The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Dr. Ken Berry: Why a "Proper Human Diet" Could Change Your Life
What if everything you thought you knew about nutrition was wrong? 🤯
In this eye-opening interview, Dr. Ken Berry, a board-certified MD and YouTube sensation, reveals the biggest myths about food, metabolism, and chronic disease. After struggling with his own health—morbid obesity, prediabetes, and metabolic issues—Dr. Berry made a dramatic shift in his diet and medical approach. Now, he's on a mission to help others break free from food addiction, sugar cravings, and diet misinformation.
🔥 In this episode, we cover:
✅ Why doctors get nutrition WRONG (and what they aren’t taught in med school)
✅ How sugar addiction is REAL—and why Big Food doesn’t want you to know
✅ The truth about keto, carnivore, and low-carb diets for reversing chronic disease
✅ Why mainstream diets fail and how a Proper Human Diet can transform your health
✅ How metabolic health impacts mood, mental resilience, and energy
✅ Steps to break free from processed foods and regain control over your cravings
Enjoyed this episode? We'd love to hear your thoughts—share your feedback with us here!
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Hello everybody and welcome to an interview today with Dr Ken Berry. Probably doesn't need an introduction because he's a bit of a YouTube celebrity, but in case he's a little bit new to you, I'll hit you up some highlights and then we'll get into his story. And the very first thing I will say is Dr Berry is an MD. He has a degree, a science degree, and then he moved in to get his MD certification and he practices a traditional medical doctor in Tennessee. And then in around the year 2000, there was a pivot. There was a pivot in his life and he started to become awakened to the potential for lifestyle medicine to be the form of medicine that brought dramatic benefits to his patients.
FLORENCE:But in the meantime he had also gone on his own journey, from moving from morbidly obese he was pre-diabetic, he had acne, he had severe GERD tons and tons of health issues. He was in the midst of his own health crisis. He was telling me that he was a bony kid, skinny little kid, couldn't gain weight until his early thirt where his food addiction, his ultra processed food addiction, caught up with him. He was stressed. He was in scrubs all the time. He was an ER doctor, right Like. Residency is brutal on doctors and it all caught up with them and, you know, at 297 pounds he realized I'm sick and I'm a doctor and something a doctor and something needs to give here. So welcome, dr Barry.
DR. KEN BERRY:Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
FLORENCE:So do you remember going what inspired you to become a doctor?
DR. KEN BERRY:I've wanted to be a doctor for as long as I can remember I I was a kid. All my favorite shows were Trapper, john, md, mash, quincy every medical show that I could watch. That was always my favorite shows and never really considered anything else except for being a Navy pilot. I thought about that for a second and just didn't appeal to me. So medicine's where it's at for me. That's my original passion. My original love is medicine and the practice of it.
FLORENCE:Incredible. So I have asked every doctor I have ever interviewed that question and 99% of them have told me when I was a kid, when I was a kid, I knew I wanted to be a doctor. There is zero doubt in my mind it's a calling.
DR. KEN BERRY:Yeah, yeah, I agree. And therefore a brief period of time. In my teenage years I started having severe migraine headaches and I'm like, well, I can't be a doctor if I have to get eight hours of sleep every night and, you know, never can stay up late. And then, when I got into my early 20s, I was in college, and you know a college student, you stay up late, you party, you study, whatever. And then I was like, wait, I'm not having the migraines anymore, maybe I can, maybe I can get back on track to the career I really have dreamed of. And so then I gave it another shot and it turned out it worked just fine.
FLORENCE:Amazing, amazing. So you get into medical school, you're pumped, you did it, you got there, you busted the butt to get there and you get accepted. And then you come out and you're starting to practice. What inspired that pivot? Was it just your own personal health crisis, or was there a disillusionment happening about how effective you were as a doctor?
DR. KEN BERRY:Yeah, I was classically trained in allopathic medicine. There was no hint of alternative or naturopathic practice in my residency program or medical school. But practicing just classical allopathic medicine is boring. I went into family practice because I wanted to do procedures and do things and other specialties just don't get to do that. I was actually initially going to be a surgeon until I realized that their day starts at 4 am and that wasn't really something I was interested in. And so I wound up with family practice, because you can have a broad scope of practice but the average internal medicine doctor or family practice doc, all they do is write refills for hypertension and sinus infections and diabetes. That's literally it. And so I did a lot of dermatological procedures, gynecological procedures, orthopedic procedures in my family practice and that was fun. But just the routine practice of medicine was boring and I've always been a bit of an iconoclast in my entire life and so I was always looking for alternative things, because you can just imagine seeing the same patient every six months for the next 25 years just to refill their blood pressure medicine and check their labs. That's not a lot of fun and so I was always kind of looking. I wonder if there's some tweak I could make that would help their blood pressure. Some dietary tweaks, some lifestyle intervention, some herbal.
DR. KEN BERRY:I studied deeply in herbal medicine just on my own, not as part of my traditional training, looking for something, but I could never see anything that really had a lot of signal. And by signal what I mean by that is if I put 20 or 30 patients on this herb from the Himalayan mountains when they come back for their six-month follow-up, has there been any noticeable improvement? Did the patient notice anything? Did I notice any change in the blood work, any change in the blood pressure? And I just couldn't find anything that gave me any meaningful signal. In the alternative naturopathic medicine space, read deeply about all the different naturopathic things, but I just couldn't find anything that made a meaningful difference for my patients.
DR. KEN BERRY:Until I personally became very metabolically ill, pre-diabetic, severely obese. And in my research, how am I going to fix this? I tried every herb, every supplement, every single thing you can imagine, every diet. I tried the American Diabetes Association diet. I tried a very low meat you could call it vegetarian, because easily 80% of my food intake was plants. None of that stuff gave me any meaningful signal in my own personal health. It was only when I discovered paleo, primal, lower carb, more meat centric. Then I was like, oh yeah, I'm losing weight. Oh, my A1C is coming down. That, okay, good.
