Jonathan is an ER doctor based in Philadelphia, trained in both internal medicine and pediatrics. His journey as a foodie began during medical school while dissecting cadavers, which sparked his fascination with learning how muscles correspond to various cuts of beef. He now runs the dinner series Anatomy Eats (@anatomyeats on all social media platforms), where he collaborates with chefs around the country to serve offal dishes. During these events, he discusses the anatomy and physiology of the parts being eaten, sometimes even dissecting organs as people dine.
In his first book, "The Unseen Body," Jonathan addresses the 1971 US law banning the sale of animal lungs as human food. In 2023, he submitted an official petition to the USDA arguing for the overturn of this law, and he is currently awaiting their response.
Jonathan is writing a new book based on Anatomy Eats, which will explore the intersection of anatomy and cuisine worldwide. The book aims to debunk many misconceptions about food that can be easily disproved with basic knowledge of anatomy and physiology. Some topics he plans to cover include whether eating testicles increases testosterone or masculinity, the real reason some cuts of meat are tougher than others, how foie gras relates to fatty liver disease, and the safety of consuming animal colons (which he confirmed through a visit to the Chitlin Fest in Salley, SC).
Rather than focusing on the nutritional benefits of eating these body parts, Jonathan emphasizes the fascination of understanding that human bodies are composed of the same parts and tissues consumed from animals. He believes that comprehending this overlap enhances the intrigue of eating offal. While he considers every part of an animal healthy (unless it's actually toxic, like a polar bear's liver), his primary interest lies in exploring the anatomical and physiological aspects of these foods.
Instagram: @anatomyeats @jonreismanMD
Twitter: @anatomyeats @jonreismanMD
YouTube: @anatomyeats @jonreismanMD
Timestamps: 00:00 Trailer. 00:50 Introduction. 06:54 Anatomy eats dinners, dissecting hearts during meals. 09:42 Eating any part of the body can be healthy. 12:03 Icelandic cuisine: dried fish, whale blubber, ram testicles. 14:34 USDA made lungs illegal due to safety concerns. 17:15 Cultural food beliefs and palate adaptability. 21:08 Examined whale heart, fermented walrus dishes fascinating. 26:14 Reevaluation of fat in Western medicine and nutrition. 27:12 Inupiat elders recommended traditional fat-rich diet. 32:54 Traditional vs. modern diet and physical activity. 33:42 Nanook of the North film, hunting seal. 36:39 Fascination with Asian cuisine and exotic ingredients. 42:48 Animal blood can be used in cuisine. 44:57 Modern raw milk is less dangerous. 49:13 Culinary road trips through Mexico and China. 50:25 Where to find Jonathan.
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Hey guys, this is Swank Grill, he's up to 1,500 degrees to grill the juices, steaks you've ever tasted in as little as three minutes. At 1,500 degrees you get the perfect sear and create a delicious crust on both sides of the steak. This grill is made in USA and uses the exact same technology as the world's best steak houses. Swank Grills.com that's S-C-H-W-A-N-K Grills.com code "ShawnBaker" for $150 off. Starting in the first day of medical school we started dissecting our cadaver and which was I found a very fascinating process but maybe the most enlightening of my life cutting open another dead human. I'm not interested in these foods or promoting them for the gross factor, you know, oh isn't it gross that you're eating this animal's tongue or heart or brain because it's not gross, it's just that some people might not be used to it. At some of our anatomy eats dinners I'll actually dissect the heart while people are eating a heart dish, anything from pancreas to testicles to brain. People ask me well what do I think is the best diet, I'm actually surprised they want to hear from me because doctors have been so wrong about nutrition in the past. I'm curious who actually wants to hear from a doctor about what nutritional facts they learn in medical school because they're probably wrong based on terrible science. I'm here with, we're happy to have our guest today, Dr. Jonathan Riceman. He's from, I guess, Pennsylvania and I worked with him I think he said ER physician if I'm not mistaken. Correct. I trained as an internist and pediatrician, I did a med-peeds residency but I worked in the ER basically my whole career. Gotcha. And then you said I saw something here a foodie anatomy, the second I could have made you a foodie, I'm interested in how that came to be. Yes, I grew up not really being interested in food, not cooking much, maybe I learned to make a stir fry in college, I guess that was the extent of my food, know how, but after. So up starting on the first day of medical school we started dissecting our cadaver and which was I found a very fascinating process but maybe the most enlightening of my life cutting open another dead human but one of the professors like pointing out which muscles in the cadaver in humans corresponded to which cuts a beef and that got me interested in learning more about that and I visited some slaughterhouses, started learning how to butcher and then that led into my interest in both foods anatomical and otherwise. It's interesting, I can tell you funny, when I was doing my own with big stirs more as we're going to our spine, our spine is right, we're doing all these back surgeries, I don't remember if you want surgeries and you look like you're hungry and you're still dissecting out basically the back strap but it looks like a full way, I was just trying to think about it. So you just can't walk as much as it is a little bit, it's just amazing what we are, we're basically now we're in meat, that humans are what's interesting, so I guess when surgeons use the electro quartery the bovee, it can sometimes smell burnt or cooking meat in the operating room. It doesn't smell that nice, I bovee to hell, I did a lot of bovee years, this kind of I remember smiling all you made is fake mistake but yeah it does have a set, it's not something I would say it's back here, I think, as well as I go just... Let me ask you, MedPeds, when in DQER, I was interested in food and how it's produced and what it does, but how has that impacted you, where are you at these days? So in general, I have my job as an ER doctor where I'm not generally doing too much counseling, I do some counseling on nutrition and food intake and other things but often I'm just patching up the acute injury and then sending people back to their primary care doctors. But in my own personal life, my interest in food and anatomy and the overlap between sort of medical knowledge and food knowledge has impacted the way I eat and what I'm