Dr. Hillary Lampers: Wild Game Nutrition and Hunt Harvest Health

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 465 — Dr. Hillary Lampers — Hunt Harvest Health, wild game nutrition, and reversing cognitive decline.

Introduction

Hillary Lampers: My daughter killed her first mule deer this last fall, and I went on that hunt. I've never been on a hunt with my husband, so I got to be there and watch her do that — clean the animal, break the animal down, go through the organs, decide what organs we wanted to take, get all the meat off, carry the bone, do all that hard work, carry it out on my back at night because my husband is seriously into killing animals right before dark and then doing night hikes out in the snow, in the wind, exhausted, and waking up the next day. There is a sense of satisfaction that is unlike any satisfaction you will get going to a grocery store and putting meat in your cart, because all of a sudden you have this neural association, this hormonal association to this animal that took this animal's life. Now you are working hard to get this animal back home so that you can eat this animal and take the nutrition from it. And so your whole idea of food and food waste and just throwing stuff away radically changes. I think that is probably the biggest thing that we've lost in our culture — this respect for food. I'm Dr. Hilary Lampers, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the podcast today. We've got a really interesting one for you today — Doctor Hillary Lampers from the Hunt Harvest Health podcast. She does it with her husband, Ryan Lampers, who's a very accomplished hunter. They live in Bozeman, Montana, and Doctor Lampers is a certified, licensed naturopathic doctor. We're going to talk today about all sorts of conditions that are plaguing the United States population, and what we can do about them. She has some really amazing advice, and I really enjoyed this conversation — I learned a ton. So get out your notebook, because you're probably going to want to take some notes on this one. She is very smart, very with it, and very interesting. So here's Doctor Hilary Lampers. Doctor Hilary Lampers, how are you?

Hillary Lampers: I'm good, Tom. How are you doing?

Tom Rowland: I'm great. Thanks for doing this, I really appreciate it. I've been doing some research on you and listening to your podcast — I really like it. You do something kind of similar to what I do. I have these long-form episodes, but then I have a How-To Tuesday and a Physical Friday, and you're doing, like, hunting — well, it's called Hunt Harvest Health. Your husband, Ryan, is an accomplished hunter, and you guys live in Bozeman, so there's lots of western hunting talk. But then you have this whole other angle that you're bringing into this podcast — you are a doctor of naturopathic medicine, right?

Hillary Lampers: Yes, uh-huh.

Tom Rowland: So explain that — what is a doctor of naturopathic medicine, and how is that different from a naturopath?

What Is a Naturopathic Doctor?

Hillary Lampers: Good question. I've been a naturopathic doctor since 2007. Prior to that, I worked for a naturopath for ten years, and I was a massage therapist. I have an undergrad premed focus with a nutrition undergrad, so I was a nutritionist as well — that kind of got me through med school. I went to a university in Seattle, Washington — my husband is from Washington — after a couple of years. I went to MSU here in Bozeman, grew up in Bozeman, went to MSU for a couple of years, and then, funny enough, I was in a major in 1991 called Health and Wellness Promotion, which nobody knew what that was — it was a brand new major, and there were only two people in it, me and one other girl. They eventually got rid of that major, but I know now universities actually have a degree called Health and Wellness Promotion. So I left MSU, went to Seattle, and over the years did all my education there. I went to a university called Bastyr University, a four-year medical school, after I finished my undergrad — I was a bit of a late bloomer. I started working as a massage therapist with injury patients — trauma, car accidents, that kind of stuff — and went to a naturopathic physician who did a really strange therapy for headaches I was having, and he changed my health and my whole perception. I got a job working for him for ten years, and in that time I wanted to do this therapy myself, but I had to become a doctor. So I went back to school at 27, got my undergrad, got accepted into medical school, and did that.

The difference between a naturopathic physician who's actually certified and licensed and a naturopath is that there are naturopaths who get their license online through online universities — a whole different association and a whole different group of people. Years ago we used to call them diploma mills — you could take all your courses online and then call yourself a doctor. But to actually be a doctor, just like an MD, you have to go to school, do so many hours of undergrad sciences, and then do clinical boards. We had cadaver dissection, in-class anatomy, physiology, pathology — all of that for two years. You take your clinical boards to get into clinical shifts so you can work in the clinics, and after those two years we're pretty much identical to the University of Washington Medical School for the first two years — that's when they weed out the people who can't handle it. Once you pass your boards you can work in the patient clinic and start doing clinical rounds. MDs do the same first two years, then take their clinical boards and start deciding on a specialty — neurology, cardiology, gynecology, whatever it is — and they learn a lot more pharmacology and surgery. We learn according to our scope of practice — we can do minor surgery, like removing lipomas, depending on the state you're licensed in, but you're mainly doing lifestyle medicine primary care.