DR. KEN BERRY:And so then I thought, well, I'm going to put my most morbidly obese patients, my most severely type two diabetic patients, because at that time I only thought this was a weight loss hack and a blood sugar hack. I didn't really know anything about being in ketosis or eating uninflammatory or eating very, very low carb. I didn't know anything about that, I just knew I'd lost weight and my A1C got better. So I picked all my patients who had a BMI of above 35. I'm like I'm just going to tell them about this, because all my patients were like hey, doc, you're, you look great, you've lost weight. I can tell you look, you look happier, you look like you feel better. And. And so I would be like, yeah, I'm just trying to, you know, eat less and move more or something. To the normal patients, but to these people with a BMI of over 35, some of which were were trying to get approved for bariatric surgery, right, because they were so severely obese, I would say you know, this is what I've been doing. You should try this for three months or six months and see what it does for you.
DR. KEN BERRY:Well, remember earlier I was talking about signal back from my patients. When those patients would come back for their three-month or six-month checkup significant signal They'd lost 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds. Their A1C sometimes, you know, 11, 12, 13 had come down, not two or three tenths of a percentage point, but two or three points full points on their A1C. That's a huge signal, right? And I'm like, oh okay, so not only does this diet help them lose weight, but it immediately makes their ability to control their type 2 diabetes much, much better.
DR. KEN BERRY:And and also, I had a few patients with type 1 diabetes because that's it's much less common than type 2 and even them they would drop several points off their a1c and they would report hey, I can't use nearly as much insulin, and that's how they would put it I can't use nearly as much insulin when I'm eating this diet you recommended. Now I look at it as they don't need to use, they get to use less insulin. But back then it's like if I use as much insulin as I normally use, I get very low blood sugars on this diet you recommended, and so that was the biggest signal I'd ever seen in any intervention that I'd ever recommended as a doctor and I'm including all surgical procedures and all pharmaceutical interventions as well this low carb diet, this meat centric diet that I was recommending I was getting more signal back from my patients than any prescription drug I had ever put a patient on. Signal back from my patients than any prescription drug I had ever put a patient on, because the average drug for type 2 diabetes will lower somebody's A1C anywhere from two to five-tenths of a percentage point. If it dropped their A1C from nine to 8.5, I was like, oh man, that's a great medicine, but this diet was dropping them from a 10 down to a seven in just three months. I'm like that's huge. Why are more people not talking about this?
DR. KEN BERRY:And I kept researching and I came upon ketosis, started reading the research, of which there's a lot about being in ketosis and the benefits of that. And then I started to hear about this carnivore diet trend where people were just eating meat and eggs only, nothing else. And I received very little training in medical school about human nutrition. I got a little, but it wasn't anything to brag about and I'm like well, how can you get all your vitamins and minerals. I just assumed you had to eat the rainbow, all these plants, all these fruits and vegetables to get all the nutrition and minerals. I just assumed you had to eat the rainbow, all these plants, all these fruits and vegetables to get all the nutrition that you need. But lo and behold, when I kept looking into it it's like, wow, meat has a lot of vitamins and minerals. I didn't realize that. I thought it was just saturated fat and protein. I didn't realize that it had all this other stuff in it.
DR. KEN BERRY:So then I started to recommend this low carb, meat centric diet to any of my patients, because I kept reading research about how it improves mood, reverses fatty liver, can completely reverse type two diabetes, metabolic syndrome improves, triglycerides improve, blood pressure improves. I'm like, well, okay. And so now I've come to the epiphany that there's not a patient that I should not put on a very low-carb, meat-centric diet. There is no such patient, and so I started calling it a proper human diet, because I feel like the keto diet that term has such connotations that come with it. It has so much baggage because so many people try to sell keto products, they try to sell keto supplements, but let's just call it what it is a proper human diet, and over the years of researching this and practicing this way, I've come up with a set of 11 principles of a proper human diet which we can talk about if you think it would help your viewers.
DR. KEN BERRY:But there is no other dietary intervention that I've ever seen that has this degree of positive signal in improving patients' health, and so you'll sometimes see a social media post about oh, a vegan diet improves type 2 diabetes. But if you go look at the study, the vegan diet did improve their lab results, but never have I seen a documented case of somebody reversing type 2 diabetes with a vegan diet. I've yet to see that. I keep asking people and they're like oh, my vegan diet controls my type 2 diabetes very well. Well, what do you mean by controls it? Very well, what's your A1C? And invariably it's 6.4. Maybe it's 6.1. Usually it's right at 6.5, which most doctors would say oh, that's well-controlled. But that's not my definition of well-controlled. My definition of well-controlled type 2 diabetes is having a normal A1C, and you cannot get that At least I haven't seen the research that shows that you can get that from a vegan diet, and so so many things went into this.
DR. KEN BERRY:I can't tell you how many books I've read. I've got every book that T Colin Campbell ever wrote. I've got many books that Ansel Keys wrote. I've got books from so many different vegan and vegetarian authors. And, yes, I think a vegan diet is less bad than the standard American diet, but that doesn't make it the best. But that doesn't make it the best diet. It doesn't make it the proper diet for human beings. But I can see that a vegan diet is less bad than the standard American junk diet? Yes, absolutely, but it's not going to get you where you ultimately want to be, which is optimal health.
FLORENCE:Yeah, and I think probably just for transparency. I think that I haven't worked with 20,000 clients. You're a doctor. You've 20,000 patients have come in and out of your offices. That is stunning amounts of frontline experience working with people, their bodies, their health and diets. Although, that said, I do believe that the vegan diet can be deeply detoxifying. I think it can do miraculous, wonderful things, but potentially not long-term, because almost everyone I know has had remarkable transformation by eating simple, clean, lots of fresh, raw fruits and vegetables. I've personally seen people have massive transformation, but I've also seen them down the road say it was so funny. One day I woke up and I just wanted some salmon. Or one day I woke up and I started to eat some eggs. It was like my body was was transitioning me to a you know more like what you recommend the, the protein, veggies and fat.
DR. KEN BERRY:Yeah.
FLORENCE:And Dr and Dr Barry, before we ran the camera, was saying you know, you can, I have a huge spectrum. There's a huge spectrum of carbohydrates. You know whole foods, plants, that people can eat with. You know, 100 grams or less is what he kind of recommends. That you stay in that kind of range so you don't have to just be carnivore, you don't have to just be eating high fat. You can eat a beautiful range of whole foods and still fit into this suggested human diet that Dr Berry recommends.