interested in eating, the recipes I might seek out especially when traveling to another country, exploring another cuisine or even within the US we have so many varied cuisines from northeast to south and west and so just exploring all those cuisines has a big part of my life, a big interest and led me to create anatomy eats, this dinner series where we promote eating all parts of an animal's body, every part of which is edible and nutritious. I'm not an expert in nutrition but I like the fascinating aspect of eating these interesting body parts, knowing from my medical education what they do in living humans and living animals, how they function inside of us and how that incredibly complex biochemical function or whatever the function of that particular body part is, but you're eating that same substance that carries out that sort of almost miraculous function to keep us and animals alive. So that sort of interest led me to be forever exploring cuisine and how different cultures around the world and around the country have cooked these different body parts, it's certainly impacted my own life in that way. There's the old saying you are what you eat or if you eat what you are in some way, it's just that if you look at what we're made up, if we're made up, and the cells and I make the art and make the animal cells have what animal cells need, you go from a structure and you're just going to pour it in. So how is that? What would be some of that? I guess people would consider a maybe unusual thing to bizarre. I remember there was a guy I came on this name that used to be around the world eating just the weirdest crap. It was just like quite awesome, that was disgusting but I can't remember that. I think that was bizarre, that's all that guy he was using on that stuff. What did you discover? It made you want to shoot a little? Any shame or no? I think that's an important point that I'm not interested in these foods or promoting them for the gross factor. Oh, isn't it gross that you're eating this animal's tongue or heart or brain? Because it's not gross, it's just that some people might not be used to it. Those who grew up eating these body parts or in cuisines where it's a common ingredient and food don't find a gross at all, hardly find it any different than regular meat, which is perhaps more familiar to most Americans. It's not that it's gross, it's that it shouldn't be gross or that it actually isn't gross, it's instead it's fascinating to eat these parts. Even from, let's say, liver, I feel like if you ask the average American who does not eat any internal organs or awful, liver might be the thing they're the most familiar with as something that is eaten. So I grew up with people around me eating liver though I actually thought it was gross as a kid. I didn't like the taste, I didn't like the thought, I didn't like anything about it but then after I went to med school and learned some million and one things about the liver and how amazing it is as an organ to keep us alive, got me reinterested in trying it and then I did try it and I grew to love it. Even something like that's a super common internal organ that people are familiar with might see in the grocery store. To let's say the heart which is quite striking, at some of our anatomy eats dinners I'll actually dissect the heart while people are eating a heart dish, cut it open, show them the ventricles, the valves, how it beats, where the coronary arteries are that feed the heart muscle blood. And something like that can be very startling for the average person who gets their food already cooked or perhaps butchered and wrapped in cellophane in the butcher portion of the grocery store supermarket. Anything from that to let's say sweet breads which are the thymus glands which is probably I had a sweet bread dish in France last year, probably one of the most delicious things I've eaten in my life. Anything from pancreas to testicles to brain. One of our anatomy eats dinners we did a cardiovascular theme where the chef I was working with that time, Ari Miller, cooked three species of heart, cooked in three different ways. So he made a beef heart tartar, pork heart skewers and a chicken heart terrine just to demonstrate how different animals obviously have different sized hearts, different shaped hearts and they can be used in different ways to make different dishes and there's really a lot of creativity that you can do based on some of these organs. Yeah, I know when I was in Iceland I had to eat some quite strange things. I thought there were a matter of people who have been there, like basically making sure I mean some other bizarre testicles and all that stuff that I try to know. As a physician and you said you're patching out people, one of the things I discovered as well as pig exertance was how important nutrition played a role in either the improvement or the progression it sees but I read it and that's something that I, you know, that's one of you now, I'm not nutritioning out of back self. Is that something you eat in too much or is it more just about keeping the novelty of you? Sure, different things. I would say I don't, in my job as an ER doctor I don't get into nutrition a ton. I do and in my personal life I certainly think a lot of the nutritional knowledge I learned as a medical student. I don't believe any more and I think that evidence is clear that a lot of what I learned is wrong so I like eating, ingesting cholesterol, raises your cholesterol or certain things about vilifying certain kinds of fat. I think nutritional science that I learned or that doctors talk to the patients about is often wrong. People ask me what do I think is the best diet, I'm actually surprised they want to hear from me because doctors have been so wrong about nutrition in the past. I'm curious who actually wants to hear from a doctor about what nutritional facts they learned in medical school because they're probably wrong based on terrible science. For me I guess my approach to nutrition is anything that any part of the body is edible and any part animal body is of course not human but any part of the body is nutritious as well. Like you said, we are made of the same stuff so why wouldn't it help rebuild and help put the turnover over our own tissues if we're eating the same raw materials or raw ingredients. I certainly think eating any part of the body can be healthy even from an environmental standpoint. I think there's no reason to waste body parts that are edible can be delicious just because people let's say in America are just not used to eating them or don't see them as food or often ask the question you know can you eat that and the question the answer is any part of the body can be eaten and can be nutritious. So it's definitely changed the way that I think about nutrition. I guess nutrition doesn't often come up in my