Dispelling The Myths Of Fiber, Cholesterol, and Saturated Fats | Dr. Zoe Harcombe

The purpose of eating is that we need essential nutrients. We need fats and proteins and vitamins and minerals. So presumably the body has developed a really good way of stripping out the nutrients that we need and then packaging them onto kyomicrons and various other systems in the body to transport them around to where they're needed. So I would kind of think if something's in my system longer, it's because it's providing more nutrition and the body is taking the time to make sure it gets all the goodness out of it. So, if my apple is going to shoot through in 2 hours, that's cuz it didn't really have very much. It was 95% water. The rest is sugar. There's a bit of vitamin C. There's actually more vitamin C in liver, but don't let that upset your plant-based ideology. [Music] You for joining me on another episode of the Plant-Free MD. I'm your host, Dr. Anthony Chaffy. And today I have a very special guest, uh, Zoe Harkham, who I've been looking forward to speaking with for quite some time now. She's done quite a lot of, uh, talks and rounds in the low carb space and even has her own diet, the Harkham diet, and has her own, uh, YouTube channel, which I encourage everyone to look at as well. Zoe, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for joining me. Sorry if I looked a bit distracted. I was just trying to click on the Yeah, I'm good that we're recording and my hubby's mouse was upside down. So, it was like, do you remember when you had those micro fish that you used to look at and you had to put them in the right? It was kind of like that. So, we're all good now. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, good. So, uh Zoe, for those of uh of our listeners who don't know who you are, can you please tell us a bit about yourself and and what you do? Yeah. Um, okay. I kind of have had two careers. So um I went to Cambridge University. I then did what my mom would call sort of a normal job, proper job. Um did some management consultancy, got the opportunity to travel extensively. Uh worked for Mars, so I've worked for Big Food. I worked for Smith Klein Beachham, so I've worked for Big Farmer. Um and ended up as a HR director at sort of management team level. So I've always been really interested in what motivates people, why people do what they do. Um and then of course the world kind of almost financially collapsed in 2008 and a number of people in the corporate world got the opportunity to leave and do something else and I just thought you know what I'm going to see if I can make what I really enjoy my vocation as well as my passion. So I left um started trying to do more in the field of diet and health. I'd already written three books by this time. Um then did a PhD in public health nutrition. So, it's very specifically on the dietary fat guidelines. And what do I do now? I read, write, and talk about diet and health. Um, so I speak at conferences as you do. Uh, I do this Monday note where I take a academic paper that's in the news, red meat is going to kill you and whole grains are going to save your life and I dissect it. Um, and the kind of motto is, guys, I do this so that you don't have to. Just read my exact summary if that's all you want. two minutes you'll understand what was wrong with the study and then you can put the mother-in-law at rest and get on with your day. So that's me. That's what I do. Well, that's great. And uh well that I I think that's a service to the world that you're doing reading those those papers so other people don't do. Um well I mean that's that's a perfect segue. There was a recent paper from Harvard that uh spoke about how red meat causes diabetes and I I believe you wrote a a rebuttal to that as well. Is that right? Yes, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah. Can you tell us a bit about that and why? Well, yeah. He caused diabetes. Your thoughts? I mean, I'm I'm working on something at the moment to to help other people understand how to read a paper because this is what I do. Um, and I'm now on note number 665 or something. So, I've been doing this every Monday for several years. Um, so I know how to do it. But it's an epidemiological paper. So, it's a a population paper. Um, for those of your followers who know about the hierarchy of evidence, um, the epidemiological studies, as we call them, are sort of heading up towards the higher part of the pyramid of evidence, but they're very much below intervention trials, what we call randomized control trials. And of course, they're below systematic reviews and meta analyses, which is the new sort of pinnacle of evidence, where you pull together all the evidence available. You don't just cherrypick certain studies. So, this was a population paper. Um, the minute you you read the headline, you just know it cannot make sense because diabetes can essentially be summed up by the inability to metabolize glucose. And of course, meat is one of those rare foods on the planet along with uh fish and eggs that contains no glucose. I mean, glycogen and liver aside, it contains no glucose. So, it makes no sense whatsoever that red meat would have anything to do with diabetes um at all. So that's your starting point. You go in knowing that something is wrong. Then population studies there are always the same flaws. So sort of flaw zero as I consider it is the inaccuracy of dietary frequency questionnaires. So this particular questionnaire um the the people in this study were women from the nurs's health study number one and women from the nurs's health study number two and then men from the health professionals follow-up study. So these were all health professionals and they were asked what was your consumption of these items 41 items in the case of nurses one over the last year and it would say for example how many portions 6 to8 ounces of skinless chicken breast did you have over the past year. So let's say you're a nurse and you have 5 ounces of chicken for your dinner every night. How do you answer that question? Do you say I had no 6 to8 ounce portions because you didn't or did you do you average it and say well over the week I have 35 ounces so if I take that as five you know 6 to8 ounce portions there's five of those you don't even know how to answer that so that's floor zero floor one is then that population studies can only ever tell us association they cannot tell us causation and yet these headlines that come out of Harvard particularly are always inferring causation so eat meat and you will get diabetes is the very clear inference from that study. The second key flaw for all population studies is that the headline is relative risk. The absolute risk is usually tiny. And again, in this case, the headline risk was, oh, you're going to be 61% more likely to get diabetes. And people think, oh my goodness, so if a 100 people are going to get diabetes in the non red meat eating group, then 161 are going to get it in the red meat eating. You know, that's quite big. That's almost double. That's, you know, that's of concern. Doesn't mean that at all. It means perhaps one in a thousand people got diabetes in one group and 1.6 people in a thousand got diabetes in the next group. Do you care about the difference between one and 1.6? And that's before we've gone on to all the other flaws in this study. So the final one that they all suffer from is what we call the healthy person confounder. So the person who is eating what Harvard want you to eat, which is kumquat and kiwi and legumes and quinoa and all the rest of it. Put put that kind of person in your head at the moment and what image have you got? They're slim. They're educated. They've got high income. They've got children called Tarquin and Olivia. um they're affluent, they're they're privileged, they're advantaged, and then look at the person who's having the burger and the fries in the fast food joint, who's obese, who doesn't exercise, um who can barely afford the rent. It's a completely different kind of person that you're describing. And epidemiological studies would have us believe if only those poor disadvantaged people at like the privileged advantaged people, they would enjoy the same health. And where do you even start on that one? So, I should take a breath at this point. Yeah. Well, that I mean that's great. And I mean I think the thing is too like like you said, you know, the hierarchy of evidence um the experimental data trumps all. I mean just previously to that study coming out there has been experimental data you know from Verta Health with ketogenic diets heavy in meat and fat from meat presumably red meat played a part in that as well and this was reversing type 2 diabetes. So how how does that work exactly? you know, um, you know, it really doesn't follow. And it it's sort of strange when we have better studies coming out, higher levels of evidence, interventional trials that show a different relationship, why are we still trying to bark up that tree of of meat causes harm? I mean, is there any sort of idea there? Um, when things like this happen, it's there's only ever two reasons. One is incompetence and one is conflict. Um, Harvard is an esteemed institution. I don't think they're incompetent. I do think they're conflicted. Um, and Nina Titles has just done a brilliant piece of investigative journalism looking at the conflicts of the Harvard team, particularly Walter Willick, because Walter is the main person at Harvard. He's one of the authors on this name paper. He is the corresponding author. I did correspond with him over this. Um, and he did reply to be fair. Um, so I took some of the um, when I did my rebuttal to this publication, I did a 14 issue rebuttal and I didn't even have to scrape around to to find those 14 issues. I mean, I was just writing them down as I went through the paper and it was just boom, another one, boom, another one. Um, so we've got the sort of naugh to naugh to three that I've gone through. There were some that you were unique um to this study. So for example uh one of the really bizarre things was that it was claimed in the characteristics table which is where they place the participants into groups by meat intake. It was actually claimed that at the lowest level so they they split them into five groups which we call quintiles. And in the bottom group the bottom quintile for the women the nurses health study one they were allegedly having 0.46 46 portions of total red meat today and men I think from memory were having 0.24. So almost half. That would be the first study I've ever seen in the world where women eat more red meat than men. Um and I put this to um to Walter Willlet and I mean the reply was hilarious because the nurse's health study started in 1980. I think the the health professionals follow-up study was in 1986 and his answer was well red meat consumption was already going down by then. So hang on a sec. So in the period 1980 to 1986 red meat consumption was going down. And again Nina can show you a great chart. She presents it in her lectures where red meat consumption has been going down since the dietary guidelines were introduced around 1980. But of course diabetes has been going up. I mean, it's like an airplane taking off. Um, so how does that work then? You haven't even got an association, Mr. Walter Willlet. Um, and then there was another one where um, oh, I mean, this this this just completely goes to conflict rather than incompetence. So in the characteristics table where they say right the these are the people um split by meat intake and then you're supposed to list all the other attributes that are collected at the beginning of the population study because then you know what to adjust for and that's where you always see the healthy person confounder. So the people men or women eating the most meat are also the ones who are current smokers. They're the ones who do less activity. They're the lower income. there, the less educated there, as I described in that example. But what he also put into that table was their other food intake. And he put in fish, he put in poultry, non- red meat, he put in eggs, he put in legumes, he put in fruit, he put in vegetables. He didn't put in the two things that actually have something to do with diabetes, which of course are grains and sugars. And I said to him, "Why didn't you put in the two things that actually have something to do with diabetes?" and he said, "Oh, there was no space." It's like, you have all the space you want in the world. You This is not the BMJ when it now gets published as a bound um sort of volume and it gets sent out to doctors around the UK. This all goes online now. You have no limitations. And by the way, you did have space on that page. And by the way, you had a half a page at the end of the study. But I mean, don't give me that. And if it really was space, then take out fish and eggs and put in grains and sugars. Um, I mean, another anomaly that was just ridiculous, the calorie intake in the lowest group for the women was 1,200. You're trying to tell me that nurses in 1980 on their feet all day were consuming 1,200 calories. And for the men, you're trying to tell me that male junior doctors and physiootherapists and health professionals were consuming 1680 calories on a daily basis. I mean, that just tells me they forgot almost half of their calories. And I asked him about this and he says, "Well, we adjust for that." It's like, I know you adjust for that, but it's just wrong. And you use that as your baseline against which to compare everything else. So, you compounded wrong. Um, so it it's conflict. It's it's utter conflict in my view. They have an agenda and they're determined to keep pushing it. Yeah. And I mean the amount of I guess they just cut out the amount of chocolates that they ate on the ward, you know, during that time because anyone who's worked in the hospital, I mean there's just piles of candy and chocolate um around around the wards from the nurses and doctors and things like that. So um you know, as everyone, you know, very nicely says, "Hey, here's some chocolates. Thank you very much for taking care of my mom and my dad." And so there's abundance of candy and so maybe they just weren't counting that. But um no, of course not. I mean 1,200 calories a day. How could you uh do that? You're very busy. You're running around and um you know that wouldn't that wouldn't sustain just sort of your your normal workflow. But I mean that would be that would be a that wouldn't even be representative of the normal population because the normal population certainly is not eating 1,200 calories a day to 1,600 calories a day. So even if that w