We're trained as primary care providers, so we do everything from sports physicals to gynecological exams. To deliver babies you have to be an OB-GYN or a midwife — that's a whole different training — but basically we're primary care providers, and our specialty is in lifestyle medicine: nutrition, sleep, exercise, movement, and nutrients. Depending on the state you're licensed in, we can also prescribe medications — I'm licensed in both Washington State and Montana, and in both I can prescribe things like antibiotics. I do a lot of hormone therapy, so my specialty is really endocrinology. I started with a keen interest in neurology and traumatic brain injury, which naturally led me into hormone therapy, because a lot of people who suffer brain injury also suffer atrophic brain issues from hormone depletion — and men tend to struggle with that more, since men get more head trauma based on what they do. Men between the ages of 15 and 25 have the highest incidence of head trauma, based on sports and just the way men are — fighting, accidents, driving crazy — so you'll see a lot of hormone deficiencies in men after these traumas. That's just naturally where I ended up.

So that's the difference — we have accreditation, we have licensing. We don't have quite the same setup as an MD; I'm not exactly sure how MDs are licensed, but I think it's more national, and they typically have hospital rights or can work for a hospital. A lot of them do surgery and pharmacology, whereas we're not working in hospitals — although there's a movement to get NDs more rights to at least admit people to hospitals. We're working mainly in private practices and specialty medi-clinics, where there's a lot of aesthetics and hormone work going on. The clinic I work in sees everything from pediatrics on up, and I do a lot of cognitive work because I'm dealing with a middle-aged population. I'm also just about to get licensed in the ReCODE protocol, which is for preventing cognitive decline and helping people reverse it before they get to Alzheimer's.

Tom Rowland: Really?

Hillary Lampers: Yes — that's been an area of real interest for me because I have a lot of neurodegenerative disease in my family. My grandpa died with Alzheimer's, and so did his mom, his sister, and his aunt, and my other grandma died of Parkinson's. So I want to try to ward those things off as long as I can, or not get them at all.

Tom Rowland: So do that without drugs or surgery, if possible?

Preventing Alzheimer's and Cognitive Decline

Hillary Lampers: Yeah. Alzheimer's is a really interesting condition, because there have been billions of dollars thrown at researching it, and there's not one single thing that's come out of that research that has actually fixed Alzheimer's disease. Some drugs have come out of it, but even those don't cure it or get rid of it — they just prolong the cognitive decline. And as we know, we have an aging population, so people are living longer. Late-onset Alzheimer's usually starts later, in the late seventies or eighties. Women suffer with it more — they have a much higher incidence of dementia and Alzheimer's — and there are a lot of theories as to why, but the main one is estrogen depletion at menopause. Estrogen is a very trophic hormone for the brain, meaning a growth hormone, as is testosterone. When the ovaries go to sleep at menopause, women lose estradiol, a very potent estrogen, and some testosterone as well. The brain has more estrogen and testosterone receptors than any other organ in the body, so they think women may be more prone to Alzheimer's because of that estrogen depletion. They're saying about a third of the population is going to have Alzheimer's — if that's true, it's going to bankrupt the medical system. The cost of Alzheimer's care is astronomical — if you don't have long-term care insurance to cover the $10,000 or more a month for a long-term brain-health or Alzheimer's facility, your family is going to be strapped, or you'll end up on Medicare in a facility that isn't the best. A lot of families end up taking on caretaking themselves, which is really difficult, because in advanced stages of Alzheimer's it's more than just cognitive decline — there's physical decline too. So Alzheimer's is a big deal that's going to affect a lot of people, but there are actually ways to prevent cognitive decline — if you know you're at family or genetic risk, there are things you can do now to put the brakes on it.

Tom Rowland: So what can you do?

Hillary Lampers: There's a great book called The End of Alzheimer's, which I'd recommend to anybody over 40, or anybody with Alzheimer's in their family. It's very reader-friendly, very layperson-friendly. Doctor Bredesen is a researcher who's been studying Alzheimer's for over twenty years, and he asked why all this money was being thrown at Alzheimer's when no medications seemed to work and nothing seemed to fix it. Research had always focused on the tangles, the tau proteins, and the plaques that develop in the brain and eventually cause it to shrink — treating that as the one thing driving Alzheimer's. What he found was that if you look at multiple factors in a person's lifestyle, biochemistry, and genetics, there are around 32 to 36 different factors that play into cognitive decline — it's not just plaques in the brain. Why are people getting plaques in the brain in the first place? That's probably the most important question, and it has to do with a number of different factors: blood sugar management, inflammation, toxin exposure, and atrophic loss — basically loss of hormones over time that helps the brain shrink. Plaques develop in a lot of cases partly because of genetic risk factors.

