Travis Barker sat down with Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where the Blink-182 drummer revealed a jarring detail about his recovery from the 2008 plane crash that burned 65 percent of his body: hospital staff force-fed him meat during his six-month stay in a burn center.
“Because I had doctors that were super old school in the hospital with me,” Barker explained when Rogan asked why he started eating meat while recovering from his burns. “That figured out I wasn’t eating because they were trying to feed me a bunch of meat and they stuck a hose down my throat and that just sucked.”
Barker said the situation stemmed from a communication breakdown.
“Because I was like secretly just eating kind of like what I wanted but not eating a bunch of the meat because I told them, ‘Hey, I don’t really eat meat.’ So there was like a miscommunication where they just put a hose down my throat and were feeding me like that.”
One nurse found a workaround.
“During that time, my one of my nurses was super cool and he started making me bags of beef jerky. So I would eat beef jerky in the hospital to get whatever protein that they wanted me to have and then down a peanut butter blast smoothie,” Barker stated.
Barker said he needed a 6,000 to 7,000 calorie diet daily to heal from 30 surgeries in six months.
Barker, vegetarian since childhood and vegan for the past 20 years, pointed to his physical output as evidence his diet works. He described training regimens built around running, boxing, and jiu-jitsu.
“I figured out after years and years and years of working out with different people, what’s best for me is fast twitch and lots of reps, lots of sprints, quick explosive energy. I love boxing, love jump roping.”
He also credited his diet for the endurance he needs behind the drum kit.
“All my blood work that I do, my protein is top notch,” Barker said, crediting lentils and beans rather than mock meats. “There’s a lot of junk food meat eaters, a lot of junk food vegans. It’s about dialing your stuff in.”