were accurate it wouldn't be representative and so it would thrown out for that reason as well. Yeah absolutely. Well that's the that's a trouble. um you know people like Walter Willard are very uh very influential and and I I know a number of people that have gotten their um masters in public health from Harvard and they come in thinking one thing and they come out vegan and that's just that's how how that works. So I think there's quite a lot of influence uh from him and I I don't know do you know um exactly what his his ties are. I do know that he's worked with the Seventh Day Adventist and Lovinda and their studies quite often. I don't know if he's a member, but obviously that they are they are ide ideologically anti just from a religious standpoint. Do you do you know his uh ties at all? I don't I think Belinda Fetki will probably be one of the people who best knows that. Um, what I do know is that it was called the Harvard School of Public Health and then it became the Harvard Tchan School of Public Health and Tchan donated apparently $350 million to the Harvard School of Public Health, which is enough to get your name above the door, no problem. Um, and therefore there will um the the papers will be pandering to the desires of whoever this T Chan is. Um, and there appears to be no doubt that T-ch is very keen on anti-meat papers, um, pro- cereals and grains papers. Um, whether he's involved directly in the fake food industry or perhaps in the pharmaceutical industry because of course the fake food makes us sick. Um, I don't know particularly what his agenda is. I did do a bit of digging on him when it was all announced and I couldn't find very much. um not easily helped by the fact that there are quite a few tans over in China, but uh yeah, I mean there's there's conflict going on there. They're they're not stupid. I mean, the idea that you don't put in sugar and grains because there's not enough space. Um there was another one I I asked him about which is which is quite funny and and I I don't know if I can explain this to because it was such an obvious error to me and I've tried to explain it to a couple of people and some of them look a bit baffled and and some of them just get it straight away. So, let's you your listeners are going to be smart. So let's try it. So um they had a risk ratio for total red meat which was 61 um or 1.61 sorry they had a risk ratio for processed red meat which was 1.51 and then they had a risk ratio for unprocessed red meat which was 1.4. Now total meat always comes between processed and unprocessed because total meat is the aggregate of the two in terms of being examined. So when it comes to the risk ratio, you can view it as the processed meat raises total meat overall and the unprocessed meat lowers the risk overall. So the total red meat is always in between those two. And in this study it wasn't. And I was trying to liken it to my husband is 6 foot and I'm 5'2. It's like saying he's 6 foot, I'm 5'2, and yet our couple combined height is 7 foot. It's like, "No, it's not going to be seven foot. It's going to be somewhere in between 5'2 and six foot. Um, it just can't happen." And I put this to him and he said, "Oh, it's just something that came out in the statistics." It's like, "Well, it's wrong then." Um, come on, guys. You don't just chuck something into a statistical package and then it churns that out and you don't then immediately go, "That's a bit odd." Um, Total Meat is always moderated by by the other two. It's always in between the other two. Um there was another one they and I saw somebody on Instagram who was a plant-based um one of these, you know, blonde looking 20somes who have been plant-based for five minutes and feel great and in two years they're going to be going carnival because their health will have collapsed. But anyway, she's she's happily plant right now. And she was saying what a great study this was and how it adjusted for BMI and all the rest of it. It's like no, the headline figures did not adjust for BMI. So when you did adjust for BMI, those ratios of 1.6 1.5 massively came down. I I mean they were in between 1.1 and 1.2. But they decided not to adjust for BMI in the headline data which is the only thing that the newspapers reported and they covered it worldwide. Why did they do that? because they said, "Well, your meat intake would have had an impact on your BMI and therefore we should not adjust for BMI." It's like, well, you've A, you've double counted it. B, you've assumed that the meat was driving it. I mean, we haven't even got on to what do you eat in the US with meat and you graduated qualified in the US. So, you know what meat consumption is in the US? It's not grass-fed steak and no vegetables. It's burgers and hot dogs. and what comes with the burger and hot dog, the white bun, the fries, the fizzy drink, the milkshake. And none of that was taken into account. You know, let's let's blame the red meat in the burger for what the bun and the fries and the fizzy drink did, but let's not even measure the bun and the fries and the fizzy drink. I mean, this was so bad. It just was so bad. Yeah. No, that's awful. Hey everyone, if you need a little extra help getting started on a carnivore diet and my online resources that I have for free aren't enough for you, you can go to www.howtocnore.com how tocarnnavore.com and sign up for our 30-day carnivore challenge where you'll have online resources, group support, weekly Zoom meetings, as well as the ability to chat live with myself, Simon Lewis, and the others in the challenge who can help you and support you and give you extra advice and help you along the way. So, if that sounds like something that would be beneficial to you, then please go to how tocarnnavore.com and sign up. All right, thanks guys. We'll see you there. Well, that's interesting about about TH Chan as well. I'll have to sort of look into that. I wonder if if anyone sort of done done some digging on that. But that makes perfect sense, you know, if if that that's going to have a lot of influence on the department in general, if that's the major fun as well, his name's. So, that's very interesting. So, you've done some some quite uh exceptional talks on on YouTube that I've seen with low carb down under and other other talks as well at other conferences which I I found fantastic is something that that comes up again and again and and maybe we can go through some of these things. But one of them is the idea that it doesn't matter what you eat as long as you get your your your macros in order. you get your calories in, calories out, sort it out. That that then you're fine. It doesn't matter what you eat. Doesn't matter if you just chocolate. As long as it's it's the right amount of chocolate, then that that's exactly the same as a steak, except that of course you'll get diabetes if you eat the steak and and not the chocolate. Um, if you can if you can go through this, you know, can you tell us how how that's flawed? And you know is a calorie is a calorie a calorie or is there a problem with that statement? Yeah. Oh um yeah good one. I mean criy this is I mean I've got a 45 minute presentation I think on calories thermodynamics kettles right let's um one of the best ways I think to explain this is take a typical female because the maths are easier. Um I did maths at Cambridge but you know other people might not like numbers as much as I do. So, take your t typical female who needs 2,000 calories. And it is a unconvention um an indisputable fact. This is not contentious that there are different calories um that can do different things within the body. So, if you take that 2,000 calories, it would generally be agreed that you've got something called the basal metabolic requirement, which is if that female is ill in bed all day and doesn't go about um thinking, working at the computer, going to the gym, picking the kids up, whatever, um she will probably still need 1,500 calories. And those 1,500 calories are for what we call the basal metabolic requirements. So, what does the body need to do every day regardless of what we do on top? Needs to build bone density, fight infection, um rejuvenate the muscles, keep the heart pumping, keep the lymphatic system going around, um process waste d I mean, it's just going to do all of that um every day. Now, when you look at and and this is a piece of work that I I I need to do as an academic study. I can't nail down exactly how many of those, let's say, 1500 calories because that is about the right number for the basal metabolic requirement for an average female. How many of those can only be provided by fat and protein, but it's a high proportion because fat and protein are your nutrients that are going to do that building bone density. Body repair and maintenance is is performed by fat and protein. um it's not performed by carbohydrate. Carbohydrate will do some of that as in carbohydrate can keep you warm. Carbohydrate would help you turn over in bed. You don't need any carbohydrate of course, but it's just if you had consumed some, the body would be able to use a certain amount. Then you've got the 500 calories if she's up and about. If she's moderately active, again, it's generally accepted that she would probably be needing about 500 calories on top of that. And for energy expenditure, the best macronutrients that the body would look to would be fat and or carbohydrate. Again, carbohydrate not needed. Um, but if carbohydrate is available, the body's lazy and the body would take that carbohydrate for fuel first. So, picture those 2,000 calories as 1,500 needed for body repair and 500 needed for extra stuff on top. and the 1500 needed for body repair predominantly need fat and and protein and the 500 on top predominantly need fat or carbohydrates. So first observation you make is fat is your ubiquitous macronutrient. Fat is your best thing. Fat is the thing that the body can use for the most things. It's it's the one that your body is going to find able to use up. Of course it has other great advantages. it's going to have no impact on glucose and it's the one macronutrient that won't mess around with your insulin either. So, you start seeing fat in a different light. But here's what happens when the government wades in and we've got pretty much the same dietary advice, US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, um, Europe, across the globe. We've adopted the dietary guidelines from Americans, which is incredibly carb intensive. I've analyzed some of the menus that have been provided by public health England and their carbohydrate intake is in the range 65 to 70% of calorie intake and fat is at around 15% and protein is is making up the difference at around 15%. I mean the one macronutrient that we don't need they are telling us to base our calories on. So let's say that it is around 70% and then the government is telling us to have 1,400 calories in the form of carbohydrate and the body says let let let's assume that for all intents and purposes the 1500 of fat and protein and the 500 is fat or carbohydrate and I'll I'll I will get to the bottom of this in my lifetime. I will work out how much of that basal metabolic need if any can be provided by carbohydrate but it is let's go 1500 500 it won't be far away and then you eat 1,400 calories of carbohydrate and the body says I only needed a maximum of 500 and actually those could have come in the form of fat and I would have been quite happy if I'd become fat adapted so you've given me an extra 900 carbohydrate calories that I didn't need and actually I can't use for basal metabolic functioning and repair. And this is how we get both fat and sick at the same time following the government guidelines because we're eating more than is good for us in terms of what we can use as energy and we're eating not enough in terms of what we need for building our bodies back. So, you know, I would say to dieters as a starting point, you want to be eating the 1500 protein and fat if you care about calories. I mean, I don't and I know you almost certainly don't as well, but we're having the calories in, calories out debate. Um, if your mindset is about calories, then as a minimum, eat the 1500 that your body wants in the form that your body wants them. And then it's not just to go after these macronutrient ratios because I don't agree with that either. My principles are number one, eat real food. Number two, choose that food for the nutrients it provides. And then you will naturally choose red meat over white meat, oily fish over white fish, eggs, especially the yolks, full fat dairy. And you can stop there because that's going to give you every single nutrient, vitamin and mineral, essential fatty acids, complete protein that you actually need as a human being. Um, and and those would be your two points. Now, if you then don't need to lose weight, you might want more energy on top. And again, I'd say don't go over 500 calories of carbohydrate. And if you can become fat adapted, almost certainly, depending on the exercise that you choose to do, you're going to be perform better having access to your body's store of fat as opposed to just your body's store of carbohydrate, which is glycogen. Um, but I just cannot see a reason for anybody on this planet, um, even an elite athlete to be going over 500 calories of carbohydrate a day. And most people would do far better on far less than that. Yeah. Well, I I certainly know as you know in in my playing days, I I've never felt better in my entire life. I've never played better. I've never had better energy than when I was on a on a just a zero carb carnivore diet. I didn't even know it was a carnivore diet at the time. I just wasn't eating plants. I just toxic plants were like, "Yep, not eating those anymore." And I just defaulted into just eating meat and eggs. And I absolutely never felt better in my life until right now when I'm I'm doing that again. I rediscovered that. And you know, the biochemistry makes sense as well. Like you say, you're going to be far better off running on your own fat stores because you have far more fat stores than than you will be able to store in glycogen. There was a recent study that uh uh Dr. Paul Mason told me about recently which actually show because the argument was okay well maybe you can replenish your glycogen stores and and make blood sugar and make ketones as well. But do you replenish your glycogen as quickly as say just sucking down sugary drinks? And the answer is yes you do. You actually make it faster. So in in human trials and with athletes, they found that the the keto athletes, the ke the fat adapted athletes actually replenish their glycogen more quickly than the