I’m excited to connect with Dr. Bill Schindler today! He is the author of Eat Like a Human: Nourishing Foods and Ancient Ways of Cooking to Revolutionize Your Health. He is also an internationally known archaeologist, primitive technologist, chef, and co-founder of Modern Stone Age Kitchen.
Dr. Schindler is all about helping people understand ancestral approaches to maximizing safety, nutrient density, and bioavailability. In this episode, we dive into his background and discuss what we should eat, milestones related to ancestral health perspectives, nutrient density, bioavailability, and how technology has impacted how we eat today. We also discuss plant toxins, organ meats, dairy, bug protein, and more.
I loved Dr. Schindler’s book, Eat Like a Human: Nourishing Foods and Ancient Ways of Cooking to Revolutionize Your Health, so do check it out! I hope you enjoy listening to our fascinating conversation. Stay tuned for more!
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
Dr. Schindler went from being a wrestler to having an evolutionary perspective on food, how we interact with it, and living a Paleolithic lifestyle.
How important evolutionary milestones have impacted the way most people eat.
Most of us have become severely disconnected from our food system.
What plant toxins do to our bodies, and what we can do to make them less toxic so that we can consume them safely
The biggest problem with oxalates.
Changes that have occurred that may contribute to people becoming intolerant to dairy.
What is the difference between raw milk and pasteurized and homogenized milk?
How to get the maximum nutrition most safely from dairy.
Ways to prepare organ meats and offal to make them more appetizing.
We can benefit from including insects in our diet.
Dr. Schindler explains what he and his family are doing at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen.
"We are the only species on the planet that hires other people to tell us how we should be eating."
-Dr. Bill Schindler
Connect with Cynthia Thurlow
Connect with Dr. Bill Schindler
On his websites: www.eatlikeahuman.com or www.modernstoneagekitchen.com
Follow Dr. Schindler online: @Dr. Bill Schindler and @Modern Stone Age Kitchen
Eat Like a Human: Nourishing Foods and Ancient Ways of Cooking to Revolutionize Your Health is available in print, audio, or digital from any major online book supplier. Or order a signed copy from Dr. Schindler’s website.
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent, is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
Today, I connected with Dr. Bill Schindler. He's the author of Eat Like a Human: Nourishing Foods and Ancient Ways of Cooking to Revolutionize Your Health and is an internationally known archaeologist, primitive technologist, and chef, he is also the co-founder of Modern Stone Age Kitchen. And he's all about helping individuals understand ancestral approaches to maximizing safety, nutrient density, and bioavailability. Today, we dove deep into his background about what should we eat, milestones with regard to ancestral health perspectives, the role of nutrient density, bioavailability, connection versus disconnection in technology, and how it has impacted the way that we eat. The role of plant toxins, organ meats, dairy, and bug protein amongst many other topics. I really loved his book, Eat Like a Human, you definitely want to check it out. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did recording it.
Well, I'm so excited to connect with you, Dr. Schindler today to really dive into your work, I can tell you that I really enjoyed preparing for this podcast episode with you.
Bill Schindler: Thank you very much. I'm super excited for the conversation.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah, so share with the listeners a bit about your background, you've got quite an interesting background. I was mentioning before we started recording that anytime I'm preparing to interview anyone, I'm listening to them on other podcasts, I'm watching their videos, and you take things to a whole other level. I was watching National Geographic's Great Human Race. And I thought to myself, this is not just taking a liver supplement. This is next level paleolithic ancestral health living. So, how did you go from being a wrestler, navigating college, to leading yourself into this anthropological background, and ultimately ending up with this very evolutionary lens on perspectives on our food and how we interact with food and this paleolithic lifestyle?
Bill Schindler: Sure, the entire journey, like you mentioned, it's a sorted journey with a lot of different branches but really, in a very wonderful way about 15 years has come all together in a full circle. For my entire life I've been trying to answer the question what I should be eating to try to nourish myself and understand how to live my best life. And I've had most of my life an incredibly unhealthy relationship with food. I was very overweight as a kid. And then when I was a Division I college wrestler, certainly wrestling and food in that relationship was unhealthy, especially in the 80s and 90s until a lot of the NCAA rules and regulations changed. And then after I stopped being the Division I athlete, though the weight poured back on and I suffered from all sorts of metabolic disease and discomfort and problems, my quality of life was tanked just because of all that. And so a lot of what I'm doing now started as a result of like for most people trying to figure out how to live their best life. And then really got magnified when I got married and realize that now I was trying to nurse two people and then we started having kids, it became really, really important.
All the conventional ways, I was trying to figure out how to do this. We're not answering my questions like for probably most of the listeners have tried all the fad diets, all those different things, listen to the doctors, listen to the nutritionist at least that I had access to, listen to my coaches. And what I realized about 20 years ago was that I was not only asking the wrong question, which I hope we can talk about a bunch today, but also looking at the wrong places for sources of information and inspiration. And I had lived most of my life on these two tracks, these two major interests. One was about food and diet and health and one was about being outside and hunting and fishing and trapping and learning about our ancestors and all of those sorts of things. And for most of my life, seemingly two separate tracks. But what was brilliant and eye-opening and enlightening to me was about 15, 20 years ago or so they came together in this really wonderful way.
My undergraduate career was 10 years. It took me 10 years. I started college in 1991 and I finally graduated in 2000. I failed out of college and dropped out of the same college. I had gone blind and there was a lot-- I had an eye disease and lots of different things resulted in that, but the reason I bring it up is because one of the benefits of being an undergrad for 10 years is that I had a lot of classes, I had a lot of classes, I changed my major nine different times and it really helped me look at the world through a lot of different ways. And the best professors I had allowed me to see the world through their eyes and supplemented. So, I had all these things going on at the same time. I was diving deep in archaeology and anthropology learning how to do experimental archaeologies, which is all about primitive technologies and ancestral technologies, and stone tools and pots and all these sorts of things. When I realized that lens is the perfect lens to look at the diet that built us as humans and start to at least create that foundation in my mind of, okay, this is a healthy nourishing diet, this is the diet we had in some ways. We first appeared as a species 300,000 years ago, then maybe there's some really good valuable information there that I can use to apply to my modern-day life.
