Dr. Anthony Chaffee - 'Ketogenic Carnivore athletes'

[Music] today I'm going to be giving a talk that's uh very appr propose so the discussion that uh ended Dr Paul Mason's talk on concussion sort of LED right into this which is where if you have a patient that has an athlete who has had a concussion um it is it can be could be beneficial to be in a state of ketosis at the time of concussion and that could have neuroprotective effects but is that really feasible for an athlete a recreational athlete or a top athlete to be in ketosis during that uh experience is that going to hurt or hinder their um athletic performance so I'm going to go through some of the data for that I'm going to give some arguments uh about why it is beneficial not only to be a ketogenic ketogenic athlete but also a ketogenic carnivore athlete there's some benefits on top of that as well um some of these things um you know Dr Paul Mason has an excellent talk talking about some of a lot of the science and studies that go into the ketogenic athlete and I'm going to touch on some of those here and then add uh a few as well so we're going to go over three key benefits to being a ketogenic or carniv ketogenic carnivore athlete uh we're going to talk about the growing list of carnivore athletes because there are quite a number of top tier International athletes that are coming to a ketogenic carnivore diet and showing vast improvements in their performance and then my own experience because when my professor said plants are trying to kill you and that he didn't eat plants he didn't eat salads he didn't eat vegetables he wouldn't let his kids eat vegetables uh that stuck with me and I was I was an athlete at the time I was a uh played at the University level and at the premor ship level in the US and Canada and then professionally in England and I can tell you it was a massive massive difference in my performance so one one of the main benefits is you you actually tap into a much better more useful and much more uh uh wealthy store of energy when you're in a ketogenic state to store glycogen you have your your liver and your muscles but you can only store about 10,000 K which about 20 2400 kilo calories of energy so it's a decent amount of energy but that's by no means our main energy store in fact it's our fat and our fat in a 65 kilo athlete with only 6% body fat so an elite level body fat percentage and just those 6% body fat has nearly 36,000 kilo calories of energy available to them so this is why you're seeing people run ultramarathons completely fasted uh Alex McDonald is an athlete in U actually he's just a recreational athlete in in Sydney and he ran five marathons in 5 days completely fasted didn't eat the entire week just to prove the point that you didn't actually need to suck down a bunch of carbs because the energy that you use for your exercise today doesn't come from the food you ate this morning yesterday it comes from the meal you had two weeks ago and it's stored in your fat and then you use that fat but only when you're ketogenic if you're not in a ketogenic State you cannot access your fat stores because once insulin gets up to a certain point your fat cellers are locked you cannot get energy out of uh those fat stores if you're insulin is too high so you want to get that down low then you tap into this nearly bottomless amount of energy that's available so for Karm athletes they're going through this period where they Bonk they usually be called hitting the wall uh when I was a kid it was called hitting the wall and and now we have all these gels and these powders and and sugary drinks and things like that so that people can keep up their energy and maintain their glucose but what I was told when I was a kid was that you have to keep pushing keep pushing and eventually if you push through you'll get break through the wall you get need your second wind and then you can just go forever and when you're in a ketogenic state that is your second wind you're always in your second wind because you're tapped into your your fat stores you're not just running on glycogen you're not just running on glucose you're running on ketones and that's very important so as a ketogenic athlete you don't Bonk you don't run out of energy you don't have to keep sucking down these sugar gels and having these ups and these downs and these highs and these lows and that's also important too because we're we're going to talk also about longevity as an athlete and as as a a person if you are eating a certain way or taking in a lot of heavy carbohydrates for your athletic performance that's going to have a metabolic toll as well and a lot of athletes that Professor noes and others have studied when they have these comparative analysis with ket Jen athletes and carb fueled athletes they may have similar performances on on game day but the carb fueled athletes some of them were pre-diabetic they were getting metabolics and these are leite athletes and these people are exercising a lot in the pre-diabetic so obviously that's not a sustainable um not sustainable for an athlete as well so well why are we told told this that carbohydrates are the best fuel for athletes well it it's predicated on a few different things but one of them is this idea that um that you can only you up to a certain point of percentage of V2 Max you're burning fat and then past that you have to have carb so if you want to be an elite athlete where you're really pushing yourself and really extending yourself then you have to have carbohydrates because you'll only run on carbohydrates and so this was um besides in this quote here uh by burken Holly it says no nobody is awarded Olympic gold medal for the most interesting metabolism which is true um but I would actually refer to that metabolism carbohydrate metabolism as the interesting anomaly because the vast majority of animals on Earth including humans in the wild are in a ketogenic state that is the natural state of most animals that's the natural metabolic state of humans when we're in the wild eating our natural diet uh We've looked at Lions we've looked at wolves they're all ketosis even if you look at uh cows and gorillas they tend to be in ketosis as well and that's because they aren't running on carbohydrates even though they eat fibrous plants which are strings of glucose they don't break those down no vertebrate animal can break down cellulose it's the bacteria in their gut that ferment and eat the fiber and as a byproduct excrete fat fatty acids so short chain fatty