There's a lipoprotein that carries cholesterol called ApoE. You have three different alleles — you get one from mom and one from dad, and it's either a 2, a 3, or a 4. The 2 allele is actually protective against cognitive decline. The 3 is middle ground, and it's the allele most Americans have. The 4 is more inflammatory — you can't clear toxic cholesterol from the brain as fast. So if mom gave you a 3 and dad gave you a 4, you have what's called an ApoE 3/4 phenotype. The 3/3 phenotype is the most common in the United States, and with it you might get dementia, you might not. But if you have one ApoE4 allele, your chances of Alzheimer's are something like nineteen to twenty percent higher, and if you have two ApoE4 alleles, you're over fifty percent higher than someone with none. That's where a lot of the research was going — how do we change this lipoprotein's activity in the brain. But Dr. Bredesen started researching lifestyle factors instead: what really drives ApoE4 to be more dangerous? Because it's still doing its job, just more slowly than ApoE2 — it doesn't clear toxic lipids from the brain as fast, so they hang around and cause more damage. If your blood sugar is a mess, that adds to it. If your cholesterol is abnormal — too many LDLs, not enough HDLs — that's another factor. Mold exposure or toxicity in your environment is another, especially if you live somewhere warm and humid.

Tom Rowland: Mhmm.

Hillary Lampers: When we lived in Seattle it wasn't warm, but we lived in a rainforest, so we had lots of water and mold issues. The Keys is probably a great example of having lots of water around and lots of exposure to mold if you're not careful. Living in old homes, heavy metals — lead paint, mercury in fish. You're a fisherman — mercury and heavy metal exposure from the fish we're catching and eating affects our bodies too. And then the last factor is hormones, and how deficient you are, because your brain needs a lot of hormone to make signals happen in the body. So Dr. Bredesen started researching all of this and taking patients who were having cognitive decline, putting them on programs — leveling out blood sugar, improving their lipids, getting them to exercise, and if they had ApoE4, not drinking alcohol, making sure they got enough sleep, and not eating a ton of super fatty animal-rich foods. He also put people on a ketogenic diet, which he finds is the most supportive diet for the brain. With this kind of program, he could actually reverse cognitive decline, and even pre-Alzheimer's, in some patients.

He has a whole blood-lab panel called the Cognoscopy — like everybody gets a colonoscopy at 50, he says everybody should get a cognoscopy in their forties, checking blood levels across all these different markers. It's kind of a spoof on colonoscopy — it measures your inflammatory markers, blood sugar markers, hormone markers, nutrient markers, and toxic exposures. On our website, huntharvesthealth.com, I actually have the lab list — you can go there for free and download the cognoscopy, along with a list of questions to answer and the ranges of labs you could ask your doctor to run. If everybody knew these numbers early on and worked to get them into the best range, then long term, even with a genetic risk factor, your chances of cognitive decline are greatly decreased — and he's proved this through research. If you read his book, it's great — I think the program is now called ReCODE, which is what I'm getting trained in. In the ReCODE program, physicians work with people who are having cognitive decline and help reverse it by establishing all these blood markers through a very extensive blood test. I work with an assistant who's a nurse practitioner and a coach — she deals with the daily coaching and cognitive testing, and I deal with the lab work. There's also something called PreCODE, for people like me who have a lot of family history of these diseases but don't want to get there — I can do the same labs and preventative work to learn how to keep myself functional. So that's a long answer, but —

Tom Rowland: I like that answer, because it leaves me with some questions. The first one — you said one of the accelerators for men is when they decline in hormones. Is that just testosterone, or are there other hormones as well?

Hormones, Testosterone, and Aging

Hillary Lampers: The biggest hormone decline in men doesn't happen as swiftly as in women, obviously, because it's not like the testes just go to sleep — we know men can still father children into their sixties and seventies, even if it's a lot harder. From the age of 30 on, the statistics say you lose about 1% of your testosterone per year off your baseline. Testosterone has a really big reference range — if you go to your doctor, the range is roughly 280 to 1,100 — but hormones like testosterone are one of those things where some labs you want to be in the middle of the functional range, not too high, not too low. Testosterone is one where, as a male, you probably want to be more toward the higher end, closer to 1,100 — that's more like a 20-year-old, whereas 280 is more like an 82-year-old man. So if your doctor draws your testosterone at, say, 52 years old, and it comes back around 480, he's going to say you're fine — and I'd agree, if you weren't having symptoms. But typically men don't go to the doctor unless they're having symptoms: fatigue, poor recovery, being sore for three days after a workout, brain fog, trouble focusing, poor sleep, not getting into deep sleep, moodiness and irritability, and maybe — or maybe not — low libido.

Most guys go in with this whole list of symptoms, and the doctor asks, Well, do you still like sex? Do you have a libido? And the guy says yes, so the doctor says, don't worry about your testosterone. But the brain has more testosterone receptors than any other organ in the body. So if you're at 480 total testosterone, your bioavailable — free — testosterone might only be around 10. We know guys feel best closer to 18, and when we do TRT we're often targeting somewhere between 25 and 35. So if you're a 10, or even a 7 — I've seen guys come in at 6 — that's the only testosterone that can actually bind to your receptors. Over time, the brain, being this very trophic organ that needs hormone receptors stimulated to keep growing and firing, will actually start pulling receptors in because there isn't enough testosterone around, and guys just start feeling not well without being able to put their finger on why. In older men over 50, sexual side effects become more evident, partly just because they're older and not having sex as often as their 20-year-old counterparts, so they don't think about it the same way. Usually it's the wife who sends them in — tired, irritable, cranky, gaining weight, not sleeping well, snoring at night, no motivation for sex, erectile issues, no interest — and finally the guy goes in. In a younger guy, the sexual side effects tend to show up last; I've had younger guys who are quite low on testosterone but aren't yet having those symptoms. But the brain still needs that testosterone for energy and motivation — testosterone is what we call the winning hormone. It's the main male hormone, and you need it to get motivated to do things.

