This Guy Eats Raw Meat
And Says Exercise KILLS!
What better way to recreate this blog than to get into something both interesting and entertaining?
I came across this guy while vacationing and bingeing YouTube. I’m gonna refer to him as Gatis instead of his Internet pseudonyms Goatis or sv3rige because it is easier to spell and because I’m pretty sure his real name is Gatis Lagzdins.
Gatis is an interesting Internet personality that has made several pivots during his career. He first started out in Latvia as a Runescape player, before turning into a Vegan and now a Raw Carnivore YouTuber that spends his days critiquing people's diets and telling his viewers that exercise is stupid.
He’s been accused of some pretty wild things like stabbing his classmates and rape. I don’t know whether any of that stuff is true or not, of course, I looked into those claims and only found a Metro article about this and not much else.
For all I know, Gatis has created a bunch of militant vegan enemies who have since found a way to attack him. Or he could be an absolutely insane lunatic.
I don’t know. And frankly, for the purposes of this post, none of that stuff seems to pass the pub test and so I’m just going to get started.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading and video bingeing on diet recently and Gatis happened to be dumped into my feed by the YouTube algo. To be perfectly honest, Gatis often makes valid points, as crazy as they may seem at first.
Let's explore that.
Gatis has this whole theory about what is natural and the natural way of doing things which he distills into advice about eating a raw meat and organ diet and not exercising because it ages you and leads to premature death.
Raw Meat
On raw meat and organs, Gatis says that this is how humans have eaten for eternity and that some tribes still eat this way today. He says that raw meat and organs have the highest concentration of nutrients as compared with any other food group.
Intuitively this sounds true (the part about organs) but I decided to check and it turns out it's absolutely true. Here is a link to a fellow Medium blogger that’s done the research. There are also a bunch of food calculators online that you can use to investigate this yourself.
But hang on a sec, just because organs are highly nutritious, that doesn't mean we should eat them raw, does it?
Well actually just because the idea of eating raw meat or a raw organ makes you want to vomit it does not mean it's necessarily unhealthy or more dangerous.
People do eat raw meat and it's more common than you might think.
In the West, we eat things such as raw beef or steak tartare. The Japanese eat raw fish (sashimi), and the Germans eat Mett, also known as Hackepeter which is raw, minced (ground) pork.
Here is a list I found of 15 different raw meat dishes from around the world. You’ll notice raw fish is not included, if it was, the list would be a lot longer.
Can you get sick from eating raw meat and organs?
Yes, but as with all things, it depends, common sense is your friend here.
You can get sick from eating raw meat and organs if there is a presence of prions, viruses, bacteria, fungi, or parasites which you might not know are being harbored inside.
And of course, you can also get sick by eating fruits and vegetables. Here is a recent US Consumer Report that looks at 10 common grocery store-bought items linked to food poisoning.
And guess what?
Most of them are not raw meat or organs. Only 3 of the 10 are.
Onions, peaches, cold cuts, bagged salads, leafy greens, lettuce, sliced cheese, and flour all make the list.
In Australia where I am from, it’s mostly the same. Most times you hear a report on the news about a food product recall its usually frozen fruit or vegetables and occasionally you will hear about some eggs containing something like Salmonella on the shells (which of course can be washed or boiled off..).
I’m going to assume that the reason we don’t see more meats being contaminated is because of the rules and standards applied to meat production versus everything else.
If you want to eat raw meat, speak to your butcher, they should be able to recommend something fresh and safe. Prepare your meat and eat it as soon as possible.
Personally, I have eaten different types of raw meat, some I thoroughly enjoyed such as the German Mett recipe which I can’t get enough of but others like raw Oysters are not my favorite even though I’ll still guzzle them down anyway.
I’d like to finish this component off by saying that Gatis himself once contracted some kind of illness from eating raw meat. It is hard to find any good quality information related to this, although the YouTube channel Interesting Stuff from Around The World does a video about Gatis, and the YouTuber goes into this at around the 13-minute mark here.
To each their own.
I’ll post my final thoughts on diet, meat, and raw foods at the end of this post.
Exercise
On exercise, Gatis says we shouldn't really be exercising and definitely not pumping iron because humans in nature don’t work out or go to the gym and that it (exercise) leads to early death due to stress and aging.
I’m paraphrasing and condensing most of his rants on this topic.
If you want to hear what he has to say about exercise you’ll have to trawl through his videos and live streams because I can’t find one good quality single video that he’s dedicated to this topic.