carb fueled athletes who were sucking down the sports drink. So uh you know especially for athletes, it makes a huge difference in your favor to cut out the carbs as well. Yeah. So you know and then the you know the the other thing too is I mean these these people just the idea of calories being of important of importance like it's it's a it's a measure of heat we're not combustion engines we're not a locomotive so it really doesn't matter what heat is coming off of these things. If we heat up a glass of water it doesn't have more calories. It doesn't weigh it more calories but it doesn't weigh more than than it used to. Right? has more heat that it's giving off and um and so that's that's pretty uh worthless when we're talking about you know how much weight we I mean we weigh atoms have weight calories don't have weight so we need to think about that a bit differently also all these different carbohydrates they all have unique individual chemical reactions in our body they have different hormonal responses in our body same with the amino acids same with the fatty acids somehow can't even be used at all like fiber that's completely inexpensive And then a lot of amino acids are used as as structural components. So they're not being used as energy either. So it's a bit funny. And then you eat different things as well and even just the fiber and you'll block out 20 30% of of the food you're eating as well. So, you know, the idea that it just that all that matters is just that that calorie number I think is going I think well it has gotten in people into a lot of trouble and that's some people can yeah can work out push themselves and eat what they eat and they can and they can stay lean and strong and that's great but not everybody can do that and a lot of people who are struggling run into that and they just basically get told that they're liars or they're lazy and um you know that though you you're just you're you're saying you're actually eating when you're when you're not supposed to. You're lying about how much you're eating, things like that. They're not uh you know, it's much more complicated than that. Yeah. I mean, and that was calories in terms of what do we need? When you get into should we cut calories because there's this idea that if you eat less and or do more, you will lose weight. So, in the example that I used earlier, you could cut your calorie intake to 1,500 calories and have them entirely in the form of carbohydrate and you're still in the place that you've got too many carbohydrate calories for what you're using up. So, you will store them and they will then be turned to fat and you will gain weight, but you didn't have enough calories to actually meet your metabolic requirements. So, you're getting sick at the same time. So, it's about it. It's so about what you eat. You know, the idea, first thing that happens when you try to eat less, do more, is your body tries to get you to eat more and do less. It's just the first thing that happens. You know, you start a calorie control diet on a Monday morning, by 11:00 a.m. all you can think about is food. And you were going to go to the gym that night and by 5:00 it's like, I'm not going to the gym. I haven't got the energy. You know, the idea that the body is just a cash machine for fat, let alone at the rate of one pound equals three and a half thousand calories. I mean, if you Google my name and that, there's a there's a blog post that comes up. I mean, that is just completely unproven. It's just another one of these nutritional myths. Um, but the idea that the body goes, "Oh, okay. You've had a deficit this week of three and a half thousand calories. There you go. There's a pound of fat and a little bit more on top in terms of water and lean tissue." No way. The body has nine systems that it can turn down, turn off. Um, do that for any period of time and the body's going to turn off the reproductive system in women. Just stop the periods. You're not looking after yourself. I can't risk you trying to have a baby. It will turn down the heating system. Dieters get really cold. Um, turns down the lymphatic drainage system. So, you see this sort of puffy carb face in people who are eating low-fat diets, high carbohydrate diets. You know, the body just adjusts. The body is not going to say, "Oh, there you go. There's a pound of fat. I know you want to get into that dress for the weekend. Um, my pleasure." It just doesn't do that. We've evolved to store every ounce of fat that we can get our hands on. We're not going to buck I don't know 350,000 years worth of evolution just because somebody invented a calorie counter. Yeah. No, that's it. Yeah. And I I was I always thought that was funny too like in the 80s they said we should eat a lot of fiber. You should eat a lot of like the celery diet. You you actually expend more calories processing the celery than you get from the celery. So you just eat unlimited celery and you'll just the weight just drop off and the fiber will stretch out your stomach. It will release leptin and it'll trick your brain into thinking that you've actually eaten something useful. And I just always like you are not that smart. You are not you're not going to be tricking millions of years of evolution. Like it's just it's just not that easy. You're not that intelligent. And if you were intelligent, you'd be trying to work with your biology and with that evolutionary process. And and I mean that's the thing too. It's just not understanding physiology. You know, your vag nerve has receptors in your stomach that actually counts macros and micros and sees the nutrients. So, you you just Okay, fine. Eat a box of styrofoam. It'll stretch your stomach, but you know, you'll release some leptin and it'll suppress ghrein, but your your stomach will see that and be like, there's zero nutrition here. You need to eat. You're going to stay hungry. Yeah. Right. So, well, a calorie is not a calorie. You heard it here. The arguments still be going. I I literally had to to wade into this in some Instagram comments today. This guy was like, "Oh, well, a caliber is a calorie." Oh my god, they still make you like seriously. It's just bad. So, so that's some of the myths. But, um, you know, one of one of the things that is is quite contentious. I thought you did did an excellent presentation on was was fiber. You know, is fiber actually good idea for people um to have? And I've always thought that well, let's just bare bones. You know, are we is that are you know what what animals on earth eat a fibrous diet that cannot break down and absorb the nutrients from fiber? You know, no one really no one really does. For some reason, we were supposed to we've been told that we need to eat more fiber basically in the 80s again. And why is that a thing just in the 80s? Why didn't why didn't our species need fiber before that? Why do we just figure that out? And you know, so I I never thought I that never really passed the smell test for me. And if we uh fiber, then why is it you know, how could we have survived the ice ages when we really didn't have access to these sorts of things? or if meat were not enough for us, how could we survive the ice ages? Um, what is your take on fiber and how would you address something if someone's having this argument at Thanksgiving coming up when they have to have fiber, they shouldn't just eat the turkey? Um, I think uh here's a hypothesis here. I think that the fiber narrative has been increasingly pushed because it's the last thing left to justify carbohydrate consumption. So I think deep down they know um I mean I think Eric Westman puts up something from a um a government document from decades ago I think it was that um provided you eat enough fat and protein your actual requirement for carbohydrate is zero. It's the panel on macronutrients. I think it's 1985 or something. We can put it in your show notes. I'll find it. Um, but they've known for a long period of time because it is indisputable. It's just a biological fact that there is no requirement for carbohydrate as a macronutrient. Um, and I think when you've got that situation, you've got to try to find a different justification for pushing carbohydrate. And of course, the only source of fiber is carbohydrates. So if you can promote this fiber narrative that we must have fiber, we must be having 30 grams of fiber, then it's it's something that they can use to keep the carbohydrate narrative going. Now you also me mentioned the 7th day Adventist and I go back to this in my presentation and I look at the origins of where people started really pushing the serial agenda which was John Harvey Kellogg clue in the surname um and Sylvester Graham Graham's crackers the grains around at the time. So, uh, individuals who then went on to develop grain conglomerates were obviously going to be pushing the grains agenda, have cereal for breakfast instead of eggs. And all the, uh, trials that we've had on why you should have cereal for breakfast and not eggs, why breakfast is the most important meal of the day. All of that nonsense comes out of this school of let's push grains. Um, because of course the margin in grains and cereals is massively higher than the margins in an egg. Um, so in that fiber presentation, I go back to carbohydrate 101. So I say, okay, there are monossaccharides. Um, we know those as glucose, fructose, and galactose. And then you've got the disaccharides, two sugars. Let's just take the one that people are most familiar with, which is sucrose, which is one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose. Then you get into the polysaccharides. Poly means many, and saccharides means sugars. So you're now into many sugars. And you've got digestible forms of many sugars and you've got indigestible forms of many sugars. And fiber technically is indigestible polysaccharides. Many sugars that we cannot digest. So from a intuitive starting point that doesn't sound like a very good thing. That doesn't sound like something I need to be putting into my body. And indeed it's not. But we have this whole um narrative that's that's come about from the grain pushers and also because they want us to eat plants and carbohydrates and not meat and fat because they know that meat and fat makes us healthy. So in this presentation I then go through what do we need to eat? Where do we find those nutrients? And of course it's what we've said already. It's red meat, oily fish, egg yolks, full fat dairy. Um compare plant foods alongside those foods. They're incomparable in terms of complete protein. they don't have it. Essential fats, they're not in the right form. Vitamins and minerals where they've got them again, they're not in the right form. It's not retinol, it's carotene, D, it's not D3, it's D2, and all the rest of it. So, plants are just massively inferior, but they're promoted because of this fiber um agenda. Uh now, one of the one of the last sort of bastions that people hang on to with fiber is, oh, you need it for your gut flora. Um, so towards the end of the presentation, I actually look at all the other things that can do great things for your gut flora, which have nothing to do with fiber whatsoever and in fact are far more powerful than beans on toast. Um, which is a a fibrous meal. Um, what is far more important than that? The health of your parents. I'm sorry to say it was something you couldn't do anything about, but the health of your parents and their gut flora was incredibly important. Um, did your mom then give birth naturally because you're then bathed in flora as you come out into this world? That gives you a great start. Um, whether or not that happened, did your mom then breastfeed you for as long as possible? Because again, you're getting all of her flora and immunity passed through onto you. Did your mom make sure that she didn't take antibiotics during pregnancy? Did she make sure that you didn't take antibiotics during childhood? Unless your life depends on it. Do you also as an adult make sure that you're not going to the doctor and asking for antibiotics like Smarties? Um if you have antibiotics, do you counter it with probiotics immediately? Are you consuming probiotics? Um are you having natural yogurt? Are you having blue cheese? Are you having aged meat or whatever? Are you having um keir? Um are you if you are having plants, are you fermenting them? Are you having fermented foods in any way? Um there are so many things that you can do that create a great gut flora that have nothing whatsoever to do with beans on toast. So again that the idea that we have to have fiber for great gut flora is just a complete myth. But the minute I go on I I went on a podcast the other day with um someone who's quite a well-known actress in the UK and she's like us. She eats real food. um she she's not carnivore, but she, you know, would quite happily eat meat and fish and eggs and but also big salads and all the rest of it. And when she was talking about salads and I was just sort of, well, you know, they're not all that. Um you you're describing what you'd have in your dinner tonight and I'm hearing lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and nothing's registering until you get onto the chicken with the skin and a hard-boiled egg on the side, and then suddenly my ears are pricked up. And she's like, "Well, what do you mean? you know, vegetables are really important and all that fiber and everything. Why does the fiber word always come up? Um, they've done such a great job on that on that propaganda. They really have. Um, people need to see it for what it is, which is just pure propaganda. Yeah. Well, that's I think that's the the best work that they've done is that they they've actually been able to classify fiber as an essential nutrient, meaning if you eat it, you will die. And yet it has zero nutrients in it. You get it has zero nutritional value which I think is just well I think it's wonderful honestly. I think it's just hilarious that they you can't even digest it you know not and then they say oh as it's going through the gut flora it's feeding stuff along the way. It's like where do you get this stuff from while it's going along your digestive tract this thing that your body's got to expel because it can't digest it. You know it's probably quite abrasive. It's probably quite inflammatory. It's probably no coincidence that we've got epidemics of diverticulitis and irritable bowel syndrome and there is that great study um in the Far East and I always um credit Iva Cummins and Paul Mason for doing a great double act on this study and Paul did some great graphics with it and it was only involved about 67 people but they had just the worst irritable bowel