Cynthia Thurlow: I think it's really interesting because, as you stated really looking at what should I eat has been the governing principle throughout this journey for you. And I would imagine that if we're looking at the way most westernized Americans or westernized countries are eating, is the antithesis of where we really originated from, and really starting the conversation about what has happened, what has changed about our food that is impacting our health so significantly, and so profoundly. And I know that along the way, on an evolutionary lens there were things that happened that were of great benefit to us as human beings, whether it's the access to fire and tools and weapons. And you even mentioned, when you were going through The Great Human Race that you start to realize how things have been able to progress because things have been made-- in terms of access to food has been made much easier. So, let's kind of start there, what are some of the kinds of big changes that you've been able to kind of look at as having an enormous impact on the way that most of us have been eating, and I'm not just talking about the processed food industry, but from an anthropological perspective going from when we were out having to hunt our own food and capture things and went through periods of feast and famine, through the kind of agricultural revolution to where we are today? What are some of the big milestones that have impacted the way we eat now?
Bill Schindler: And there is a couple of very important milestones that I think can help put all this in perspective and context very quickly. So, thanks for the opportunity for me to lay this out. One thing we have to remember is, first off, the food and nutrition that we were getting throughout our ancestral dietary past helped support massive body and brain growth, and at some levels later on population growth, and all these wonderful things. But it didn't kickstart it, it wasn't the thing that made our brains grow, there were a lot of-- we're not actually sure what those mechanisms are that pushed our bodies and our brains to grow. But when we think about food and ancestral diets, we have to realize is whatever that mechanism was happening and there is a couple of ideas about what those were, but without that incredible nutrition, and I mean incredible in both nutrient density ways and also in bioavailability ways, we wouldn't have been able to support that massive body and brain growth.
So, looking at that diet is incredible-- what that diet was like and that dietary change is incredibly important. Also, the role of technology in making food nutrient-dense, bioavailable, and safe is inseparable from any understanding of our ancestral dietary past. So, there's going to be piece of that in this next-- what I'm going to lay out. And third, I can go to three points not just two, is at an entirely different level, not just meeting our biological needs through these increasingly nutrient-dense, bioavailable, and safe diets. From completely different, but equally important level, there's a level of connection that comes through with the way that we dealt with our food for millions of years. And a level of disconnect that really starts with the agricultural revolution that results in where we are today, even having to sit here and talk about what a proper diet is, and try to help other people understand. This was never a question in the past, we are the only species on the planet that hires other people to tell us how we should be eating. So, as I go through this, just remember there's an increasing and decreasing at different times level of nutrient density, bioavailability, and safety in our food.
There's an increasing role of technology in our food, and different levels of connection or disconnection with our food that all play a very important role as to how we are here today having this conversation. So, the real quick layout is beginning about 5 to 7 million years ago when our ancestors first stood up, they were just gatherers, if they were eating meat at all, it was just a little bit of rodents they could catch but for the most part, we're talking about very small ancestors about three and a half feet tall, brains about the size of my fist, very low nutritional requirements. And they were eating hyper-seasonally and hyper-locally what they could collect with just their fingers and their teeth. So, they were herbivores, they were frugivores, and they were insectivores. Of the three parts of their diets, the insects were by far the most nutrient dense, bioavailable part of that diet. But they were eating some plants but remember they had no technology to detoxify those plants or to access to nutrients in those plants, they had to rely solely on their digestive system. So, the food they could get from them, and the diversity of what they could get from their environment at that time was incredibly low.
The biggest change happens at about three and a half million years ago when our ancestors first created a stone tool. And it doesn't seem like much and if I showed you how to do it, it takes less than a second to make this tool. But it was the first and when they struck these two rocks together and created a razor-sharp edge, an edge that is more durable and sharper than anything on their bodies. They can interact with the outside world in a completely different way. They didn't have to rely solely on what they had anatomically. They can now make tools to do other things they couldn't do before. And what they did with that tool three and a half million years ago, was they started butchering, they started scavenging. So, we went from 5 to 7 million years ago, we were gatherers to 3.5 half million years ago, we were scavenger-gatherers, and the food they had access to at that time-- And this is one of the most important things I think we need to understand is that they started to introduce flesh or meat into their diets 3.5 million years ago. They were scavenging the kills that were made by other predators on the savanna at that time. When a predator and I don't know how many people listening have watched the Audubon Society sort of things on TV or whatever, but if you've ever really seen what happens when a predator takes down their prey on the savanna, it's not they don't kill it, and then just start dining on the flesh, they kill it, they rip it open, and they start dining on the most nutrient-dense bioavailable parts of that animal. And that's the blood, the fat, and the organs. And they typically will gorge themselves like we do at Thanksgiving, and then go off and they go asleep on a rock, digest that meal. And while they're digesting that meal, that huge carcass is sitting there on the savanna. And it's the perfect opportunity for scavengers that are physically designed to go in and scavenge the meat, they have the right claws, they have the right teeth, they have the right digestive tract to take the flesh off before that predator comes back to finish its meal. Well, now our ancestors at that time armed with the stone tools can run in there alongside the ancestors to modern-day hyenas, and modern-day buzzards, pack off pieces of meat and bring them back to safety and eat with the rest of their group.
So, they started introducing meat and a little bit of marrow at this time. We know that because we've seen the tools. We know that because we've seen the bones that had evidence of butchering marks on them made by these tools, we don't know how much meat is getting into their diet but what's very interesting is that this time, you'd think, oh my gosh, all of a sudden they have access to all this meat, they're going to jump in body size, they're going to jump in brain size, and they don't. Not in a very significant way, their brains get a little bit bigger, their bodies get a little bit bigger. But it isn't until 2 million years ago, where we see the introduction of two very important technologies, transformative technologies that we see a major change. One is the introduction of fire and the other is the introduction of hunting technologies. And so, we go from gatherers to scavenger-gatherers to now we're finally hunter-gatherers and the difference between hunter-gatherers and scavenger gathers is that if you're the hunter, you're the predator, you have first access to any part of that animal you want. So, the blood, the fat, and the organs, the most nutrient-dense bioavailable parts of that animal are now accessible to our ancestors because we're the ones taking that animal down. So, that coupled with fire help support the biggest jump in body and brain growth in our ancestral past.