conversations with patients unless it's more like telling them to stick to a clear diet until they stop having diarrhea and things like that sort of more short-term nutritional advice than really long-term. Yeah, I suspect a lot of people present the oh boy they're in nutrition or I've still probably drove. Keep it sufficient? Yeah. I certainly think that's true. So you have you traveled extensively trying sampling once you mentioned France. Have you gone to the pictures and seen like stuff that we would never have heard over and have thought of here. I was in Malaysia and I had jellyfish which I thought was really this hard. I didn't even jellyfish. It was actually crunchy which surprised me. I was surprised by that. Yeah, I do travel. I'm working on a book based on anatomy eats and so I have a few countries I still haven't gotten to that I need to explore the cuisine. But I've also been to Iceland as you mentioned they have some very interesting food preservation techniques that sometimes cause foods to have a lot of ammonia in them like the pickled shark. I'll call that you talked about which is if you don't smell it it's not too bad to put in your mouth. You have to really try not to smell it and then other things in Iceland I really enjoyed that in Iceland you can go to any general supermarket and buy whale blubber as a snack and slice thin and put on there. In Iceland they love this dried fish called heart fisker that almost traditionally was a bread substitute because they can't really grow green there. They would use dried fish fillets as something to spread butter or put whale blubber on top of which I thought was pretty great and have those ram testicles as well. I did spend a bunch of time in Russia not in recent years but after college when I was younger and tried some interesting foods there. I spent a bunch of time on the Kumchatka Peninsula in the Far East where a lot of people especially in the northern part of the peninsula do a lot of salmon, fishing and harvesting the caviar, the red caviar which was very interesting that will be in the reproductive chapter of my Anatomy Eats book which goes by System but eggs that you're eating and also they would make spread out of the sperm from the male salmon which is also called nilt, M-I-L-T which you can sometimes find stores like from cod especially. And the milk they would boil quickly it would hard it was this long sort of tubular cylindrical sack of white sperm and when you boil it briefly it hards up and then they would grind it with a little bit of chopped green onions and just add some salt and it actually made a great spread on bread also. And many other foods too I was in Spain recently exploring the cuisine there and I guess one thing we're blessed with in America is that people bring their cuisines here and while we might find them gross or disgusting raw fish was gross 50 years ago and then in the 80s and 90s all the rich people started eating it and now we all love it. But so a lot of interesting cuisines people bring to the US that we might not might not wet our appetites initially maybe we get used to it later. You can go to ethnic parts of various cities and explore cuisines almost without traveling which is pretty great. If I go to Philadelphia nearby here and go to the Chinatown I can pretty much get almost any body parts in a grocery store or find it served on menus. And so that's a great way to explore as well. Yeah I mean I don't maybe I'm wrong as well I thought like some body parts you can't get any less like long and stuff like that I think there's some I don't know if they're starting to worry about safety of that or are there any issues with that which you see. So you're right lungs is actually a one that is illegal in my book I write about how how that law came to be so it was not a law debated in Congress but it was a rule passed by the USDA in 1971. They wanted to invest starting in the late 60s there's some congressional records or government records about how they started wondering if lungs were safe to eat or healthy for humans to eat because of all the things people and animals inhale like dust or fungal spores and pollen and other things like that and the trouble with the lungs is this organ turned inside out where you can't really look into all the airways to inspect it for abnormalities or contaminants unless you cut it open and totally destroy it unlike other organs where you can just observe them from the outside without shredding them to make sure they're healthy and should be in the food supply. So they cut open a bunch of lungs doing this USDA study that pathologist conducted and found a lot of these things in their lungs in their airways like dust and fungal spores and because it's difficult to examine all this all the specimens and make sure they're healthy they just said we'll just make lungs completely illegal. Lungs stopped appearing in butcher shops no longer appeared on any menus and there's a bunch of recipes that certain ethnic groups in the US had that suddenly couldn't they couldn't make anymore because lungs disappeared from the butcher shops. There's very few that are actually illegal. Lungs are one the thyroid gland is another the third though I only know these three but a third one is a lactating utter so you can serve or sell non lactating utter as food I've actually had that in France they call it tatin de vash or utter of a cow and but lactating utter is like full of milk which sounds delicious perhaps is not legal to sell in the US but on the topic of lungs I did submit a petition to the USDA last year last February to overturn that 1971 rule because I don't think it actually makes any medical or nutritional sense to keep people from eating lungs as you can in almost every other advanced country in the world except for Canada. Lungs are freely available in haggis in the UK and served in in all over Asian various traditional dishes and nobody's coming down with anthrax as a result of eating it. Okay so that's why haggis is a wee one the US, correct? Correct. They made some non lung containing haggis products that you can buy in the US but the traditional recipe with lungs is not available in the US. I see I used to be in the Scottish to Highland Games and so I remember that was always a hopefully my petition goes through and real haggis will be available once again for the first time in 50 years. It's your state. Have you, I guess, we have obviously different countries that have run different beliefs around through things about nature in the US? Like you mentioned, the USA is such a melting pot that you can be exposed from this depending on where you go, hold you on and things like that. Do you find that a lot, like I said I wonder why it is a lot of people inherently just think it's a training thing, it's a palette, that another thing, so a lot of people still