syndrome symptoms you could imagine. Constipation, diarrhea, extreme pain, extreme discomfort and the trial intervention trial for all of them. It wasn't randomized. It was just like all of you give up fiber for a period of time and then let us know how your symptoms are. And every single symptom just disappeared. And then the trial finale was, "Do you want to go back to eating fiber?" And of course, a huge proportion of them didn't. I mean, some would because they think, oh, it's just how we're supposed to eat. Um, but the majority of people like, no, that hurt and it didn't hurt when I stopped, so I'm not going back there. Yeah. Well, good for them. figured that out. Hey guys, just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at Carnivore Bar. I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat. For those times that you're out hiking, road tripping, or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat, fat, and salt if you want it, the Carnivore Bar is a great option. So, I like this product not because it's just pure meat, but also because I want the carnivore market to thrive as well. And the more we support meat only products, the more meatonly products there will be available in the mainstream. So, if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind, check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10% off, which also applies to subscriptions, giving you 25% off total. All right. Thanks, guys. That's another thing, too. They said that we need we need fiber for paristtoalsis. Your gut will not move without Okay. Well, the Inuit exist and they, you know, they go to the bathroom and so and you know, 70% of of animals on Earth are carnivores as well fiber. So, so how is it that that we're the only species on Earth and not even only primate there are primates that are completely carnivorous as well and uh and they you know they don't eat eat fiber so it's not a primate thing it's not an animal thing why why would this be a homo sapien thing why would that be us and and why would we not have died during the ice ages and why is it that that population is alive you well up until recently when they were eating their traditional diet some will still eat their traditional diet like some Inuits or the Nette no fiber traditional fiber and yet they're they're able to go to the bathroom. So these things that I don't think that people really think them through and and and just thinking about that this is an essential nutrient. You have to have it or you die and there's zero nutritional value from it. That that to me is just hilarious. I just love that. And it's waste. I mean in what other field on this planet is waste a good thing? Yeah. Everywhere else waste is a bad thing. Yeah. And and at the same time this is sort of like double think where they have they have the the idea in their head that you cannot break down or digest fiber and that's a good thing. This makes your paristalsis go and all that sort of stuff. And in the same thought process they say and you shouldn't eat meat because you can't break it down. It sits in your digestion digestive tract and and takes 10 years to to digest. Like, do you know what a tube is, right? It's not going to sit there. And and I thought that that was a good thing. I thought you didn't want to actually break it down into digesting. I thought you wanted massive bulk for this to to move through. What? Like five seconds ago, this was a good thing. And yet they they can hold those two competing and and uh conflicting thoughts in their head at the exact same time. and see no problem with it. And the other thing is is they say um oh stuff moves out of your body quicker and that's a good thing because then you're not going to get bowel cancer. I'm thinking okay so the the purpose of eating is that we need essential nutrients. We need fats and proteins and vitamins and minerals. So presumably the body has developed a really good way of stripping out the nutrients that we need and then packaging them onto kyomicrons and various other systems in the body to transport them around to where they're needed. So I would kind of think if something's in my system longer, it's because it's providing more nutrition and the body is taking the time to make sure it gets all the goodness out of it. So if my apple is going to shoot through in two hours, that's because it didn't really have very much. It was 95% water. The rest is sugar. There's a bit of vitamin C. There's actually more vitamin C in liver, but don't let that upset your plant-based ideology. Um, what was the point of the apple? You know, the body didn't have very much to strip out of the apple, did it? No fats, soluble nutrients, no B vitamins to speak of. Really, not that much. Um, which is why the body was quite happy to get rid of it really quickly. And it probably bloats you in the process. I mean, they taste great. Don't get me wrong. I've got an apple tree in my garden. So, in autumn, I'm going to eat I'm going to eat an apple. I'm not going to lie. I'm going to eat quite a few apples. Um, but they do make you feel a bit bloated when when you're not used to eating that kind of volume of of fiber or carbohydrate. Yeah. Well, you know, and and that's the thing. We should just understand it for what it is. It's a treat and you enjoy it and fine, but it's not something that's essential that you have to have or you'll die. So, you know, it's like it's like, you know, having a drink sometime. If you enjoy that, it makes you happy, then by all means be, you know, if you're an adult, you know, go ahead and do it. But, you know, you shouldn't you shouldn't drink because someone says it's really important that you get at least, you know, you get your your five and two, five shots and two beers a day. You have to get that, you know, and so, you know, if people want to drink because they enjoy it and that that brings something some joy to their life or whatever, then, you know, that's fine. But understand it for what it is. it's something that's not all that great for you can cause harm and and um and so it may not be something you want to do a lot and and often you know same with with you know apples and other sorts of vegetation. I um also, you know, that reminded me as well of the fact that they they say you have to for, you know, um constipation, you want this to to move fast through so that your your colon doesn't dehydrate your stool too much and it gets dry and hard. And and to me, again, that's going counter to our physiology. So that doesn't really pass the smell test because our colon is designed to dehydrate your stool. That's disappoint. So why are we fighting against our own biology? Why are we fighting against our own physiology and saying no, we don't want this evil colon to do its job that it was designed to do. Obviously there for a reason. It's doing that for a purpose. And so if you have to fight against it, maybe you're doing something wrong. You shouldn't have against your biology and your physiology. Maybe it's that you're not getting enough fat and that and then that excess fat that's sort of sitting there which repels water anyway you know could could sit in there and keep things soft where you know that's sort of when the timeline hits where people started getting very constipated they started recommending fiber was in the 80s I remember this as a kid quite vividly you know where they were saying well we need to everyone's getting constipated doctors saying you should eat more fiber increase your fiber and that will increase your your um you know the bowel motility that was exactly the time we stopped eating fat and we started fat and we all started getting constipated. So to me that sort of that sort of made sense as well. I don't know if you you had a a similar conclusion on that. Oh I mean we did we had the flan diet as it was called in the 1980s written by Audrey Aton and it was one of these uh like the Scarsdale diet. It all went a bit wild. But on the constipation thing, so if your sink is blocked, no plumber is going to come along and say, "Right, put more fat down it. Your sink is blocked." You obviously tried to, you know, throw away some moldy moldy lard or something. Um, just put more fat down it and and it will all be fine. So, I've never understood why when people go and complain of constipation, doctors say, "Oh, you need to eat more fiber." It's like, "I'm already bunged up and you're telling me to put more of the stuff in that's going to bung me up. How is that going to work? You know, if somebody came to me and said, "I'm constipated." I would say, "Eat less fiber and and increase your vitamin C." Um, and not through apples, but actually if you need to take a vitamin C supplement for a period of time, um, the body we out B vitamins. So, if you take a multi-B vitamin, some people do if they go on holiday because there's rumors that it might help with mosquitoes, it turns your wee yellow. So you wee out your B vitamins and we tend to excrete out excess vitamin C. So um if somebody for example took 10 grams of a chewable vitamin C or something and they'd never taken any before, they would almost certainly get the run. So you don't do that. Um, but you might want to take 500 milligrams, see if anything happens, maybe take a gram and just, you know, I've helped my elderly parents over the years who were um sort of around at the time of the 80s when they started saying eat low fat and they changed things at home and they put cereal into their diets for breakfast and stopped doing all the bacon and eggs and the good things that they had naturally done. And of course, as they then got older, four four decades of that, older people, they're sort of, oh, you know, I'm a bit constipated. And it's like, okay, mom, you know, 500 milligrams up to a gram tomorrow. If the earth hasn't moved by Wednesday, up to a gram and a half. And then when it does, you just pair back. And then you find what we call your poo tolerance level of vitamin C. And you'll be going comfortably if you know almost whatever diet you are eating. But hey, by the way, you might want to cut back on the all brown at the same time. Yeah. And that's the thing, you know, you have a traffic jam. You don't just add cars into it. It's already stuck. the the vitamin C thing is is great. I have not I have discovered that uh just in in practice and in life. There's one one time um I was going skiing with my brother and he was he was my older brother. So you know obviously a little dynamic there and he sort of was doing the older brother sort of why don't you go and do this for me? I'm like, "Okay." And and so the thing that he wanted me to do then was and he said it in in sort of the such a way that it sort of irked me. And so he said, "Would you go upstairs and get me a glass, you know, of water and put some vitamin C seed powder and do this and do that?" I'm like, "Okay, I'll do that." And so I already had a plan. My my mom had some water boiling for for tea. So I just took some hot water, put it in a mug, and just dumped it. I don't even know how much. I mean, 20 grams, 30 grams of vitamin C. I mean, it was a lot. Oh, wow. And I mean, it was it was, you know, it was a couple inches at the bottom of this of this. And so, I I dissolved it in the hot water, sort of made a super saturated solution, pulled it down, just slowly, you know, put cooler water in so it wasn't like hot. When it got to him, it just sort of warm. And we both knew what was going on. He knew that I was going to do something to it. And and I knew he was going to know that and he just sort of had this look on his face like he knew it. He's just going to be like over overly would have added too much vitamin C. And he just did the same thing where he's just like not going to say anything. Just drink it all down like nothing happened. Like you know just each other like okay all right we didn't say anything just like headed up to the mountains within half an hour and he just looks at me and goes like how much did you put in there? I'm like, "Oh my bottle, man. I don't even know how you handled that." And he was just like, "My my stomach is really upset right now. Find the restroom." Yeah. Well, we ended up going We ended up getting all of our gear and we ended up going on the first chairlift and you just went, "This is a mistake. Oh my god. I need to get back." and and we had to like get it was I don't know 15 minute chairlift up there and we just sped down to the bottom and I was like okay you know I'll I'll go you know on another run I'll meet you back here and I went on a run check back still not out went on another one still not back I ended up going like five runs and coming back and I just went looking for him I was like where in the hell is he been in there the entire time could he could not leave the bathroom and was just absolutely just destroyed by that so I have seen that. The funny I think the funniest part from that is that he then learned that he's like whenever he sort of blocked out he's like I'll just take some vitamin C. I know that. Exactly. So yeah, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's that's the if you take one thing away from this podcast, guys, you need never be constipated again. That's it. Vitamin C will work for you. I've seen I've seen the results for sure. Absolutely. Um so the other thing too is um well we have we have this massive plant-based push and you know you sort of mentioned it may be because you know people they just sort of want us unhealthy. I I almost have to believe that at this point because I think a lot of people are um I mean a lot of the industries are uh you know coordinating with each other invested in each other. food companies and pharmaceutical companies are are cross-invested in each other. Potentially some of them even, you know, make similar products. I I haven't been able to confirm this, but I I heard at one point that Kelloggs is vertically integrated. They make all the they grow their crops. They make their products and they're also vertically integrated with the pharmaceutical companies and they make diabetes medication as well. So, you know, that was that was um something that Gary Fetkkey told me, Linda's husband and and so I just need to sort of find that source. But, you know, that you know, if that that is the case that they're doing that, I mean, that that's almost malice of forethought that they're they're knowingly causing harm and then they're they're selling you something for that. They But you can't do that. You can't go around smashing tires and sell people tires. That's not that's not allowed. That's not something you're allowed to do. Um, but there's this massive push for plant-based diets. There's