To help: Gatis started talking about these ideas about 2 years ago when he uploaded his first video on Liver King. If you sort his videos by oldest and scroll down to find the Liver King video, shortly after you’ll notice Gatis uploads more and more videos related to exercise. Here is a good one that condenses his ideas and here is another very recent one.
Does exercise lead to premature death?
I can’t tell if he’s exaggerating for clicks and effects when he says frequently in his videos that we should “never exercise” or that tribal people and pre-humans never exercised because obviously that's word trickery which we will get to in a moment but lets quickly look at the guts of the claim, pun intended.
There is a ton of information on this topic of exercise and longevity, but it's all over the place. And specifically, very important aspects of this topic are not well-researched at all.
For example, you would think that if we want to find out if exercise causes premature death we would compare people doing the exact same things and the only difference being that one group is exercising and the other is not e.g.: the people would have to be the same age, eat the same diet, have similar genetics, live in the same geographical area, live relatively similar lives with the same levels of stress and so on.
But we don't have anything like that to go off of.
Also, a lot of us, Gatis included use words like “exercise” which is an umbrella term, and so is “fitness”. There are other descriptors you frequently see used by the people who know the most about these topics, such as “moderate intensity exercise” which make this whole thing even more confusing.
What the hell is moderate-intensity exercise? And for who?
Is exercise or moderate-intensity exercise going for a leisurely walk where time means nothing, or is it waking up at 4 am and heading into a doof-doof techno-themed gym filled with people that look like they're at a day rave?
I assume from everything I have had shoved down my throat since I was in high school that moderate exercise or moderate intensity exercise is going for a brisk walk or jog wherein you start to get a sweat on, perhaps maybe something like tennis works as a good example of moderate-intensity exercise, and if so, high-intensity exercise would be something like boxing, grappling, bodybuilding, or high-intensity interval training, perhaps sprinting, etc.
Assuming Gatis is specifically referencing high-intensity exercise when he says exercise is bad, and we have to assume this because he never explicitly defines what he means, let's take a look at that and specifically bodybuilding which is something Gatis loves to criticize the most.
Does bodybuilding lead to premature death?
You don't often see bodybuilders that are centenarians. I don't know exactly why that is the case, but it does seem to be the case. I only found 1 example in my research.
Common sense would probably dictate that when your body is that large, your heart and all of your other organs are going to struggle to do their job.
Once you add pre-workout drinks that young gym junkies like to consume such as C4 with 300mg of caffeine or Rich Pianas Pre-Workout Powder with 400mg of caffeine to the mix, along with steroids, other types of supplements, growth hormones, intense diets, and weight cuts, and all the stress of bodybuilding on your muscles, organs, heart and cardiac system, you can see why body builders don't live to be centenarians.
Rich Piana by the way died after he collapsed in 2017 at the age of 46. His heart was enlarged and they found white powder on his credit card which his partner at the time said was pre-workout powder that he used to snort.
Rich Piana was never the sort of bodybuilder I looked up to. All tatted up and bug-eyed. The guy looked like The Toxic Avenger crossed with a coked-up tomato. Poor guy.
Instead, I grew up in the 90s watching Arnold Schwarzenegger carry tree trunks on his shoulders and assumed that going to the gym and lifting weights was one of the healthiest things you could do for your body, and of course, I also thought it’d attract the ladies.
But then I got older and realized Arnold Schwarzenegger is just an actor playing a part, sometimes that means looking like a ridiculous circus clown and having numerous heart problems.
I grew out of the idolizing phase pretty early in life.
But enough of the jokes.
There is a very good article published this year (2023) on Springer that looks at this very topic of premature death in bodybuilders which you can read here. Their conclusion was basically…:
there is currently insufficient high-quality scientific evidence to support a causal link for either claim, especially given numerous plausible confounders.
What do they mean by that?
Does bodybuilding cause premature death or not?
Bodybuilding has many different factors to it. That’s what it means and that is what I was trying to explain earlier.
Meaning that bodybuilders have crazy diets, and they frequently dehydrate themselves which sometimes leads to premature death as we all collectively witnessed when young Aussie Aziz “Zyzz” Shavershian died in a Thai Sauna, they take a crazy amount of supplements and many of them use steroids.
The point is if we’re going to try to say that bodybuilding in and of itself causes premature death, we have to compare bodybuilders with non-bodybuilders and only that. Everything else would have to be the same and even then you can see how arguments will be made about diet!