like this stuff. Like you mentioned, you're a kid, you know, like little, why do you think that was and what was what was the turning point to change you on that and preparation or it's a good question. It is interesting because I see in my kids or my nieces and nephews now, like some of them like liver and some don't and I'm a little fascinated by why that is. I think for me, some of it was the texture, some of it was the taste. I do think liver does have one of the stronger tastes of all the internal organs. Like I said before, when you ask the average American who doesn't need anything unusual, what is the internal organ that people eat, liver is the main one I think people think of and it but it does have the strongest taste, it's a very irony metallic taste that takes from getting used to. I often say I think livers are not a good first step for someone just getting introduced to Ophel. So I'll often recommend like a heart which is much more similar to meat because cardiac muscle and skeletal muscle are much more similar on the macroscopic and the macroscopic level and it doesn't have as much of an irony metallic taste. So I'll often recommend heart as being the first one. So I wonder if liver turns people off to internal organs altogether because it does have the very strong tastes. For me, it was really just learning all about the liver in medical school. What an amazing organ it is, it's 15 organs in one, sort of the metabolic powerhouse of the body both in humans and animals and just understanding that jiggly purple chunk of flesh and our abdomens that does all those amazing biochemical feats for us every day. It was the same liver that my relatives were eating when I was a kid. The same thing that you spread on bread and he made me interested in trying it again and just that fascination with how meat and organs become food made me keep trying and then get used to it and now I love it. I do think a lot of it is just what you're used to. Honestly, I think that's probably the biggest part of it. Yeah, I had like far more in France, it's delicious and white. I wanted to see very different way to put that in the fat, make you septo so do that. But what about like various animals because obviously in the US, if it's big, it's chicken for the most part, maybe a little bit away at quite. You go overseas and now you're all you're eating weird stuff if you're eating monkeys in Malaysia. What are your thoughts on some of these different types of animals and you keep hope there's much on that? I do focus a little bit on that just I've certainly find it fascinating myself. I'd love to try meat and organs from every animal there is. I haven't tried any monkey, meat or organs, but I would gladly one day I for a while I worked in Arctic Alaska as an ER doctor and so I got to know traditional Inupia cuisine which has features, a bunch of animals I'd never eaten before. Obviously like whales and seals and walruses and caribou as well and their diet is very fascinating. Just like the Inuit, they eat mostly all meat diet with more than 50% of calories coming from fat. While I was there, I did try whale meat and whale blubber and whale heart and I got the chance to examine a whale's heart which was the size of a yoga ball, a bowhead whale that had been hunted there by one of the whaling crews in Barrow, Alaska and they have some various fermented walrus dishes that were interesting as well. One of the most interesting dishes I've seen actually they Inupia will take caribou's liver and actually put it into the stomach contents from the caribou's first stomach so the rumin, the largest one, inside of it this green partially chewed up lichen and grass stew and they put it in there and let it let the chemical microbial and enzymatic action of the rumin sort of act on the liver and then they'll take it out, slice it up and eat it. I never got the chance to try that but I did think it was one of the more interesting anatomical dishes that come across but yes, trying every animal is certainly fascinating I think. I do like to focus more on the interesting parts of the familiar animals but I'm certainly interested in let's say familiar parts of unfamiliar animals or the organs of unfamiliar animals as well. Yeah speaking of being up near the Arctic Circle area I know there's some people it's said that or a liver would something if people couldn't be well with it was like very problematic maybe it's too much about a man something like that is that something that's the way it would. Yes it is vitamin A I believe that is the issue. I never figured it quite got to the answer of why there is so much vitamin A in the polar bear liver I presume it serves some function for them. We have vitamin A in our liver too just not that much and I guess something about the polar bears biology and physiology makes it need a lot of vitamin A even in traditional like Inuit and Inupia mythology there were reasons why you shouldn't eat the polar bear liver it's certainly known that it was poisonous but also interestingly in the Inupia language the word for mushroom is basically means if you touch it your hand will fall off so they had some which doesn't quite make sense because you can eat a lot of mushrooms yes summer poisonous but some of them are healthy so it's interesting also how nutrition enters mythology and what you should eat and shouldn't eat which is another fascinating topic about food taboos and certain parts of the animal that you shouldn't eat like I read that the crow the Native American from the plains the crow never ate the buffalo heart for I'm not sure why but different peoples have different taboos around different body parts and even the way you butcher up an animal and who gets what body part and what body part is considered the most prize and what are considered the more wasteful parts that you give to lower people lower in the socio economic ladder that's also a very fascinating aspect of cuisine and anatomy yeah I guess maybe because I think the awful or the awful was once given to the poor is it like in Europe somewhat I think that's where I actually heard that is it is there some truth there is some truth it's interesting that also varies by culture for instance yes a lot like in in the US a lot of the extra body parts the pigs feet and the intestines were given to slaves let's say but at the same time even in Versailles like in France where the king and queen would spend their time in their in the palace at Versailles some of the menus from their banquets featured tons and tons of awful and organs and liver cooked in a million different ways and exotic not only exotic animals but exotic parts of all sorts of animals so I do think there is this there is that where certain body parts are relegated to the lower classes or to the slaves could be because they're unwanted and in other ways