massive pushes for veganism. Um, what is your critique on on the vegan diet and and what would you say to people because there are so many people like you said like that that woman who was on Instagram, you know, saying, "Wow, this is a wonderful diet and is ideologically driven." um what would be your response if you were able to have a sit down with her and uh and talk about veganism? Um I've got an advantage in that I've been there. Um so I was vegetarian for about 20 years and during that period I kind of describe it as I lapsed into veganism without really realizing um I'm not much of a cook so if somebody puts food in front of me I'm really happy like just put it in front and I'll I'll eat it. Um, and I was dating somebody at the time who I thought was veggie like me, but it kind of turned out he was a little bit more on the vegan side. And if I'd have thought about it, I was busy. I wasn't thinking about it. I was being given plant-based veggie burgers, rice and peas, um, most nights. And then at work, I tended to be grabbing some dry cereal because it was just, you know, I didn't have to even go and find the milk in the fridge. It was just I was so busy. It was just sort of quick, speedy food. And then there were some cereal bars that I was having for lunch that were, you know, good good amount of energy and quite tasty and I just wasn't giving it any thought. So I I actually suffered some harm uh when I realized that that was kind of the route that I'd gone down. Um so looking back at that time and then also coming across the absolutely outstanding book by Leair Keith called the vegetarian myth. Um there are three reasons why people go vegan, stroke vegetarian, stroke plant-based. So, let's talk about vegan plant-based because that is the extreme of that movement. And the three reasons that vegans will give are number one, they think it's healthier. Number two, they think it's better for the animals. And number three, they think it's better for the environment. So, let's just quickly unpack those. Um, number one is an argument that you just cannot win, dear vegan influencer, because I will just go back to what are the essential nutrients? What does the body need? By essential we mean it doesn't make it. Essential fats, complete proteins, vitamins and minerals, where are they found and where are they found in the form that the body needs them? And they are found in animal foods. And it was of great distress to me um as a vegetarian to discover that. But you've got to go with the evidence when the evidence comes back in your face. So you cannot win that argument. You just dear vegans, you cannot win that argument. It's just incontrovertible. Um the second one is really interesting because the second one is it's better for the animals and that was my reason for being vegetarian. I absolutely adore animals and the idea of actually eating an animal was quite aborant to me. Um what I didn't realize is that there is nothing that you can eat as a vegan for which nothing has died. And this is one of the great things that Leah Keith goes through in the group in in in her book. So she talks about trying to grow a lettuce. So take she takes it to the extreme. She says, "Right, I've got a lettuce patch in my garden. The only way I'm going to end up enjoying that lettuce is if I can keep the slugs and the snails away. Now, I either sit up all night and just keep moving them so they don't get near the lettuce or I have to put down something at some point that is going to kill them and keep them away from the lettuce. But the basic um facts about food are you're going to have to keep the animals that want that food as well, and and there are a lot of animals that like plants. you're going to have to keep them away from that food. And that's not going to be possible on an industrial scale. And of course, even if it were possible with the lettuce in the garden, you cannot live on lettuce alone. And so, um, I've got a presentation online called Should We Be Vegan? And in this second part, I've got a picture, um, of this sort of combine harvester sweeping across the field, and it's two, three tennis courts wide. And you want to say to vegans, okay, so which animals are going to survive that? you know, your your mice, your vos, your rabbits, domestic cats, god forbid, you know, people's pets who are out playing in fields, if people live in rural areas, that combine comes down and they were having a little snooze in the long grass, they've got no chance. And as well, you've got snails and worms and insects and bumblebees and other things that that you might well care about. So there's a great paper called field deaths in plant agriculture and it tries to estimate tries to quantify and you're up into the billions billions of animals are dying every year and I hate to say this vegans but I don't know how Kelloggs when they're sweeping that barley field or that wheat field to turn it into into the cereals. I don't know how they then get those bits of animals out of your cereals. I mean the whole thing is just harvested. If you watch farming programs and you see that it just all ends up in a big pile and then it goes off to the mills and then it ends up being processed either into beer or into bread or into cereals or whatever. Where was the bit in the process that was trying to get out all the bits of worms and cat and rabbit and vos and whatever because I didn't see it. So I'm sorry but you are eating bits of animals. You just didn't sit down and and eat some lamb. So if you're up against billions of deaths in field agriculture, your more honest thing is actually to eat one cow. If you want as few animals to die as possible, and I put it up on on the presentation and you look at the calories that you can get from a cow and you can feed one person from one cow for the year. Um so if you want one animal to die as opposed to billions, then you need to eat the cow. Um, and you also need to realize that if we don't eat the cow, it's not the case that you're going to enjoy seeing these animals in fields because farmers don't keep pets. So, let's say the world goes vegan overnight. There's a directive that comes out. We've got no choice but to comply. As soon as the current cows, sheeps, pigs, chickens, whatever are dead. They're they're gone. They're gone forever. The species dies out. There are no more cows and sheeps grazing in the field. And of course you then come on to the third argument which is they think it's better for the environment. And where do you even start on that one? We have no top soil without ruminance. So without the cows and the sheep and the goats and the deer grazing on the land with their unique four stomach system hosting the microfllora regurgitating it eating it up again hosting it regurgitate. That is what rejuvenates top soil. And what we should be doing with our food production is the old free field system from the UK agricultural revolution. So one year you've got animals in there grazing, making the soil fantastic. The next year you've got the crops in there taking the nutrients back from the soil. Plants rape the soil. Um so they've got a year to rape it. And then the third year you leave it to recover before the animals then go back in and make it good again. We used to have top soil that was several feet thick. We've now got top soil that's millimeters thick. So vegans, if you get your way, we have no way of producing your plant food. We have no chance of producing harvests in, I don't know, 10 years, 5 years. It's not much more than that. There literally is no top soil left on the planet. Then you're into what is possibly the endgame anyway for companies like Cargill, Monsanto. They've got the control of the food supply and we've already got food being grown upside down in green houses. No need for soil, no need for ruminants, no need for nutrients. You just hang it from the ceiling. You spray it with um chemicals. You spray it with water or you've got water trickling down through it and you can make a strawberry in a non-tropical environment on Christmas Day. And that's the way our food supply will go if vegans get their way. And it's a terrifying dystopia. And the idea that cows farting is somehow burping. It's burping, isn't it? Not far. You know, the idea that that is somehow an issue. You've got to wake up, guys. You've got to wake up. You are You are really part of the problem. You are the spokespeople for these conglomerates, whether they're big food or big farmer. You are manner of heaven to those organizations. you are doing their bidding work and you think you're doing it for the right reason. I admire your integrity. I admire why you think you're doing it, but you could not be more wrong and please rethink what you're doing because it is wrong. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you for that. I I totally agree with all of that. It's um it is a shame that these people's very good intentions are being manipulated in such a way because I mean I mean the people that are trying to do the manipulation they have an ideology and they're driven by that motivation and obviously that's not who we're talking about. We're talking about 99.9% of people who go vegan vegetarian for a very good honest reason and and they really do care about about animals and the environment and and nutrition and their own health and the health of of others around them. And unfortunately, they've been seriously manipulated. I I share all of their uh their their drives and passions. It's just, you know, I've I've seen things in a slightly different way and so I've I've taken that in a different direction and but I I totally agree with their motivations. I really appreciate their motivations and it's really unfortunate that these very good kind people have been manipulated in such a by by a lot of conglomerates, a lot of um special interests and people trying to make money and profit off of their suffering which is pretty [Music] All right. Well, that brings me to the other side of the argument, which is a lot of the some of the vegans will say, "Well, maybe this is maybe plant food is missing some things, but you can just take some supplements, and that's fine. Um, plant toxins don't exist. That's a that's a myth that from, you know, big botany textbook, I guess. I don't know who's coming up with that that one." But um the the other side of it is well you shouldn't eat meat because that's bad for you. It makes you sick, gives you heart disease, probably causes diabetes somehow and and um and obviously the guidelines are there and and they should be there. they've been there uh for quite some time and we should follow and honestly I I talked to doctors now that are getting flak from their colleagues or even their you know heads of department about you know doing low you know suggesting low carb diets to their patients and highfat and they and they get a lot of push back and and they say well look at the evidence you know look at these studies and one thing they say is I don't I don't care what the evidence says. I care what the guidelines say. I practice guideline medicine and you know that's obviously pretty problematic. But the dietary fat guidelines um you did a presentation on on whether these should have been even been introduced in the first place. So I mean what evidence even there to even make this recommendation first? I mean I think we can agree that they're wrong but you know should they have even happened in the first place? I mean, is it a matter that I think we should rethink them and we I think we should should recast them, but should they have even happened in the first place? No. Um, no. In a in a nutshell, um, that was my PhD. So, my PhD, I mean, gosh, if I can remember the title, it was um an examination of the introduction of the dietary fat guidelines, which was total fat and saturated fat using systematic review and meta analysis. And it was the first part of the PhD was to look back at the time. So um what I said was let me imagine that I'm the dietary guideline committee back in the US in 1977 when Senator McGovern was playing around with the US guidelines and then they became embedded in the 1980 guidelines for Americans and of course they've just got repeated every five years with a few tweaks but essentially the high carb low-fat diet advice has prevailed and the saturated lowsaturated fat has has prevailed. So I went back to say if I'd have been looking at that as the committee at the time was the evidence there to introduce those two guidelines. So the two guidelines were you should have no more than 30% of your total calories in the form of total fat and you should have no more than 10% of your calories in the form of saturated fat. So there are four parts to the PhD basically. So I looked back at the time and I said okay let's look at the population evidence. So that would be studies like the Framinham study, the seven countries study. Um and what did the population evidence say? Although as we opened up the um the interview talking about the population evidence is not as strong as the trial evidence. And in summary, there was no um support in population evidence whatsoever. The only one that was suggesting any kind of association was the seven countries study that actually found not many people know this. The seven countries study did not conclude anything against total fat. It did think that there might be an association with heart disease in men and saturated fat. But then Anel Keys was um assuming that things like cake and ice cream were saturated fat. So it was kind of nutritional ignorance. Then you look at the trial data that was around at the time. There were only six trials. Things like the rose corn oil trial. Um the Sydney diet heart study was available to the British committee in 1983. not even the American committee in 1977. You had the Oslo trial, um the London lowfat trial. So those combined six trials and and my first paper from the PhD was the one that summarized all of this and it just went viral. And it basically said, so there are only six trials. They only studied 2 and a half thousand people. All of those two and a half thousand people were men. So we've studied no women whatsoever. All of those two and a half thousand men were sick. So they'd already had heart disease. So we didn't study any healthy people and none of those studies actually concluded that we should start restricting dietary fat. On the contrary, they were making warnings such as a low-fat diet has no place in the treatment of myocardial inffection. That's the final sentence of the low-fat diet trial. um the Woodhill trial and another one that administered vegetable oils instead of natural animal fats. They