And it's exactly the same for women — we just don't think about testosterone in women very much. When people think of testosterone in women, they think of bodybuilders who are juicing. But I'll have a lot of women come in with all these symptoms, and I'll run their testosterone and it's borderline low. It's very common for women not to have libido — society has created this stereotype that men should have ravenous libidos all the time and that it's normal for women not to have much libido at all, especially after having babies. A lot of husbands come in complaining that their wife hasn't had a libido in ten years, and the woman says, Isn't that normal? What we find is that by the time women hit 40, they've often lost over 50% of their testosterone, and if they've had babies it can be even worse. Women will also suffer a lack of motivation — losing interest in hobbies they used to love, feeling too tired, not wanting to work out anymore even though they used to love it, not being able to keep lean muscle mass on, and not getting deep or REM sleep. So for a woman with low testosterone, yes she might naturally have lower libido, but I always ask about those other symptoms too, and the answer is usually yes. Testosterone deficiency can be low in women just like men, because their brains need those receptors filled too — just not at the same level as men.

So testosterone is the main male hormone, but there are other hormones involved, and one of the biggest players is insulin. We don't usually think about insulin as a hormone, but it's probably the most important one for regulating blood sugar and hormone function long-term. People think testosterone or estrogen dictates how much weight you gain — actually it's insulin that dictates how much weight you gain. Testosterone and estrogen dictate where you gain it.

Insulin, Blood Sugar, and Weight Gain

Hillary Lampers: Typically men gain weight in their chest and upper body — it's rare to see a man with a lot of extra weight in the hips unless he's very metabolically inflexible with a lot of estrogen dominance or insulin resistance. In women, estrogen dictates fat going to the lower body — the pear shape, gaining more in the gluteal and femoral regions. As you become more insulin resistant, that starts to change. Insulin is basically the gatekeeper — it's secreted by the pancreas, and when you eat sugar, carbohydrate, or even protein, insulin is secreted because your body detects glucose that needs to be pulled into the cell for energy. It's a misconception that eating carbohydrate automatically gives you energy — it does nothing for you unless it actually gets into the cell. Everything else just floats around in the blood, and that's damaging, because if glucose can't get into the cell to make ATP, it stays in the blood and glycosylates things — like making hard candy, it creates these little sharp edges. Over time that glycosylates your red blood cells, which is why diabetics have problems with their eyesight, kidneys, and neuropathy in their feet — imagine hard candy trying to move through tiny capillary beds, destroying them over time.

So insulin is secreted, detects glucose, and opens the channels so glucose can get into the cell and be used. If you're eating too much carbohydrate and not burning it off, insulin can keep up with that for a while — when you're younger your body manages glycogen storage better. But as you get older, insulin eventually says, essentially, I've got enough, I can't open the gate anymore, so the body stores the excess as fat. The more this continues, the more your cells become resistant to insulin, and the pancreas responds by putting out even more insulin because it senses all that glucose — but the cells have become resistant to opening the door, causing more problems. As people become insulin resistant, their insulin levels rise in the blood. I want a patient's fasting insulin to be under 8, and if someone is really metabolically healthy, it should be between 4 and 5. The official reference range goes up to 24, which is much too lenient — if I see a fasting insulin of 24, that person is insulin resistant.

Once you're insulin resistant and storing fat, testosterone and estrogen dictate where that fat goes — for men, right in the middle. Postmenopausal women also tend to start gaining weight in the middle, because estrogen normally keeps cortisol in check, and cortisol is a blood-sugar hormone that pushes insulin. So stress, poor sleep, lack of exercise, and insulin resistance all contribute to that midsection weight gain. Insulin is probably the hormone we most need to focus on for long-term health — not just for the body but for the brain, because the more insulin resistant we become, the higher blood sugar climbs and the more toxic, inflammatory damage the brain takes on.

Tom Rowland: So I'm assuming as a naturopath you'd gravitate toward regulating insulin through diet.

Diet Approaches — Carnivore, Keto, and the Zone

Hillary Lampers: Yeah, for sure. The most important thing is getting people to eat less carbohydrate — specifically the simple carbohydrates that are just empty calories, while not moving enough and not eating enough complex carbohydrate, or drinking too much alcohol, which is basically just sugar. There's also a phenomenon around diets like keto, carnivore, and the zone diet.

Tom Rowland: I think the zone diet is more of a higher-protein diet — it's forty, thirty, thirty: 40% of calories from carbohydrates, 30% from fat, 30% from protein.