acids which are 100% saturated and then those bacteria die off and they're absorbed as protein so gorilla is eating leaves and cow is eating grass but what they're absorbing is fat and protein just like a lion just like a wolf just like we're supposed to and so they're all going to be in that ketogenic so-called starvation state but they're not that's a normal metabolic state so I would actually say to Burke and Holly that their metabolism is the is the unique strange metabolism so so this sort of details some of this so there's some of these these studies that that showed and and this was um mentioned in the previous talk by Dr Paul Mason that some of the performance of the ketogenic athletes while they were still going through fat oxidization they were running on fat they didn't actually have the same performance but that has to do with a lot largely with uh being fat adapted and so this study the Supernova trial didn't actually account for that they only had these people going for uh you know you know 2 3 weeks um and so they weren't fully fat adapted they weren't being uh adequately given electrolytes we given very small amount of electrolytes and so this was uh very poor for a number of different reasons and there are other studies that did have keto ketogenic adapted athletes that had far far greater performance so it's not just about mobilizing the energy the fat the ketones it's about how you use them and U and that makes a big difference so we looked at some other trials we look at volc um and Finny did a study called faster into 2016 and so that idea of of only burning fat up to 60% V2 Max is is sort of undone here because they found that that's only applicable to carbohydrate fueled athletes and so it's it's not the case in ketogenic athletes especially when they've been fat adapted and these people were it said 6 months there but it's actually 9 months they were fat adapted for at least 9 months average of 20 months and these were um Elite athletes ultramarathoners Iron Man competition athletes and they had been self you know chosen themselves to go on a ketogenic dieet and they'd been on that for uh a number of years on average in the low carb group that actually you can actually see that they had um fat oxidization well past that's a red line there well past the high carb diet you know over 80% V2 max they're still uh the large majority of their energy is coming from fat oxidization so it's it's very different so if you're run if you're eating a whole bunch of carbs your insulin is high and you can't run on fat properly then sure you know you need to keep eating carbs but if you have gotten away from that then you actually had a huge Advantage so the keto athletes had a carbohydrate sparing effect there vast majority of the energy was in um in in fat and the good thing is is as we'll as we'll see in this trial uh you make glucose you make glycogen so even the amount of carbohydrates that you do use you don't need to take those in exogenously and in fact if you do take those in exogenously then you're going to go down that blue path and you're actually going to really curtail your energy mobilization so this was this was the study that uh was mentioned um in the last talk which was where they took muscle biops so they took muscle biopsies before after and then 3 hours after uh their their their exercise tests and they found that the ketogenic athletes had essentially the same glycogen muscle glycogen levels as the carbohydrate athletes and the carbohydrate athletes for the three-hour test they were taking down sugary gels and different sorts of sugar drinks and things like that whereas the uh fat adapted athletes you had a bit of fat or something like that they did not take in car carbohydrates and so it was their body replenishing the glycogen not the carbohydrates that they were eating this is a this is a a study from Professor Tim noes down in South Africa and this was an interesting trial because he took high carb athletes and low carb athlet he switched them around so it was a crossover study it's a randomized crossover study where they looked at the performance of recreational athletes you know weekend warrior sort things where they they tried to push them to the maximum limits where they tried to do things that was that the the trial where they had five successive uh 800 meter runs and so you're run really really hard and you're doing this again and again and again and they're trying to wear out and get rid of all available glycogen and see what happens well the fact is is that the keto athletes did not lose any performance and then they did adapt them for 6 weeks about 42 days and then they they competed with um you know in the different trials that they had then they had a twoe wash out period where they ate whatever they wanted to and then they switched and so the carb athletes became the keto athletes and vice versa and then they keto adapted them for another 42 days and they found that there was no drop in their performance so the idea that you have to have carbohydrates or you will hurt your performance is simply not the case and once you get away from carbohydrates even before we look at any sort of AD advantages you have once you're once you're very keto adapted in months and years after you're keto adapted which I I would argue is the case you are already at a massive massive massive benefit as an athlete just because you're tapped into your fat stores you're tapped into 15 times the amount of energy from your fat stores than you have available in your glycogen for for a 65 kilo person at only 6% body fat and if you have more than that then you have even more energy available to you so the low carb group was still burning fat up to 90% uh V2 Max and the high carb group was you know no surprise running primarily on carbohydrates the low car group had better metabolic flexibility again this is this is uh looking at the carbohydrate a these are taking a lot of carbohydrates it's actually causing metabolic issues and and forcing people into pre-diabetes so obviously that is not a sustainable uh model as an athlete if you want to be if you want to continue to be an athlete um Professor no also has a theory that the reason that athletes Bonk and they run out of energy is not because they're running out of glycogen but actually their blood sugar dips a bit and so this is not getting enough blood sugar to the brain the brain feels the effects of that um that's also very much benefited by being in a state of ketosis because you can