actually cautioned about the potential toxicity of their interventions. They were quite worried about vegetable oils in these trials. So there's no evidence at the time. So then the second part of the PhD was to say okay but we're not in 1977 1983. We're now in 2016 when I was doing my PhD. So there are more studies available. There's the Women's Health Initiative, that massive study done just on women by Howard over in the US. We've got the Minnesota coronary study that's now come out. We've got a few more population studies. Let's pull all of these together and let's see what the evidence says. Now, and the evidence still says there was no reason to introduce either of those two fact guidelines whatsoever. Now, I say to people in that presentation, don't just take my word for it. You might think, I'm not paid by anyone. I'm not paid by industry. I've got no conflicts, but you might decide you don't want to believe what I say. Well, I'm one of seven teams of researchers who've looked at this. And when researchers look at this kind of thing, they come up with a number of findings. So, let's say one of my papers would have a finding on total fat and then a finding on saturated fat. So, among these 17s, there were 40 different findings. Now if I tell you only three suggested that there was anything whatsoever to do with either total fat or saturated fat, you'll realize that I am not alone in asserting that there are no issues with fat. So one of the three foundings was the Chowry paper where they found an issue with trans fats and I think it was heart disease like you won't get any arguments from me on that one because trans fats of course is processed food. And then there were the two Hooper papers and one was just a repeat of the other, an update of the other. So essentially they found the same thing and they claimed that there was an issue with saturated fat and cardiovascular disease events. They found nothing for mortality, nothing for coronary heart disease, nothing for this, nothing for that, nothing for the other, not for the other. They found this one finding that they then just repeated two times um in their own document which was a cockrain review. It's about 90 pages long. um when they do the sensitivity test and this was a great test for not just the studies that said they were going to reduce saturated fat but the ones that actually did there was no impact whatsoever. So we have no evidence we just have no evidence and the impact of that and this was a real penny drop moment for me. So everyone visualize a circle in front of you and you'll know this Anthony it's just a a nutritional fact I can give you an empirical citation for it. I can give you theoretical citations. Protein just ends up being about 15, maybe 20% of any natural diet. It doesn't actually matter much if you're a vegetarian or if you're a carnivore who's not doing stupid things but eating the proper amount of fat with your meat. It just ends up being around 15 to 20%. So now put in one segment that says 30%, you should have no more than 30% of your diet in the form of fat. And you can see what's happened to the rest of the circle. the rest of the circle has to be taken up by carbohydrate. So the inevitable outcome of our dietary fat guidelines was that we mandated a minimum 55% carbohydrate in our diet. And at the time of doing that, we hadn't studied it. We didn't know that it was safe, let alone healthy. But it was just the inevitable consequence of the dietary fat recommendation that came in. And that is why we have the lowfat, high carbohydrate guidelines that we do. Because by going low fat, you necessarily go high carbohydrate. Which is just exact opposite of why if you go low carb, you're going to go high fat. Unless you start doing really stupid things with protein like white fish or skinless chicken breasts or protein shakes or egg whites, unless you do stupid things like that, you're going to have that natural amount of protein. So that is where those guidelines left us. Now the other things I' I'd say to your colleagues is a couple of things actually. One, how have they done for us? So those guidelines came in in the late '7s in the US. There's a great NHANES chart. I open my 2009 obesity book with this chart and you've got obesity in the US and it's just, you know, trundling along pretty close to zero and then it just takes off like an airplane and suddenly the UK goes from 2.7% obesity in the early '7s to 25% by the end of the last century. You know, we get a tenfold increase in obesity. Diabetes explodes, heart disease explodes, cancer explodes. you know how has it been doing for us dear fellow colleagues and then the second thing that I would say to people what had one of the biggest impacts um among doctors who are prepared to listen is when new dietary guidelines came out in the UK in 2016 I went to have a look at exactly where they came from so a panel was put together by public health England so public health England is the dietary guideline setting body it will be like your Australian guideline committee equivalent and they had 11 members on the panel that they wanted to look at the new revised guidelines and I got a paper on this in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. They were one of the few journals prepared to take this on board because Public Health England were not happy and I got a lot of flack. Eight out of those 11 members were representatives of the fake food industry. And I'm not talking representatives of one company. So I'm not saying they had someone on there from Coca-Cola or Kelloggs. They had people from the Food and Drink Federation, the Institute for Grocery Distribution. These are organizations that represent every single fake food company you can think of. They were the industry bodies to push for fake food. We had something called the Association of Convenience Stores. Now, in the UK, those are the little shops that are on every corner. They only sell junk. They only sell biscuits and crisps and cakes and sweets and ice cream and Coca-Cola and fizzy drinks and cigarettes and stuff you might run out of on a Sunday evening, but it's just basically junk. And those were the guys who put together our healthy eating guide. So when you look at that guide and doctors, you want to tell me that that's what we should be advising, you better know where it comes from and you better know how it's done for us over the last 40 years. Now, I understand why you're doing it because you don't want to get sued and you know that if your patient ends up with diabetes, but you recommended the government guidelines, you can't be sued. And if your patient, if this is the Gary Fett key territory, if your patient ends up with diabetes and you told them to do the right thing, I mean, the chances are they're not going to end up with diabetes. That's the irony. But something happens and somebody sees that you put them on a low carb diet, you can then be sued. who who's going to take that risk? Only the really caring doctor is prepared to take that risk for themselves to genuinely help their patients. Yeah. Thankfully, uh because of of Dr. Fetty's martyrdom, uh it's been accepted in the Australian guidelines, national guidelines for the treatment of diabetes as a low carb diet. And that that actually protected uh people and like me I had I had someone who was actually um wasn't even I he wasn't even a colleague but he was a he was a a doctor here that just seemed to just have a problem with me and so he tried to um uh tried to make a a claim behind my back against saying that I supported the potentially dangerous carnivore diet and um and tried to tried to you know get me in trouble like like Dr. Fecky got in trouble and it made up a whole bunch of other things. them just flagrantly um you know fictitious and so it was easy to sort of disprove which didn't really help it help this case but I was at least able to just say like listen carnivore diet is a ketogenic diet or just the ketogenic diet is is now part of the national schedule for diabetes treatment here's the link and a carnivore diet is a ketogenic diet that's what this is so this is not fringe pin a fringe opinion this is mainstream medicine now And uh and thankfully that was that was uh you know dismissed. It didn't it didn't go anywhere. So um yeah I think that that you sort of have to I mean as Dr. Fecky said you know once you see this you can't unsee this. You know he he unfortunately having to cut off people's limbs with diabetic foots and things like that that they were getting necrotic and he was having to to amputate these. And he found putting them on a ketogenic diet stopped them from needing or as radical an amputation as they needed previously. And I mean that's I mean how how can you not do that for your patients? I know that's how can you say okay well don't do that. And how can you as a nutritionist or a dietitian or some other person in the medical system say no you're not allowed to do that and leg off like that's that's insane that that we've gotten to that. So yeah, I think that uh thankfully, you know, it's that's at least starting to become a bit more acceptable. But I I think the way I do it, I I my first interview I ever did was with um Dr. Sean Baker on his first uh podcast, human human performance outliers podcast, and we were talking sort of a lot about the sort of the carnivore diet and all that sort of stuff. And and he um he sort of asked me, he's like, "So so what are you going to do? how are you gonna how is this going to affect your your practice? And I said, well, I just I just plan on getting in a lot of trouble, you know, because, you know, I can't I can't not do this for people. You know, this is the right thing to do. It's not ethical. I don't think it's ethical to withhold something that I that I know can help them. So, that's just sort of going to have to roll those dice. So, yeah, I think that's the only thing you can do. Um I I'm conscious of your time. Do you still have a bit or do you need to wrap up? Yeah, sure. Yeah, if you got another question or Yeah, lovely. Yeah. Well, I I I I do. Um, couple more things that I I wanted to ask you about. Um, one thing I I I I saw from some of your videos, which I thought was was quite nice and something that I've played around with in my head thinking that, you know, with these food the food misinformation and the guidelines being what they were that this would just bring about um eating disorders and this this could and this is something I believe you have um experience with that you wrote about where you talked about food cravings and eating disorders and how they can sort of each And I think that was that would sort of lead into my next question which was um the Harkham diet. you wrote a book about the Harkham diet um about sort of optim optimal diet then and and how this that can help alleviate um at least food cravings as well. And um and I I also wondered sort of has anything changed from you 14 years ago or so when you wrote that to now with the diet as well? No, that's a good question actually. So um that the first book I wrote was in 2004 and I could have written it about 20 years earlier because it was something that fascinated me in my first job um when I graduated from Cambridge. I became a management consultant which is ridiculous because you don't know anything. So how can you consult anyone? But anyway, they do that and I got posted over to Boston because I think I was about the only person prepared to sort of just go over there on my own and work 135 hours a week or whatever it was. Um, and anytime I did get time off, I didn't have any friends. I hadn't met anyone over there. I was working too hard. So, I'd end up in a bookstore and I was eating really badly. I was just um trying to, you know, I literally was working 17our days. So, I was trying to keep myself awake and I was grabbing some M&M's, which were always in the kitchen over in the workplace. And of course, you get a big sugar high and then you get the sugar crash and then you need something else. So, I was just in this constant roller coaster of, oh, how can I get more energy? And of course, it gives you less energy because you just end up putting on weight and feeling sluggish and just not being able to access your own body's stores of energy. So, it was it was quite a a sort of personal experience, but not one that I had much time to explore at the time. So, I'm in these bookstores and US bookstores were just 20 years ahead of the UK and you could just I mean, we didn't even have Starbucks in the UK then. So, I get this lovely milky cappuccino and they would just put you in like there's a seating area and they just say, "Take a book off the shelf. It doesn't matter if you're not going to buy it. Just browse it, read it. If you buy it, that's great. If you put it back, just put it back in nice condition." It's like, "Wow, this is amazing." And I started reading um about things like food intolerance and um yeast um syndrome as it was called, candida or beans. Um really early explorations of imbalancing gut flora and what impact this could have on the whole physiology of the body. And then of course hypoglycemia which at the time was just not something that was generally being talked about but now it is just so mainstream. the idea that you can have blood sugar highs and lows. Um, and not just as a diabetic, but anybody eating the the sort of recommended advice. Um, so I was really trying to understand food cravings at that time because I was experiencing them. And I'd observe things like, well, I never crave salmon and green beans or, you know, scrambled eggs. I'm craving carbohydrates basically. It's just carbs. Um, and it's particular carbs. Um, and and I guess that's when I really started trying to understand food and learning about food. Um, so my first book, as I said, was called Why Do You Overeat When All You Want Is To Be Slim? That could have been written 20 years, not 20 years earlier quite, but you know, certainly 10 years earlier. And it explored those conditions and it looked at a lot of literature that I'd come across where doctors would be writing about their patients saying, "Oh, and my patient Shirley was going to the 7-Eleven at 3:00 in the morning and buying cartons of ice cream and crate loads of cookies and couldn't stop." And it's like, whoa, you're on to something here. um you're exploring the condition of hypoglycemia, but you're explaining what's happening. When people are out of the normal blood glucose range, but you're then not making the connection that the minute they go for those kind of things, your blood glucose is just going to lurch unnaturally high, then it's going to go