In fact, we jumped to almost modern-day proportions in body and brain size. From that point forward, we just increase in our technologies, they just get so much better, we're hunting better, we're trapping better, we're fishing better, we're collecting better, we're detoxifying plants better. We're starting to do things like fermentation. All these things that we're doing help us access increasingly diverse nutrients to our environment and then take those resources and turn them into their safest and most nutrient-dense forms and bioavailable forms. And this continues until about 300,000 years ago, modern-day Homo sapiens first appear on the planet, us, and then the next biggest change happens at somewhere between 10 to 15,000 years ago, at the beginning of the agricultural revolution, massive change happens around the world. One is we go from eating dozens of animals in a given year and all different parts of those animals and hundreds of different plants and all different parts of those plants to a diet based on one or two annual grasses depending on where you are in the world. It could be rice, it could be barley, it could be maize, and whatever it is, we're almost always focused on an annual grass, the diversity in the diet goes down, the nutrient density in the diet goes down, the bioavailability in the diet goes down and the food safety goes down.
I mean, just think about the lectins and all the toxins that are coming in from focusing on grass seeds. And the other thing that changes to is the connection with their food completely changes through the millions of years leading up to the agricultural revolution. We are all viscerally connected to every part of our food system. If we're not the one hunting, if we're not the one gathering, if we're not the one preparing food, it's somebody in our family. That's doing it, we see it, we smell it, we touch it, we hear it, we know everything about our food, everybody does.
When we start the agricultural revolution, the way it's taught in eighth-grade history classes that "Oh, my gosh, agricultural revolution was fantastic, because now you have a certain segment of the population producing food for other people." So, they can be freed up to become poets and artists, and politicians and all these things, which there's something wonderful about that. But at the same time, those people are getting freed up from their food, that hassle of having to get and prepare their own food, were also getting disconnected from their food. And it's a process that starts about 15,000 years ago.
So, it's our food producers then at the Industrial Revolution would become food consumers, or at least most of us do. Most of us are severely disconnected from our food system, where our food comes from, how it's grown, how its prepared, how it's shipped out everything up to where it how it gets on the grocery store shelf. And then, the nutrient safety, the nutrient density, the nutrient bioavailability has plummeted. And that's where we are today, we know nothing about our food, we have to ask people about our food, and our food has never been so poor. And the final thing I'll end with, sort of peace with real quick, is up until the agricultural revolution, there's been a massive amount of food processing going on for three and a half million years, but that food processing enhanced the food, made it so that that food was safer, more nutrient-dense, and more bioavailable. The food processing today in the modern industrial food system is still happening, but it's at the expense, the goal of it is to make other people a whole lot of money. So, it's for shelf life, and shipping and uniformity, and those sorts of things at the expense of the things that actually built us literally as humans.
Cynthia Thurlow: I think it's really interesting because we forget that this evolution, although it has allowed us to be able to have access to food or food-like substances, 24/7 has really evolved to a state where I would imagine the average person really doesn't know where their meat comes from. They have no sense of where their fruits and vegetables come from. They're eating fruits and vegetables that are out of season, year-round, which again impacts nutrient density, you're probably eating berries that have been shipped from South America to the United States, which means they've lost a lot of nutrient density. But one particular thing that you touched on that I think for a lot of listeners is perhaps something that they haven't heard a lot about on this podcast is when we're talking about plant toxins. I speak very openly about the fact that I'm very oxalate sensitive, that was a byproduct of getting food poisoning in Morocco, which is a whole separate tangential concept. But let's talk about what is it about types of plants. And there are lots of varieties of plant toxins. I know these things are designed to protect the plant. But let's talk about what they do to our body and then how we can make them less toxic to our body. What are the things that we can do that are leaning into that ancestral health lens that can help our body have more bio-individuality, actually remove the anti-nutrients or lessen their impact, so that we can consume them safely?
Bill Schindler: Thank you, but I'm so glad we're able to talk about the oxalates. When we're at KetoCon, there was a question asked about oxalates. And I actually stood on stage and said something about how dangerous almond flour is at a Keto Conference, the whole place went [gasps] and then all of a sudden, I went back of my table, my booth, I was worried about what the repercussions were going to be something like that. And I had a line of people in tears telling me about their oxalate stories and asking questions. And yeah, I'm so glad we're finally talking about it. So, one thing to remember is, and this is something that again, finally people are talking more about every single plant on this planet is toxic at some level. And we have to understand that that isn't meant to scare anybody about vegetables, but it is meant to make us be aware of things and gain this level of responsibility and owning we're thinking about vegetables when we make certain choices.
I used to be the person who went into the grocery store. In my mind, the safe place at the grocery store is the produce section. Everybody says plants are healthy if you walk and some is good, more must be better. And even though I was always thinking about food throughout other places and the grocery store, I would turn my mind off in the produce section and just start loading my cart with whatever I wanted and not thinking about it. And that's one of the most dangerous things that we can do. Plants are not put on this planet to feed us, they're on this planet doing the same thing every other organism is doing is trying to survive, reproduce, and make sure that their offspring can reproduce as well. That's the only way a species survives. We, other animals, and other organisms can do it through all sorts of different defense mechanisms, but since plants can't move, they're doing it through chemical and biological warfare, they're creating chemicals. And what we also have to remember is any sort of production of what we call these illegal chemicals, these toxins, it's not just happening for no reason at all. I mean, it's nutritionally expensive. It's energy expensive for those plants to produce these illegal chemicals, there are reasons for them.