So while the article can’t categorically say that bodybuilding causes premature death, they do a good enough job with things like this…:
In 2021, over two dozen professional competitive bodybuilders died suddenly, along with a number of retired bodybuilders under the age of 60 years
And this..:
A 2022 systematic review identified 13 papers (case studies and case series) which describe acute or chronic kidney injury or disease in a total of 75 bodybuilders
What about other types of intense exercise, can they be deadly?
Long-distance runners put their bodies under a different type of intense stress. They are thin and the guys you see doing marathons and triathlons sometime look gaunt and unhealthy, quite the opposite of bodybuilders, they don’t lift weights but instead, force their hearts to pound at over 180 bpm for hours at a time.
There are many cases of these runners collapsing just prior to or at the finish line of the Kona Iron Man which is written about here in this article published in 2016. The article states that most cases of collapse especially in Kona are due to heat stress but there is more.
The article Cardiac Risks Associated With Marathon Running published in Sports Health Sage Journals 2010 says that “Vigorous exercise is associated with a transient increase in risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD)...”.
The researcher's result findings state the following “Marathon running is associated with a transient and low risk of sudden cardiac death. This risk appears to be even lower in women and is independent of marathon experience or the presence of previously reported symptoms. Most deaths are due to underlying coronary artery disease.”.
This article is saying that these cardiac events associated with marathon runners are usually independent of their marathon running, meaning they would have these problems regardless but it looks like the actual running of the marathon is putting their hearts and cardiac systems under stress which causes complications and sometimes death.
A separate article titled Endurance Sport and “Cardiac Injury”: A Prospective Study of Recreational Ironman Athletes published in Int J Environ Res Public Health seems to draw similar conclusions:
“There is no doubt that athletes have a higher incidence of atrial fibrillation [58] and bradyarrhythmias [60]...”.
From much of the research I have done, most cardiac-related issues and deaths are occurring in people with underlying issues, and these issues are exacerbated by high-intensity exercise, which makes sense.
The question then should be if you have an underlying or known health problem and you don’t force your body to do high-intensity exercise, would you be better off doing no exercise or less intense exercise?
That's easy to answer.
All of the world's top heart research and advisory foundations from the EU, UK, USA, and Australia recommend moderate physical activity even if you have a health condition related to the heart or cardiac system and they all say that this will strengthen the heart and lead to better overall health and longevity.
I think they are right.
Final thoughts on exercise.
I have seen what happens to elderly people who are sedentary, they may live slightly longer lives, but their lives are generally spent sitting in a chair or bed or being pushed around in a wheelchair and having their diapers changed because they have lost the strength and agility to be able to do those basic life things on their own.
As humans, we are not designed to lay in bed or sleep all day and be sedentary. And to Gatis's point, we are also probably not designed to run marathons or lift heavy things repeatedly just to make our muscles look big.
Tribal people run and chase their hunts, they climb into trees or onto hills and rock formations, they throw spears, nets, and rocks, they propel boats with their wooden paddles and they swim and dive to catch fish.
A healthy human should get some form of exercise and while Gatis is technically correct when he says that natural humans don’t exercise in nature, because well, they don’t, what we have to understand is that we are no longer living as our ancestors did and so when we exercise by doing cardio or strength training we are simulating those things that we would have done in nature, and I don't think that there is anything wrong with that.
Back to the main question though, is it unhealthy to exercise?
I agree with Gatis and I think that some people in the gym are probably doing more damage than they are doing good in the long term.
These days gyms are filled with young naive people that have been convinced by social media influencers that they need to do silly and stupid exercises such as deadlifting or squatting heavy weights where the risk of injury far outweighs any benefit they are going to get in their life outside of having voluptuous muscles to attract the opposite sex, which of course they will never admit but that is the reason they are in the gym in the first place.
You want to not only age, you want to age well. It’s all about balance.
It's one thing to live a long life into your 90s and even into or past your 100s, but simply living for the sake of being alive is stupid. You should be able to still walk, move, feed yourself, and do basic things up until the point at which you die, and unfortunately, if you’re not keeping your body, heart, lungs, bones, and muscles strong and agile you’re going to be living a life sitting in a chair or worse, a bed, and having people care for you which is no life at all as any old person in a nursing home will tell you.
The problem is as you get older your muscles atrophy, your bones get weaker and you lose your agility and stamina.
Most people that you see in nursing homes who are using walkers or wheelchairs, most of them have no injury, they are simply too fragile to move themselves around unassisted.