Hillary Lampers: Right, so it's a bit more carbohydrate-driven, but from complex carbs. The average American is eating mostly simple carbs and not enough complex carbohydrate and fiber. The carnivore diet is a good example of the opposite — you're not eating carbs at all, though some carnivores do eat a few blueberries or some honey, more ancestral things. The reason people survive on it is that the body has a protein threshold, and once you hit it, your body converts excess protein into carbohydrate — so you're still getting some. Meat, organs, and natural animal fats provide all the essential fatty acids and plenty of protein, some of which converts to carbohydrate once you hit that threshold. I think the reason carnivore has worked well for people with autoimmune disease is that it doesn't push insulin the way carbohydrate-containing diets do, and insulin and blood sugar dysregulation drive more inflammation — which matters a lot in autoimmune conditions. I've seen it work quite well for some people with autoimmune conditions who just eat meat — some literally eat two steaks a day and nothing else, though you do need adequate salt and a few other things dialed in.

Tom Rowland: What's interesting is there are a lot of different diets and a lot of different conditions. Somebody drinking too much alcohol, eating too much carbohydrate, being overweight and not moving much — you just described maybe seventy percent of the population.

Hillary Lampers: Eighty percent, probably. I'd say only about eighteen percent of the population is metabolically flexible, and I think forty-three percent of the U.S. population is obese.

Metabolic Flexibility and the Modern Lifestyle

Tom Rowland: I almost qualify as obese by that chart, and I have a six-pack — I'm five-foot-eight and a hundred and eighty-five pounds, and that doesn't fit the chart.

Hillary Lampers: Statistics can be misleading — where are they getting them from, and who are they testing? Body type matters a lot. A short, stocky, muscular guy is going to have a high BMI, and if you're strictly going by BMI, it's a really poor indicator of obesity. So let's use common sense instead — go to your local shopping mall, or an airport, and look at ten people. How many of them look metabolically flexible? Metabolically flexible people tend to have more lean body mass than fat — though there's an exception for the skinny-fat person who isn't overweight but also doesn't have good lean body mass, so they end up with a high body-fat percentage for their weight anyway. It doesn't take much to look around and see that it's getting harder to find metabolically flexible people in the community. I think the biggest reasons are that our food supply is compromised, and we're a sedentary culture that only exercises on purpose — we don't have daily living activities that require us to be metabolically flexible anymore. You don't have to walk two miles to the river for water, kneel down and scoop it out, and haul it back building your whole body in the process — you just turn on the tap.

That's been true for a long time in the span of most people's lives, but it's a very short time in the span of human existence. We've lost a lot of that primal movement our bodies used to burn energy doing, and so we overeat and overconsume across the board — food, alcohol, drugs, media, fear, porn, all of it. More feels better, but too much isn't good — and it's the same problem in reverse as an eating disorder that under-consumes. We see nutrient deficiency in obese people just like we see it in anorexic people. The more weight you carry that isn't metabolically flexible, the more low-grade inflammation you have, which requires more nutrient capacity to manage, which pushes you further into disease states like cardiovascular disease — which killed far more people last year than COVID did, probably three times as many or more. Most people who died with COVID had cardiovascular disease as an underlying comorbidity. I got COVID myself and barely noticed — my daughter lost her sense of smell and we didn't feel great, but I had zero respiratory symptoms — whereas someone who's metabolically inflexible with underlying cardiovascular disease they don't know about can have a much worse outcome. So you've got cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and even medical mistakes, which used to rank higher until COVID took its place — these are things that happen over time as we age, but they're also very inflammatory diseases that start young, rooted in this long movement toward metabolic inflexibility.

Tom Rowland: So in your day-to-day practice, seeing this all the time, what's the answer?

The History of Sugar and Overconsumption

Hillary Lampers: I think the answer is very complex, because we live in a complex society with so much convenience — life is genuinely easy for us as first-world Americans, Europeans, and others. We've gotten used to things that make life easy, so we actually have to work much harder now at building a fulfilling, active, healthy life for ourselves — otherwise it's easy to slide into letting everybody else do everything for you: buying prepackaged meat with no relationship to it, never gardening, never learning the soil, never putting your hands in blood. You can just pay other people to do all of that — and that used to be a luxury only for wealthy people, for royalty.

I talk a lot about sugar in my talks. The slave trade in the United States was partly rooted in European royalty wanting white sugar, which was extremely laborious to produce from sugarcane — so laborious that they needed a huge amount of manpower, which led to the triangular slave trade: ships to Africa, African slaves brought to the West Indies, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, the southern United States, to make sugar from sugarcane, which was then shipped back to Europe for the wealthy royals in places like Versailles who ate all the white cake and refined sugar, because it was so expensive. A poor farmer back then wasn't eating white sugar — couldn't afford it, couldn't afford slaves to make it — so they ate whole grains, berries, foods from their garden, things wild-harvested from the forest, animals they killed, and fish they caught. That's how a lot of natives in this country lived before colonialism, and they were traditionally very healthy, robust people without a lot of the inflammatory conditions we see today. Now life has become so easy, and sugar is everywhere.