DR. KEN BERRY:Yeah, and I totally agree with you. I think if somebody is living on the standard American junk food diet and you convert them to a whole food, plant-based diet, their health is going to improve. Yeah, they are going to have some degree of a health improvement transformation, but it's my opinion from my 22 years of clinical experience that they're not going to have a complete transformation, from my 22 years of clinical experience that they're not going to have a complete transformation. At some point they're going to have to add back in some seafood, some eggs, some kind of full-fat dairy. They're going to have to add that back in because it's just so hard.
DR. KEN BERRY:Well, it's impossible to get all of the vitamins and minerals that you need and all the fatty acids that you need from a vegan diet. You're going to have to take somewhere between eight and 12 supplements a day. If you're planning on staying on a vegan diet for decades, you cannot do that without supplementation or your health will suffer. And the beautiful thing about a proper human diet that does include that seafood and the egg yolks and other things that are super nutrient dense is that if you structure it right and it's well formulated, you don't have to take any supplements. And that, to me, you can't call a way of eating a proper human diet if you're having to take a handful of supplements every day. That just doesn't make any sense.
DR. KEN BERRY:What did our ancestors do 5,000 years ago? There was no GNC. They just had to eat the food that they had on offer and they somehow were able to live and reproduce. And in many cases there's ample anthropological evidence that, if they made it past childhood, past the traumas that come with life, past the infection that come with life, back then they live to be 70 or 80 years old, just like we do today.
FLORENCE:Yeah, yeah, sorry, my question was there and it just flitted out of my head, something about ketosis. Oh I, know yes.
FLORENCE:Here's another thing that there's often a misunderstanding that the whole food plant base or people that really love their veggies and seem to thrive on them and enjoy them and do well with them and digest them and feel good on them and their blood you know their blood works good et cetera Assume that this keto diet is like their opposite. No, because people can do ketotarian, people can be low carb vegetarians, right. There's so much capacity to play with whole foods to figure out what's the right ratios for us. There is no one size fits all and sometimes I feel like we box the sort of paleo, keto, carnivore types into this. No, there's so much flexibility here to sort of figure out what works for you but to also not box ourselves in philosophically about building an identity around I'm carnivore, I only eat meat. I never eat right, because then someday you might wake up and go damn, I want a salad yeah, yeah, exactly, and I think that's why there should be a spectrum of proper human diets.
DR. KEN BERRY:And I know some people who, in order to optimize their health, they had to go carnivore for three months or six months but then, after they got everything in order, they were able to branch back out and add low carb vegetables back in, add some berries, add some nuts and, in many cases, quite a bit of fruit, and they were able to stay metabolically very healthy in a more ketogenic or even low-carb way of eating. And I think that not everybody needs to go carnivore and stay carnivore forever. Some people, I think, do. I'm one of those people. If you put me on 100 total grams of carbs a day, I would start gaining a pound or two every week. My A1C would start to creep up. I'd start to have done lap that's when your belly is done lapped over your belt. I'd start to have all that stuff again. Uh. But there are some people that if they're eating 70, 80, 90 total grams of carbs a day of real whole food carbs they do great and I think that's fine.
FLORENCE:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, good, because I just want everyone to feel included in this conversation. This is relevant to almost everybody, and I remember years ago I had interviewed Dr Naysha Winters and she was saying you know what we're calling low carb these days? Come on, that was just normal carb for our ancestors. There's nothing low carb about a low carb diet. It's like it was just normal back then.
DR. KEN BERRY:Exactly.
FLORENCE:Yes, yeah.
DR. KEN BERRY:You know, in the past, looking at the anthropological literature, only for a few months each year could you have even possibly eaten a high carb diet Right 5,000 years ago. It just was impossible to do that, regardless of where you live in the world, because all fruits are seasonal. Even if you live at the equator, in a jungle, fruits are still seasonal, and so you had to eat a significant portion of meat or you would have died. You could not have just lived on plants. That's impossible, and indeed we don't have a single anthropological example of a successful population being vegan. It just doesn't happen.
DR. KEN BERRY:And so I understand that some people have ethical and moral reasons for not eating animal products, and I honor that. If that's the reason that you're eating plant-based, then I respect that decision and I honor you for your ethics and morals. I don't denigrate that at all. But if you're doing it because you've been misinformed and you falsely believe that a whole food, plant-based diet is the healthiest way for human beings to eat, then I have a problem with that because you've been misled, because I just I don't think there's any research in any scientific field that supports that.
FLORENCE:And one of the things we talked about earlier too is that I see these really really low carb sort of keto carnivore type medical interventions for three to six months really can be this very powerful medical intervention that creates massive transformation, metabolic healing, mental health healing, and you can't understand it till you've lived it, you've tried it. Um, I know that my experimentations with keto this is maybe a little bit outside your realm, I'm not sure, but I experience the experience, the trauma, freeze response. If I get overwhelmed, my body will collapse and I feel like really lethargic, I feel like I'm immobilized, like my body's, my body's overwhelmed, and it's basically stop, just stop. Right now I just need to just stop. And when I'm in that place, and when I'm in that place for long stretches of time, nothing, nothing works better than keto to bring me a different kind of energy that I can burn, nothing pulls me out of my freeze response like fasting, intermittent fasting, eating lower carb and no one's talking about that.
DR. KEN BERRY:I totally agree. Okay, totally agree. So, being in some degree of ketosis. We're seeing research coming out almost weekly about the benefits of being in some degree of ketosis for mental health conditions. And there are three things you can do in a stressful situation you can fight, you can run or you can freeze. And it's actually evolutionarily advantageous if our tribe has a variety of those people, because in some emergencies, if everybody runs, everybody's going to die. If everybody freezes, they're all going to die. If everybody fights, they're all going to die. And so you want there to be variety in how members of your tribe react to an emergency. You want there to be some freezers and some fighters and some runners.
