This transcript is AI-generated and [lightly] edited by a human.

Karina Inkster:

You're listening to the No-Bullshit Vegan Podcast, episode 178. Champion vegan bodybuilder, Geoff Palmer, is on the show today to talk about all things omega nutrition: busting omega-3 and omega-6 myths, discussing DHA, ALA and EPA, and much more.

Karina Inkster:

Hey, welcome to the show. I'm Karina, your go-to, no-B.S. vegan fitness and nutrition coach. I'm back to publishing regular podcast episodes after a short summer break. My husband and I had several rounds of friends visiting, so we did all the fun local BC, Sunshine Coast stuff like paddle boarding, a day trip to Savary Island with its amazing white sand beaches, lake swimming, backyard barbecue feasting, frog watching at the lake, music-making, all sorts of awesome stuff. Now it's kind of unbelievable, but for us here in Canada, it is already back to school time in just two weeks. September is the second busiest month for me and my coaching team, after January. So if you've been considering getting a kick in the butt, a.k.a. fitness and nutrition coaching, check out our programs at karinainkster.com/coaching and apply for one of our available spots ASAP before the back to school rush. So that's karinainkster.com/coaching. 

Introducing today's guest, Geoff Palmer. He's a 61-year strong, 39-year vegan, natural bodybuilding and natural physique masters champion, the owner of Clean Machine Plant-Based Fitness Nutrition, author, national lecturer, vegan patent holder, and two-time NEXTY winner for best supplement of the year. Geoff was number 40 of the top 100 most influential vegans by Plant-Based News, and he created the first 100% vegan natural bodybuilding competition in the world. Geoff's favorite meal is vegan pasteles. Here's our discussion. 

Hey Geoff, thanks for speaking with me today. Welcome to the show.

Geoff Palmer:

Thanks for having me. It's great to get connected with you on a different podcast. And now here again on yours.

Karina Inkster:

That's right, yes. We were on a panel with a couple other folks like Robert Cheeke and Mark Young. We were on a panel for Real People Eat Plants, although I think they changed their name. It's Real Men Eat Plants, but I'm seeing that they've rebranded to Real People Eat Plants.

Geoff Palmer:

Yeah, because it was interesting. I was like the whole panel and then there's Karina.

Karina Inkster:

Yeah, everyone's a dude except for me. Anyways, welcome to the show. I'd love to jump into your vegan story. So you're someone who's been vegan for almost four decades, if I'm not mistaken. It's been 39 years. So way before it was cool! What happened? What is Geoff's vegan origin story?

Geoff Palmer:

It's not typical. Fortunately, there's a lot of books and movies and celebrities and people, influencers. There's social media, so there's a lot of avenues where people get introduced to it, not back in 1985 when I was there.

Karina Inkster:

Okay, just full disclosure, I was not yet born when you went vegan. I'm an ‘86 baby. So you were vegan before I was born. How cool is that?

Geoff Palmer:

Nice. Yeah. So obviously the internet wasn't established yet except for the military. So there was no social media. There were, I won't say no books because veganism goes actually way back to 1930s, I believe, in the UK when the phrase was actually coined. But who had heard of it even when I became vegan back in 1985, I didn't even know the word vegan. I had never even heard it.

Karina Inkster:

Most people didn't know it back then.

Geoff Palmer:

Correct. And so why did I go vegan? I lost my father to alcohol when I was 18. He died three days before my 18th birthday. And then my mother was diagnosed with fatal multiple sclerosis, and my brother also was diagnosed with illness. So I lost half of my family within a few years, and I fell into a very, very dark place. So my father was a English professor, my mother was a union psychologist. So I was raised with a high level of conversation. And when all that went away and my circle of friends wasn't that type of conversation or that type of emotional support, I just felt really, really alone. Especially I was a nature boy. I was really always, as soon as I get home from school, I'd go down, put down my books and go out and either be on the lake or hike in the woods and just be in nature and be immersed in nature.