Now, it gets complicated when you really look into individual plants and which ones and which parts are good and which ones you have to detoxify, which ones you don't have to worry about. But some people just shut their brains off and say it's too much information, I don't even want to think about it. But let me lay out, I think a very easy way for us to at least think about plants at a 40,000-foot level. And hope it can be a little bit more clear. If you remember, it's all about reproduction. If you're looking at a plant part, different part of plants and thinking about toxins, toxins can occur and often do occur in almost all parts of the plants. But in general, the parts of the plants that they're really putting a lot of energy into to support and protect are the babies, so seeds, nuts, grains, legumes, that are the babies of the plant, they need to make sure that they stay viable, and also for certain plants, especially perennials in the roots, because that is the most important part of the plant. That's the part of the plant that has to get protected over the winter until the next year when that shoots up greens and starts photosynthesis again. So, something like a potato for example, it can be incredibly toxic, because that is the part of the plant that allows that plant to survive into the future. So, number one, seeds, nuts, grains, legumes, roots are quite often very toxic. Leaves and stems and things like that can change and vary depending on the plant.
But at the same time, there is often a lot of toxins in some of those areas. At the same time in plants, some of these illegal chemicals are not meant to defend, they're meant to attract. And that's again part of reproduction. So, things like flowers are beautiful, sweet-smelling. Often, they look pretty because they're trying to attract things like pollinators, for example. Typically, flowers are not toxic or if they are they're very, very low in toxins. Fruits, same thing. I mean, a fruit is a delivery mechanism for those seeds. Those seeds are chemically and physically designed to withstand the digestive tract of animals, that animal will eat the fruit, which it's supposed to do, it goes through a digestive tract, and the seed gets deposited somewhere else in a pile of manure, the perfect growing conditions. So typically, fruits are not toxic, you can have an incredibly toxic seed surrounded by a not-so-toxic fruit. So, with that said, some of these toxins will kill you outright. Some of these toxins if you consume them, you wish you were dead. Some of these toxins, we really don't have to worry too much about.
And a whole lot of toxins, which are the ones that I'm mostly worried about are the ones that build up over time and can cause havoc, weeks, months, years, decades later, like oxalates and one of the biggest issues with oxalates to me are that you don't eat it and then the next day it feels something, you eat it and you eat it and you eat it and it's a part of your diet. And then 5, 6, 7, 8 years down the road, you start having issues and to even suggest that this food is causing you a problem. It's so hard for our minds to make that connection. If we ate it and got sick an hour later, oh, that makes sense. If we ate it and got sick 10 years later, it's hard to think about it. The cool thing with many plant toxins is that our ancestors and indigenous and traditional groups all over the world have formed long-standing relationships with many of these plants. They've devised ways to detoxify them. And we can employ those detoxification methods in our own kitchen to do some wonderful things. And they're very basic, I mean, things like soaking, sprouting, fermenting are quite often, depending on the toxin in the plant very useful, leaching in the forms for water-soluble toxins like tannic acid, cooking, drying, all of these sorts of things depending on the toxin makes a lot of sense.
And I've spent 20 years actually of my life looking at ancestral and traditional detoxification strategies. The problem is one of the toxins that doesn't seem to have a good detoxification strategy to make it safe are oxalates. There's a little bit of suggestion that fermentation can help, but not at any meaningful level. So, as far as I'm concerned, oxalates are something that we need to pay attention to, we need to understand what plants have them in very high levels. Think about maybe not including those in our diets or maybe eating them in certain quantities. And the other problem with that disconnection is that-- and the way the modern food industry has worked is that we have taken away what I could call limiting mechanisms, right so for example, spinach, one of the highest oxalate-containing plants in the grocery store. If you ate spinach for the two weeks out of the year that it actually would grow in your area, you're probably not going to have a problem, though we've labeled it a superfood, we've made it incredibly affordable, we have it in the grocery store 365 days out of the year, so the fact that it has no season any longer to it, and the fact that it's cheap and the fact that we consider it as amazing food, now we don't have those limiting mechanisms that would have kept it at a certain level in our diet. Same thing with nuts, almonds are one of the highest nuts in the grocery store. If I said to you go find an almond tree, get the almonds, take hulls off, shell them, collect all the nuts and then eat what you have, you're going to spend hours and you're going to get a handful of nuts, not a huge big deal. But now we have-- we've labeled them a superfood, we put them in big box stores like Costco, they're $10 for a huge bag of already shelled nuts, and then all of a sudden there's nothing limiting it. So, a lot of the problems that we have now with things like plant toxins or problems that we've created because we've made, we've taken away a lot of those limiting mechanisms.
Cynthia Thurlow: I think that's such an important point and I also think about a few years ago, it was the celery juice craze, and I would have patients telling me, my mother, my brother, my best friend love celery juice. I drink it and I feel terrible. And I always reminded them, yeah, it has some anti-inflammatory properties. But if you're sensitive to oxalates or you're sensitive-- I think kale is another good example. In fact, Teri Cochrane calls kale, killer kale and I just keep that in my background in my mind because if you look microscopically at oxalates, like under, if you plate them and you look at them, they look like little crystals. And is it any wonder that people get significant side effects, I think almond flour crackers and a lot of as you appropriately said, low-carb keto snack foods, and people are like, I need a cracker. And so they lean into the almond flour crackers and they wonder why they're feeling poorly. So just really making those connections I think is really powerful.
And it's interesting, in your book, you talk a little bit about-- as an example, according to a 2007 report by the organic center, America's unwavering emphasis on crop yields has resulted in a steady decline in crop's nutritional value. So, not only are these plant toxins potentially harmful in the right amount at the right time, but also understanding that there is a very calculated focus by the processed food industry in the USDA to really encourage farmers to grow more and more and more of these types of foods.