much better you're much better able to maintain your blood sugar level but also your runs on ketones and primarily runs on ketones for about 2third of your brain it preferentially runs on ketones so when you have ketones available and even if you have an abundance of glucose those parts of your brain will only run on the ketones it's only when those ketones levels start dropping that you start filling in the gaps with blood sugar I learned that in Biochemistry 23 years ago and yet we forget this somehow so let's look at actual performance when you have somebody keto adapted longterm with high level athletes so mweene 8 actually showed um in high high performance Elite level athletes that were self- selected into high carb group and low carb group for 12 weeks so it's a that's a good amount of fat adaptation you could go longer but some Studies have shown that after about 12 weeks on a ketogenic diet you have roughly four times the number of mitochondria and they're four times as effective so right there is a massive benefit in energy production so the the athletes in the keto group outperformed the high carb group uh they had three different tests and uh two of them came to statistical significance one did not however in the short six-second Sprints that did come to statistical significance so they they were able to outperform their High carbohydrate uh compatriots and they also improved their body composition they on average uh lost about 6 kilos and and the high carb group lost less than a kilo and so this shows the benefits of that upregulation of these of uh of being keto adapted so you can make all the keton me this is something we notice when people first go on a ketogenic diet cornivore or otherwise is that their ketones can go up very very high they may even notice their ketones in their urine um that means your body's not using it if it's just being peed out right it's wasted but after over time then the urine levels of ketones tend to go away and you can measure this and your blood levels of ketones tend to go down is that because you're making less ketones no it's because your body is utilizing them and using them properly you can measure this with uh uric acid levels uric acid competes for elimination in the kidneys with ketones and so if you're spilling out more ketones in your urine that's going to offset the uric acid so your serum levels of uric acid can go up slightly have and Studies have track this it can actually go as long as four months and still be elevated so well while it's coming down you still have slightly elevated levels of uric acid for some people they don't get gout by the way um and that's another thing people don't realize there are five different causes of gout up until the early 2000s they were all caused G called gout now it's called pseudo gout and then gout is called is the uric acid crystals you have no idea they all present exactly the same they have exact same symptoms the only way to tell is about sticking a big needle into this inflam nasty painful joint which no doctor is going to do unless they want to get sued and then you send that off for to a lab to see what kind of crystals are in there sometimes it's uric acid crystals other times it's oxalate crystals that's another cause of pseudo gal which is a plant toxin which we'll get to so another reason why this is good is because it can promote muscle growth and fat loss which is obviously IDE beneficial to an athlete I was speaking to someone in the break as very very um uh very timely so I added it in and she said that her uh nutritionist relative or dietician relative said that well carnivore only helps because it eliminates the junk and I was I was thinking about that I was like well yeah but that's like saying that the only reason you're not poisoned is because you stopped eating poison I like well yeah that's that's that's entirely the point um and plants are also junk that's the problem too um um but but that is a major Pro that is a major thing the things we're putting into our body directly cause harm and we know this from a junk food perspective from a high carbohydrate perspective you know if you're if if you're eating sugar in the form of fruit you get a very different um GL glucose and Insulin Spike as you do if you're eating refined sugar of the same gramage um so it affects your body differently but there are other things in this world that cause harm it's not just carbohydrates or processed carbohydrates or even seed oils even though those are very very harmful things things there are natural ways that plants defend themselves and some of these uh can be thought of as anti-nutrients so they'll block out the absorption of certain nutrients we saw that example with different foods uh such as black beans and corn blocked out the zinc absorption in um oysters uh but there's so many more there things like fiic acid there's oxalates there tannins um and lectins these things can bind and denature the different nutrients that vitamins and minerals that we're trying to bring in and and and stop us from being able to absorb them properly so that's very important thing called proteas Inhibitors that are very common in things such as wheat and soy which will block protease which is our enzyme from our pancreas that breaks down proteins and amino acids and allows us to to absorb them properly and so when you block protases then we can't break down these proteins we can't absorb them and they go out they're not bioavailable we won't absorb them so it doesn't matter about how many grams of protein go in your mouth matters how many get in your body that's very important it doesn't matter how many you know how many milligrams of zinc go in your mouth it matter about what gets in your body and it's very important that's one of the ways that plants defend themselves is by making themselves less nutritious by not being bioavailable like strings of glucose in the form of cellulose we cannot break those bonds we cannot access that glucose and so all those calories that you would see in a fireplace when you burn wood there's heat escaping that that does not translate into energy in your body and the same thing goes for many other nutrients not just not just glucose but also they make other things less bioavailable and less nutritious as well and so this is something that that can cause quite a lot of malnutrition and this is this is the argument is that it's not just well eliminating junk food and that's what makes a carnivore diet better you're also adding in