Tom Rowland: A hundred and eighty pounds a year, or something like that?

Hillary Lampers: It's everywhere — it's in everything, so you have to read labels, or you're just eating sugar all day if you're eating prepared foods. So you have to teach people the basics — if you don't already know how to cook food, if you don't already know that you have to move your body, that's where you start. Sometimes people come in really sick, and we need to put them on a medication to get started, because if blood pressure or blood sugar stays too high, that's not good — you can always start with some higher-force interventions if people need it to get healthier. But the goal in naturopathic medicine is that the highest-force interventions are surgery and drugs — which is exactly where conventional medicine usually goes first.

Tom Rowland: Both of those.

Naturopathic Medicine's Low-Force Approach

Hillary Lampers: Surgery and drugs. If you can get people to the lowest-harm, or lowest-force, intervention instead, diet is a low-force intervention with a huge therapeutic window — most people don't have side effects from dietary change unless they have allergies or their body is already trashed from years of poor eating. Drugs, by contrast, have very small therapeutic windows — you're probably going to have a side effect, which then requires another drug to fix, and so on. Surgery is great, and surgeries absolutely save lives — I've had surgeries I needed and might not be here without them. But it's a mistake to assume surgery alone fixes these problems. Take weight-loss surgeries: I've had patients lose an amazing amount of weight with lap bands who absolutely needed them, but some then develop eating disorders, because with a lap band you can only eat a small amount before you get sick, and that can lead to nutrient deficiencies — and what happens to your brain with nutrient deficiencies? You're skinny, your insulin resistance may improve, but your body can't absorb what it needs because your stomach capacity has been shut down to force the weight loss.

Then there's the subconscious culture around looking perfect. The older I get, the more it's not about looking perfect — it's about feeling good. You may carry some extra weight, you may be bigger, you may be overweight by BMI, and that's not what matters to me. Get off the scale — throw it away. What matters is how you feel and what your body composition is, because the harder you work, the more you move, and the more intentional you become, your body will change even if the number on the scale doesn't say much. So what I tell patients is we're looking for body composition and how you feel. If you feel like crap every morning, can't get out of bed, need sleep medication at night and coffee every morning, and you start taking little steps and eventually wake up wanting to work out — that's a huge milestone, because six months ago you couldn't do that. That means you're becoming more metabolically flexible — your body is getting the right cortisol surge in the morning, you want to move, which is natural. Everyone used to get up and have chores.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Hillary Lampers: You got up and did stuff. So I think it's very complex, and —

Tom Rowland: It seems complex, but when you use a little common sense, what you're saying is we're moving less, eating things we shouldn't — super processed food, lots of sugar — combined with alcohol, and not moving. So how do we get back to what we used to do — getting up, working, carrying things, lifting things, working out in the sun? Get some sun, get a workout that resembles farm work — lift stuff, move stuff, carry stuff, walk, run. That's basically what you pay a lot of money at a CrossFit gym to have someone tell you to do. And then eat the way you would if you were growing it all yourself — as close to the source as possible, as little processed food as possible, vegetables and meat, that's it. That would get you a lot closer to feeling good, I think.

Food, Hunting, and Reconnecting With What We Eat

Hillary Lampers: Yeah. I think the reason I've really loved working in the hunting community is that it's a community of people who genuinely understand their food. That doesn't mean everything they eat is healthy — a lot of people get fresh wild game or fish and are still eating garbage processed food and too many potatoes or white rice — but there's a deep connection with harvested food that's very different from buying something at the grocery store with no connection to it at all. There's something about that connection that I think is ancestrally wired into us — a signal that tells the body, this is something I'm going to use. You can call me a little woo-woo about it, but I've experienced it myself, growing a garden, and with my husband. My daughter killed her first mule deer last fall, and I got to go on that hunt — I'd never been on a hunt with my husband before — and watch her clean the animal, break it down, go through the organs, decide what to take, get all the meat off, carry the bone, do all that hard work, carrying it out on my back at night in the snow and wind, exhausted, waking up the next day. There's a sense of satisfaction unlike anything you get from putting meat in a grocery cart, because you have this neural and hormonal association to the animal that gave its life — now you're working hard to get it home so you can eat it and take the nutrition from it, and your whole idea of food waste and throwing things away radically changes.

I think that's probably the biggest thing we've lost in our culture — that respect for food, in the way our ancestors had it, because you have to eat, you can't survive without it. It's the same with water — how many times have you gone without water, and when you finally got it, you were so grateful? Being out on boats on saltwater, you can probably relate completely to how vital clean drinking water is. We can live without food for a while, but not without water, and if you've never experienced water being scarce and precious, you just don't understand it the same way. I think food is the same. I've talked about this on other podcasts — the soil is the microbiome of the earth, and our planet's soil has been reduced to almost nothing. The soil manages the plants, manages the animals, takes in everything — the animal waste — and turns it into nutrition for humans and plants and animals again, a cycle of life. I think that in making everything so easy for ourselves, we've lost that connection, and when you get it back, you have more respect not just for the process but, I hope, for yourself — because people aren't respecting themselves when they trash their bodies.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, and they don't even know they're doing it sometimes.