DR. KEN BERRY:But many people think, oh, I'm a freezer or I'm an anxious person or I'm just a depressed person, until they try some version of a ketogenic diet that puts them in some degree of ketosis and, I would also argue, remove some of the inflammatory food-like products that they've been eating in the past, which keeps their brain inflamed. When they remove the inflammatory food-like products and they get into some degree of ketosis, all of a sudden they're not defaulting to freeze anymore, they're not defaulting to give up, they're not defaulting to give up, they're not defaulting to being overwhelmed anymore. It's like, wow, I just kept going right through that. I've never done that before, and so I think a lot of you know we tend to own what we've done in the past, like, oh, I'm just an anxious person, I have a depression disorder, I'm a freezer, I don't perform well in urgent or emergent situations.
DR. KEN BERRY:That may not be true. Actually, you may have always reacted that way because of the inflammation and never being in ketosis. You may actually be a fighter and you just don't know it. Or you may actually be somebody who can rise to the occasion, although you currently don't believe that about yourself. It comes down to feeding your brain the nutrients that it needs, removing the inflammatory agents and being in some degree of ketosis. You find all of a sudden I'm able to rise to the occasion. Wow, that's amazing.
FLORENCE:It really is. I know this probably sounds unreal. I've lived this, I'm watching this in my own practice and, as I'm researching and studying trauma, I think this is like one of those moments where you just want to like shut it at the rooftops. Like so many of us are living in high functioning freeze, we're overwhelmed, we're chronically stressed. We've got this part of our system that's shut down but in survival mode. And the power of nutrition to heal metabolic health and mental health issues we're talking about, but the power of nutrition to help us have enough of the right kind of energy to meet the challenges of life and to feel like I can handle this, I can do this Is you have to live it to believe it.
DR. KEN BERRY:Like yeah, I totally agree, totally agree, and I've seen this in uh, we have a private community. We have thousands of people in there and many more and more people every day are coming for the mental health benefit of low carb, keto, keto or carnivore that's. That's the full spectrum of a proper human diet and we see reports of this all the time.
DR. KEN BERRY:I used to be that wallflower who I thought I was shy, I thought I was introverted, I just thought all these things about myself. But now that I've been in ketosis for most of my days, suddenly I'm this gregarious. Outgoing, it's so weird, it's like I don't even know who I am anymore. Outgoing, it's so weird, it's like I don't even know who I am anymore, but in a very good way and I see that all the time. We hear that feedback constantly a very huge signal in the mental health space for feeding your brain the food it needs and removing the inflammatory offending agents and being in some degree of ketosis. It's so powerful that anybody suffering from any kind of mental health issue you don't know what benefit you could reap from this until you try it for three months.
FLORENCE:Totally Absolutely. And for those of us that are on the ultra processed food spectrum, addiction spectrum, where if we have a little, we get cravings and they annoy us until we give in and then we feel bad, like oh man, I know this stuff's bad to eat, Like what's wrong with me. And we're stuck in this cycle of trying to override, you know, the cravings, the predictable cascade of events that happens after we consume a substance that triggers our bodies and inflames our bodies. Well, when you take a complete break from all of those foods and you have, you know, what Roxanna, my co-host, calls blissful satiety- yes, it's a brilliant way of putting it.
FLORENCE:It's such a brilliant way of putting it. It is a blissful kind of satiety that you cannot understand when there's your carb ratio is over the line, whatever that line is. For some of us it's zero for short stretches. For some of us it's zero long stretches. For some of us it's 50. For some of us it's 100. You know, it's somewhere on that spectrum.
FLORENCE:But what I found for me is that there were stretches of my life, all the experimentations I've done with my own meal plans, that if I was eating enough carbohydrate to not be in ketosis but not enough carbohydrate to actually have enough sugar to burn, I was in this like purgatory hell, exhausted like I'm, like this isn't working, it's like the best possible diet I can think of and and with the light bulb went on, like you are not eating enough carbs to burn. Be a carb burner, yep, and you're not in ketosis, so take your pick. And what I realized? That there's, and I did a 90 day perfect, whole food, plant-based experiment, probably about a year ago, and I just was exhausted all the time. And it's just. I realized I'm you know, there's just not, I wasn't eating the really fast burning sugary stuff. It was all the good stuff, and for my body I wasn't getting it. It would. It would be all zingy and alive and full of energy on the sugar, but it just anyways. So everyone has to play with what those ratios are.
DR. KEN BERRY:And you brought up something, florence, about sugar addiction, food addiction, and I think let me just be very clear about this. I think sugar addiction and carbohydrate addiction is absolutely real, but what you're seeing in mainstream media is you're seeing the same muddying of the water as we saw. For those of us old enough to remember back when we were holding congressional hearings about cigarettes, is nicotine truly habit-forming? And some of your listeners may remember the congressional hearing when theos of every major tobacco company said I do not believe that nicotine is addictive. So they said that under oath, knowing the full time. That was absolutely false. So what I want people to understand is sugar addiction is absolutely a real physiological phenomenon and the the waters are currently being muddied by the big food manufacturers.
DR. KEN BERRY:They're using the exact playbook that big tobacco used to say well, I don't know, cigarettes may be bad. I think you can smoke in moderation. I don't know, scientists don't know if nicotine is really addictive or not. Because if you introduce that doubt, then people with the sugar addiction, what are they going to cling to? They're going to cling to. Oh well, the experts don't even know if sugar addiction is real or not. That's probably baloney. I'm just going to eat what I want. That's exactly what Big Food wants you to do. That's why they introduce the confusion into the conversation is to give you that freedom which is not really freedom, but they give you that freedom to say I'm just going to eat what I want, because nobody can make up their mind. Eggs are good, eggs are bad, eggs are good, eggs are bad. Nobody knows they're doing that on purpose, so that you'll keep eating the highly processed, sugar-filled junk that you're addicted to.