So I had this really, really strong connection to the natural world and the animals and plants that populated it, but I couldn't connect with other people on that level. That was just not the thing. So there was a degree of isolation in the quality of conversation with social interaction with other people, with what was important to me, nature and the animals. And when my family unit started crumbling right before my eyes, I just became extremely depressed. I got into drugs, alcohol, and attempted to take my life twice. The second time was a drug overdose that left me in a coma for three days. And when I came out, I really said, okay, the next time is going to be no room for a miss. And I was in a bar getting drunk as usual, doing drugs, and a woman walked into the bar and she was really happy.

And I said, what have I got to lose? I just walked right up to her and I said, you look really happy. She goes, that's funny that you noticed that I just came from someone who's really helping with the breakthrough. I said, can you take me to him? I want to learn to be happy again, otherwise I don't want to be here anymore. And she took me to his place and he met me at the door and he blocked the entrance. And I'm like, well, that's kind of rude. So I looked up to him and he goes, oh, you came here to prove me wrong. And he saw me so clearly I've never felt so naked before in my life. So I just said, what the hell? Go with it. See where this takes me. And we were talking about nothing. He was a healer and it was helping people have breakthroughs.

And I'm like, all right, well, let's see if that can happen for me. He talked me back into the pain of losing my father. And when he did, a dam burst and emotions just started pouring out, all this anger for my father, for abandoning me, for choosing alcohol over being there for me. Why wasn't my life good enough for you to stay here? The value of my own life seemed worthless if my own father wasn't interested in staying here for me. But when I broke through that, I saw his suffering why he drank. I saw how he couldn't find the answers that he was looking for, and I felt this overwhelming forgiveness and then forgiving him, I began to forgive myself for all the anger I was holding on to, all the resentment, all the hurt that was hurting me and hurting the people I loved who cared about me watching me.

So that breakthrough was so overwhelming. Immediately I started seeing auras everywhere, energy just bursting out of people because it was bursting out of me. My hands felt like somebody had plugged them into electric sockets. The energy was coursing through me so much. It was the most intense, what most people would call a spiritual experience that I've ever experienced in my life. I felt so happy and I was like, I didn't even know it was possible to feel this happy. I was ecstatic. I was so relieved from my own pain and replaced with all this love, this love for my father, this love for myself, this love for nature, this clarity that I was seeing now that I just sat in meditation. I couldn't sleep all night. I just sat up meditating on how do I give this feeling back? How do I pay this forward?

And my higher voice in meditation just said, stop harming others. Stop harming the animals. And I'm like, oh my God, how come I didn't see that before? And that moment, I quit drinking, I quit doing drugs, I quit smoking cigarettes and I quit eating all animal products. That moment, almost 40 years ago, and I'm still there now. I dedicated the rest of my life to helping others try to make this connection through health and fitness. I took off and just said, I've got to learn how people make breakthroughs in other cultures and other peoples around the world because I was telling people my story and they were like, oh, wow, that's weird. That's a strain. I can't relate. And I'm like, okay, well, I got to find a better way of communicating this experience to people because it was such a profound positive influence on my life.

My health improved, my energy improved, my body weight improved. Everything improved. I never had a single day of depression since then in almost 40 years. And the depression then was so intense. I didn't want to continue living. Life wasn't worth living at that point. So no, not your typical path to veganism, but it was mine and it was authentic for me, and it was real for me because I knew what suffering felt like to the core, and there was no way on earth that I would contribute to that kind of suffering, the suffering that animals are experiencing every day. So that's led me to a passion to create clean machine, to try to bring plant-based products to people to become a natural bodybuilding champion, to try to show people a, you don't need animal products in order to be in the best physical shape of your life.

And even to now writing a book about Omega nutrition because there's still this misunderstanding that somehow we need preformed DHA for our Omega nutrition, and it's just simply not true. We have the research to prove it not true now. So I'm writing a book like the call out and thank Dr. Milton Mills who will be writing the forward for the book. So I'm really excited. There is no animal on this planet that suffers more than fish and shared numbers. Two and a half to 3 trillion fish are killed every year. And four, a misunderstanding about omega nutrition that somehow fish is supposed to be healthy and it's not healthy for the fish, it's not healthy for the environment, and it's not even healthy for the human being that's eating them. I know some people don't believe that. And there's research out there that would show, Hey, wait a minute, when people eat fish, they get healthier.