Hillary Lampers: No, it's so subconscious, and it's not a judgment — you don't even realize you're doing it, but it's easy to do these days.

Tom Rowland: Sure, it's super easy to do. But I'm with you on the respect and getting your own food — though I also know plenty of people who hunt and eat almost entirely wild game and are still overweight, because of everything else that goes along with it. That's fantastic and a great source, but it's not entirely the answer. The real answer is somehow regaining control of your health — recognizing the condition you're in and actually doing something about it. That's where someone like you comes in. When you talk about all these different diets — carnivore, paleo, keto, the zone — it seems like some people pick one and get amazing results, resetting their blood markers right where they should be, while other people bounce from one diet to another, get a little result, blow up, lose weight, gain it back. So from a nutritional perspective, how does someone know — say they're getting their own fish, their own food, they're hunting, but still overweight — where do they go? To a nutritionist to look at their blood first, and then tailor a diet from there? Or what do you suggest?

Where to Start — Labs, Accountability, and Motivation

Hillary Lampers: I definitely believe it's good to have some baseline numbers — I think that helps, especially for men. I do a lot of men's health, and I think men tend to be more logical, factual beings who perform better when they can see the physical evidence in front of them — here's your blood sugar, here's your testosterone, here's what your lipids are doing — and that gives them more motivation to make changes once someone explains what it means and how to get there. A lot of guys are goal-oriented, and it can help to get baseline blood markers done so you can track how they change over time with the therapies you add. I think a good healthcare provider — or a nutritionist, or a trainer at the gym — someone holding you accountable is very important, because a lot of people don't want to admit they're not doing things right, or don't know how, or feel humiliated — like you said, they still eat wild game but are still overweight, and they genuinely don't know what to do, and they don't want to be talked down to. People really don't like being talked down to by healthcare providers — the minute you do that, they run in the other direction and typically won't do what you're asking.

Tom Rowland: Most of the time the healthcare provider is telling you to lose weight while you're looking at them thinking, well, you're overweight too — what are you going to do? You're telling me to lose weight?

Hillary Lampers: Healthcare providers are some of the most unhealthy people out there — I'd 100% agree with you, and I've had patients say exactly that to me. I think it's on healthcare providers to be role models, to actually do the things we ask our patients to do in our own daily lives — not just by how we look, but by our actions — and to have empathy, because everyone is coming from a different place. I've been guilty of this myself — I'm a real cheerleader, wanting people to do it, get it, go, be wonderful — but not everybody's ready for that. Some people are totally turned off by it — you dump all this on them, and they start having a panic attack because it feels overwhelming, and they get analysis paralysis, get overwhelmed, and don't come back. What I've learned with people starting this process of changing their health is that you have to go slow sometimes — you can't dump the whole truck on them at once, you have to give them bits at a time. So I usually start with labs, and say, okay, here's the work we need to do, here's where we go. Some people need to find someone to hold them accountable, or a workout partner, or something that motivates them, because most people just need to move more and eat less of the crappy food — not less food overall. And it really is simple things — going to bed earlier, turning the phone off at a certain time, disconnecting from the world, doing things with family instead of being plugged in all the time.

So sometimes you don't have to go to the doctor right away, but if you're having symptoms, you're overweight, and you're having a hard time losing it, you can bet your organs and your brain are inflamed and struggling — so it's probably a good idea to get baseline labs done. For a lot of people, though, you just need to start with the basics — try going to bed an hour earlier, getting up a little earlier, going outside for a walk. I don't live somewhere warm — the summers here are glorious, but the winters are dark, and I am not getting up at 5 a.m. to walk outside when it's twenty below. When I go to Arizona or Florida, where you can get out of bed in January and walk outside at 65 degrees, that's my dream — if you live someplace like that, just get up and move your body a little. Even a twenty-minute walk does so much good for the rest of your day. You don't have to be doing kettlebells and CrossFit like you and me — just get outside. There's research now showing that because we're exposed to so much blue light, we're not getting enough natural daylight, and the first thing you should do in the morning is stimulate your eyes with natural light. Natural light kicks off the metabolic process for all your hormones and stimulates the cortisol awakening response that gets you up and gives you energy. A lot of people put blackout curtains on their windows — I've done that too, since it doesn't get dark here until 11 p.m. in summer and it's light again at four in the morning — but I've noticed that when I let natural light into my bedroom in the morning, whatever time that is, it stimulates me to wake up, and I get up better when the sun is shining, even early. So sometimes it helps not to black out all that natural light, and to just get outside and away from electrical lights — that alone can help regulate your blood sugar, insulin, and cortisol to start your day.

Sunlight, the Beach, and Negative Ions

Tom Rowland: I like that. And then vitamin D, obviously, is super important.

Hillary Lampers: We could do hours on vitamin D.

