[00:00:00 ] Rebecca: I listened to your, talk at the Weston A Price Conference and was so fascinated by everything that you've done and everything that you've experienced. So to start off, would you just give us a brief introduction of who you are and how you got to be where you are eating like a human.







Who is Dr. Bill Schindler



[00:00:17 ] Bill Schindler: Sure, I would love to, and thank you for the opportunity to talk with you today. So my name is Dr. Bill Schindler, and I am the executive chef currently of the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, which is a full family endeavor, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a little bit, and also the director of the Eastern Shore Food Lab, which is our non-profit.




https://eatlikeahuman.com/eastern-shore-food-lab/




[00:00:34 ] Bill Schindler: And the where, how we got to this place, you know, our tagline, our, our motto, all of it is, is "eat like a human" because my background is actually in anthropology and archeology and I've spent literally my life at some level looking and I'm trying to understand and studying ancestral and traditional diets.



[00:00:52 ] Bill Schindler: Some through the archeological record and some millions of years old and some more recent in historic through the ethnographic record and tried to make sense. And I'm using that to make sense of, our current issues surrounding food and diet and health and ethical eating and sustainability and all those things that we're really, you know, trying to problem solve today as a species.



In Person Classes:




https://eatlikeahuman.com/product/eat-like-a-human-3-day-intensive-march2023/




The Question We Should Be Asking About Food, Not What but How



[00:01:13 ] Bill Schindler: We've, I think my, my wife and I and my family have really started to at least ask the right questions. We don't have all the right answers, I'm sure, and we're headed in the right direction, but I think we've, we've started to at least ask the right questions, which I think is, is, is very important, especially in today's



[00:01:28 ] Bill Schindler: dietary climate where we had landscape, where we have all sorts of, of information hitting us, left and right and don't really know, know how to feed ourselves. But my own relationship with food is, is actually incredibly important as well. I spent most of my life, very unhealthy because of how I ate, incredibly poor self body image, battling weight, battling, metabolic disease until we've really took this ancestral and traditional approach.



[00:01:52 ] Bill Schindler: my, I'm I'll turn 50 in about a month, and I've never felt better. I've never been in better health and, my entire life has been transformed because of, of this approach. And, and very quickly, I think just to mention what that approach is. We as a species right now, as humans, are trying to understand obviously how to feed ourselves.



[00:02:11 ] Bill Schindler: Most of us wanna lose weight or feel better or live a better life, and to figure out how to do that, we're asking the question, "what should I eat?" 



[00:02:19 ] Bill Schindler: And trying to achieve that health or that body. Through that answer. You know, what, what should I eat? And we think that, you know, from that sort of Weight Watcher's mentality, if I have this much carb, this much protein, or I go on this diet and I eat this green smoothie and all this, all my problems will be solved.



[00:02:35 ] Bill Schindler: And even though what we should be eating is a very important question, what I hope we get a chance to dive into a little bit today during this conversation is it's not the only questions that humans need to ask. 







How Should We Eat?



[00:02:47 ] Bill Schindler: We are a completely different species. The way we go about eating and getting our food is completely different from every other animal on the planet. It is partially the what built us as a species with these big brains and these big bodies. And in order to properly fuel our bodies, we also have to ask the question, how should I eat? How can I, how should I take these raw materials from my environment and transform them into their safest and most nourishing form possible for my body.



[00:03:12 ] Bill Schindler: That's where we've landed, that's where we're spending all of our time. So our family has a, a restaurant called the Modern Stone Age Kitchen where we put all of this into practice and we also have the nonprofit where we continue to do research and teach these approaches to food. 



[00:03:25 ] Rebecca: That's awesome. I know there's probably a lot of misconceptions about you, and when people just see, you know, "eat like a human", they maybe don't know what that is.



[00:03:35 ] Rebecca: Maybe they think paleo or something like that. I know when I first met Christina, I wasn't really sure what type of diet you guys followed, and I think it's interesting because people have these preconceived notions. So this happens to me a lot my website is that organic mom and people come to my site or they come to my YouTube channel and they think, oh, she's a vegan.