very nutritious things and you're and you're not nutritionally deficient anymore because most people are nutritionally deficient there's a couple good examples of this in uh veterinary medicine livestock medicine where they have things called uh different diseases like big head big tongue limp neck Crazy Cow syndrome these are all diseases but they've actually figured out that they come from the animal eating a plant that they're not designed to eat and they're actually getting poisoned by the toxins in those plants and so and that's and that's um very important because they can say okay well that's what this cow has we need to get them out of this pasture we need to get them different Forge all these sorts of things and maybe give them some medicine to get them through it the reason that they figured that out for cows we haven't figured that out for humans yet cows are actually worth something humans are inherently worthless right so because you know we're selling cows we using them and they're a commodity and so when your cow gets sick or it dies and its babies are dying people are losing money and so they need to figure out what the hell is going on when people get sick they go to the hospital they spend money so that's the incentive they're actually not looking to keep us well I'm not saying they're trying to make us sick but I'm saying they're not incentivized to keep us well anyway but they are incentivized to keep livestock well another another illustration of this which I find very interesting and I fire this out at different conferences like this to see if there's any sort of neurologist or anybody else who who treats this maybe the pediatrician in the room that um may see these sorts of things there's there's very clear signs of disease in livestock as well now we know a lot of these sort of deficiencies pgra and and berry berry scurvy these sorts of things we s deficiency of a specific uh vitamin but we didn't always know that they were from deficiencies pgra killed hundreds of thousands of people in America before they figured out that it was a nasin deficiency and uh right now we're going through a lot of diseases I think come from toxicities but also malnutrition very interesting crossover from the animal world is um muscular distrophy cows have muscular distrophy and apparently it's the exact same presentation as human muscular distrophy but they figured it out it's from a selenium deficiency so it's actually called nutritional muscular distrophy has anyone ever asked if our children with muscular distrophy have a nutritional deficiency selenium or otherwise I don't know um I would I would hope that people listening to this will start asking that question so these are some of the some of the great things about going carnivore on top of just being ketogenic is because you eliminate all these sorts of things you eliminate these toxins you eliminate these antinutrients and you're just giving yourself more bioavailable food um you know the the lectins and things like that these are very diverse set of molecules but they can damage your gut lining like weater glutenin can cause leaky gut now you're allowing more these toxins to get in your body you're allowing bacteria to get in your body where it's not supposed to be your body has to attack these things and make antibodies towards them that's actually a a theory on autoimmunity is that you get these lectins in the body and your body's making antibodies towards these lectins and maybe other bacteria that are getting in your body through leaky gut and then that is getting a cross reactivity with your body or another another another theory is that these lectin are actually because they can they have a carbohydrate component they can bind onto different carbohydrate surface molecules with a carbohydrate component in your body and so they can attach on to different organs inside your body once it gets into your bloodstream and that your body is attacking making antibody towards that complex actually is trying to defend you and protect you but you're getting hit in the crossfire so this is is a theory of of autoimmunity and either way when I put patients on on a purely carnivorous diet just just beef Lam and water and nothing else we notice our antibodies going down and eventually for the ones that you can test like Hashimoto they they do tend to go down to to trace and people's symptoms of autoimmunity go away and I have I have patients that were in wheelchairs with multiple sclerosis and they are now symptom free and on MRI they have had a 50% reduction in their in their lesions and I've actually I'm putting together a case series to publish that because that's pretty unheard of and and in fact uh one uh patient of mine fired her neurologist because she went into him and she and he was very very critical on her about um trying this sort of dietary approach said that she was going to kill herself and was really Reckless what she was doing with her health and uh but she she refused um to listen to him she ended up uh going going on a carnivore diet she came off all her uh an autoimmune medications and 68 months down the road she had an MRI and indeed had 50% reduction in her lesions and her neurologist said I can't explain this I don't know what's going on I've never seen this he said well do you think it might be the diet absolutely not couldn't possibly be so you know so she stopped seeing him and I think that's fair so you're getting rid of these things and yes it is well you're just not eating junk yes there's more junk than we realize and but you're also getting in proper nutrition which you have to have especially if you're an elite level athlete the ketogenic carnivore diets or just ketogenic diet in general can help weight uh regulation without without having to count calories track macros is very satiating your body just like every other animal on earth the human animal seems to be able to um tell exactly how many macros and micros we need just by eating an our Sati signals as long as we're eating the right thing carbohydrates raise insulin that blocks letin leptin is a satiety hormone and we drop our blood sugar we become hungry again we have this pattern of overeating just like that pediatric case where the young girl was very overweight eating a lot of sort of processed garbage and was hungry all the time she was constantly hungry all the time and and that's why it's these hormonal mechanisms um and when you're not eating those sorts of things lectin actually can bind sometimes uh studies