unnaturally low because the body's not going to get it into that magic sort of one teaspoon of glucose in your in your, you know, the four grams in your whole bloodstream. So, you you're just messing this whole thing up. And it's why if you have one biscuit, you then can't stop. If you start on the M&M's, you can't stop. I mean, it was explaining so many different things. Then I started looking at what is food and why do we need to eat? Um, and then I started noticing things like um nature puts food in if if you look at the macronutrients and I have this little chart that I use in presentations over on one side you've got a pure carbohydrate and there's only one on the planet and that's shakrose. It's got no protein, no fat, no nutrients, completely useless, but it's your only pure carb. Um, and of course, honey, which is just sticky sugar. Over on the other side, you've got pure fats, which would be your olive oil, your coconut oil, and then everything else in between, butter to lettuce, contains protein. So, you put this sort of protein bar across the top. You've got stuff that's providing plant protein, and you've got stuff that's providing animal protein. So, then you say, "That's really interesting. If protein is in everything, nature is providing foods that vegans do eat, and they are carb proteins, and they are your grains, your legumes, your vegetables, and your fruits. And then nature is providing foods that vegans don't eat, things that you eat, which is the animal foods, which is meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. Um, and it's really rare that nature puts fat and carbohydrate in the same food at the same time. In fact, it pretty much only does it with nuts and seeds and avocado. And of those, the ones that you'll find really difficult to limit if you've got a weight problem are nuts. And if you start on nuts and you're trying to lose weight, that's not going to be a good move because you're just going to want more because they have that unique fat carb combo. And the fake food companies have realized that the fat carb combo is completely irresistible. So, think about all the foods that you crave that you can't stop eating once you start. They're a fat carb combo. So, they're the ice creams, the cookie, the donuts, the biscuits, the cakes. Um, even crisps now. They've got fat in them, but they put sugar in them as well. And of course, they've got carbohydrate because they're potato chips. So, I really started to understand food more. What is real food and what is fake food? And why can we not resist this fake food? And it was the start of my journey down the route of we've just not got to eat that stuff. We've got no chance. Now, I then became a board director at Cardiff Metropolitan University. They happen to have a food science lab. They took me around the food science lab as one of the board directors. I thought, "This is hilarious. You have no idea what else I do in my spare time." And I'm watching these students being fed some crisps and then they write this report and they say, "What was the first experience in your mouth? How long did it last in your mouth? Was it fatty enough? Was it sugary enough? Was it sweet enough? Was it salty enough? put your form back in through the hatch and then they'll give you something that's been tweaked and they just keep doing that all day long until they get the perfect Pringle and they know that if you put one in your mouth, you are not going to be able to stop and you're going to want to buy Pringles again. Um I've heard people describe Dunkin Donuts as crack cocaine. That's what they're after. Um so that that was me starting to understand what food addiction is all about. You can't eat this stuff in moderation if you're a food addict. If you ever find yourself overeating any processed food, you have to stop eating processed food. You can no more have that in moderation than an alcoholic can have alcohol in moderation. You just can't. You've just got to stop having it. And then you will find that the more even you can keep your blood glucose, the easier you will find it to control your eating. And you only have that teaspoon in your entire bloodstream at any one time. You have an apple. you are shooting out of the normal range. You probably got four times the level of glucose that your body wants. Your body has to call upon the pancreas to release insulin to attach to the glucose to take it out of the bloodstream. If the body gets that just right and you're back within that incredibly narrow band, great. But it's not going to get it right every time. And the more you do it, the less chance you've got of it getting right. And if your blood glucose is slightly on the low side of normal, your body is going to make you crave food. So almost the single best tip if you want to control your eating is manage your blood glucose level because if you let your blood glucose level dip below normal and you're not fat adapted because that's the time when the body will just naturally call upon body fat or or triglycerides in the bloodstream or whatever to put some um energy back into your bloodstream. Your body's going to try to get you to eat some fast carbohydrates because that's what you're used to fueling on. Um and and you said something on this earlier on. It's about working with your body, not working against your body. Trying to eat junk food in moderation is working against your body. Trying to eat real food, really moderating your carb intake because you're naturally eating the most nutrient-dense foods, the meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. That's the way to work with your body. And then the the the final tip, you know, of my three sort of eat raw food, choose the food for the nutrients. The third tip is eat no more than three times a day. If you're grazing the whole time, you know, you're going to end up the size of a cow because that's what they do. Um, and you're going to mess up your blood sugar all day long. So, just stop it. If you don't like breakfast, don't eat it. That's you eating twice a day. If you're too busy for lunch and you had a great meal last night, that's great. That's you down to one meal a day. Um, I'm a three meal a day person, but it's whatever works for you. Perfect. Well, I think that that's great advice and and it's it's something that that I think all of us have have noticed. I mean, you do try to like the Dunkin Donuts or Crispy Cream, but my god, I the first time I tried a crispy cream when the hot light was on, I came up, I was I mean, that was the plutonic form of a donut. Like, that was this is what's supposed to be. And I'm of I mean, good luck not eating the entire box of crispy cream donuts. That was such a great business model. They they opened them up so slowly. It was like a 45 minute line to even get an order. And then yeah, well, okay. Well, we already waited 45 minutes. Obviously, we're getting like nine boxes, not finishing all those, you know, by the time you get home. So, or when you get home and um you know, it and it works and and we're just you know, eating ourselves into into an early grave. And and so, you know, that was one that was one critique of the carnivore diet from um um Rhonda Patrick and she said that well in all of these extreme elimination diets when you're sort of cutting out a whole bunch of things, uh the natural tendency is to is to just sort of eat less over time. And so really it's just calories in, calories out. And of course, you know, that that's problematic just on its face. But what I thought was was um a bit strange was was how she couldn't see how how amazing that was, how important that was. That just naturally eating naturally, letting your body figure it out, not counting calories, not bringing out the calculator and trying to figure out your macros, but just eating intuitively, your body will naturally eat to your biological design. will eat exactly what you will reduce your calorie intake or your food intake, I should say, and and and temper it to exactly your biological demands. I mean, how do you not see how how important that is? And um you know, that's that's that's something that the food scientists are trying to subvert. They're they're trying to go exactly opposite of that. are trying to screw up your natural senses so that you overeat so that you can't stop eating. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're we're money-making machines. If they can get us to buy our food and then keep eating their food. Um you I missed a bit of your question earlier on when you said sort of have I changed over the time. So I first wrote um so it's nearly 20 years ago. Why' you overeat came out? I was vegetarian at the time of eating that. Um, so I would talk about not mixing your foods, not replicating that fat carb combo. So I would give the example, um, if if you eat oat biscuits on their own, you've got a limit. If you eat cheese on its own, you've got a limit. If you put the crackers and the cheese together, you've got no limit. So eat the way that nature intended you to eat. And because I was vegetarian at the time, I would then say, okay, remember protein's in everything. So, think of meals as either carb meals, which is your legumes, your grains, your vegetables, and your salads, or your fat meals, which for a vegetarian would be your sort of egg, cheese, um, yogurt, dairy based meals, but don't go sort of mixing those two. And vegetables are fine because they're essentially water. So you can have those with fat meals or you know so I I might have an omelette um with some coles saw made with different vegetables or I might have brown rice with a um a veggie curry or something like that. So those would be my sort of carb meals or fat meals and it actually worked really well and I you know I could not believe how spectacular the weight loss was. You know I was getting I put my email in the first book because I thought oh you know nobody's going to read this. Um, I started getting emails from people saying, "Oh my goodness, you know, this this really works." And where were you when I was at university? Stuff in my face. And it's like, well, I was where you were. I was at university, stuff in my face, and not really understanding what was going on. But I kind of, you know, I worked it out and wanted it to share it with you guys. But how has that evolved over the years? Well, I'm not vegetarian anymore, obviously. I ended up um, not being vegetarian. 2010, I went to a Western Price conference in London. I was fortunate enough to hear Barry Groves rest in peace um do a presentation on the carnivore diet and um natural evolution and why we should be eating in the way that we were. And then I heard Sally Fallon Morell talking about nutrients and how would I know this? I mean you don't learn nutrition at school when she was saying and of course vitamin A comes in two forms. There's retinol that we find in animal foods and there's carotene that we find in plant foods. And yes, you can convert keratene to retinol, which is the form that the body wants, but not everybody can convert. And diabetics, interestingly, are particularly poor converters. And I was sat there thinking, "Oh my goodness." Because when I'd lapsed into veganism, very very soon afterwards, I'd ended up at Morfield's Eye Hospital, which is the primary um elite eye hospital in the UK with a really unusual eye condition that ended up having me having an operation in each eye separately. I could hardly open my eyes through pain at one point. And I didn't realize at the time what it was. This was 10 years before I saw this Sally Fallon. So this was sort of 1999. had had this eye trouble. saw Sally Fallon in 2010 and it was like why did nobody at the eye hospital say right for something to change something must have changed so what have you changed and then we could probably have worked it out together you know if they' said what's your diet are you eating oily fish are you eating liver I'd be like well no I'm vegetarian okay how many eggs and how much dairy are you eating oh right now not actually any you know it should have been so obvious to the doctors and I bet even today they don't ask people when they walk in with an eye problem, what are you eating? And particularly young women, have you recently gone vegan or vegetarian? Um, so how am I different now? I'm not vegetarian. I'm even lower on the carbohydrate because if you're not vegetarian, suddenly the meat and the fish meals open up to you. Um, and I'm not saying that I being a natural vegetarian, you know, if somebody said to me, "Would you like a mushroom risotto or something?" It's like, "Oh my god, that'd be so tasty." Um, but I can't eat it knowing that actually the nutrients are going to be in a steak and I'm not carnivore. So, some steak and some greens that we grow in the garden or whatever or some beetroot that my husband pulled out of the garden yesterday. Um, I don't seem to have a problem with plants. I might be deluding myself, but my health seems fine eating mostly meat, fish, eggs, and dairy with some vegetables and salads and 85% dark chocolate. Um, and that's me. But when I look back at the amount of brown rice, beans, pulses, lentils, um veggie sort of carb proteins that I used to eat, it it's very very different nowadays. Yeah. Well, I mean I obviously very healthy and that's my my main drive is not to just drive every carrot out of every hand, but you know really just to just to sort of let people know that they that you know again you know if you want to if you want to do these sorts of things and you enjoy them and you feel good with them great but I I don't think that people should feel that they are obligated to eat these things if they don't want to and that meat is not bad for you that meat is very for That's sort of my main thing. If I can just sort of get that message out there, I'd be happy. For for me, I I just have noticed. I mean, I I originally stopped eating plants simply because I I'd taken a number of classes and I just had a a a professor that really influenced me because he said he was showing us all these different toxins and carcinogens in the produce that we eat. We're very blown away by that. And he just said that he himself doesn't eat, you know, vegetables or salads. doesn't let his kids eat salads and and his words and which is why I named my talk this plants are trying to kill you and I was like yo convinced and so I just I stopped that day and I I really never felt better in my entire life and I was always eating very clean. I never ate junk food. My mom always cooked every meal. Um maybe we'd have some box cereals but often often we were were eating whole foods otherwise. And um then I slipped