Well, they're replacing animal products which are much worse like steak and meat and things like this with fish. And fish eaters tend to eat a lot more plants. They're getting health benefits from the plants and from not eating the other bad stuff, it's not from the fish. So there's this overlap that is misleading people into thinking fish is healthy. No, in every study they've shown where improvements were made for fish, if you took away the fish, the improvements continued to get better. So it's not the fish that's doing it, it's the more plants that you're eating that's doing it.

Karina Inkster:

Yes, and that's definitely something that I want to talk about because a lot of people have these buzzwords like DHA and ALA, and they're not entirely sure what they mean, but they know they're important. So first of all, thank you for sharing your vegan origin story because that for sure, well, first of all, it's very powerful. Second of all, I'm glad you're here 39 years later. That's amazing. And third, you're right, that is not a very common, this is why I went vegan story. So it's very unique, very powerful, and I appreciate you sharing that. Everyone has their own path to coming to veganism. Sometimes it's about health, sometimes it's about the animals. Sometimes it's about meditating and realizing, oh, maybe I shouldn't harm other beings. And whatever it is, we as ethical vegans want the whole world to go vegan, of course. But we realize that people come in in different ways, and I think that's why I always asking folks, well, what brought you to it?

Because everyone's story is different, and I think it can resonate with different people. So I appreciate that. But let's go into this topic a little bit. I also have another topic that has not been talked about on the show before that you brought up when we chatted before we hit record. I do want to make time for that too. But since we're on this track of the book you're writing and Omegas, let's start off with what the myth is because there's a myth, and then there's research that shows that it's not true. And then there's what we need to do as vegans. So it's kind of like, here is the belief system, here's why it's wrong, and here's what we as vegans can do for optimal health. So let's go with the belief system first. So what are we told? This is kind of like another episode recently with Sandra Nomoto, which is about how animal agriculture companies mislead the public through marketing about the health benefits, the supposed health benefits of meat, dairy, and eggs. So I feel like this is kind of similar, but tell me about the current situation, the thing that we are fed that actually isn't true.

Geoff Palmer:

There's actually a little cluster of them that together have cumulate led people to a belief that they need to get their omegas from. Let's start with the basics. Fish don't make omega threes. They consume omega threes. They get them from either eating other fish that ate algae or from the algae. The algae in the water is what gives it produces the omega threes, EPA and DHA. They don't make them. So let's get that straight from the beginning on land animals herbivores, all herbivores get their omega threes from ALA. That's the only essential omega. Essential omega means we have to get it from our diet because we can't make it ourselves and our body. Okay, so those are the basics. Now, the first thing was, oh wait a minute. When we look at blood draws, we don't see ALA converting to DHA.

It converts very readily to EPA in the bloodstream, which is good. Okay? So you can get ALA and EPA and that's never been the issue. It's the DHA. So we need DHA for our brains. That's the largest pool of DHA in our body is our brain. And so the assumption was, wait a minute, when we draw blood from people, we don't see ALA converting to DHA. So they thought, one, we must not produce the enzyme. Well that converts ALA to DHA. That's not true. We now know that's not true. The enzyme is produced but not in the bloodstream. This is where we got all these assumptions wrong. We now know that ALA converts to DHA in the liver and in the brain itself, but it's not really simple to go around taking biopsy punches out of people's liver and brain just to see if you're getting enough DHA.

That is what they call an unethical study. Okay? So what I think is also unethical is that they actually did these research in animals from fish to rabbits to rats to mice, to primates, all of 'em the same thing. They all convert ALA to DHA in the liver and in the brain. They all produce more than enough to supply the brain. But is this true in humans too? Yes, because we have the identical enzymes, we have the identical pathway and we have the identical places of those happens. So the fish oil companies worked with a company called OmegaQuant to produce an omega index. This is what everybody believes. Oh, this measures how much DHA you have, but it measures it in red blood cells. Okay, well, that's not where the DHA is being converted. It's being converted in the liver. So when confronted with this information that the omega blood test is horribly inaccurate, especially for vegans or those not consuming preformed DHA, now let me explain that term preformed.