has shown that certain lectin can bind five times more tightly to to insulin receptors than uh insulin does and so you can have a similar sort of effect and you can and trigger an overeating um phenomenon on there as well so you get rid of all that and now your body knows uh how much leptin it has how many fat how much fat stores it has and and you don't tend to uh drop your blood sugar you have ketones available so you're not going to overeat because your body's starving for energy um so the other thing is is that our stomachs have uh receptors that track up the Vagas nerve to the brain and actually track macros and micros so this is why people notice the phenomenon that when you start eating fatty steak or something like that tastes amazing at first but then you start eating your way through it it tastes less good and less good until finally it doesn't taste good at all and they have a bite and they just it's the same piece of meat to cook at the same time in the same conditions it's still warm and it doesn't taste good anymore it tastes sort of bland and I don't really want to eat this anymore that's their body naturally telling you you don't need this anymore because your stomach has told your brain that you're good every single animal on Earth can Auto regulate you know you don't see animals with weight problems you don't see Badgers running around obese Badgers running around like oh it's just got to you know can't has no self-control you know so it's just like nature should work out and so if we're eating our natural diet we should see this phenomena and that's exactly what we see um so you have a big benefit of that and Studies have actually shown that when you're in a ketogenic State you actually burn more carbs you increase your basil metabolic rate by 350 kilo calories so you actually burn more calories your body's using more calories and uh and weight control and weight management is much easier I noticed this as well when I was an athlete I could stay in good shape because I was just running all the time working out all the time soon as we had a bit of a break in the offseason or something like that you to see the the fluff starting and it it was it was a bit surprising but that was that was the thing we're told we just just fighting against entropy our body just wants to break down and be you know you know fat and slobbish I mean I remember thinking as a kid I was like why you know why are we you know the only animal that's not fit all the time why are these animals are all just very powerful and lean why are we the only squishy animal on earth and we just can't maintain our our own body composition the argument is that well they're in the wild and they're running around all the time but that doesn't explain animals in the zoo animals in the zoo live in a box quarter of the size of this room their entire life that's the definition of a sedentary lifestyle and yet I've never seen a fat zebra or a fat giraffe or a fat lion unless they're being fed something that they're not supposed to eat and you'll see those exact same diseases in those animals they get human diseases what the hell is a human disease diabetes cancer autoimmunity arthritis um obesity osteoporosis things like that these are not found in naturally in the animal kingdom so this keeps to this keeps athletes athletes for longer there are several different mechanisms I'll touch on a few um the simple fact of of of energy uh production in the body through the kreb cycle you go through glucose you use four NAD plus to get two acetal coas um ketones you actually only use one so your ratio of NAD plus nadh is actually improved and this has been shown to reduce oxidative stress and improve in a number of different um ways especially in it's protective to brain health as well ketones like betah hydroxy butyrate which is the main Ketone body that's made when we're in ketosis blocks nlrp3 inflammosome and so this directly reduces inflammation throughout the body and when you're in a high stress State you're working out all the time you have inflammation building up this is a very good thing um also you're not bringing in extra ant um um inflam inflammatory factors like from from the different things that you're eating so it's much cleaner and your body is able to get rid of and deal with inflammation much better you're not going to be building up uh that sort of uh pressure on your body ketogenic diets enable autophagy autophagy is something we speak about we have to fast for five days you know people uh talk about how you know every quarter they would fast for uh five days just to go let their body go through autophagy well the interesting thing is that just having low insulin levels will also let you go through autophagy because it's not the lack of food and starving yourself that triggers autophagy it's just the lack of insulin blocking autophagy we've spoken a lot about the benefits of being on a low carbohydrate diet of lowering insulin the reason that is is because insulin doesn't just affect energy mobilization and energy going into your cells that's probably one of those least parts of what it does insulin affects over a 100 different mechanisms in your body and so when you elevate that with a high carbohydrate diet you are elevating that insulin and now it's out of balance for all these different mechanisms including autophagy so now that stops autophagy you can't replace your old damaged precancerous cells you're not going to replace out your old damaged mitochondria and other organel and they're just going to continue to break down and degrade and you're going to get metabolic dysfunction and disease when this is this is why I mentioned earlier when you're on a ketogenic diet for 3 months or so you end up having four times number mitochondria and they're four times as effective because you go through something called mitophagy as well and mitogenesis so you're turning over the old damaged mitochondria and you're actually regenerating more of them as a result of that so this this is this is the key different this is the key point because people say well just not eating is what you have to do you're starving yourself and your body's looking around for resources to try try to get some of these resources and and uh and use them for energy around your body well the problem with that is that when you start breaking down your mitochondria they don't just get used by some you know in somewhere else they get turned into more mitochondria It's actually an energy dependent uh mechanism