This brand makes two claims: eat the food humans are built for, and train hard for twenty minutes a week. This page is where we show our work. The first four categories below test what we say about food. The fifth tests the training.
Each card is one claim, with the figure it rests on and a badge saying how strong the evidence is. Open a card for the full explanation, what we concede, and links to every study, so you can check us yourself.
What your body can actually absorb, measured.
Zeroactive vitamin B12 in any plant food
Vitamin B12 does not exist in an active form in any plant food. The B12 in spirulina and similar supplements is largely pseudovitamin B12, which is inactive in humans. Any diet that needs a pill to prevent neurological damage is telling you something about itself.
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Not yeta plant carries beta-carotene, which your body still has to convert
Plants contain beta-carotene, which your body has to convert. Conversion from real food is far worse than the old textbook assumption, and two common gene variants cut it further. A large share of people are poor converters and have no idea. Liver, egg yolk, butter and cream contain retinol, the finished form, with no conversion step.
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14 to 18%iron absorbed on a mixed diet, against 5 to 12% on a vegetarian one
Those are whole-diet figures from the paper the reference values are built on. Phytate, polyphenols and calcium block the plant form of iron, and they are usually in the same meal. Adding meat to a plant meal rescues the minerals in the plant meal. The reverse does not happen.
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Grams liewhat counts is the amino acid profile and how much you digest
The measure that matters is the amino acid profile and how much survives digestion. The UN replaced the old scoring method precisely because it flattered plant protein. On the current standard, milk and whey score above the bar and wheat scores lowest, with soy and pea in between. Gram for gram, animal protein also produces a greater muscle-building response.
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99.99%share of dietary pesticides, by weight, that plants make themselves
A plant cannot run away, so it defends itself chemically: oxalates, lectins, phytates, goitrogens, glycoalkaloids. The scientist who invented the standard laboratory test for chemical mutagenicity calculated that 99.99 percent by weight of the pesticides in the human diet are produced by plants themselves. This is ordinary plant biology. It is just missing from the conversation about what you should eat.
What we concede
Most people handle normal amounts of vegetables perfectly well, and some of these compounds have genuine benefits at low doses. We do not say vegetables are poison. We say they are optional, they are not free of cost, and the only way to know how your body handles them is to remove them for two weeks and watch.
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Already standardthe accepted treatment for IBS removes specific plant carbohydrates
The accepted treatment for irritable bowel syndrome is a diet that removes specific plant carbohydrates, demonstrated in a controlled feeding trial. In a separate study, patients with long-term constipation improved when fiber was reduced, in proportion to how much was removed. Almost nobody notices what that implies.
What we concede
The fiber evidence overall is better than we would like it to be: large reviews find consistent associations between higher fiber intake and lower disease risk. That is why our guidance is a personal two-week test rather than a rule for everybody.
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How humans actually ate, for two million years.
Like a wolfwhere bone chemistry places Neanderthals on the food chain
Nitrogen isotopes concentrate as you move up a food chain, so bone chemistry places its owner on that chain without any guesswork. Every Neanderthal sample tested across their whole range came back at the top trophic level, alongside wolves and hyenas, taking all or most dietary protein from large herbivores. A later study using single amino acids confirmed it and ruled out the objection that an unusual environment could fake the signal.
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73 of 100societies taking most of their food from animals, out of 229 studied
Researchers went through the ethnographic records of 229 hunter-gatherer societies. 73 percent got more than half their food from animals. Fewer than 14 percent got more than half from plants. The pattern inside the data is the important part: plant intake rose near the equator and fell near the poles, tracking what was available rather than what was preferred. Plants were the fallback.
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2 million yearshow long our genus is argued to have eaten as a top predator
A peer-reviewed synthesis assembled roughly 25 independent lines of evidence, from stomach acidity and fat storage to gut shape, bile acids, tooth wear, isotopes and archaeology. Its conclusion: our genus occupied a hypercarnivorous trophic level for around two million years, with plant food rising only late, as the large animals disappeared. The first tools humans ever made were for cutting meat off bone and cracking bone open for the fat inside.
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One full yearon meat, fat, organs and marrow alone, under hospital supervision
Vilhjalmur Stefansson had lived for years on an all-animal diet in the Arctic and was not believed, so he volunteered for a supervised experiment. He and a colleague ate only meat, fat, organs and marrow for a full year, beginning as hospital inpatients at Bellevue. No scurvy, no deficiency disease, normal kidney function. His own account insists the diet only worked with enough fat, and that lean meat alone made you ill.
What we concede
Two people. It is a landmark case study under medical supervision, not a trial, and we never present it as one.
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Shorter and sickerwhat the skeletal record shows across the shift to grain farming
The skeletal record across the shift to grain agriculture shows reduced height, more dental disease and more markers of nutritional stress. Farming won because it fed more people per acre, not because it fed them better. That is one of the most useful facts in this whole library, and it is not controversial among the people who study bones.