Tom Rowland: Yeah — you know how people say they feel so good after going to the beach? You think about it, and it's like, well, you've been cooped up in an office, you haven't been walking around, and then you go to the beach and walk barefoot on the sand or in the seawater for miles, getting tons of vitamin D, probably sleeping more than you did — of course you're feeling great, getting all that energy from the beach, the water, and the sun.

Hillary Lampers: Isn't it interesting, the draw humans have to the beach? I've always thought about that — it's because the beach has negative ions. All the blue light and electrical lighting around us stimulates positive ions, which are somewhat detrimental to our cells, while the ocean stimulates negative ions, which is what calms the cells down. Even landlocked in the mountains like me, just the thought of going to the beach is relaxing — Hawaii, Florida. My dad lived in Savannah, Georgia when I was in high school, so I spent a lot of summers there and we'd go down to St. Augustine, with these big, beautiful white sandy beaches — so exotic to me growing up here. There's something about the beach — that negative ion, the sound of the water, having your feet in the sand and actively moving muscles you don't normally use when walking — there's something therapeutic there for everyone. I think that's why beaches draw people all over the world, along with the vitamin D and sun.

Tom Rowland: There's power there, and everyone can feel it, even if they just chalk it up to time away from work or needing a vacation. But maybe what you really needed was walking around in the sand, getting vitamin D, and sleeping a bit more. So what I'm getting from this is: we need to hunt, we need to fish, we need to walk the beach, go bonefishing — you'll be a super healthy person if you just hang out at the beach and go bonefishing.

Rest, Stress, and the American Work Culture

Hillary Lampers: Get a job where you get more than two weeks off a year. I mean, seriously — the American way of working, if you've ever gone to Europe... I love America, I'm American through and through, but I've traveled quite a bit, and a lot of cultures that are far less stressed than us eat all kinds of things we'd consider unhealthy — they drink wine, eat cheese, eat gluten, take a nap — and they're not overweight, and they don't have the metabolic diseases we have here. I'm convinced a lot of our insulin dysregulation and metabolic disease comes from stress, because as a culture we're that independent, go-get-'em, never-take-a-break, entrepreneurial people — it's just ingrained in who we are. But that also means we don't value relaxation, we don't value the siesta, we don't value downtime, and you have to have both. Two weeks off a year in America — are you kidding me? That's not even enough time to wind down if you have a genuinely stressful life, and vacation itself can be stressful — a lot of people say they took the family on vacation and couldn't wait to get back, it stressed them out so much. But taking more time off, more three-day weekends, something — or if your job is wrecking your health, you have to rethink that. People make a lot of money, and money is important, and everyone's striving for the dollar — I work in Bozeman, not far from the Yellowstone Club, one of the richest places in the world, where people have amounts of money you can't even fathom. But to make that kind of money, the stress those people are under, the social stress — I can't even imagine.

And it doesn't matter — money doesn't make the stress go away. If you're just chasing the dollar and wrecking your health over it, that's where a lot of this unhealthy stuff comes from — life has become too simple, too convenient, and it's been made easy for us so we can work more. And that's what we've done — worked more, and worked our health into an absolute disgraceful place that we now have to climb out of. I think a big piece of that is learning how to relax, and not constantly be going.

Tom Rowland: Well, that's what we'll talk about when I have you on the podcast next time — how to relax, and different techniques and methods we can use. But yeah, I loved this conversation, it was awesome. And what I believe is that no matter where you are, you can turn it all around — you really can. It's just a matter of finding some help sometimes, finding somebody who can help you — it's not all just discipline, though that certainly plays into it — finding somebody who can help you get on a pathway to steady progress, and a year later, people wouldn't believe where they could be.

Hillary Lampers: Oh, yeah — you just have to make a step, ask for help. So many times it just starts with people asking for help, reaching out to somebody — it could be as simple as a counselor, a nutritionist, or your spouse. Just asking for help, and realizing that none of us do this by ourselves.

Tom Rowland: Right. Well, if people wanted to learn more about you or find out everything you're doing, where would they go?

Where to Find Dr. Hillary Lampers

Hillary Lampers: We have a website, huntharvesthealth.com — an informational site with recipes, blogs, and a lot on hunting, health, relationships, and gardening, which are our big interests, plus some free programs you can download, including the cognoscopy lab list. We also have a supplement company — originally called Stahelthy Hunter, my husband's Instagram handle, now Stahelthy Nutrition — where we do high-quality, medical-grade supplements that are very strategic; we started with CBD in the hunting industry, which has done really well, and we're expanding into non-CBD products at stahealthynutrition.com. And if you live in Montana or Washington and want to see me as a patient, you can contact elevatehealthmt.com for a free consult — if you live in another state, you're required to come in for a first visit, but a lot can be done over telemedicine after that. And of course we're on Instagram and Facebook, and at huntharvesthealth.com. Alright!

Tom Rowland: Alright — well, Hillary, thank you very much, and I'll continue listening to your show and learning more about how I can be a healthier person.

Hillary Lampers: Thanks, Tom.