awful can be the highest form of cuisine in the form of let's say some like liver mousse type dishes or things like that are that are that you can eat in France and that are really quite delicious and sometimes it even varies by which organ in which culture like the lungs in western culture many western cultures the lungs were considered for the poor but in on in other cultures the lungs were considered a prize delicacy so it really varies in a quite fascinating way across the world when you look back into history and look at like certain religious texts they talk about fat name and the fat calf and all these things and fat being very valuable and there's obviously organs which fat is a significant percentage of the brain when it comes to mind but of course how do you see that in different cultures with the value or the like in the United States we are we see value fat within the Senate give us heart disease but do we see that maybe some of these fattier things a lot of the organs of what we have had the kidneys very lean on the glories very lean loss of fat you have already so is there a role for fat or do you see much itch to shouldn't show that yeah fat I think is one of the more interesting body parts and traditionally it's been vilified in western medicine I learned when I learned about nutrition in medical school it was all about like certain kinds of fat versus other kinds of fat avoiding the fat being responsible for so much of what ails and kills modern humans I often tell the story about my so my grandmother was a Jew from Lithuania who came to the US and she most of her life cooked in schmaltz which is chicken fat and then in the 60s or 70s some doctors started telling her that was bad for her and she should instead use margarine or other kinds of artificial shortening which have trans fats in them because that would be much healthier obviously now we know that switch is probably a terrible idea because trans fats are just about the worst thing you can ingest and a lot of people are going back to those traditional fats that doctors told them to stop eating because they're they're more delicious and they're probably not as bad for use the artificial fats similar story in arctic Alaska when I spoke to some of the elders there when I was working as an ear doctor the inupia elders all had stories about how doctors told them to stop eating whale blubber stop eating seal blubber start using vegetable oils use whatever modern oils and fats people in the rest of the US use and now the CDC is encouraging inupia another native elastins to eat more of their traditional diet so it's as western medicine flip flops on fat would find I feel like that a lot of the fats people use traditionally are probably the better options not to mention they're often more delicious I think about when I was a resident doing primary care and I would often tell people who are overweight with various aspects of metabolic syndrome high blood pressure diabetes that they should eat more greens but they should not use too much fat to fry them in and it seems like an impossible task for the average American to do that so it seems silly that I was giving them those pieces of advice at the same time now I'm more on the end more on the end of the spectrum where I say like you have to drown things in fat to eat them it's probably fine yeah that's so tough to show gals so it's interesting you said that because I hadn't heard that they were encouraging your traditional first nations or eight block voices in Canada to eat more conventional because I had seen recently there was a Canadian they called it a food igloo and it was designed for blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah the CDC is definitely especially there's a CDC office in Anchorage Alaska that does a lot of research and public health messaging in Alaska and they have started promoting more of the traditional diet I think in the maybe 50s 60s 70s western doctors saw natives of arctic eating lots of blubber lots of fat and decided they should stick more to the traditional or to the sort of modern American diet but now we see the modern American diet leads to all sorts of health problems and so there is a lot of messaging actually in Alaska now about eating more traditional foods lots of fish which is very traditional and meat from marine mammals like seals walruses and whales and even some blubber I don't know that anyone's saying go back to the 50 percent fat diet of pre-modern in inupia life but they're still they're not not saying that fat's gonna kill you and probably marine mammal fat probably is healthier than a lot of other animal fats as well yeah okay and I know I've seen accounts of particular animal with that these people were not overweight at all they were quite slender people they were bundled up and found an animal first they looked like they were squatting it they were really quite lean and yet they were consuming massive amounts of fat in some ways it helped them to maintain a body because it's such a cold environment that was almost a necessity out there is that something that you anyone discussed we do all the other why they were eating so much fat yeah I think it's a big a lot of people said just we need fat I love fat I want to eat fat I feel like when you spend that you spend a week or more in very cold temperatures like camping in the winter or out snowshoeing skiing kind of trip I feel like your hunger for fat increases I find I was on about two week snowshoeing trip in in part of Canada in the winter and I found that by the end of it I was just taking bites of a stick of butter which is something I would not have done in normal life and it was just absolutely delicious and wonderful and it felt like it was keeping me warm I spoke to a bunch of whale hunters in Barrow Alaska they invited me and I got the chance to go out on the ice with them in the spring whale hunting season and they were telling me how they went to a whaling conference in New Bedford Massachusetts which used to be the sort of capital of the whaling industry in North America and they went to the banquet there and they said how during lunch it was all fruits and vegetables and they were this group of Inuit Eskimo were complaining where's the meat we're Eskimo we need meat and fat we can't eat this which I thought was which was pretty interesting yeah I guess I think in the end of it obviously only so many disagreements on this but my understanding is as Peter as we as the western sort of society to discover them in Iraq and in that what's their mean early 19th century I found that these people were very robust and vigorous and healthy free of disease largely compared to even well back then is that the sensitive you at least people were generally pretty healthy on their native diets yeah in fact I remember learning in medical school when we're