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Honest notetwo places where we correct our own side of the argument
We are not claiming nobody ever ate a plant. There are starch grains on ancient grinding stones and charred tubers in ancient hearths, and the Hadza today eat a great deal of honey and tubers alongside meat. Our claim is about proportion and priority. We have also retired the usual Inuit talking point: the claim that Greenland Inuit had little heart disease does not survive the mortality records, and they carry genetic adaptations to that diet that most people do not.
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Two curves, and they are the same curve.
13% to 42%American adults with obesity, early 1960s against today
About 13 percent of American adults were obese in the early 1960s. Today it is around 42 percent. Diagnosed diabetes went from under 1 percent of the population in 1958 to roughly 38 million people, with another 98 million prediabetic. The human genome did not change in sixty years.
What we concede
Diabetes diagnostic criteria changed over that period. The change in criteria does not come close to explaining a curve that shape, but it is real and we say so.
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About 12%share of US adults passing all five basic metabolic criteria
Measured against the standard five criteria in a national survey, roughly seven adults in eight fail a basic metabolic screen. That is not a population with some sick people in it. That is a population where health has become the exception, and a heart attack was a case report worth publishing in 1912.
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500 calorieseaten extra per day on processed food, in a sealed metabolic ward
This is the strongest single study in this library, and it is not a correlation. Researchers kept adults in a metabolic ward for four weeks and fed them ultra-processed food against unprocessed food, matched for calories on offer, sugar, fat, fiber and macronutrients. On the processed diet people spontaneously ate about 500 extra calories a day and gained weight. On the real food they lost it. Same people. Same calories available.
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1,000-foldrise in soybean oil available per person across the 20th century
Before 1911 almost nobody on earth ate extracted seed oil, because making it requires industrial presses and chemical solvent. It is not a food you can make in a kitchen. Estimated soybean oil availability then rose more than a thousand-fold across the twentieth century. When trials finally tested replacing saturated fat with seed oil, they lowered cholesterol and did not save lives; in one recovered trial the intervention group died at a higher rate.
What we concede
The consumption figures come from food disappearance data, so they measure availability rather than what went into mouths. We label them that way.
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68 to 78years lived by hunter-gatherers who survived childhood
This is the objection everybody raises, and it has a real answer. Historical life expectancy is dragged down almost entirely by infant and child death. Pooling hunter-gatherer demography, the typical lifespan for those who survived childhood runs to roughly 68 to 78 years. They had grandparents. What killed them was infection, injury, childbirth, predation and accident, which is exactly what sanitation, antibiotics and surgery fixed.
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Zero calciumarterial calcium in 65% of Tsimane adults over 75
We do not have to infer from bones. Researchers CT-scanned 705 adults of the Tsimane in Bolivia and found the lowest coronary artery disease ever recorded in any population. Among those over 75, 65 percent had zero arterial calcium, against about 5 percent of comparable Americans. Age is not what causes this.
What we concede
The Tsimane eat a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet and are physically active all day, so this is not evidence for our plate. It is evidence that a population eating non-industrial food and moving their body does not get the disease we treat as an inevitable part of ageing. Separately, CT scans of 137 ancient mummies did find atherosclerosis in four preindustrial populations, so it is not purely modern either.
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Look at the equipment you were given, and work backwards.
Four against onestomach chambers a cow needs to live on plants, against your one
A cow holds food for 40 to 70 hours, brings it back up and chews it again, and still cannot digest grass itself. No mammal on earth produces the enzyme that breaks down cellulose. The cow rents it from bacteria and grows them a fermentation tank, then digests the bacteria for protein and lets them make its B vitamins. A horse has a huge hindgut chamber. A rabbit eats its own droppings to run the food through twice. Every animal that lives on plants has enormous, expensive, obvious machinery for it. We have one chamber, a few hours, and none of that.
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pH 1.5human stomach acidity, against pH 4 to 5 in herbivores
Researchers measured stomach acidity across 68 mammal and bird species and mapped it against diet. Herbivores sit around pH 4 to 5. Carnivores sit lower. Scavengers, facing the heaviest microbial load, are the most acidic of all, and human stomach pH of about 1.5 sits right there. Acid that strong is metabolically expensive and biologically risky, and nothing evolves it without buying something. It is a sterilizing filter for meat. It is the wrong tool for a leaf.
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Invertedsmall intestine is 56 to 60% of our gut, the colon 17 to 20%
Across mammals, leaf eaters are colon-dominant and animal eaters are small-intestine-dominant. In a gorilla the colon is the largest part of the gut. In a human, the small intestine is roughly 56 to 60 percent of gut volume and the colon is roughly 17 to 20 percent. The small intestine is where protein and fat are absorbed; the colon is where plant fiber is fermented. Our gut allocates its volume to the first job.