off of that because I didn't sort of realize the significance of of what I was doing. And then just six years ago, I sort of rediscovered this and went like, you know, that makes sense because those five years that I was doing this, I've never felt better in my entire life. And I've always been trying to get back there. Like how do I get back there? I just it was just this golden time. And I just figured it was because, you know, age 20 to 25 prime of life. and I was absolutely working out like a crazy person all the time. And so I was like, well, of course you're going to be in great shape. And so then at 38, I was already sort of doing keto. I just had naturally I wasn't doing keto, but I just sort of naturally gravitated away from carbohydrates because they didn't make me feel good and back pain, like act quite serious back pain. And when I I sort of avoided carbohydrates for three, four days, my back pain went away. like, "Yep, well, that's that's what I'm doing." And then when I So, I was just eating veggies, just greens and some lean meat, and I was still avoiding fat, you know, even though I had seen tons and tons and tons of research that I shouldn't be avoiding fat. And then I just stopped eating the greens and just started eating more fatty meat, a lot more fatty meat. And this is the whole calories in, calories out thing out the window, at least for me, because I started eating far more food. I probably quint quintupled my caloric intake and and and vastly increase the amount of fat that I was eating and I and I stopped eating the greens and I lost 23 pounds in 10 days. So 10 10 days and I I just felt amazing after that and to the point that I I felt like I was 22 again. And I went did what I did at 22 again, which is I went out and started playing rugby again and went out and started, you know, playing with the my team in Seattle, which had always been in the top top leagues in America and now had gone professional in Major League Rugby. And I felt great. I was I was able to push myself even though I hadn't played a full season in three years, I felt good enough that I was able to keep up with everybody who had was in great shape. And and so after that, I just started getting in better and better and better shape and I just felt amazing. So for me, that's why I sort of do this. And and when some things sort of slip back in, it's not that I just feel horrible. It's not that I get sick. It's not I get diabetes. I don't have an autoimmune issue like rheumatoid arthritis or Crohn's. I do have patients that have these and I and I do encourage them to be quite strict because uh it's more important for them because little can can trigger them. And so if they want to stay off medications, it's sort of important to do that. I don't have those problems, but when these things sort of slip in, I don't feel my best and I really enjoy feeling best. And so, you know, that that's why I do it. But I certainly um you know, just encourage people to do what's right for them. So not um you definitely not I'm still I'm still a fan even though you you eat vegetables. Who knows? I mean, maybe one day I'll try it and just think, "Oh, why didn't I try that sooner?" But it is convenient. We eat out quite a lot. It's nice going around to people's houses for a dinner party. And almost at a dinner party, whatever they put in front of me, I'll eat. Um, you know, if they put potatoes or even rice or pasta or whatever, it's kind of like, hey, it's not going to harm me because I don't feel any different the next day. Um, maybe I'll get one day and it does. But uh so do you think they hurt everyone or do you think it is individual? Well, I think I think it's there's individuality in that some people are more sensitive than others and certainly there's certain populations such as native populations like the Native Americans, native um Australians who are going to be much more susceptible to the different chemicals in there. I mean, you know, we we have the advantage that we come from a European background in the sense that we've been our ancestors were exposed to agriculture 8 to years ago and so we've had about 10,000 years of adaptation towards this. But the Native Americans, Native Australians have not and their health is has severely suffered. When I first came to Australia, I was told that when you have an Aboriginal patient, a native Australian patient, that that whatever their their age is on their sticker, add 20 years to that because that's the diseases they're getting. You need to start considering these people elderly when they're 30 and 40 and because that they're getting diseases of the elderly because their bodies are just breaking down much quicker. Um, and so I think that that that is because of u because they did not have exposure to agriculture more than hundred years at most. A lot of them especially Native Americans like the plains plains Indians. I they were eating bison by and large up until the late 1800s when we eradicated all the bison in order to wipe out their food supply. And then they had to start going to alternative means of of um nutrition and their health has suffered dramatically since then. You can look at the Inuit similar sorts of examples nearly no chronic disease or cancer early in the 20th century and then sort of decade by decade is sort of creeping up creeping up and increasing as became more westernized and incorporated into western civilization. But even in you know European populations or other populations in Asia that have had agriculture very long a long time or Middle East, Mediterranean areas, Northern Africa obviously Egypt and and um uh the middle and Persia would obviously be sort of centers. There are people that that can be a bit more sensitive and have autoimmune conditions, have this activity, the the the molecular mimicry, they're reacting to something that's getting in their body, whether they're causing um leaky gut and lectins and other sort of plant toxins are getting in or just bacteria are slipping in. Their body's reacting to the bacteria, it's reacting to something. And thought is is that well you get this molecular mimicry and you get sensitized to your own body and then you're and then you just start really focusing on that. But that doesn't fit with the observed phenomena which is when you stop eating basically everything you just cut down to a complete elimination diet down to just meat and water really just red meat and water as Dr. J. Salsbury discovered in the late 1800s that you could actually put autoimmune conditions into remission with a pure red and red meat and water diet like rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's and ulcer colitis. You know, we're seeing that now. So, so why would that be? You're you're not eating these sorts of things and now all of a sudden you're not introducing something into your body that your body acting to. So, now your your antibodies go down. And I I track these with my patients. I track their antibodies and you can actually see them coming down when this dietary change and then their symptoms improve as well. I don't think it's just the bacteria because it can take months and months and months for leaky gut to heal. But when take people off all plants within days they're improving. Within weeks someone is can be in complete remission symptomatically from Crohn's for instance. And so, you know, that's not long enough for their gut to heal the leaky guts. I think that there definitely is something in the plants that we're reacting to. Objectively, plants do have defense chemicals. Some people are react more or less to them. But if if you react, you know, less harshly to lead poisoning than I do, that doesn't mean that lead is good for you. It just means it's less bad for you. And so, I mean, objectively, these they do have toxins. And I think that a lot of people are we've just been eating plants forever and so this is just how we feel and you can sort of improve things and I I would hope that you would have felt better once you started incorporating more meat. But you know sometimes we just we can only compare ourselves today against ourselves yesterday. And so today we feel good as compared to yesterday or maybe the same or maybe worse. But until you until you have that frame of reference where you've just completely eliminated everything for you 30 days, you don't you don't necessarily know exactly how good you can possibly feel. And so sometimes I encourage that with my patients to just like, hey, look, just try it for 30 days, see how you feel. And you know, then you can sort of add things back in. Say, well, I really like this. Maybe I'll add this back in. See how I react to it. Add this. Okay, that was fine. Great. now I can add this other thing back in. But I certainly found that when when and I didn't have major medical issues. I was always very healthy and just by getting rid of the greens I I literally felt a thousand times better and I was already not eat. And so I just found that even some little things getting getting snuck in could make me just sort of just dull the edge a bit. maybe maybe not all that horrible, but it I've noticed a difference. And so it can be that, you know, just because we've had that that experience, we just sort of this baseline level of feeling that we've always felt, we sort of you know, say I feel good or bad in comparison to that. But when you know that that um that that's not the same thing as as getting rid of all this stuff out of your diet and then seeing okay how how was the best I can possibly feel and maybe you possibly feel maybe is not all that much better than now go happily go back to you know eating eating whatever but it could be that you feel amazing me personally after about two weeks three weeks I looked at I looked back on my life and realized that I felt like garbage my entire life except years and right now. And so I was actually quite upset. I sort of robbed my my birthright of actually feeling amazing all the time. And so that's what that's what people tell me when they try it and they they give it 30 days and and they they say the same thing. You're very compelling. I might be trying it. Yeah. Well, you know, the thing too is, you know, it's 30 days. It's not all that long, you know. Peterson said the same thing. You know, Michaela, his daughter, she put her rheumatoator arthritis, very serious rheumatoid arthritis into remission. Yeah. Getting rid of salads. They were doing keto, a lot of meat and fatty meat and and salads. And she found that she got rid of the salads and she actually felt great. It didn't have any flare-ups. And then she said, "This is stupid. Salads aren't doing anything to me." She had a salad and the next day she had a flare up and she said, "Okay, all right. And maybe I need to be completely strict on this. She convinced her father Jordan because he was he improved dramatically with his health that highfat keto diet, but he was still having a lot of anxiety and depression issues. And he said, and she said, "Well, why don't you just try it for 30 days?" And he said, you know, in the grand scheme of things, if this can help my anxiety, if this can help me feel better and help me, you know, live all the rest of my life in a better way, what what is 30 days? 30 days is nothing. You can hang by your fingers from a from a window sill for 30 days. I mean, that's nothing. And so, and so he tried it and he and he said within three weeks his his anxiety cleared up and he said, "Salad was doing this to me." Yeah. quite shocked, but um it could be quite quite impressive what happens. But and it's 30 days. It's not all that long. And we need him back in the world right now, don't we? He's thinking. Yeah, absolutely. Big big thinkers who are prepared to shake things up. Whatever you think of what they think about, just let them think. That's it. And communicate it. Yeah. I I don't Have you come across Thomas so before? Yes. Only recently, actually. Yeah. Love that man. If I could get in contact with him, if anyone knows him and get contact with him to try to pitch a carnivore diet to him, like I mean, I just I would love to do it and just get and and just keep that guy just healthy, happy, and his brain just just firing away as it as it always has. I just I absolutely love that guy. It's your bedtime now, isn't it, Cray? Probably. It would be my bedtime in Australia time. Yeah. No, it probably is. Well, um, Zoe, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Um, I've really enjoyed talking to you and I and I know everyone will enjoy uh listening to this as well. Can you let everybody know how to find you and if you have any speaking events coming up or anything else that you'd like to uh share with listeners? Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me. It has been really fun. The time has just flown. Um, I'm on zoeharkham.com as a website. I'm on Twitter. I don't do Instagram. Um, but I'm just Zoeharkham on Twitter. Um, and who knows, I'm due a visit. I do get invites to come down to Australia. So, um, I I need to at some point. We had pets for quite a long time that we just didn't want to leave. They were rescue animals and they'd um they'd get all upset, but we lost the last one now. So, um, yeah, I know it's sad, but they had great lives. So, um they can't complain. They they they really did have the best of times. Um so, we don't have that anymore. So, who knows? Um we'll we'll see whether it would be next year, the year after, I don't know. But I will be down there at some point. And if not, as you say, there's plenty on YouTube to uh to entertain you. Yeah, definitely. So, if you're around, it would be lovely to see you in person. And yeah, we'll buy you a steak. We'll see how we can get that that ball rolling on your 30 days. Or maybe you'll have tried it by then. Maybe I'll be there by then. I'll take you off on that. Actually, we'll we'll work out the dates and sort something out when you're over. Come to Wales. We have beef and lamb. I look out the window and there's cows and there's sheep. So, there's my dinner. Yeah. Good. Well, thank you so much, Zoe. It's been an absolute pleasure. Pleasure. Thank you. Your links in our description and people can can find more of you there. Thank you so much. you know change your practice and you know based on that I don't know what are some hard facts well hard facts are that you know in in botney and and and horiculture we know that there are certain poisons in there that that plant makes to deter insects and animals from eating them you know especially in the bean right because a bean is a steed right all organisms protect their babies more than anything by and large and a seed is a plant's Maybe.