Older people need to exercise moderately, they need to stretch and lift some light weights so that they can force their bodies into remaining strong.
Being sedentary has some benefits when it comes to the reduction of stress, however being sedentary as you age when your body is not as efficient as it once was will lead to you withering away to the point you can no longer even walk unassisted.
I agree with Gatis that running like David Goggins or weight training like Rich Piana is probably going to do damage in both the short and long terms, however, most people know and understand that these forms of exercise are at the extreme end, most people, for the most part just go to the gym to try and look and feel healthier and stronger and I don’t think there is anything necessarily wrong with that.
Just like there is nothing wrong with living in a warm apartment and uploading videos to YouTube (Gatis). It’s not exactly natural, but we should seek to find a balance in life between health, enjoyment, longevity, and happiness. Some people find happiness in going to the gym or working out and that happiness reduces their stress and probably adds years to their life.
Its all a out balance.
Final thoughts on diet.
For the most part, I think Gatis is right.
Humans If you observe them in nature eat lots of animal products, meat, fish, and fruits.
This is the human diet.
I have come to realize this after having researched the topic through dozens of books, articles, podcasts, and lectures over more than a decade and that includes the ones that state the exact opposite such as Michael Greger's works and his book How Not to Die.
Arguments can be made about tribes in South and Central America where they have eaten potatoes and corn for over 7000 years, and it is similar in Europe and Asia with wheat and rice, but what you have to understand is that this is a very short period in the span of humanity and that these people live very different lives to modern Westerners. Again that word ‘balance’ works great here.
The best evidence I can give you with regard to diet is this:
We have information about Australian Aboriginals who have successfully thrived on the continent for over 60,000 years. Some say 80,000.
We know that indigenous Australians ate mostly kangaroos, wallabies, bandicoots, possums, lizards, birds, and fish as their primary food source. This is well documented. Supplementary food sources were grubs, insects, worms, honey, fruits, bush potatoes, and even seeds that they would turn into a type of bread called Damper.
Below is a picture of what Aboriginal people looked like in the early 1900s.
You can clearly see lean, strong, healthy-looking people.
In the modern diet debate, many people and cultures will always be used as examples proving certain diets work well and others don’t but I have not seen any focus on the Australian aborigines which we know prior to colonization lived into their 60’s based only on reports of the time and with no modern medicine, water filtration or modern amenities and they were said to be in pristine health with perfect white teeth, strong, lean and healthy hunter and gatherers.
The other thing I want to point out as evidence for our optimal diet is that when you take modern humans, Westerners for example, and you dump them off somewhere in the middle of nowhere and you tell them to survive, they will always seek out animals to eat.
You can see this for yourself in the many different TV shows and programs such as Naked and Afraid, Alone, or Life Below Zero.
Sure, you can try to make an argument and say that hunting or fishing is far more exciting for the viewer than the collection of leaves or fungi but I challenge you, put yourself mentally into a survival situation, and see what you are drawn toward. Or better yet go walk outside right now in a natural environment, your going to gravitate toward animals as a food source because that is what we have done for hundreds of thousands of years.
This is also evident in virtually every single outdoor survival book ever printed going as far back as 1956 where the very popular book How to Stay Alive in The Woods describes knocking owls out of trees and eating them, stealing food from wolves and bears, spearing frogs and indulging in moth and grasshopper meat.
It's the same as the SAS Survival Handbook published in 1986 and which has sold over a million copies. In this book, the author goes into great detail about food and even focuses heavily on plant foods.
The startling contrast in the book is that the plant section is riddled with disclaimers, warnings, and precautions about some plants having very little food value, being poisonous, harsh on the stomach, and of course potentially deadly.
The animal section is what you’d expect and starts by saying:
“All animals can be a source of nourishment”.
You don’t have to eat raw liver like Gatis promotes if that is just not your thing, you just have to get back to eating as close to what nature provides and that means animals, animal products, some fruit, and water, and that is about it.
Below is a picture of what I think is as close to a modern example of what humans should eat. I prepared this myself.
On the left is a whole forequarter of a goat, organic grass-fed beef (rump) to the right, and some organic milk and fruit.
Diet is not complicated. Neither is exercise.
Listen to your body, if lifting heavy ass weights as former Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman used to call them is not your thing, don’t do it, and if modern vegetables and grains make your stomach upset as they do mine, don’t eat them, eat something else.
Strive for balance and you will always come out on top.
Mr. Fireside.