and so you and now you're making more mitochondria as well so even without eating your body is doing this and so this is just a normal housekeeping process that your body should be going through at all times as long as your insulin is low and it will be if you're on a on a low carb diet so the ketogenic state allows autophagy and increases Brown cell fat and Cell Activation and growth hormone testosterone uh Etc and uh that's true so high insulin one of the many things that insulin does is block the action of growth hormones so you get lower uh igf-1 and you get less less growth hormone action um I've seen in my ketogenic carnivore athletes and um and others and just my normal patients the testosterone levels increased dramatically I had a 72y Old Gentleman who tripled his testosterone levels um and in a matter of months by doing this and felt obviously much better and all these other sorts of things and this was without trt it was wasn't giving him any sort of medication for this uh and then different athletes we'll come to a couple of them dramatically improved their testosterone as already an elite level athlete and that's obviously going to have a huge benefit as well articular cartilage arthritis this is something that has been shown on biopsy of people with arthritis to um have heavy uh glycation end products so and ages Advanced glycation end products they find these in abundance in damaged articular cartilage and it doesn't say here on the slide but also in um degenerative discs that was a study that I found very recently and they found the same sort of um ages and build gly glycation and damage um in the degenerative disc so we're looking at degenerative spines and things like that this could be a very common mechanism for that and then down there at the bottom is is concussion obviously you know from the talk we heard uh from Dr Paul Mason today on concussions and how Advantage advantageous it is to be in ketosis at the point of concussion this is obviously a huge advantage to any athlete going especially a contact athlete and I just reiterate for people um you know on watching this on YouTube the reason being is because you have a secondary uh damage that comes after the the initial concussion and insult and uh this can cause inflammation oxidative stress and when you're in ketosis those elevated ketones block inflammation like the nlrp3 inflammasomes and it reduces that inflammation and damage it also allows you to get energy into the brain to to um uh heal you help the brain heal and recover and also just function normally because when you have that concussion you can become uh your brain can be less able to use glucose and so you need ketones as an alternative as well and if you're in ketosis at the time you have all these these U mechanisms in place whereas if you try to go into onto a ketogenic diet after the fact it can take days and you and you can miss out okay so to go through some of the athletes um this is a growing list it's not a complete list because a lot of athletes are actually keeping this to themselves they don't want everybody knowing this this is a secret weapon um so some of these things are in in say like the NFL so Nick Boza he's one of the top NFL defensive lineman for the 49ers he's been on a ketogenic diet and and talks about that openly um and then I'm going to pronounce his name wrong but puka nakua from the LA Rams he's a wide receiver and he's he's full carnivore and obviously ketogenic as a carnivore diet is a ketogen diet this is a young man named Ryan talbet who who felt that he wasn't doing well didn't feel his best he was already a scholarship athlete at a at a D1 school in America in Michigan State um as a track athlete he was a pole vter and he just didn't feel very well he went to the team doctor and said hey you know can we check me out I don't feel great checked all his Bloods everything came back fine and um but he said well okay well I I don't feel fine so obviously there's something wrong and so he started looking around he found a carnivore died he tried it himself we were in communication I helped him out with it in the early stages and he had a bit of a of a two we sort of adjustment period to it but he said after that his performance just took off and he actually switched to the kathon midseason when he went carnivore and in his second decathlon ever he won the Big 10 Championship a set a School record and then earned All-American Honors that year and now he's a three-time All-American and he won bronze medal at the PanAm games representing the United States and uh just missed out on going to the Olympics this year as well that was carnivore the entire time ketogenic carnivore the whole time his testosterone these are American numbers so slightly different but his testosterone level was 760 um before he went carnivore and his doctor said oh that's great it's a great great number um one year later it was 1150 big jump to the point that he got randomly selected for drug testing by the NCAA but it came back clean and so he that was completely natural that was his body doing that and obviously as an elite level athlete if you nearly double your testosterone increase it by 80% and you're increasing all these other uh hormones and biomarkers as well as getting into a ketogenic state where you can run on your fat stores you're obviously going to have a huge Advantage decathlon is a grueling uh set of of uh events their 10 events obviously Deca decathlon split up into two days um at the All-American trials these are these are the best athletes in the world these are people that are going to be competing for a spot on the Olympic team and uh in America at least you know people have a good chance of of winning gold at those Olympics and so these are all the top shelf athletes and he said that four or five of them every at the All-American trials four or five of them were not able to compete in the last few events because they were just so broken down and worn out and he said that his last two events were always his best he was setting PRS on the 1500 meter run which is the very last event every at the Big 10 championship and the uh All-American trials he just gets better and better and better as he goes which a huge Advantage because he's not running down he's not having to take down sugary gels his body's just working and that's obviously a huge advantage to athletes Tim Olen is a record holding USA Ultram marathoner and he's a ketogenic athlete a lot of ultramarathoners and marathon runners Iron