DR. KEN BERRY:And so I think one of the biggest steps back towards good health for many people, millions of people, is to look in the mirror and say hi, say my name, I'm a sugar addict, and have that conversation with yourself, and then that opens the door for you to go okay, what am I going to do about this? Because you phrased it as freedom from sugar. But think about a raging alcoholic. If you said to them you should be free of alcohol, that didn't sound good to them. That sounds terrible to them because they're addicted. And so I would say to everybody with sugar addiction there is freedom from it, but it's going to suck for three to 14 days as you break that addiction, just like breaking an addiction to alcohol or nicotine or any other addictive substance. It's not going to be fun to do it, but I promise you there is a degree of good health on the other end of breaking that addiction that you probably can't even imagine currently.
FLORENCE:Absolutely. And how can people have some sense whether or not they fall on the addiction spectrum?
DR. KEN BERRY:some people it's very easy for them to get addicted to anything gambling, porn, cigarettes, alcohol. Other people can take it or leave it and they would have to literally work a full-time job at becoming an alcoholic. It's just so hard for them to become addicted. But I think most people who have addictive personalities, they tend to kind of know that about themselves. But if you, if you like no, I'm not a sugar addict I can take it or leave it. Well, first of all, realize me how many millions of alcoholics have said that over the years I can take it or leave it? How many smokers we know they were wrong about that? Maybe you're wrong about that too. The quickest way to know is to just stop eating anything with added sugar in it and too much naturally occurring sugar. Just stop it all for two weeks and if you can truly take it or leave it, then you'll have no problem with that. Two weeks. It'll be a breeze, you won't have any problem.
DR. KEN BERRY:But if you are a sugar addict, about that third or fourth day, whatever your previous habit of choice was, it's going to be calling to you, you're going to be having dreams about it, you're going to be thinking about it incessantly. And then, finally, the third, fourth or fifth day, you're going to give up and eat whatever it was. You're going to get in the car, drive to the store and buy it and eat it in the car in the parking lot. You're an addict, that's it, and it's okay to be an addict. That's not a bad thing. That's actually a great discovery for you to discover, because once you make that discovery about yourself, now you know who the enemy is. Then you can start to formulate a plan.
DR. KEN BERRY:How am I going to break this addiction? I thought I could take it or leave it. Obviously, I cannot take it or leave it. What am I going to do about that? And that's the first question, that's the first step on the road to great health. Is just making that determination? Am I really or not? Try zero sugar for two weeks. You'll quickly find out.
FLORENCE:Absolutely so. The experiment is no sugar, no flour no bread, no pasta, no crackers, no potato chips, nothing. So no refined carbohydrates no sweeteners no stevia, no, monk fruit, no allulose none of it.
DR. KEN BERRY:Right, because I wouldn't be surprised if there's not a sweetness addiction as well. I agree, because we see a lot of people they go keto but they're wearing out the stevia and the monk fruit and the erythritol and the xylitol and the agulose, and so I'm not so sure. Definitely there's sugar addiction, definitely there's highly processed carb addiction, but I'm not so sure that there's not also just a sweet taste addiction. I think that when you have that sweet taste in your mouth, it releases endorphins, it mucks with your neurotransmitters, and so I recommend everybody just even if you're keto now but you're eating lots of keto cookies, cakes and pies, you're putting stevia or monk fruit in every single cup of coffee let's try to just keep slowly weaning that down. But you're right, I think it's a sweetness addiction as well as a sugar addiction for many people.
FLORENCE:Yeah, I think it's a sweetness addiction as well as a sugar addiction for many people. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, so that's the experiment. And no alcohol, no sugar, no flour, no sweetness, no alcohol, two weeks. And if you're like, oh, I kind of miss it, I kind of think about it, it kind of looks good, but you're more or less able to do it, you have a pass cake every now and then, like, have a cookie and get right back on track. You'll be fine.
FLORENCE:But for the most part that just isn't who we are, who anyone on this summit is likely falling on the sensitive spectrum, sensitive to those carbohydrates, particularly as they're refined. The Dr Richard Johnson, who really studied a lot about fructose. He says we're actually designed to binge it. We are, we're totally designed to binge it in those once a year once a year in the fall for those of us in northern hemispheres, because we were fattening up before winter, just like the bears and squirrels and right absolutely absolutely the sweet gets on our tongue.
FLORENCE:It says game on the fruits here, binge fatten up. We got a long six months of winter coming, or maybe less down, dr.
DR. KEN BERRY:Richard Johnson. He's a great, great authority on this and he's absolutely right about that. And let me go back to something you said previously. I love that you include articulately bread, pasta, potato chips, because for a lot of people those are savory foods, those are not sugar foods. No, people don't make that connection. But all the starchy tubers, all the starchy grains, that starch is just long chains of sugar and when you're chewing up that bite of whole grain bread, there's an enzyme in your mouth called amylase that's breaking the starch up into sugar before you even swallow it. And so so many people are like, oh, I don't eat sugar, and they think they don't eat sugar. But that's wrong. If you're eating bread and chips and potatoes and carrots and all this stuff, that starch breaks up immediately into sugar and it becomes pure sugar in your body.
FLORENCE:Totally. And we're so clever, we're so clever We've built, we take off the bran and the fiber and we turn it into white bread and we powder things. And we are so good at figuring out how to give me the best possible sugar blast because we know that it really does create this lift of energy until we become metabolically damaged, insulin resistance, and we need so much of the sugar to feel like we're getting fueled and at a certain point we can't even run on that fuel. That's when ketosis can be. It can be a game changer really truly, and I will say this about ketosis I actually don't feel great on really lots and lots of meat. Um, other people thrive on it. My husband, like he could eat. He could eat two pounds a day, no problem. He digests it very well. He's his body great. Mine not so much. But I feel fabulous in the fasting. When I go lower carb, I can fast better, longer, and in those windows there's an indescribable feeling of well-being that you have to live to believe.
DR. KEN BERRY:Yeah, and also for people who have never gone two hours their entire life without eating. Most people are constantly grazing. There's also a power to fasting that a lot of people don't believe until they try it, because it's almost like a superpower that I can go all day without eating. Most people who are eating the standard American junk, they're like I don't even understand what you mean by that. Why would you not eat? Where do you get your pleasure from? To which I would respond if food is the greatest pleasure of your day, most days that's a problem. That's not a good thing. That's a bad thing. There are things in your life that you should be deriving great pleasure from, but it's not food. Food is nutrition. It can be enjoyable Of course we want it to be, but it shouldn't be the pleasure of your day, and for so many people, that's how they get their dopamine.
