies where they're given a combination of colostrum and egg and basically they don't get stunted growth, where ones who don't in these sort of poor areas, their growth is stunted. Then there's mechanistically like what's in colostrum and how the factors in there work in the body. There's human milk oligosaccharides, there's growth factors, a whole bunch of good stuff. Generally it's positive. That's the way I look at it.

Carl Lanore:
I just think it's one of those things that more is not necessarily better. If you look at nature and how nature delivers certain things to us, and you ignore the way nature delivers things, whether it's the pulse of growth hormone or the pulse of testosterone or the availability of colostrum, the baby got colostrum at the very beginning to create a launch pad. I think that colostrum taken periodically probably is a great thing. When I say periodically, I will get fresh, raw colostrum from my farmer, but it doesn't come around a lot. It's only when he has a cow that has a calf. The calf gets the first day, and then he'll bottle up everything from the second and third day and I'll take that and I'll drink that gallon over the course of two weeks. I won't do that again for the rest of the year. I think that the mistake we make with probiotics, with anything that has a powerful effect on the immune system is if you keep giving the immune system those things that make it stronger in those areas, it gets whacked out, even though the other areas are still strong. It’s out of balance. I think that colostrum used periodically is a smart thing. I don't think taking it day in and day out is a good thing, personally. 

Joel Greene:
I tend to make a case that that's true of just about anything and everything. You really shouldn't do anything all the time, but everything just about can be cycled in here and there or used strategically. I could see that with colostrum. I'm just curious…you’re getting the raw real colostrum. Have you noticed anything?

Carl Lanore:
It's not tasty. I haven't gotten it yet this season, but in the years where I was powerlifting, I used to get at least a gallon or two of colostrum every summer. I noticed big things when I started taking it. Growth, strength. It doesn't taste good. Just for the record, raw colostrum generally has a little bit of blood in it that when you leave it in your refrigerator settles to the bottom and you can see it. It's like this orangey red kind of glow at the bottom. But you don't drink it and go, man, that's kinda good. It has a gamey taste and it's like 55% fat, just for the record. It's very thick. It tastes like I gotta get this mouthful down. I think swallowing raw eggs by the dozen is a lot simpler than drinking a glass of raw colostrum, fresh out of the cow. Keeping it cold does make it a little easier to drink, but it doesn't taste good. It's a very gamey taste, but you do what you have to do, right? They used to say bodybuilders would eat dog crap if they thought it would put on even this much more muscle. Bear said, yes, he did get gas and bloating previously from store-bought milk, even an eight ounce glass. I love when people promote Fair Lives, a lactose-free milk. You don't need lactose-free milk when the milk has lactase in it already. Again, remember raw unpasteurized milk has everything the baby needs to digest it and assimilate it, including the enzyme lactase. This is why this is a funny thing. People don't realize this. When I buy a gallon of raw milk, the first sip out of it tastes great, creamy. As that raw milk gets older in my refrigerator, it gets sweeter, because the lactase is doing its job and breaking down the lactose and the lactose is adding this sweet flavor. In fact, there's something called clobber, which is almost like yogurt, but when raw milk goes bad, it doesn't get sour like conventional milk, it turns into this yogurty flavored stuff that you can still consume. It won't make you sick. We're dealing with a completely different animal when we talk about raw milk. If you haven't tried raw milk, go to the website realmilk.com. It's managed by the Weston A Price Foundation. Find the farmer in your area so that you can try raw unpasteurized milk. There's nothing like it. It may remedy a lot of your ailments. 

Joel Greene: [00:43:29]
I used to drink a ton of milk as a teenager. I had horrible breakouts and gas, but I didn't know what was causing it. Then when I kind of figured the gut out finally, I could have milk. I could even have regular milk and it wouldn't even bother me, regular ice cream. I haven't had an issue since. A lot of the poor digestability with milk has to do with the fact that all the bacteria and all the things that you need are wiped out in that milk, and you can replace them in the gut. When you have a species in the gut that can break down lactase and break that down, then you can drink milk and you don’t see those symptoms. But you can also just skip all that and just go straight to raw milk. 

Carl Lanore:
This is an interesting statement you just made because years ago, I did a show with a scientist. They looked at the lactase persistence and the rate of lactose intolerance in a population of people. It was like 700 people in this study. Half of them had complained that they had been diagnosed with lactose intolerance. The other half didn't have any diagnosis of any thing that would make them a concern to drinking milk. At the end of this study, they looked at the people who reacted poorly to milk and were told they had lactose intolerance and they did the blood work on them and they said they produce lactase; they’re lactase persistent. There's something else going on with the milk, and we’re blaming lactose intolerance for it.