[00:03:58 ] Rebecca: And then they see me preparing pork belly and they're like, what the heck? Unsubscribe, go away. Why are you eating meat, woman? You know, I mean, people get offended and I know, one of the first chapters of your book "Eat Like A Human" is about the question that you just mentioned, not only what we eat, but how, what, what mistakes are we making? What are we doing wrong when it comes to food? 



[00:04:24 ] Bill Schindler: One of the biggest mistakes we're making is we come at this from this idea to answer what we should be eating and, and how we should feed ourselves. We try to also say, okay, what, what is my body designed to eat? You know, what foods are my body designed to consume?



[00:04:41 ] Bill Schindler: And. We think we're omnivores that humans are omnivores and we are omnivores, but not because we have the teeth or the digestive tract to allow us to be omnivores. We're omnivores because for three and a half million years, and I've realized that that amount of time is very hard for to conceptualize for, for for many people.



[00:05:02 ] Bill Schindler: But for three and a half million years, we and our ancestors have been creating technologies that allow us to overcome our physical limitations, allow us to do more than just what our teeth can do, do more than just what our digestive tract can do and transform raw materials from our environment into their safest and less nourishing form as possible for our bodies.



[00:05:22 ] Bill Schindler: We are not omnivores because we are built to be omnivores. We are omnivores because we and all of our incredibly innovative, you know, inventive ancestors, figured out ways of, of cooking and fermenting and soaking and sprouting and nixtamalizing, and doing all of these things to raw materials to get them ready for our body so our body can safely get the nutrients from it.







How to Eat Like A Human



[00:05:46 ] Bill Schindler: So that's partially that, that, what, and how, you know, it's, it's not as easy to say, Hey, you know, I get asked all the time, you know, when I get at the end of presentations, okay, I get all the, but should humans eat bread , or should, should humans, adults be consuming milk? Isn't milk designed for baby cows?



[00:06:02 ] Bill Schindler: You know, that sort of thing. And the answer, you can't answer that question the way it's asked, right? The answer is, well, let's back up, is there something we can do to that dairy as adults, even for people who are lactose intolerant to make it safe and nourishing for our bodies? Is there a way to take grains and transform them into something that's safer and more nourishing?



[00:06:26 ] Bill Schindler: And can you introduce that kind of bread into a diet and have it be a healthy human diet? And the answers to those questions are, yes, there are ways of doing it. So to back up just to, and I do think it's very important for people to understand exactly where anybody they're getting information is coming from.



[00:06:45 ] Bill Schindler: I eat a very animal based diet. I do believe that one of the biggest, issues with our modern industrial food system are industrial nut and seed oils. We include absolutely no industrial nu seed oils in our diets whatsoever, we do use a few oils from the plant world. We use a little bit of coconut oil we use a little bit of olive, and a little bit of avocado oil in cold applications. But anything we're cooking with, anything that we're eating on a regular basis are purely animal based fats, butter, schmaltz, lard, tallow, you know, that sort of thing. 



[00:07:16 ] Bill Schindler: So, we eat a lot of nose to tail animal. We, we eat meat, we eat bone marrow. We eat fat, we eat organs, we eat all of those things. , so I, I do believe that that is the, the safest way to get as much nourishment as possible into our bodies. But on top of that, we do also eat vegetables. We're very careful about the vegetables that we eat. I love eating vegetables. I love the way they taste.



[00:07:38 ] Bill Schindler: I love the way their texture, I love what they add to foods. There are some plants that are inherently dangerous for us to eat, and I just don't put them in our diets at all. Many plants that we do eat, we do something too to either make them safer or allow their, nutrients to be more easily accessible to our bodies.



[00:07:53 ] Bill Schindler: like something like safety fermentation, for example, but we do eat a very omnivorous diet in our family very animal based, but we do include plants. So at, so just so you know where, where, where we're coming from. We also have, we don't eat a whole lot of grains. However we do, part of our restaurant is a, is a sourdough bakery.



[00:08:12 ] Bill Schindler: You make all sorts of sourdough bread. So I'm in this weird place and I know you mentioned, you know,