DR. KEN BERRY:Hit is from the high carb snacks and the constant grazing and the high carb meals. That's their pleasure and that's actually. That's a very weak place to live your life. Because you are beholden to the big food manufacturers. You need them for your fix, but when you start to practice fasting and it's really hard to do unless you're on a lower carbohydrate diet. That puts you in some degree of ketosis, very hard to fast. But once you adopt low carb or keto, many people fast accidentally. You probably have people in your group that, just like I just looked up and it was 2 pm and I just hadn't thought about eating. For many people that's almost a superpower to not have to constantly take snacks and constantly be worrying where your next dopamine hit is going to come from. That's kind of like a superpower.
FLORENCE:Totally, absolutely, to have peace with food, to not be obsessed, not to have cravings and it's annoying. Cravings aren't normal, they do disappear. The hard reality is, if you want to get rid of your cravings, you's annoying. Cravings aren't normal, they do disappear at the hard. The hard reality is, if you want to get rid of your cravings, you need to get rid of the foods that cause them. It's a trade-off, but it's a good trade-off yes, oh yeah, it's.
DR. KEN BERRY:it's absolutely a net positive for you long term and many people who are still getting their dopamine from their, their free meals and snacks. In between all high carb. It looks so restrictive, right, it's like, oh, it's so restrictive. But Roxanna is a great example. She's a sugar addict in remission. She'll tell you.
DR. KEN BERRY:I have never felt more free in my life than when I'm eating a proper human diet. I feel the same exact way. I'm so free because it's what. 1 pm here, where I'm eating a proper human diet, I feel the same exact way. I'm so free because it's what 1 pm here where I'm at, I haven't even thought about food today Literally has not crossed my mind and it won't cross my mind till 3 or 4 or 5 pm. When we're finished with this, I'm going to go work out on our farm for a few hours and I won't think about eating until later in the afternoon and I'll be like I guess I could eat something. That's that is so freeing to not have to be like well, I better take some Gatorade with me or I better take some cookies. I might get hungry. That just doesn't happen when you're eating a proper human diet.
FLORENCE:Right, and it kind of makes me understand better how indigenous populations in Canada because I'm in Canada literally we have seven months of winter up here, yes, Seven long cold months, and I think how did they survive?
DR. KEN BERRY:Yes.
FLORENCE:I get it right. They had pemmican, they had bison with dried Saskatoon berries and it lasted and they didn't need to eat that much and it lasted and they didn't need to eat that much.
DR. KEN BERRY:That's right, and they would go for a day or two. If it was a long hunt trying to feed their family, they would go for a day or two without eating and it was not the big deal that people in modern society think that that is, it's completely doable. People after a few months on a ketogenic diet. If you said to them hey, there's an emergency situation, we've got to go do this thing, we're not going to be able to eat for two days. If you said that to a group of people eating the standard American diet, they'd be like I can't go. But after a few months of keto or carnivore, all of them would be like, yeah, let's go, let's do this thing. That must be done.
FLORENCE:I can go a day or two without eating. That's not a big deal at all. One of the things that drives me a little bit crazy about the carnivore space, I think, is this that just when you think, okay, okay, okay, I wrapped my head around the idea that I'm going to try the carnivore 28-day detox, this radical elimination diet Okay, so, I'm just, I'm going to eliminate everything except meat for me, and then you get into that and then you hear things like oh no, but you can't eat chicken and you can't eat. It only has to be beef and it only has to be. It has to be like you have to stand on your head and you have to breathe through your nose only, and like you're just like oh my God, it's like the needle keeps moving. Can we just eat?
DR. KEN BERRY:as, as long as it's a meat, is that good enough? Yeah, as long as the meat is not breaded and it's not fried in a vegetable seed oil or cooked in seed oils, I think all meat is fine. Anytime something becomes very popular, like the carnivore diet is currently, you'll have zealots who come out and they'll start making rules and they'll start, and so then all of a sudden, you're not a real carnivore. It's like this is not a religion, this is not. This is not some private club. This is just people trying to eat a certain way and improve their health. Uh, I'm I.
DR. KEN BERRY:I do best on ruminant meat, but I still eat pork and chicken from time to time. I still eat seafood every time it's available. My wife does much better. She could live on chicken and pork and seafood. I've got to have some beef or some sheep or some goat or some venison. The red meat seems to do better for me, but I don't think that's true for everyone.
DR. KEN BERRY:I think there are people in the world that could literally do a carnivore diet on poultry and seafood and eggs and would be perfectly happy with that. Would flourish, would do great. I don't know why zealots. It's just human nature that we become zealots when we're part of a group. I don't know why that is, but it's not helpful and it turns a lot of people off because it feels like a closed club and you're not invited and that's absolutely false. A carnivore diet is part of the proper human diet spectrum. Some people need it, Some people don't. It's always there. If you want to do the 28 days just to see how you would feel you can do carnivore with red meat, with poultry, with seafood, with eggs Absolutely with, with poultry, with seafood, with eggs absolutely got it.
FLORENCE:That's so helpful to hear. So when you go back in time to when you were just starting to do paleo and things were starting to turn around, you start to lose weight or anyone see was coming down, you're like, wow, damn, this is. This is more effective than any pharmaceutical. This is serious medicine here. Yep. Did you go back and forth because you also said I'm, I'm a sugar addict? Did you go back and forth Because you also said I'm, I'm a sugar addict? Did you relapse and have slips? Or like what? Like what did that? How long did it take you for you to settle into? This is just how I need to eat.
DR. KEN BERRY:Yeah, I did. From time to time would would just eat something completely idiotic, but I did it. My, my journey was such a slow transformation because I converted so early in kind of the popularity of all this. And so I read Dr Atkins Diet Revolution, the Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson and the Paleo Diet by Lauren Cordain, and so I just started to slowly cut the carbs, slowly bump up the meat, and so for a long time I was paleo. I would eat tons of vegetables, tons of plant-based things. I remember I used to get these blue corn chips because they were made of non-GMO Mexican corn, right, and I would eat a bag a day of those, right. But then my transformation from paleo, primal, down to low carb and then keto it was. It was over years and so I just I was slowly weaning over those years and so I I didn't have an overnight moment like a lot of people. They hear about carnivore and they're like, oh, I'm doing that, and then they start the next day. They're, they're gonna.