learning about atherosclerosis and hardening of the arteries and heart attacks and strokes some of the professor did mention in passing that they the Inuit had despite a very high a diet high in animal fat had very low rates of atherosclerosis but it was never I feel like it was almost mentioned in passing it was never explored or brought up again and no one thought too much about it and then I remembered that when I was working there in the Arctic that was the case and I certainly do think like there let's say the level of physical activity was incredible in ancient times the amount of work it took to harvest a living from the Arctic Ocean is unimaginable it's like Olympic athlete times 10 so I certainly do wonder how their traditional diet balance with that level of physical activity compares to let's say a modern diet and the modern level of physical activity which is much less like even on a dog sled which they had you're still doing a ton of work you're often running beside the sled you're often turning over the overturned sled or untangling dog that it's a very physical activity even though you feel you might imagine it's just like riding in a car but now of course they have dogless sleds in the form of snowmobiles that that everyone gets around on men cars and most parts of the Alaska Arctic except in the bush I don't know the answer to that how the how their traditional diet compared to fish traditional physical activity compares to today yeah so there's a film Nanook of the North that came out probably not in 1954 he circled like that and it's a profile guy named Nanook and he was showing him I think it was him showing him harvesting a seal like pulling it out of water standing on ice and you don't see a lot of ways and probably twice as his way in his man halfway thing is it's his who's there for at least a long period of time swimming from men to some of the effort uh dogs that I own and just to pull it out of the water what does that look pretty significant so let me ask you about what about have you been Africa have you seen some of us up in Africa I know when I was in Tanzania I came across me on the side they'll walk around with their a little leather pouch you milk and blood mixture kind of coagulated from the alphabet some of that but I smelled it and I'm like nah I can't do this right then you explore Africa because they've got some interesting quite well look at diversity animal thoughts you got some really unusual animals bear pittance and looks them there I have been to Africa and I did visit the Messiah I did not have a chance to drink their milk and blood mixture but I know about it especially how they harvest it from the living cow by shooting a dart into the animals jugular and just holding the jug or the gourd there to catch the blood I haven't had a chance to explore Africa in enough really but I did do actually an anatomy eats dinner in Oxford Mississippi where I worked with a Nigerian chef who did cook a bunch of Nigerian kind of inspired dishes one with kidneys one with liver one with the heart actually she made the heart almost like uh cooked it for a prolonged time in a soup until all the connected tissue broke down I'd never seen heart cook like that I always see it cooked uh quickly or grilled or but that that was interesting and so we did cook a bunch of of dishes but I haven't explored the continent enough but I did find that Masai dish that Masai kind of nutritional staple of milk and blood core interesting because when we talk about feeding babies breast milk first cow's milk first formula one of the big trouble with cow's milk is that it's low in iron so I always think if you added some blood that would solve that problem so maybe milk and blood is the ultimate breast milk substitute for kids who can't breastfeed I wonder. I'm wonderful see that in the Shelton plus strawberry and strawberry because that why you say I was just seeing with both to somebody sharing one of the infant formula in the formula and it was it's 48 43% corn syrup and that was sorting in oil was the next ingredient that it was part so I was just like why would you do your children this spot it is nice zero cents to me but what about I guess the other parts of the world would you get me like Asia seems to anything that moves Elito who there's I prefer to say I think yes I think even I haven't explored Asia enough but I have been to Chinatown and Chile and New York and if you one of my favorite activities is to go to a grocery store there just to look at the raw ingredients that they're selling and I actually hired a Chinese translator to come with me so I could ask them about the different parts and it's quite fascinating all the various animal parts that you see there or even in a lot of the hot pot restaurants in Chinatown Philly they have just about everything on the menu there from chickens feet to various forms of tripe to liver to brain to heart even beef aorta or they called it ox aorta that was the first time ever saw aorta but it was basically it almost looked like calamari because for rubbery tube and you can cut it into sections and as long as you don't cook it too long it's not doesn't become too chewy it's actually quite pleasant I do think a big I've heard in in Chinese cuisine for instance the sort of texture of the gelatinous texture is much more prized than it is in the US let's say I feel like an American cuisine people do not like gelatinous things I feel like even the word gelatinous sort of has this negative gross connotation to it but in a lot of Asian cuisines that kind of gelatinous texture is desirable and I think I love it too I've gotten used to it at least and so even gelatinous slightly chewy aorta uh can be delicious yeah I think we think of gelatinous and informally and jello it's like some blue jello or something like that that's not as close as what you know that I mean there's I'm probably that I'm liking on the menu list but there's this oh the gelatinous one you get this a meter oh next thing there I can't remember it's like your point they've been fried after once you read two beds we're talking about like the meat jellies like an aspic is one word yeah before yeah yeah exactly the word jelly and jello and gelatin obvious they're in gelatinous obviously comes from gelatin which you just make by boiling any collagen for a length of time and turns into jelly and the gels in the fridge it's and quite delicious sometimes called calf's feet jelly but only because feet have a lot of collagen there's a lot of connected tissue between the bones of the feet and between the muscles and bones tendons ligaments so you can make a jelly though out of any really gelatin any collagen is part of the body you could take skin which is mostly a sheet of collagen and boil that to get gelatin please be talked about like food taboos and then probably the