Preformed means it's formed outside of the body. If our body produces it, it's called natural DHA or formed inside endogenous DHA. If it's formed outside in fish or in algae or any other animal flash that's called preformed. When you preformed it and then consume it, it shows up in your bloodstream. Obviously that's where it goes after it goes into your digester tract. But so taking fish oil made their blood DHA go way up, but taking plant omegas did not make DHA in the blood go up. Okay? At first we thought, alright, thin plant-based omegas are insufficient for creating enough DHA for the brain. This was wrong. Now we know we produce 47 times more DHA from ALA in our tissues, the fat, the liver, and the brain 47 more times than what's produced in the bloodstream. So that was all wrong. We produce way more DHA, then they found out how much DHA the brain is actually using.

Well, it uses about two and a half to three and a half, 3.8 milligrams of DHA per day. Okay? Our liver is producing about seven to eight times that amount just by consuming ALA alone. Interesting. So our body is pursuing, as a matter of fact, a lot of that DHA ends up getting stored in the fat because we produce way more than we can ever use even from ALA. And look, I am 40 year vegan, right? Never consumed any preformed DHA in 40 years. If it were true, the ALA did not produce DHA, I would be dead right now instead of talking to you.

So this is clearly not true. Now, where does all that stored DHA go in fat? So they said, well, how much DHA is actually stored in fat? 20 to 50,000 milligrams is stored in the average adult human being. That's enough to feed the brain for over 20 years. That's how much excess DHA we produce, even as vegans. This whole myth is a fear-based marketing scam by the fish oil industries. Unfortunately, Dr. Khan and Gregor, and many of even the plant-based doctors bought into this fear, I'm sorry to say, even Dr. Clapper started taking L-G-DHA because of this fear, because of this misunderstanding. We have the research, we have the data now that shows this is absolutely false and it would make sense. You look at our ancestors, they were landlocked. They were nowhere near any fish. There was no way they could consume any fish or preformed DHA. And we looked at their diet and 90 to 98% of their diet was plants by the amount of fiber they were pooping out. Fossilized poop showed 200 grams of fiber. Modern Americans are eating 10 to 15 grams of fiber. So they were eating 20 times the amount of plants we eat today.

Karina Inkster:

That's a good point. I never really thought about the landlocked piece before. That makes complete sense. I mean, not everyone across human history has lived on a coastline with marine products accessible. So that's an interesting point. I never really thought about that before.

Geoff Palmer:

And they even did what's called carbon isotope. They can see what's in the bones, what they were eating, because all food has a carbon signature. It's like a fingerprint. That fingerprint can be shown up by what they were eating. If they were eating fish. Fish have a specific carbon isotope fingerprint. It would show up in their bones. They looked at people around the Mediterranean, right? The Mediterranean diet centered on fish. They found zero incidents of them consuming fish of all the Mediterranean fossil bones that they picked up from our ancient hominin ancestors. So the Mediterranean diet didn't even include fish, the original Mediterranean people.

Karina Inkster:

Interesting.

Geoff Palmer:

We know this, and it's inarguable because these are carbon isotope tracing. It's not like you can fool this. Like, oh, we slipped some fish in there. No, that would show up in the bones.

Karina Inkster:

This is kind of the reasoning behind why this is a myth, why this is a marketing scam essentially, as you call it, right? Very similar again to what the animal agriculture industry at large is doing with products like meat, dairy, eggs, etc. It's kind of the same idea, except as you mentioned, there are plant-based folks, high level vegan professionals who are buying into this idea and who do the supplementation route, etc. So given that this is a myth, given that we know why it's always important to ask things like, well, compared to what? So your example of looking at people who eat more fish, well, compared to what if you compared them to people who just eat more plants and not the fish, correct? Right. So it's a very important piece there. And then you also need to ask, what does this look like in real life, right? So sure, maybe there are amounts of omegas that we're not getting as vegans, but what does that look like in real life? How much does our brain need every day? How much does our body need? And what's stored in it, which you've gone over. So it's a little bit of, well, okay, one thing might be true, but what does that mean? What does that mean for our health and how our physiology works?

Geoff Palmer:

And the funny thing is, when you look at the data, we know what the symptoms of DHA deficiency is, and they've never found a vegan with DHA deficiency, even if they were only consuming ALA and not consuming any DHA at all. So there's just zero evidence of DHA deficiency and in any vegan, they were basing all this information on blood tests. Okay, so why does the body not convert ALA to DHA in the blood? Because it is known that DHA increases LDL cholesterol.