DR. KEN BERRY:Many people are going to have severe carbohydrate withdrawal and a lot of people call that keto flu or carnivore flu. But phrasing it that makes it sound like there's something wrong with the diet you're eating. That's not what that is. That's carbohydrate withdrawal and it sucks just as bad as nicotine withdrawal for many people. And so I did it so slow and gradually that I didn't really have those set in stone. You know black and white day or next day I'm 100% this, that or the other. I did it so slowly that it was kind of effortless.
DR. KEN BERRY:But for anybody who tries to go from just Lucky Charms and Pepsi Cola and Cheetos and overnight I'm going to go 100% whole real food keto, they're going to have some withdrawal symptoms but that's OK because good health is on the other side of breaking that addiction. But it's going to suck and a lot of people don't explain that to them. I think that moderators should probably do this over a month or two or three. They should slowly convert, whereas abstainers and teetotalers they should just go keto or go carnivore because that's their personality style.
DR. KEN BERRY:But people who have a severe carb addiction and they're moderators they should not do this overnight. It's going to suck really bad. You should probably transition over one to three months. It's going to suck really bad. You should probably transition over one to three months. It's going to make it much easier. You're still going to get the same health benefits because you're still going to get to where you need to be. There's no reason to try to do that overnight if you're a moderator and if you're a sugar addict, because it's not going to be fun.
FLORENCE:Right, and if you're on the addiction spectrum you might do well for a little while, and then you get a craving or something smells particularly good, and then you kind of go off the deep end and we call it getting in the being, in the ditch, and it's okay that that process and you wind up being in the ditch for weeks or months, right, instead of oh, I just I idiot.
DR. KEN BERRY:I was at the steakhouse and I had steak and oysters and then I had that piece of pie and just recognizing that's not a failure in me, I'm not a failure as a person. I just had a piece of pie. I can get right back on keto or carnivore in the morning. It's not the end of the world. But if you've got a sugar addiction or you've got that kind of fatalistic, negative personality style currently because you're not in ketosis enough that one piece of pie turns into three months of just eating abject junk and gaining 20 pounds, Right, right, right.
FLORENCE:So, yeah, how you handle the slips that, oh, maybe I can handle this just a little. And then you realize I have cravings and I want more and it's annoying. Eventually you spend less time in the ditch, more time in the whole foods that you know, with the ratio that works for you, and you just slowly kind of let these foods go. I know I come out of the 12 step program where it's like abstinence and it's overnight and it's perfect and for some people that can work. For some people it becomes a full-time job. They have to call their sponsor, they have to go to all these meetings, they have to do all this stuff, and that can work. It's a beautiful path for some people, but not for everybody. And if it's not for you, then the tapering down and getting the support and knowing that there will be a day when you arrive where you go I will never forget this moment. This is different than anything I've ever experienced before.
DR. KEN BERRY:Exactly.
FLORENCE:Yeah, the blissful satiety is there, the peace with food, the sense of like. My brain is alive and I'm resilient. The freeze response happens because there's a perceived lack of energy to either fight or flight. So if you're running, if you're not feeling energized on a higher carbohydrate diet, you know, try ketosis and see if that is a fuel source that for your body, your body goes oh yeah, I'm now feeling resilient, I now can fight or flight, I can handle my to-do list, I can handle stress in a different way.
FLORENCE:And one last thing I'll say too is if you're a mom, if you're a dad, if you have kids, if you have grandkids, the generations coming up are so metabolically damaged that the sooner you wake up as a parent and a grandparent that we need to get our kids on these lower carbohydrates, have them in ketosis some of the day we're always meant to be back and forth, back and forth, metabolically flexible the sooner you might see kids that are happier, more resilient, better, easier to raise, fulfilling their potential. If there's one thing we gift the future generation, it's this. But we got to start with ourselves, often because we don't have the bandwidth to even be fully there for our kids.
DR. KEN BERRY:I totally agree. And one thing I think is very important for people, especially some people from certain ethnic backgrounds they consider their current high carb diet as part of their heritage or part of their culture, and that's just not true. The average person in their 20s, if you said what's your cultural heritage around food, well, it's what their mom fed them and what their grandmom fed them. That's what they think that their cultural heritage is, back a hundred generations. But the truth of the matter is is, if we go back enough generations for anybody in the world from any ethnic background, their ancestors, if you go back far enough, ate meat the majority of the day. That was the majority of their food intake. It could have been poultry, it could have been seafood, it could have been red meat, it could have been megafauna, it could have been small fauna, but they ate mostly meat. That is every human's cultural heritage If you go back far enough in their family tree. But most people are not aware of that.
FLORENCE:Is that true in tropical I get northern climates for sure we didn't have access to anything fresh for six, seven months of the year.
DR. KEN BERRY:But even in the equator area, yes, even in Asia, in the subcontinent, in Africa, between the tropics of cancer and around the equator, every stable isotope analysis that's ever been done on any human fossil remains, the majority of their food intake was meat and, like I said, it could have been red meat, it could have been poultry, it could have been fish, could have been shellfish, it could have been insects, but every single time we've checked that on any population anywhere in the world, greater than 15,000 years ago, right before the agricultural de-evolution is what I call it they ate mostly meat, without exception. And so you know, you think about the people of Asian descent, people of Indian descent, people of African descent. You're like well, no, they eat mostly rice. No, that's only a few generations back. If you go back far enough, all of their ancestors, regardless of religion, regardless of ethnicity, your ancestors ate mostly meat.
FLORENCE:And the mostly meat was probably not even all that much, because it really doesn't.
DR. KEN BERRY:That's right.