opposite things not like people think if I consume this gives me some sort of magic power like it but you know this food is associated with this self benefit do you have any insight in that type of stuff yeah I do I do wonder about that a lot because as as you said before let's say for your brain our brains are made of the same macromolecules the same building blocks as an animal's brain so when an eating animal brain help your own brain makes perfect sense to me I guess the doctor in me should say that I've never seen a randomized trial of people ingesting brain versus people ingesting placebo and how it affects them but it certainly makes sense that eating that organ would help you in various ways if you're anemic and you eat animal blood you're getting a ton of iron which is good for that anemia it works out that way often I don't know how one to one the correlation is sorry I lost my train I thought just what are any particular societies we'll say you hear about Eastern medicine Chinese worms and I'm sharing an article associated with liberal health and Asian and I just imagine it's a strategy to make some folklore or maybe systems around that so I think I would assume yes I do I certainly think that there there are about that I think there's a lot of I wonder about for instance a lot of people say eating testicles will increase your testosterone increase your virility I went to a testicle cooking contest in Serbia actually my girlfriend at the time was now my wife was the head judge at the testicle cooking contest in Serbia so she knows good testicles but she's sorry she's sure yeah she's so real she's from New Jersey but just an adventurous person who somehow landed that that honor so I went with her one year and there definitely the Serbians were sure that eating testicles will make you more manly and I what I learned in medical school was that sort of when you ingest testosterone it gets processed in your liver and you don't get much of it which is I think why testosterone supplements don't come as pills they only come as injection injections or a foam that you put on your skin that can be absorbed that way while estrogen progesterone in the form of birth control pills come in the come as tablets you swallow because estrogen progesterone get into your body testosterone doesn't like it's processed and delivered but the Serbians at that festival weren't interested in my scientific explanation in case I don't what about yeah so you mentioned blood and then I've had blood sloshes like Argentinian restaurants in Overland Miami I had some boy it was quite good it's a rich you can't I don't think you need too much of it but what are the rules around blood in the US because I don't know where the earth starts you about that blood there I know you can get it maybe always illegal but do you know anything about I mean inside of it in the acquisition of blood and obviously you lost yeah there's no law against it a lot of people I talk to about various organs and laws against them like I mentioned before lungs and others assume that blood is illegal or hard to get in some way but hard to get I would say yes just because the average butcher shop or gross restored doesn't carry it but you can definitely get it sometimes they sometimes it'll actually be they'll add like a citric acid to it or a citrate to prevent it from clotting if it's going to be stored and which I always found interesting because we do the same thing to blood transfusions when you take it out of one person it's often stored with citrate to prevent clotting before putting transducing it back into another person so animal blood used for cuisine can be stored the same way with citrate which binds the calcium ions and prevents clotting but you can get it I think it's just a matter of it not being desired or widely available but most of the chefs I've worked with they'll often feature a blood dish like a blood sausage like you mentioned or blood cookies was one that we featured actually at our cardiovascular system dinner with anatomy eats because the the albumin profile of blood is actually not too dissimilar from egg whites and so you can whip it into a sort of a meringue type shape it doesn't hold its shape quite as well as egg whites do but it does hold some of its shape when you whip it and mix it with air another interesting thing about mixing whipping blood is it actually gets a brighter red when you whip it because the hemoglobin in it is binding with oxygen as you when you whip it you're putting air all through it and more oxygen gets the hemoglobin so blood will actually turn a brighter red when you whip it in that fashion which I always found fascinating from a physiologic perspective but but yeah blood is it's just I think a lack of desire is what makes it not available in the stores even when mad cow was a thing in the 90s I believe certain parts got harder to find but none none were really made illegal based on that you can still find brain of most animals and you can still get blood so maybe just a little harder to get yeah I think there's a lot of people are out of the misconception that when they eat quote-unquote bloody steak it's not actual blood it's just the juices just my goal and the blood has been long drained out of the animal eat to go so it's not illegal with exposure when we get the blood in in in need of any snick their mouth so right let me ask that's an interesting thing because some states in the U.S. have different rules regarding why things like raw milk a lot of people are a bomb so that a lot hadn't had any access to raw milk I thought for anything in particular opinions on that but are there state by state variation here is that something I don't know a lot about it I guess I don't know a lot about raw milk either I do think a lot of people who are saying raw milk is dangerous they're thinking of raw milk from the 1890s before we had modern forms of hygiene and animal nutrition and storage technology and things like that I certainly don't think raw milk today is going to be as dangerous as raw milk a century ago before we had modern modern the modern food industry and ways of preserving and keeping things hygienic or even investigating outbreaks but I do know like here in Pennsylvania I know a local farm to where I am now they get around the laws by having it be a co-op where everyone everyone who wants to buy shares the ownership of the animal unofficially and therefore when they quote unquote buy it from the farmer they're not really buying it they're just owning a part of the animal and they're therefore owning a part of the milk that comes out of it I don't know a lot more about the laws but I guess there are ways around it like that yeah I see some places I saw this girl called pet milk and making some bite for your pet and then turn me through self or something like that interesting