This can increase the risk for atherosclerosis the number one cause of death of human beings on this planet. If DHA comes in contact to the heart muscle, DHA can lead to atrial fibrillation, those with AFib, as it's called, have a 63% higher risk for heart attacks than those without it. So the body does not want DHA and the bloodstream. It intentionally keeps it out of the bloodstream. The heart muscle can't even produce DHA because it would be harmful to it. So the heart doesn't even convert ALA to DHA, but if you take DHA preformed, you are putting it in the bloodstream, you are causing an increase of LDL cholesterol, which can lead to plaque and atherosclerosis. You are pushing it up against the heart muscle, which can cause AFib. We know now multiple meta-analysis studies. A meta-analysis study is one looking at a bunch of different studies, not a single study, but it's looking at the cumulative base of it.

Several meta-analysis all have said taking fish oil increases your risk for atrial fibrillation. And again, we're talking about taking something that you do not need but can increase your risk for atherosclerosis. Number one, cause of death and atrial fibrillation, which can put you at a very high risk of heart attack. Why on earth would you do that? And finally is shown in vegans that if you take preformed DHA, there is a negative feedback loop that lowers your conversion of ALA to the DHA that your body meets. So by taking DHA, you could actually lower your available DHA as a vegan

Karina Inkster:

Interesting.

Geoff Palmer:

Potentially harm causing and interfering with our own natural processes. A double negative.

Karina Inkster:

See, and this is mind-blowing to a lot of folks who have been taught for the past 40 odd years, probably that fish oil, let's call it. But technically we're talking about Omega-3 supplementation is supposed to be good for the heart and it's supposed to decrease risk and it's good for cognitive function and stuff. But at this point, a quick search, I just found a study that was published in May of 2024, so we're talking just a couple months ago. Right now, it's the beginning of July. It was published in BMJ Medicine and they had data for 415,737 people all aged between 40 and 69. So this is a large sample size, and they found that fish oil was linked to a 13% higher risk of having atrial fibrillation as a first time heart problem. So in people who have never had issues before and also linked to a 5% higher risk of stroke as a first time heart problem, why is nobody talking about this? Why is this just coming out of the woodwork?

Geoff Palmer:

It's funny because these studies have been surfaced for over a decade. We've known this correlation for over a decade, and that's just one study in 2024 that's gotten some buzz now. And GOED, which is the global organization of VPA and DHA, which pushes the whole fish oil, right? They support the fish oil industry. They came out and said, oh, that's just one study. And I'm like, okay, you are boldface lying to the public right now because if you know about that study, then you know about the six other meta analyses that are out there have shown, and that's the low wind, 13% AFib.

Geoff Palmer:

Another meta-analysis that shows 25% AFib, and the further one that says if you actually increase that to one gram a day of fish oil, you get a 49% increased risk of AFib. And that's a meta-analysis looking at seven different studies. That was the average. That means some of the studies had higher than 49% increase risk.

Karina Inkster:

That's insane. So what do we as vegans? Well, I was going to say, what do we need to worry about? But the answer is nothing clearly. But what does this mean for us, Geoff? What does this mean on a day-to-day basis? There's things like the daily dozen, there's things like make sure you get your algae supplement. By things, I mean suggestions from high-profile vegan people. Does it matter? Do we have enough regardless of what we eat, as long as it's a mostly whole foods diet, what's the deal?

Geoff Palmer:

That's a great question. And unfortunately the answer isn't simple. So the vast majority of people probably still aren't consuming enough omegas in their diet just because we're not eating as a purely whole food organic, locally grown in fungi rich soil. Okay? It's just not happening. That's the case. So the nutritional value to our food is a fraction of what it was in the wild. We just don't see the nutritional. A Rutger study showed biodynamic grown produce had up to 6000% higher nutritional value than commercially bought organic produce.