Man competitors uh T of France uh athletes are coming to this a lot of them are sponsored by carb stuff and Gatorades and things like that so sometimes they have to keep it to themselves but many people are being open about it such as Zach bidder Zack bidder is a low carb keto athlete sometimes when he's doing ultramarathon he's he's the he at least at one time was the world record holder for the hundred Mile and he is pretty much keto carnivore while training and then sometimes he'll just spike in some carbs while he's while he's doing his competition I don't think he needs them but uh that makes him feel better I guess um and then uh a gentleman in Bronco Billy ultra marathon runner again keto low carb uh Michael mcnight is another Ultram marathoner uh Marco forel is an Ultram marathoner as well so a lot of these guys are figuring out that you can actually do a lot better not eating carbohydrates uh a lot of that comes from uh this guy Dave Scott who is a he just a very very famous uh Iron Man competitor and uh when he was in his late 30s he was having health issues having metabolic issues you a lot of carbs and things like that for his competitions he went uh ketogenic low carb ketogenic he had massive uh recovery in his health and at 40 years old went back out started competing again and came in second in the in the Iron Man competition and he is said openly that if you want to do the Iron Man do not eat carbs it is too grueling of a race it is too grueling of a competition if you use carbs you will absolutely uh kill your performance and you'll and you'll crash you'll Bonk pomed by this guy who's uh Pete Jacobs who is the world champion in the Iron Man and he has been openly carnivore the whole time so in a in an article that I read that that um interviewed him they said well a lot of Iron Man competitors are going ketogenic but this guy just eating meat he's going even further and he's going full carnivore and he's talking about how beneficial that was to him and again world champion couple MMA fighters Wilton Ziggler this is some female athletes as well are doing this like Marina morose she's a UFC fighter she's full carnivore uh Tyson Pedro was a UFC fighter and now is professional boxer he's full carnivore as well um and then Michael Chandler is in the UFC in East carnivore Chris FR is a four-time tour to France winner he's ketogenic so I this is one I get all the time said well if if if this were really the way to go then you'd see professional athletes do it well you are seeing professional athletes do it they're just not necessarily telling you about it or you're not hearing about it and one thing was that well if any no one in the Tour of France is doing it yeah sorry yeah so people winning the tour to France are doing it um this is a funny thing you I mean we we we are told different things we're told things that by the medical establishment we propagate things as a medical establishment because we think it's right at the time um as William Osler said to graduating class at Harvard Medical School in the 1930s 100 years ago he said half of what you've learned here at Harvard is going to turn out to be wrong but no one's going to tell you which half because no one knows you're going to have to figure it out yourself you're going to have to keep exploring and investigating and challenging what you were taught to push uh the body of human knowledge and and this so this is an Ever evolving uh game it's not a science it's the application of science but this is very much a human endeavor 50 in the 1950s I read how the tour to France Riders uh would actually smoke several cigarettes before the race because they were told that it was that it would open up their lungs and was better for their cardiovascular health so that's what we were telling people then now we're telling people to eat carbs and give them diabetes right um a similar thing and they and they were doing this um in the 1950s they were they were doing the tour to France on dirt roads on single gear bikes these were badasses and they were smoking the whole time right because they were being told that that was good for them um this is Guy Nam is Sean Sakowski he's he's an ultra cyclist down in South Africa he's full carnivore as well he's been doing that for years he works with the the noes foundation and um and is just doing more and more competitions showing that you don't even have to eat for these you know 200k uh or longer sort of bike rides at at a very high output um again more female athletes this is Marisa Strauss who's again from South Africa she's won basically every award you can for cycling in South Africa um and and elsewhere as well and and she's full carnivore also erling Holland this guy this is an interesting guy because he went carnivore at 21 he was already he was already uh you know Premiership soccer player now he's one of the best in the world and he's considered the best striker in the world he when he went carnivore he's 21 this guy uh apparently still had open growth plates because he grew five inches after going carnivore in the last year he's grown nearly another inch um so he's he's just still growing he's like 6'5 now um I didn't get that lucky I started cornivore when I was about 20 21 and I didn't grow an inch and so that was a bit robbed but um but good for him and so he's still growing and and just doing exceptionally well he's one of the top players in the world this is a gentleman uh brand in Los yavo he's a two-time Olympic diver for the USA um he had a very interesting story because this this helped his performance but in in other practical ways this really changed his performance because he had very serious IBS and so as a diver in a pool in little Speedos that's a problem and so he would have to take sometimes up to 20 Em modium a day during competitions just to keep this under control and and then he'd still be sort of rushing off to the bathroom and and things like that horrible you know stomach cramps and pains and things like that when you're having this tight tuck roll that you're doing when you're spinning and doing these flips this St is very uncomfortable so it's very difficult for him and and it's gone all of that's gone so it's it's not just the energy Dynamics it's not just access in your fat stores it's not just the nutritional side of things there're going be very serious very real practical benefits to eating properly as an athlete or otherwise was um Blake Collier and Travis Smith these are both professional golfers here in Australia