Joel Greene: [00:45:15]
I write about this in the Immunity Code. It's basically conflation. The entire body of science on lactase persistence, is, in one sense, totally wrong. It’s not to say that it's not accurate to say that yes, there is a gene, and then we did fall out and all that deal. But the other side of that is that generally the legwork needed genetically to digest milk is not in the human genome. It's in the bacterial genome.It's the cart or the horse. When you look at the bacterial genome and you replace the bacteria, you can acquire the bacterial genes that you need to digest that make the enzymes to digest lactose. Then it's not an issue. The whole theory of lactase persistence gets a little stumbly because there's two ends of it. One is that human genome part of it, the whole theory of lactase persistence, but then there's the bacterial genome, which that theory’s never thought about. The more accurate one probably is the bacterial genome. So when you have the bacterial genome and the genes are acquired in the bacterial genome, all the issues with lactose go away, 

Carl Lanore:
When we look at predators and prey, this could be dogs and deer. This could be lions and buffalo. When we look at predators and prey, the order in which the prey is eaten probably indicates that to that particular predator, the hierarchy of importance that that tissue possesses that they're eating. Would you agree with that? 

Joel Greene:
A hundred percent. That is an example of preference. You can actually see availability and preference at work together.  For example, you'll see killer whales kill other whales or sharks, and they go after like the liver and leave the rest of the shark.

Carl Lanore:
When wild dogs run a deer down in the wilderness, they eat the viscera first, the guts, the entrails, the stomach, the liver, the kidneys, the spleen, all that first. Then if they're still hungry or other dogs come after the good stuff is taken, then they'll eat the hams on the back and all that sort of stuff. They pretty much leave the rest of the upper carcass alone. They don't even touch it. In the wild, when animals are given their preference, the order in which they consume the prey would indicate the importance to them of the nutrition obtained from eating that portion of the prey. Here's another interesting fact. When predators kill a prey that happens to be lactating, they eat the utters or the teats, depending on what you want to call them, first, before eating the viscera. It's like the creamy filling. That should also tell you that they hold milk in a very high regard.

Joel Greene:
From a survival perspective, I talked about this in the book, that the most powerful mechanism at work in your body is everything that is tied to survival. That's where all the juice is. That's where all the horsepower is. When you look at what predators, they’re going right for what gives them the greatest chance of survival immediately; they’re going for the high points stuff.

Carl Lanore: [00:50:41]
We had one last question. A listener says, do phages, as opposed to probiotics, help restore gut integrity? What is he talking about? I'm not familiar with phages.

Joel Greene:
I don't know that phages get so much into gut junction stuff, apart from interleukin cascades, if they're stimulating those by allowing certain things in the gut, which they probably are. They are very helpful at wiping out certain viral taxa in the gut. Certain things that can get in the gut. There’s a lot of unknowns with phages. When you look at supplement companies that make those, their phages only go after one specific thing, like maybe it's e-coli for example. Actually the more I think about it, that would in fact have a lot to do with gut junction integrity. I’m actually talking myself into it by thinking it through. Yeah, the answer’s yes. 

Carl Lanore:
That was a great way to come to a conclusion, by the way. We actually watched your brain at work. That was pretty fascinating. So in summary, how should we wrap up this interview for the people out there who say it's inappropriate for humans to drink milk because we're the only species that drinks milk after being weened or as adults?

Joel Greene:
I would say there is this thing that has been done to your brain. It is called infantilization and it's very real. It's part of this age that we're in, which is to essentially subjugate people by getting them to not think for themselves. Just because an authority figure says something is true, it doesn’t make it true. The reference to authority has been sort of substituted for thinking. Just think it through. That's really the lesson of this show.

Carl Lanore: [00:53:14]
I just realized we forgot to talk about something and that is allergens. Milk and egg are identified as allergens. Doctors will tell a lot of people not to drink milk. They cite the thick saliva that occurs after drinking a glass of milk as phlegm. All milk just makes mucus. First of all, that's not mucus. That’s the remnants of the thickness of the milk mixed with saliva. Isn't it?

Joel Greene:
Part of it, yes, definitely. There are legit milk allergies. If you have any food too much, you can make a case that you're going to get an allergy. You could make that case for chicken. The thing with milk most often is really, you cannot look at milk in isolation. You have to look at milk in concert with the bacteria in the gut. The two work together.  Then you're going to find that issues with milk go away for the most part. When you're lower in those populations, then all the things that you think are allergic in nature, you’re going to see more of those types of things. One of the big things is milk and histamine. The conversion of histamine, there's a very strong bacterial component to that. With the right bacteria in place, you don't see those issues. Milk can never really be looked at by itself. It has to be looked at in conjunction with the state of the gut currently. What are the bacteria that are in there? It's very dynamic. Most of the cases with milk that you think, I’m allergic to milk, no, you're not. You just are missing certain bacteria. There are a very, very small percentage of people that are allergic to issues in milk, but it's much less than we think it is. It really has more to do with missing bacteria than it does milk itself.

Carl Lanore: [00:55:55]
Interesting.Great show, Joel. Thank you so much. Again, you can get Joel's book The Immunity Code by going to Veepnutrition.com. Get yours before they're all gone. I will talk to you again soon, brother. Have a great weekend.