So we can eat and do everything and still be getting not enough. That's where I think supplementation can just make sure that we are, because it's not good to take risks and be honest with yourself. Go to chronometer or one of those calculators and put in your daily diet, but put it in for an entire month to give yourself an idea. Are you really meeting your daily requirements on there? And now it's going to say your daily intake of DHA, that's going to be wrong because you don't need it in a preformed source. You do need ALA and the proper dose is around 1200 milligrams per day. And to be honest, most vegans aren't consuming that. There are some that are diligent about making sure they're getting their hemp and stuff like that, but for the vast majority of people, now there is a second issue here that we need to talk about.

Just to be clear, there is a group of people who have a genetic variation. It's probably, it's anywhere from 10%. It could be more than that because we just don't have big enough population studies yet to confirm. But there's a rate limiting enzyme that converts a LA down to its next step, which is sd. So if your body produces enough of that enzyme, you're good. You just need to consume enough ALA. But there are people who don't produce that enzyme very well for you with the statistics or the analysis, but it's an expensive thing to try to find out if you are a POE four fads to SNPs, they're called SNPs polymorphisms, alright? They're changes in your DNA that you have you're born with. There's nothing you could do about it, but you either have to eat a lot more ALA than the normal person to get the same amount, or you could consume a source of SDA.

Now plant certain plants do make SDA, that's the next step down. So it bypasses that enzyme. So I went out and found the richest source of SDA of any plant in the world. So I could give people a universal Omega-3 that everyone, regardless of your genetic makeup, can get sufficient amounts of Omega-3 even if you have that genetic difference. And you won't know unless you do a very expensive genetic test. So you could take the test to find out, and if you do, then try to consume either a lot more omega in your diet or take a supplement like AHI flour. That is the richest source of SDA. Now, at first I was going to launch a hemp oil because hemp is one of the other few plants that has SDA in it onic acid. But when I found ahiflower and it won the next year award for the best supplement of the year, I was like, okay, this is eight times more SDA in it than hemp oil. So hemps an awesome source. It's one of the few with SDA in it. A flour is eight times better than it as far as that. Now, what does that SDA mean? It means more of the omegas actually convert to EPA into DHA and at a higher level and a quicker level than say flax or chia, which has no SDA in it at all.

Karina Inkster:

Yeah, interesting. This is a very interesting answer because as you said, there's multiple parts and it's not just easy, like an RDA for iron for women is this, and for men is this, it's kind of like protein. It depends on a lot of different factors, and in this case, one of those factors is possibly genetic. And unless you're going to do an expensive test, which I'm not interested in doing, then it's just better to be safe.

Geoff Palmer:

And either track and look to make sure that you're way above the 1200, which is kind of difficult to do without consuming too much fat, what polyunsaturated fats are. And of course, now another thing people don't realize is that the omegas that you consume, about 70% of them actually get burned up as calories.

These omegas that everybody thinks, oh, you got to take a no, if you take 500 milligrams of EPA DHA, a good portion of that, actually the majority of that is just going to get burned up for calories. And remember, your brain only needs two to three milligrams out of that 500 milligrams. So the rest is actually either going to get stored or what they call in science beta oxidized, which is burned fat burning.

Karina Inkster:

That's the case with so many things. I feel like that concept is forgotten a lot of times. So taking digestive enzymes, your stomach acid is going to kill those things, or most of them taking collagen, which of course is not vegan, but there's collagen boosters supposedly that are plant-based. Your stomach is just going to digest that stuff. So it's kind of the same concept. We don't really think about what's happening physiologically when we consume some of these things.

Geoff Palmer:

And it's the pathways too. Our body has this very complex pathway to take ALA, convert it to SDA, then ETA, then EPA, then DPA, then finally DHA, and it has those steps for a reason. So our genes can turn on and off the enzymes that do each one of those steps of conversion. This is how the body regulates exactly how much of each one of those the body needs. If you have a high blood pressure, you're going to need a little bit more EPA. If you have certain other issues of inflammation, you're going to need a little bit more DHA. So the body is constantly turning on and off these enzymes in order to regulate inside. When you take a fish oil supplement, you're just dumping preformed in there, and the body's like, whoa, whoa, I didn't make those. What are you doing? Where'd you get those from?