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Brain for gutacross primates, brain size and gut size trade off against each other
Your brain is about 2 percent of your body and burns about 20 percent of your resting energy. Something had to pay for it. Across primates, brain size and gut size trade off against each other, because both are expensive tissue on a fixed budget. Humans have an unusually large brain and an unusually small gut. A small gut can only be afforded on food that is dense and digestible without long fermentation.
What we concede
Cooking is part of this answer, not just meat, and cooking makes plant food far more digestible too. We think that supports the framework rather than undermining it: the human diet has always required processing that a human does.
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It advertisesfruit colors, sweetens and smells when ripe, and no other part does
A plant cannot spread its own seeds, so it makes a deal: it wraps them in something so attractive an animal will carry them away. Fruit changes color when it is ready, sweetens when it is ready, and smells. Nothing else on a plant does that. Unripe fruit is loaded with bitter defenses that fall away as the seed matures, and the seed itself is either armored or outright toxic. The plant is telling you which part is lunch. A leaf that gets eaten loses; a fruit that gets eaten wins.
What we concede
Modern fruit has been bred for sweetness and size for centuries. A wild apple and a supermarket apple are not the same food. Whole fruit is still the intended package, and it is still a different object from extracted sugar.
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A broken genethe gene for the final enzyme is still in our DNA, switched off
Almost every mammal manufactures vitamin C in its liver. We cannot. The gene for the final enzyme is still in our DNA, switched off. The same loss happened independently in other primates and in fruit-eating bats. A lineage can only afford to abandon a metabolic pathway when its diet reliably supplies the product.
What we concede
Fresh animal organs and blood also contain vitamin C, which is how populations eating almost no plants avoided scurvy. That belongs in the same paragraph if we are being honest, and it is.
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Why twenty minutes a week is the dose, not a compromise.
30 to 60 minstrength training a week, where all-cause mortality is lowest
A systematic review and meta-analysis of strength training and mortality found 10 to 17 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality, heart disease, cancer and diabetes, with the lowest risk at roughly 30 to 60 minutes of muscle-strengthening activity per week and no established further benefit beyond about an hour. Our method prescribes 20 minutes of maximum effort a week. That is not below the evidence. It is the efficient end of the window the evidence points at.
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60 secondsall-out effort a session, matching 50 minutes of moderate cycling
Over twelve weeks, a randomized trial had one group perform three 20-second all-out sprints, one minute of hard work inside a ten-minute session, three times a week. They matched a group doing 50 minutes of continuous moderate cycling on peak oxygen uptake, insulin sensitivity and muscle mitochondrial content, at one fifth the training volume. An earlier study found the same thing in two weeks.
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3 to 4 min a dayvigorous movement, measured in 25,000 adults who never exercised
Over 25,000 adults who did no formal exercise wore activity monitors. As little as three to four minutes a day of vigorous movement, the kind produced by stairs or carrying shopping, was associated with substantially lower all-cause, cardiovascular and cancer mortality, in a near-linear dose-response. The measurement was a device rather than a questionnaire, which is a major strength. Separately, 15 minutes a day of moderate activity tracked three extra years of life expectancy, with each further 15 minutes adding very little.
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Effort, not weightgrowth is similar across loads when sets are taken close to failure
A meta-analysis found that muscle growth is similar across a wide range of loads when sets are taken close to failure. Maximum strength still favours heavy weight, as you would expect, but growth does not care. This is the whole permission structure for bodyweight training: a push-up taken to genuine failure is doing the same job as a bench press taken to genuine failure. In a direct comparison, progressive push-up training matched bench press training for upper-body strength.
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Twice a weeklow-volume, high-effort, full-body training, in a published review
A review written by the people who ran many of the underlying trials set out how to train for strength and size in the least time possible. Their conclusions support low-volume, high-effort, multi-joint, full-body training performed twice a week. Two sessions per muscle group per week is also consistently at or near optimal for growth in the wider literature. And once fitness is built, it is maintained on a small fraction of the training that built it.
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Rest is the pointmuscle protein synthesis stays elevated 24 to 48 hours after a session
Muscle protein synthesis stays elevated for roughly 24 to 48 hours after a hard session and then returns to normal. Growth happens in that window, not during the session. Training the same tissue again before it has finished adding the adaptation interrupts the thing you paid for. The session is the request. The recovery is the delivery. Two requests a week, properly made, with time to fill them.
What we concede
Competitive athletes train for hours, and for them that is a rational trade for the last few percent of performance. We are not claiming 20 minutes makes you an athlete. We are claiming it buys nearly all of the health.
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This matters as much as the rest. A page that only holds supporting evidence is a brochure, not a proof.
Nobody argues with an experiment they ran on themselves. Two ten-minute sessions a week for a month is eighty minutes. If nothing changes, you have lost eighty minutes.
Outcomes belong to God. The effort is your part.
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