Bill Schindler: Yeah, 100%. And we have to also remember these plant toxins are there to protect the plant. And what we've done, real quick, one of the reasons I love-- I even been foraging tours for actually like 30-something years at this point, and even though we I don't eat a whole lot of plants, and the ones that do I'm very careful about and I process them in a certain way. I love foraging tours because it is an awesome opportunity to take people and connect them not only the environment they see every day, but also with plants growing in their sort of natural environment and defending themselves with what they already have. And what we've done since the beginning of the agricultural revolution is breed plants for certain traits or qualities that we as humans want, larger fruits, easier to harvest grains, seeds, something like this. We're also in many cases just as a result of it, lessening some of their own defense mechanisms, now plants still have those toxins in the grocery store. But as we're doing that, we're making them dependent on us and dependent on all sorts of chemicals and things that we have to start adding. So, we're artificially putting back onto those plants things to allow them to protect themselves, we're destroying the environment too. It's a lose-lose situation certainly all the way around.
The other thing I'd like to mention real quick with the oxalates is if you're really wondering if this is a real thing, like you mentioned, look it up online and look at a microscopic picture of those. Some of those look-like crisp little shards of glass that'll hurt you. Look up calcium oxalate raphides. I mean, this is even worse. These are a version of them that microscopically look like a bundle of needles with points on both ends. And I know there are certain plants that even here in eastern North America that we've been working with, Peltandra virginica, it's called arrow arum. If you eat this, not only do those needles pierce the soft tissue in your throat, but then it delivers this protease enzyme, your throat swells and you die, just because result of these-- this isn't what's happening with all the oxalates, but these are nasty, nasty things. It's very important to understand where they exist, what they are in your diet.
There are things, one of the issues are things that we're trying to deal here with at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen where we're trying to create really low-oxalate foods, we do sourdough bagels and sourdough crackers with everything spiced and poppy seeds and sesame seeds are off the charts with oxalates. There was a 1986 article written or at the time they thought poppy seeds were the highest oxalate-containing food in the grocery store. It's not, but it's up there. So, even little things like Everything spice have a massive quantity and people use. When they use it, they're using a tablespoon or two and there, almost two tablespoons of Everything spice on a bagel if you got one, when we've been able to create an Everything splice, it doesn't have it on there. But I bring it up because it is in all sorts of foods that you wouldn't imagine that are there. And when you're hitting it, you're getting it from your almonds, you're getting it from your spinach, you're getting it from your sesame seeds. I mean, tahini is nothing but sesame seeds, it is ground-up sesame seeds. And if you're eating tahini and drinking almond milk, you're ingesting a massive quantity of oxalates.
Cynthia Thurlow: I think that's really valuable because there's probably someone listening who might not make those connections. Now, another industry that I thought was really interesting was looking at dairy. I know that breast milk is one of the most nutrient-dense foods that infants are fed at an early age. But it's interesting because you talk in the book about the role of fermented dairy and rennet and special ways that you go about processing dairy because, for me a lot of the focus of my work is on women. And I find a lot of women by the time their perimenopausal age, so 10 to 15 years prior to going through menopause, all of a sudden dairy becomes problematic. So, what is it that has been done to dairy? I know that we went from drinking breast milk to raw milk and then there were sanitation issues with the modernization of the dairy industry, which then necessitated some degree of pasteurization. What are some of the changes that have occurred that may be contributing to not just women, why many of us may not be tolerant of dairy and it's kind of commercialized formulation?
Bill Schindler: Sure, the first thing is that, just to kind of set the foundation we've been consuming dairy-- humans have been consuming dairy as adults from other animals in certain parts of the world for at least 8000 years, probably longer but we have evidence for at least 8000 years. So, understand that, we didn't start pasteurizing milk until the late 19th, early 20th century. As you mentioned, the reason we did that is because the dairy industry at the time was doing some nasty things to milk. I go into it a little deeper into the book, but doing some nasty things in milk and people were dying. There were babies dying left and right, especially in cities. And our government had a decision to make, how to fix this problem. One, was they could either clean up and transform the entire dairy industry, which spent decades getting to the point that it was and it would have been a massive, expensive, politically suicidal lift to make, or they could boil the milk and pasteurize it. So, they decided to pasteurize it. When you pasteurize dangerous milk, you just make it not kill somebody, it doesn't turn it into good milk, it takes bad milk and makes it so it doesn't kill somebody. And now what we're seeing is we have incredible dairies doing incredible things with their cows and with their other animals go through with it and with their milk. All over the world, there are dairies producing milk that have just a high quality as we've enjoyed for 1000s of years.
So, there's an issue and we can talk longer about it about pasteurization. But there is a huge difference between pasteurized milk and raw milk. And when you pasteurize the milk-- you are destroying many of the vitamins, enzymes, you're denaturing proteins, in many cases, especially at higher temperatures to the point that the human body cannot recognize it and there're a whole lot of issues that come through the pasteurization, but just importantly, if not even more importantly is homogenization, which is when you take the milk, and you take the fat from the milk, and you literally force it through under high pressure through microscopic holes in a metal plate, and you explode the fat molecules.
You can make the argument that pasteurization will take the bad milk and not kill somebody and continue with that I understand that argument. But there's no safety reason to homogenized milk. There are only two reasons to homogenized milk. One, is to save you from the chore in the morning of taking that gallon of milk out of the fridge and having to shake it before you pour it in your coffee that's one thing and the other reason and the real reason is because the dairy industry doesn't want you to see how much cream they're pulling off of that milk. I mean, it's very visible. When you see the milk and it's separated. That cream layer that's on the top, the dairy industry makes a massive quantity of money, literally skimming the fat or the cream off that milk, telling you you should be drinking skimmed milk and then turning around and selling you cream, selling you half and a half, selling you butter, selling you ice cream and all the other things made with the cream. Have you ever wondered if you look at in almost every case if you go to the grocery store and go to the dairy section and look at the milk, just the regular plain milk, the whole milk that has had less processing to it than the skimmed milk is cheaper. It's cheaper than the skimmed milk. the other one has a little bit-- you could argue a little bit of a value added to it, they're doing something else to it. And the reason is because you've taken the fat off so. There's a lot of crazy nasty things that are happening in the dairy industry.