That's what causes when you take DHA, the body says, whoa, that's way too much, DHA, let's shut down the whole process. So you turn off the whole stream and EPA starts to actually build up, which can cause brain fog and brain dysfunction. So you're dumping stuff in and messing up the whole endogenous process, this careful balancing act that the body does. It's like taking steroids. Our body produces its own testosterone, both men and women. But if you take a preformed exogenous source of steroids and dump it into the system, body says, whoa, I don't need to make my own and shuts down. Its production of testosterone. That same process is happening in our bodies with DHA. When you take a DHA supplement, you are basically jumping the system and overriding the system and screwing up a whole perfectly balanced system that the body has in place. Every single animal has this in place. Actually, interestingly, carnivore animals don't convert a LA down to EPA. They start with EPA and only go to DPA and DHA. It's because they're eating other animals. Animals only produce EPA and DHA, just like we do. We produce it in our body just like every other animal on the planet. We're no different, but this is how we can tell human beings are not carnivores because carnivores don't have this system in place. Only herbivores and some omnivores do.

Karina Inkster:

Oh man. Well, I feel like the carnivore movement, for whatever reason, is gaining some level of traction, and it may or may not be related to another thing I really wanted to talk to you about, which is the concept of meat and masculinity. Maybe it's related to this carnivore trend, I don't know. But I'd love to get your kind of background and ideas on something you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, which is something along the lines of men have some catching up to do in the vegan world. So what does that mean?

Geoff Palmer:

So a recent poll, and it is probably updated since then, but just for reference rough numbers, they took a polling and 80% of vegans in America are women. 80%. That's an eight to two ratio.

Karina Inkster:

It probably hasn't changed that much, honestly. Maybe it's like 70/30 or something. I don't know.

Geoff Palmer:

Exactly. So men are 50% of the population, which means they're lagging way behind in the amount of people coming to the understanding that it's better for the health, better for the planet, and clearly better for the animals. So why this resistance from males? So males have this concept in their mind and it's ages old, of power over instead of power with. So examples of power with are collaboration, partnerships, teamwork. This is power with this is stronger together. It is seeing our connection with the animals and seeing the positive relationship we can have with them rather than power over is, I kill you, I win, I dominate you, I win. I'm stronger than you. I win. It's that what they call in zero sum thinking, meaning one plus zero equals one. That's a win, right? One person wins, one person loses, and that's, it's called a zero sum game.

In game theory, what we want to see is more males seeing, Hey, wait a minute, if I don't eat animals, my life, my health improves, the environment improves. The animal doesn't have to suffer, win, win, win, win. There's wins all over the place. It's seeing your win, as in everybody else's win as well. Guys need to get out of the group, think that the only way I can win is by beating, bullying, abusing, killing something else. That's a win lose situation. And that's the basis of psychology for men, unfortunately, that we need to change how we change that.

Karina Inkster:

That was my next question for you, Geoff.

I'm sure none of us has an answer here because it's kind of like if there were a magic pill that someone could invent to make everybody vegan, it probably would've been invented already or many other things in the fitness and nutrition industry. If it were a pill, people would buy it, but it's not. So you have to put in the work. So yeah, I mean, do you have ideas on what we as vegans can do? Is it a matter of getting folks like Robert Cheeke who was on the podcast that we were on recently, bodybuilding types like yourself, natural bodybuilding champions. I mean, you even started your own vegan bodybuilding championship, which is pretty awesome. That's an avenue for sure. Do we just need different options? I remember the Game Changers documentary was actually pretty key. I got so many dudes coming into our business, of course, fitness and nutrition coaching saying, Hey, I watched the Game Changers, now I'm vegan. What do I do? So I feel like there's different approaches, but how do you think we should move forward?

Geoff Palmer:

Yeah, so I was at a Veg Fest and I've got the 17-inch arms, and a girl came up to me and said, oh my God, she saw my vegan shirt. And she said, you're vegan. And I said, yeah, for over 30 years at that time. And she said, can I take a picture because my boyfriend's not going to believe you.

Karina Inkster:

Well, that's one effective form of activism, isn't it?