um have you so you've tried all these sort of some people would consider bizarre foodstuffs throughout the world are there any things that you dislike or like the same for me this is just absolutely no thank you and never do it again well at the pickled shark and ice and orange fermented everything's pickled away it's really sour what it is when it was sometimes I have joints anything that you've been sitting with that all right this absolutely no way distressing and anything you've yet to try the truck you I really want to try this but make of travel so the milk or the wolf get it yeah I think I agree about the pickled shark and Iceland that I'm glad I tried it I'm not sure I'm eager to try it again but I would say I definitely want to try everything once the one thing I didn't try due to the smell was a rotten fish head soup in kamchatka in the russian far east there's a lot of in the north there's a lot of quote unquote stinky foods like the Inuit or Inupia will bury, bury fish heads or bury seal flipper or bury beaver tail actually and leave it for six months to a year until it not really pickles but putrifies from what I hear the consistency of the flesh and the consistency of the bone is the same at the end of this process it's one big cutrified mush and they call these dishes like stinky beaver tail stinky seal flipper stinky fish head so I guess they have something similar in the the northern parts of Russia so when I was in kamchatka I did have a chance to try stinky fish heads and I did not because of the smell although that was 20 years ago before I was super interested in any of these foods so I berate my younger self for not trying it but I think if I had the chance again I would try it I would love to try everything once as long as it won't kill you as long as it's not polar bear liver that'll kill you yeah this that sort of you see some of the many in the first thing says is stinky on it but less inclined to want to eat that. I think we would tell I think this goes back to early trappers it tended to be very much high and fat and so it was all in prize for a fat cow tip they were relatively thick they're evil. Yeah that's right especially in the wet the mountain west montana and such places beaver tail was a delicacy the beaver tail sort of gets fatter and thinner with the normal cycles of eating more eating less a beaver's tail would be fattier in the fall and early winter and then slim down over the course of the winter it's just like any other deposit of fat on the body but yes actually stevenella from meat eater has a part in his book where he talks about figuring out the beaver tail because he just couldn't figure out what people were eating or why it was a delicacy and he figured out this way of roasting it over the fire on a stick that made the sort of scaly surface peel off to reveal the sort of fat underneath and and he found out why they did like it. So what's on your to-do list like is it are you like I want to go to some place and try this or this and then do you have yet to try that you're really excited to try it. There's the I think the two big things on my list are sort of culinary road trips through Mexico and through China I think those are my two two big things on my bucket list in writing this I'm writing a book about anatomy eats each chapters like a different bodily system like reproductive system endocrine system gastrointestinal system and each features some exploration of cuisine around the world and some interesting dish. So I do think of sort of China and probably Japan too as one of the one of the mecha's of interesting and odd foods so I definitely have to get there as well and when I was in Texas last year I did I got a taste of some Mexican delicacies but I heard that in certain parts of Mexico there's some very interesting foods spinal cord kebabs and things like that that I look forward to trying. If I was in Peru I would have a dish called kuit which is basically the yeah this was basically getting big serve whole likenesses claws or say they're like all right you got this that little ugly potatoes around it but I remember having it was really chewy and dry and I didn't like it was all that all that great it's have you been out of South American and seek to get some obviously different disease as well. I have been a little bit I haven't explored I've been the South America three times but haven't explored it in a culinary way unfortunately. I feel like a lot of times when you're traveling or abroad and you try some interesting meat it's often that individual specimen might be cooked in not the best way maybe it was overcooked maybe it wasn't spiced well or something like that and then it's dry or gross or chewy and you just assume that meat is that way always but I feel like in the hands of a master chef pretty much anything could be delicious. When I was in Russia I had some brown bear that was absolutely terrible and I thought I guess brown bear meat's just terrible but later in Alaska I had some other that was delicious. It's very variable and people shouldn't write off one organ or one kind of meat forever if they have one bad meal with it. Yeah well I understand around the bear is because there have been monodastric animals it's their meat is flavored very highly though it mostly eating it depends on the time of the year. They're eating a lot of fish. They're meat tastes any more fishy if they're eating berries it tastes sweeter. That's what I that's what I didn't boil. Black bear meat is wonderful at least from here in Pennsylvania once a doctor who was on his way to relieve me my shift was over his was starting actually hit a bear accidentally on the road and called out his cousin the butcher to deal with it and I got a bunch of roasts and ground bear meat that was delicious. Yeah it sure was a buy out of the black burns was it on my house that's what in our neighborhood a lot here in Washington state and all this he's I've seen him all we've seen him walk there we are before so out there. So we've been ones of all of them at Google. We are but just about out of time I appreciate it's been really interesting perspective and King where would people know if they want to find out more do you have a website or social media account or something like that we've watched it in you saw berries delicacies. Yep so I'm at Anatomy Eats on Instagram and Twitter or would say our right to most active and then I post non-food doctor things at John Reisman MD on the same platforms but for the food it's Anatomy Eats and you can go to Anatomy Eats.com as well. Dr. Reisman has been fun it's been interesting training discussion so anyway good luck to you and I hope you can try all these interesting things and maybe we can expand the palette of the average atmosphere that there's a lot of stuff - Thank you very much. - Thank you very much.