The big dairies will take that milk, separate it into all of its components, and then recombine it at its lowest minimum standards to call it 1%, 2% whole milk whatever it is and then sell the rest off for other reasons in the supplement industry. The other thing that happens, which is craziness, this is how adulterated the milk really is by the time you get it, even just a gallon of pasteurized whole milk, the vitamin A and D is destroyed through the pasteurization process. So, if you look at almost every gallon of milk, it says fortified with vitamin A and D. Well, number one, the vitamin A and D was there, they destroyed it, they artificially put it back in. And the craziest part is both of those vitamins are fat-soluble vitamins. So, if you look at a gallon of skimmed milk and it is fortified with vitamin A and D, not only did the vitamins go through all those different things, but your body can't do anything with it because you're drinking skimmed milk. So, in my mind, one of the most bastardized sections of the grocery store is the milk and dairy section, and it looks so wholesome. It has pictures of farms, it has beautiful white milk in it. It's nothing like what we enjoyed for 8000 years. And it's nothing like what we got when we were babies. But here's the really cool story about dairy. The story I told you about our three-and-a-half-million-year dietary pest is one of creating technologies that introduce foods, incredibly nutrient-dense foods in safest and most bioavailable form into our bodies so that we support body and brain growth. But these are foods that we're not designed to eat. We're omnivores, not by design we're omnivores through technology. So, technological innovation allowed us to access even animals and other foods.
The one food that we are perfectly designed to consume as humans is dairy. It's our mother's milk. And that's only for a short period of our life when we're infants. And here's one of the things that I didn't realize until about 10 years ago, I grew up in an area, had most of the people in my neighborhood were of some sort of European descent, which is an important part of this conversation. And there was one kid in my school that was lactose intolerant. So, to me at least one that we knew of, through my lens, my young eyes was like, okay, that's the weird kid, like, it's weird to be lactose intolerant. Everybody else is lactose tolerant, but something's different with that person. And it turns out, I was absolutely wrong. I was wrong about the way I thought about it on many levels, but I was really wrong about it because it is normal for mammals to become lactose intolerant. That's the norm when we get weaned off of our mother's milk. That's very human and that's for other animals.
What's weird is that some humans are lactose tolerant as adults. And what's happened is in several places in Europe and in several places in Africa, populations, communities that were really reliant on dairy as adults for a very long time. I mean, 1000s of years, they developed independent genetic mutations that allowed their bodies to produce lactase into adulthood. So, that's the enzyme that breaks down lactose. So, even today, 60% of modern humans around the world are lactose intolerant, only 40% of us are lactose tolerant. The geographic distribution that's really interesting here, somewhere like Ireland is almost 100% lactose tolerant, they've had dairy in their diets for such a long period of time. Most Native Americans are completely lactose intolerant, they've never had dairy after being infants. So, raw milk is great and I just spoke at the Weston A. Price Conference this past weekend and they're one of the largest supporters of raw milk around the world. And we talk a lot about raw milk.
One thing and I'll go with very quick story, I do it very quickly. But it's important for us to understand what we have to do to the milk to replicate what happens when we're babies. When we're babies and we're drinking milk from our mothers, there're a couple of key things that are very important. One is that milk in our mothers is teeming with live bacteria, it's already in the process of fermentation, and it's at body temperature, the bacteria that's in that milk, have through millions of years of evolution are the right ones that work at that temperature. So, when we drink from our mothers, we're getting this probiotic-rich, completely alive food at the right temperature coming into our bodies already in the process of fermentation. And our bodies are producing the right kinds of enzymes to digest that milk properly, and get the nutrients from it. So, lipase is an enzyme that breaks down the fat. So, we have that, lactase is the enzyme that breaks down sugars. All mammals produce some sort of a chymosin or chymosin-like enzyme that does things to the proteins and what it does in humans too, which is not called chymosin for humans.
It messes up or does something to the proteins that coagulates the milk and the reason that happens is because if we're doing nothing but drinking a liquid, the liquids pass through our digestive tract way too quickly for it to break down properly, chemically and physically breakdown. And it doesn't sit long enough in our intestines for the nutrients to be absorbed. So, nature figured out, we're going to slow it down. And that turns it into the semi-solid substance in our stomachs that can then physically break it down, and chemically break it down, and then it moves into our small intestines, and the nutrients are in the right state, and it sits there long enough for it to be absorbed. That enzyme chymosin in the cheesemaking world is known as renin. And also, when it's sitting on our stomach, it's also fermenting because it's sitting there longer. So, when we make Kefir or yogurt, or Clabber, or real cheese, we are actually replicating that process that took place in our stomachs when we were infants to properly digest that milk. And to me, raw milk was amazing, fermented raw milk especially for adult humans is the absolute gold standard for how we can get the maximum amount of nutrition and the safest way from our dairy.
Cynthia Thurlow: It's so interesting. What are your thoughts on a2 Milk? Do you think that that's like a step up from conventional pasteurized homogenized milk that we find in the grocery store?
Bill Schindler: I absolutely love a2 Milk and even if you're not talking about cow's milk, goat milk is fantastic and go through the same processes as well in humans do a really good job, most of us do a very good job on goat milk, as well. The other cool thing I'd like to mention with that too is all of this can be done in your kitchen. When you can literally make the most amazing cheese and yogurt and Kefir in the world in your kitchen, at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, we make all of our cheese and all of our butter and all that stuff here. But there are so many regulations tying my hands, there are things that I just can't literally do here that you can do in your own home to make it even better. So, it's empowering. I mean, it should be-- I know some of this may sound overwhelming for some people who just don't even cook that much. But the most empowering thing should be is the diet that literally built us as humans, was created, yes, through technological innovation, but in caves with stone tools and open fires and clay pots. And everybody who's listening has a kitchen that is better equipped than any of our ancestors, caves or trees where these are things you can transform that food into the most nourishing thing for your family that you can absolutely understand.
Cynthia Thurlow: And one of the things I really love about your book is that after each chapter, you have a lot of recipes that we're going to definitely try, my husband loves to cook as do I. And so, I was saying to him, I think we should really make a point and kind of really try to recreate some of these recipes, things that we've never made before, but you make them very accessible. And certainly, there is lots of coaching in the book as well. I would be remiss if we didn't talk about organ meats. This is one of the most nutrient-dense foods, it's out there and we have to make sure we talk about offal-
Bill Schindler: Sure.