FLORENCE:Yeah, it's much less than people think. Very interesting, the eskimos. I only recently, when I did my nutrition genome, it came back saying that I don't process saturated fats very well. They recommended that I I minimize it, that I do better with the mono and the poly. But they had indicated that, uh, the eskimos were thought to be living in ketosis because they mostly fish, whale and fat. And they thought that, oh, they must be mostly, you know, living in ketosis. And it turns out they have a genetic snip that makes it impossible for them to be in ketosis. But what they were doing was converting the fat in the meat, particularly the protein, into glucose. That they were glucose burners, which is just so fascinating, right.
DR. KEN BERRY:Yeah, and there's still that's not settled. That discussion is still ongoing. There's more research pending, but it looks like that the Inuit were not as deep in ketosis as you would imagine from them basically living on whale blubber and fatty seal and fatty walrus. They probably weren't in as deep a ketosis as you would just imagine that they would be, but there is some discussion around that topic. They probably did have a higher rate of gluconeogenesis than other people, but they still absolutely benefited from all the saturated fat that they were eating. That absolutely benefited their health. But you're right, there is a little pocket of debate there about them.
FLORENCE:Yeah, yeah and it doesn't really matter. The bottom line is that our bodies know how to adapt to whatever food we have access to and to make it safe and healthy for us that they were vibrantly healthy. No issues before the introduction of all the ultra-processed foods and processed carbs.
DR. KEN BERRY:Absolutely correct. Basically, cavities in teeth. Anytime you look at a fossil human remains that's over 15,000 years of age, they don't have any cavities. They have very few signs of dental abscess. That just didn't happen to them and it's because they ate mostly meat. The plants that they did eat were very fibrous and very low in carbohydrates. They had access to sugar in some parts of the world for two or three weeks out of the year, so for the other 48 or 49 weeks of the year they were eating mainly meat.
FLORENCE:Interesting. So to wrap this up today, I want to say that I remember the moment when the light bulb went on for me. I was in my 12-step program and a guy named Eric had come in into the room a bit late. He was morbidly obese, he was in his 60s, he'd been diabetic for 30 years, he was depressed, he was slick with oil and he smelled terrible. This was a man who was hanging by a thread. You could just tell he didn't. He barely wanted to be alive, if he wanted to be alive at all. But he came in on one last ditch effort to try and get his and turn his life around, turn his health and mental health around. He came in. We gave him a low carb meal plan. Three meals, no snacks, protein, veggies, healthy fat. We had berries one today. That was it. Here's the meal plan. Three meals, no snacks, protein, veggies, healthy fat. We had berries, one today. That was it. Here's the meal plan. Follow it, the miracle will happen. Just wait for it. That's literally all we said to everyone who came into our 12 step program.
FLORENCE:So none of us are able to do it all that easily, but we get it. We, you know. We get support and we eventually get it three meals, no snacks, whole foods only blah, blah, blah. No sugar, no flour, no sweeteners, no alcohol. And Eric went to the front of the room and it was just about the six month mark to share his story and he brought up a pair of jeans and he said I can almost fit my new body in one of these pant legs. I just came back from the doctor. I was on 11 different medications. I've 10 have been removed, one is left and I'm pretty confident that one will go as well. I'm no longer diabetic and he'd lost 75 pounds in six months. Now only men get to do that. I don't know why.
DR. KEN BERRY:That's right, that's right, that's right, it just it just falls off them, but anyways.
FLORENCE:And he said, I'm no longer diabetic and I shot the guy beside me. His name was Ron. I'm like Ron, I don't think we can reverse. You can't reverse diabetes, and right. And Ron, and this was 22 years ago, 21 years ago. And Ron said to me Florence, we know everyone who comes in who's diabetic. If they're not not diabetic within 30 to 45 days, they're cheating on the meal plan. Everybody reverses diabetes. And my, I remember my whole body going what Yep Like. Why is this not on the front page of the New York Times?
DR. KEN BERRY:You would think that the American Diabetes Association would be releasing a press release weekly saying hey, you can reverse type 2 diabetes with a low-carb or keto diet. It's proven in multiple studies. But yet you don't hear anything about that and people have questions why the ADA is not more vocal about how easy it is to reverse type 2 diabetes. Why are they not talking about that?
FLORENCE:And I don't know if it's because they haven't seen the Eric's. Like you saw in your practice, your own personal experience, like when you see it, when you see it, you believe it, when you live it, it's like this truth, and so I wanted to end on this note that there are people who jump into this space to make a buck. They're selling keto something. Dr Berry isn't one of them, I'm not one of them. The people on the summit honestly, this is because when you know this, it's like you have to share it. We are literally compelled to try and bring this message, because I know how much I was suicidally depressed. I was overweight, I was miserable, and I just know that you're motivated by that same desire, that you were called to medicine, because you want to truly have people experience vibrant health. That life without it is pretty miserable and it's possible to have it.
DR. KEN BERRY:Yeah, I feel in my personal life as a doctor for over 22 years, that it would be unethical and immoral of me to stop talking about a proper human diet on social media. That would be an unethical act for me to say I'm going to start talking about classic cars or something. That would be sinful for me. To know what I know and had to have seen the success in tens of thousands of people now all around the world, it would be unethical for me to not recommend a proper human diet to every human being I meet so is there any final words you'd like to share today before we wrap up?
DR. KEN BERRY:yeah, there is a degree of health that you currently can't imagine. It's available to you. There is an option there. It may not be fun initially, it may be uncomfortable, it may go against your religious belief, it may go against what your mom and your grandmother taught you is proper human food. But I promise you, if you keep reading and keep researching, keep experimenting, you are going to discover your proper human diet and where you fall on the proper human diet spectrum and when you find that, it will become effortless to eat that way and to not eat that way through fasting, it'll become effortless. It'll just become part of your life. And I know you're sitting there now thinking. This sounds like you're speaking in a foreign language. I don't even understand what you mean by this. I'm pretty healthy. A lot of people think that until they discover what true health is and true blissful satiety is and what true mental peace is, you thought you were healthy, but you really need to experiment with this because I promise you there's another level of health that you haven't unlocked yet.
FLORENCE:Thank you so much. When you were a little boy, you dreamed of being a doctor that would make a difference, and how amazing that you are that you get to through all your tireless free work that you put out in the world. So thank, thank you again.
DR. KEN BERRY:Thank you so much.