Geoff Palmer:

Exactly. And I thought, oh, wait a minute, just be a billboard for it. So I always wear vegan shirts in the gym, and I even got comments on my shirt today. So my shirt on the back said, 39 years vegan, 60 years of age, and a hundred percent drug free. And two guys came up to me and said, is your shirt really accurate? I said, no. I said, no, it's not. And they laughed and they go, oh. I said, it's actually 61 years, 39 years vegan. And they started laughing and they're like, oh, really? And I'm like, yeah. And they're like, you're 61 and you're lifting that pushing 450 pounds on it.

Karina Inkster:

That's amazing.

Geoff Palmer:

At 61. And they're like, wow. So I think that can help, but I think books like I'm writing to really show the research and show the lies that we've been sold. When I approached GOED, I did a podcast on Nutri Ingredients, which is the largest industry podcast out there for inclusive of the Fish Out, which makes up a big portion of them. And GOED did a response to my interview showing that EPA and DHA are not necessary, that our body makes all that we need, and that they were looking in the wrong place with the Omega index, and they actually may have cope with a little bit and said, yeah, we need to look at other sources. You know what they did this year? They put out a study totally funded by GOED and the fish oil industry saying that everybody should run out and get an omega blood test immediately.

Karina Inkster:

Oh dear. That's like telling people to get a blood test to figure out where they're at with calcium. It's the same idea. You can't get a blood test to tell you if you're eating enough calcium.

Geoff Palmer:

So they knew this blood test was grotesquely inaccurate. It's bogus. It's a lie, especially for vegans. Their response was to go out and urge people to go get the blood test. That kind of boldface marketing lies that people assume, Hey, this is coming from the largest nutritional organization out there for fish oil and health, and they buy that, and it's sad because they're being lied to through marketing, not through accurate nutritional information. It's frustrating, but that's what we're up against. And talking with Dr. Milton Mills, the other actually last night saying, Hey, wait a minute, putting this information out there could get a lot of heat. And I'm like, I do understand that, but look, two to 3 trillion fish are dying every year are suffering the counting on me to be a voice for them. I have to do this for them.

It's funny when I talk to, they're like, oh, a fish are killed immediately. I'm like, no, you realize we breathe air with a little bit of dissolved water vapor in it, right? There's water vapor in the air, so we get mostly oxygen, a little bit of water. They have the reverse. They breathe in mostly water with a little bit of dissolved oxygen. When you take them out of the water, immediately, that's reversed. Now they have a whole lot of oxygen burning. Their gills, inflaming their whole respiratory system. It's excruciating. The equivalent of that for humans is waterboarding. We force by putting a wet towel over somebody, we force 'em to breathe in more water and it causes our lungs to be on fire. Extreme panic. It is one of the worst forms of torture for human beings, and we are doing that torture to two to 3 trillion animals every single year. This is horrific. That's why I'm standing up, and that's why I'm putting my own self at risk by coming out against a 22 billion industry and say, you're lying. This is wrong. You're doing marketing and you're telling people a falsehood all to get them to buy your product when you know it's doing them harm.

Karina Inkster:

Very well said, Geoff. On that note, folks can find you at cleanmachineonline.com. Is that right? We also are going to have show notes where people can connect with you, check out all of your various endeavors. Was there anything you want to leave our listeners with? Anything that we've not covered?

Geoff Palmer:

I just want to say whatever it is you do. Look, I took up supplementation. I took up bodybuilding. I'm now very passionate about the nutritional side of it, but there are so many things. I love this quote from Walter Cronkite when he was asked by a reporter, what was it that ended the Vietnam War? Was it the body bags coming home in the plane on TV? Was it the grotesque Nepal being burning children, seeing pictures of burning children? Was it the protest, violent protest in the street where kids were being shot by our own military? What was it that stopped the war? Was it the economic situation? And he said something that lives to me to this day. He said all of it. Never forget how every important factor, whether it's writing a book or doing a show or speaking publicly, or even just privately speaking to friends and family. We can all be activists, and it's all important. It's going to come by all of us doing grassroots and high level efforts. That's what's going to take to move this movement forward and to give animals the freedom and the end to their suffering.

Karina Inkster:

A hundred percent. Geoff, I fully agree. So great to speak with you. As always, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Geoff Palmer:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Karina Inkster:

Geoff, thank you again for joining me. So great to connect with you. Access our show notes at nobullshitvegan.com.178 to connect with Geoff. And thanks so much for tuning in.