Cynthia Thurlow: -because I think most people when they think about meat in general, they're thinking about muscle meat. They're not even thinking about the organs or other parts of the animals that perhaps they thought were just like throwaways, you give them to pets.
Bill Schindler: Yeah, so the word offal actually means fall off or off fall and it refers to the part when you're butchering an animal that in a modern butchering situation is considered waste. But if you remember when we laid out that timeline, it is at that moment that we had access, when we were hunting, we had access to the offal, we had access to the blood, the fat, and the organs that our bodies and our brains grew to almost modern proportions. Most of us today, if we're thinking we're eating in an ancestral way, or eating just the meat, we go on the sort of carnivore binge and don't get me wrong, meat is much more nutrient-dense and bioavailable than any plant on the planet. But it is the least nutrient-dense part of an animal. And it is the least bioavailable part of an animal. So, the blood, the fat, and the organs are really something to pay attention to. And are something that again, from an economic perspective is incredibly accessible.
For most parts of the country, these are things that are considered waste still and you can find them, they're usually super cheap. You can find them at butchers, you can find them in ethnic grocery stores, and you can certainly find them in health foods as well. And what I'm talking about are things like first of all obviously high-quality animal fat is fantastic, but liver and it doesn't just stop at liver there's been a huge-- for a lot of different reasons people are becoming much more aware of liver and recently, especially on social media, but it's not just liver, I mean its liver and its spleen, and its kidney, and its heart, and its tongue. These are all different parts that had their own nutritional profiles, their own textures, their own flavors, and if cooked properly are something to celebrate, not just sort of shove down or hide in a smoothie somewhere. They're not that very difficult to cook. And again, they're incredibly nutrient-dense and bioavailable.
The easiest way, here's a couple of tricks or gateways into getting into that world. Pate is fantastic. Pate is simple to make, its amazing, it has this kind of high-end cuisine sort of connotation to it, which might help at some level, very easy to eat, you can put it on stuff or eat it by itself. And a lot of the problems that people have with organ meats is texture, it's the texture that we're not used to. It's the texture that we're not used to in the modern world because it was really not in most of our diets as we grew up. It's a texture that other people are used to or people in the past were used to because they ate it their entire lives. But to us, the texture of a liver or the texture of a spleen may seem really strange, so pate helps. Freezing helps, I mean, I eat a little bit of raw beef liver every day, and it's frozen. And the freezing helps a little bit with the texture. If it's a flavor you don't like, it's sort of masked a little bit. If you really had or squeamish and worried about any of that, heart and tongue are essentially muscles with a better nutritional profile than just meat, but have a very similar texture and can be put into recipes in a very similar way, right so you can cook heart, you can cook tongue, they're tougher, they're used all the time right, we talk all the time and our hearts beating all the time. So, they're a little bit tougher of a muscle, they have to be cooked a little bit slower. But the texture of them and the way we can use them is very similar to most sorts of cooking already.
Cynthia Thurlow: It's interesting, I grew up with an Italian mom and so liver was a large part of our diet growing up, and she used to disguise it with onions and bacon, and my brother and I still talk about, it was very metallic. And so, I'm excited/nervous about integrating some of these more adventurous types of meats into our diet. And I've come to find out that either freezing it or taking it in capsule form, which I know makes me sound like a gigantic wimp. But I'm one of those texture people I really am like I'm drawn to leaner meats just in general. So, for me it's like really kind of cautiously dipping my toe in the pond. So, I'm definitely appreciative that you gave us some kind of gateway steps into utilizing these. Now, I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about which I thought was really interesting bug protein. You mentioned, from an ancestral perspective that way before we could go out and kill an animal with a weapon, we were eating insects. And so, I've seen over the last several years that there's been greater interest in insect proteins like cricket flour and things like that, and you do talk about in the book. So, let's unpack that a little bit before we wrap up our conversation because I think it's really interesting. I think for many of us, we are probably skeptically looking at that not realizing from an evolutionary lens, we did actually have a period of time where that's where we got a lot of our protein from.
Bill Schindler: Yeah, and I put that chapter and I put it a chapter on earth, ash, and charcoal. Not because I expect people to eat insects every day. We don't eat insects every day either. But solely for the purpose of pushing our boundaries in our minds a little bit more. Because if we're really going to sit down and have a conversation one that's unbiased, that isn't dependent on cultural norms, about what is the healthiest human diet, which in my mind is also the most ethical and sustainable one as well. Then let's throw everything out on the table. Everything from pre-chewing our food for kids, which we see around the world prehistorically and even in some cases today, to things like insects or charcoal in our diet, so at least start thinking about those things. You are right, insects have really started to become a little bit more popular in certain levels and unfortunately, just like everything else right now has been so divided with this sort of vegan carnivore dichotomy, it's unfortunate because the conversation has gone to a place that it really shouldn't have gone. Before we start though 5 to 7 million years ago, were eating lots of insects and it didn't stop, we started eating meat, it continued and still continues in different parts of the world today.
And I know it's weird for many of us to think about sitting down and eating an insect. And from our modern western perspective, if we can even fathom that somebody else was eating insects on a regular basis somewhere else in the world today, that it must by default be something that they have to force down or their parents or making them eat and it's not. And one of the stories I tell in the book, we went and did a lot of work in Thailand. I wanted to experience and study and research different ways of eating insects. I wanted to go to a rural area where insects are truly part of a daily diet still today, I wanted to go to a really high-end restaurant in a major city where they're taking and not masking the insects, they're actually celebrating not only the shape of them and the way they look, but the flavors and the textures. And I also wanted to see what it was like in an urban area at some of the markets. I mean here are people that in many cases have been taken out of where their family has been for generations now there and have been eating insects over generations are now in a city, in sort of a metropolitan sort of situation and have access to insects in the big markets in the middle of Bangkok.
