#95 Importance of Nutrient Dense Animal Foods with Frank Tufano

Frank Tufano (0:00)

There are sources of vitamins that are present in nature that all life needs. You know, all life needs vitamin D3, whether it's a plant or an animal or a human. What dictates the source that we need is, you know, what type of being we are.

A human and a human digestive system requires these nutrients in animal form.

Just because you mesh a bunch of powders together and it has something that, you know, it says on the label, it has this, just because you consume it doesn't mean you're absorbing it. If we achieve a base nutrient density from these animal foods, you know, what should the rest of our diet really be composed of? Can it be completely carnivorous? Are there benefits to consuming these plant foods? One thing I knew for certain is that the plant foods that I have access to are not reminiscent of what our ancestors used to eat.

Siim Land (0:50)

Body Mind Empowerment.

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Siim Land (0:58)

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Siim Land (1:03)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Frank Tufano. Frank is a YouTuber who makes videos about nutrition and food.

Frank, welcome to the show.

Frank Tufano (1:16)

What's going on? Thank you guys for having me.

As you said, I do fitness, nutrition-focused videos oriented around kind of the nutrient density of animal foods in particular.

Siim Land (1:28)

Yeah, you do have like a more specific way of talking about nutrition than the general fitness advice that focuses solely on macros and such. So I really enjoy your videos about the nutrient density as well as the micronutrients that most people tend to kind of overlook. But can you give a maybe short backstory about where you're coming from and how did you end up here?

Frank Tufano (1:50)

Yeah, sure. So I was really big into bodybuilding, weightlifting, just fitness in general when I was younger in high school, college. And it got to a point where I felt like I was wasting my time.

I didn't feel good. I didn't have energy. You know, I was literally eating pounds and pounds of like sweet potatoes and rice every day, not feeling good. So I started actually trying to figure out what a healthy diet was. And some of the resources of information I came across were anything from seeing what indigenous peoples ate. There are two really specific books that turned me on to it. A Western Price Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, as well as The Fat of the Land. And the first book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, is about a dentist who went around in the early 1900s because he was fascinated why these indigenous people didn't have any cavities, you know, why these tribes were free of dental decay.

And the second book, The Fat of the Land, is about an Arctic explorer who spent many, many years with various Inuit Eskimo groups of people and observed their all-meat diet. And the one constant thing between these two groups of people was they were kind of free of the modern degenerative diseases and they had a very, very specific level of physical development where, you know, they had no need for glasses, they had no need, you know, nothing wrong with their teeth. They were all of similar height, stature and facial development, almost like an animal is supposed to be in nature specific to an area in a way. And after looking into this, you know, I read a couple other books like Norgigatus Primal Body Primal Mind and I was starting to piece things together in my head. I was like, well, if all of these groups of people consumed a certain amount of their calories from animal foods, both because it was the only source of nutrition in nature they had access to and that they have all, well, they're pretty much in optimal physical health.

What about energy? You know, if I have no energy eating four to five pounds of carbohydrates a day, maybe a ketogenic metabolism is the way to go and the way to try it. So I was like, well, that makes sense. So, how would you do a ketogenic metabolism on this diet? And that's essentially what they were in because they were really eating a large amount of animal food. So after piecing that together, you know, I started trying it and this was about six years ago now and eventually looking into the science, looking into why the diet actually works, trying to understand the nutrient profile. That came with a lot of time.