And what was really interesting in those markets is that, okay yep, again from our perspective, there is insects available there? There's an entire section and I love these markets for just insects. For a lot of people, I've talked to, yeah, they're going to be eating insects there, but it's because the people that are eating insect maybe that's all they can afford and it's not the case at all. In fact, I saw people, many people would go through and get all the meats and all the other vegetables, all the other things that they wanted. So, they certainly could afford everything that was in that market, they were laden with bags, and then they would hit the insect section, they load up on the insects with smiles on their face, and bring them back and that was a part-- it continues to be a part of their diet. For us, we have this cultural blockage, but we have to remember the same people who had never put cricket on their plate are sitting there eating lobster and paying a lot of money for it. The insects and the ocean are the same. If you think what a crab looks like, what a lobster looks like, it is an insect but it's living in the ocean.
So, from that perspective insects, first of all, they're incredibly nutritious compared to plants, they're very bioavailable and depending on how you deal with them, they can be really, really tasty. I'm telling you, we've been eating insects all over the world and they can be incredibly, incredibly tasty. The problem today is and where the conversation has gone is that it's perceived as this sort of anti-meat agenda that "Oh, we should be eating--" Crickets and insects in general are incredibly sustainable to grow to create a certain amount of nutrients that's the end product with a very little amount of waste, that's absolutely true. From my perspective including animals in our diets, especially the blood, the fat, and the organs is what literally helped make us human. Blood, fat, organs, and meat is the most nutrient-dense, bioavailable food on the planet.
Next in line to me would be insects, and then next in would be certainly fruits and vegetables and things. So, to me a diet that highlights animals include some insects, and includes the right kinds of plants that are processed in the right way. And included in our diet, the right way, is the ideal meat most amazing diet. But the conversation has gone to either insects or meat. So, you see a lot of the carnivore people with a large platform suggesting that insects shouldn't be a part of our diet. And I think they actually can be and in many ways should be, but not at the expense of meat in addition to meat. Listen, cricket flour is incredibly accessible, you can get organic cricket flour made for human consumption, which is nothing more than well-raised crickets that have been roasted and powdered and sent through a sieve so that you can replace 20% of other ingredients like flour. If you're using flour, or almond flour, or cassava flour whatever you're using, you can use that and replace it with things like cricket flour and you can get a nutrient boost and start to work towards that. This is something that's been in our diet for literally millions of years. You can get whole cricket, you can get mealworms and all sorts of other things today.
Cynthia Thurlow: It's really interesting. I have a bearded dragon in our house. It's my 15-year-old bearded dragon and he eats mealworms. And so, I'm humored that one of the calculations you gave in the book was 100 grams of mealworms equate to 20 grams of protein and that's a good amount. But I know exactly what they look like, do you have a favorite insect? Or is there one that you and your family like lean into if you're given the opportunity would try over others?
Bill Schindler: And I have to be completely honest, this is not a thing that my family loves to enjoy all the time. So, it's not at that level. I do just like foraging I think including insects in your diet a little bit even if it's a Halloween or whatever it is, at least is one of those mechanisms that reconnects us a little bit to what a diet can be, what our diets used to be like, and really just pushes those limits, which is a really important thing to do. My favorite, one of the things we make here and sell quite a bit of, actually we ship it all over the country are recipes in the book are insect protein bombs or insect cricket bombs. We take the cricket flour, we don't use any almond flour in it because of all the reasons we talked about earlier, a good substitute for almond flour is sunflower flour, which is incredibly low in oxalates. Sunflowers and pumpkin seeds are really good choices as far as oxalates are concerned, but we make a really cool kind of protein bomb out of the crickets that I haven't had anybody not like them. So, for a kid if you're looking for something for Halloween make these and kind of you can exasperate the insect part of it. My kids do enjoy that but they're not eating insects on a regular basis at all.
Cynthia Thurlow: [laughs] Well, I could definitely enjoy connecting with you for hours. Obviously, I'd four pages of prep just from reading your book, your book, Eat Like a Human. Dr. Schindler let my listeners know how to connect with you, how to get your book, how to connect with you at Modern Stone Age Kitchen, which we live in an adjacent state and I'm already thinking of some ideas that my husband would probably really love going there and checking out the work that you're doing.
Bill Schindler: We would love to have you here, let me know, please. So, Eat Like a Human, you can get it print, audio, digital on any of the major help suppliers online or if you ordered it, it's the same price if you order through our website, I'm happy to sign it and ship it out to you. And you can find us at eatlikeahuman.com and at modernstoneagekitchen.com. So, you can get the book in either one of those places. My family and I are passionate about empowering people to nourish themselves and their families in every way possible. So, we have two different entities here in Chestertown, Maryland. We're on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. One is the Modern Stone Age Kitchen where we've literally taken that book and put it into practice. So, it's a restaurant, quasi-growth, there's a little bit of takeaway goods as well. But everything that we do, everything in house, there's no two ingredients put together outside of these walls. We make all the butter, all the cheese, all the in-house butchering, all sourdough and there's no refined sugar. They're no industrial nut and seed oils, we only fry in animal fat and we do things like nixtamalize maize and sourdough bread to the exclusion of all the fast-food processing. So, please come visit us here. And we also have a nonprofit called the Eastern Shore Food Lab, which is where all of our research and education is funneled through, so upstairs we have this gorgeous teaching kitchen and we run classes on everything from home butchering, the cheese making, the fermented vegetables and the list goes on. So, you can find out all of those, all that online and you can follow us @drbillschindler and @modernstoneagekitchen.
Cynthia Thurlow: Well, it's been such a pleasure connecting with you. I'll definitely have to have you back. I really enjoyed reading your book. And as listeners know, I'm a prodigious reader, but I found it really, really helpful and incredibly enlightening in a very accessible way. It's not designed to scare people. It's really just helping to educate people and inspire them to get reconnected with their roots.
Bill Schindler: Thank you so very much. It's great to talk to you.
Cynthia Thurlow: If you love this podcast episode, please leave a rating and review. subscribe and tell a friend.
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