they're both carnivore and they both found that they are feeling much better much more mental Clarity their brains are running on ketones now they don't have much of junk going through their system they don't get tired halfway through their round they're just going game after game after game and they just feel feel fantastic um you know Professor Peter Brookner worked with the Australian uh National cricket team and turned them from uh you know sort of midling Team uh to very very successful being some of the top teams in the world and so um that and by going on to ketogenic sort of diet approaches and there's different sorts of uh you know individuals obviously that we could name but you know a lot of those individuals on that team went um the All Blacks there there are several All Blacks playing right now the Frank brothers are openly keto carnivore uh OFA is uh is a prop playing for New Zealand now and he uh I've actually spoken to him he said he's been for8 years and and that most of them are you said about 40% of the All Blacks are carnivore right now they can't really talk about it though because uh they get sponsored by cereal companies and so they they're supposed to keep their mouth shut about it but that that's what they actually do uh Sunny Bill Williams has been carnivore for a number of years um and uh like I said others old blacks quig Cooper um and uh pocok have been low carb for quite a long time uh Martin taow he he's been doing carnivore and that's reenergized or revitalized his career um Curtis cerin he's uh openly talked about his carnivore died as well um and many other people um playing such as um Josh adocar which is goes by the fox he's one of the top rugby league players um and he's been openly um vocal about his uh uh carnivore diet as well um so for me uh I I definitely noticed a m massive difference in my performance as uh as an athlete um I started this in my early 20s just because I just stopped eating plants and everything else came with plants I was only eating fatty meat and that's it and I felt a lot better because of that my performance improved quite dramatically um so when I um when I changed when I it was probably 25 I was playing in England and I I sort of slipped off of it because I didn't realize how significant what I was um what I was doing was and I started eating chicken that had a bit of crumbs on it and I didn't think that was a big deal because of course dose makes the poison and that's just a small amount of of uh of of carbs and things like that I didn't think it was that big of a deal but I definitely noticed a massive difference in my performance and uh and of course that opened the door to allowing a little bit more and a little bit more and a little other things and went back to basically eating what I grew up eating which was a very clean uh meat heavy omniv diet and I would eat some vegetables and things like that because I was you know supposed to and so I would do that out of sufferance um but then you know 13 years later when I was 38 years old uh I came back to this understanding that well actually we're we're we've been eating meat for millions of years certainly not bad for us and there can be other things that that can be harmful to us and if we don't need them expressly and that can cause harm be it moderate harm or mild harm uh it can still it can still affect you I thought okay well let's just go back to doing what I was doing before and I I went and um uh went back just started eating fatty meat and water stop everything else and um and and that's that's me there that's a 38 years old that's not me at 22 or 24 and I went back and started playing uh top level rugby the US for the mlr for the major league rugby uh competition in Seattle for the Seattle uh Sea Wolves and I was back feeling like a 22-year-old I could go as hard as I could I could I could um perform just as well as other people I was I was just come back from doing humanitarian work in Bangladesh as a as a volunteer doctor there in the refugee camps and I was not in shape I was eating whatever was available in a refugee camp which is generally not much and um and I wasn't ketogenic or anything like that and I came back to this and I I felt absolutely amazing within a couple weeks I felt like I was 22 again I felt better at 38 on a carore die than I did at 28 playing uh rugby professional rugby and uh at at the top of my my game I thought and I went back out and started playing rugby again felt amazing but then a couple weeks after that so I'd been you know eating this way and ketogenic again probably for that point four to 6 weeks which is a good amount of time to be keto adapted I felt so good um and I was able to perform so well that we did a fitness competition called the modifi bleep test and I actually came in top five out of 92 players two weeks in into training it was it was all diet and so my friends that were you know running the team now said like oh you've been you've been keeping in shape you've been putting a lot of work no no I have not um I've been I'm completely out of shape this is all diet and I started getting very interested at at that point and um and then that's when I started digging into the research and the literature to see okay well what what is it what is about this uh way of eating that's so beneficial and and I I obviously found all the thousands of studies on uh the benefits of being on a ketogenic diet and a carnor diet is a ketogenic diet and typically when you get rid of carbohydrates you have to replace it well you have to replace it with protein and fat and where's that Source coming from typically comes from meat and so a lot of these things you can call you can um uh you you know infer quite a lot of information on the benefits you'll get from going on a ketogenic carnivore diet as as just a a standard ketogenic diet and it allows you um you know in your 40s to go and do this to your friends and just you know knock the snot out of them which is always fun and um uh I was sort of like that because that actually is a good friend of mine and um we grew up playing together but he always hates me uh displaying that picture because it's uh yeah uh obviously because because of what you can see there but um uh but it's still one of my favorites I was just like seeing that so in summary uh there's a clear advantage to being fully fat adapted uh as an athlete um in a ketogenic State massive advantage and if you clean things up even more and get rid of the other sorts of things that could curtail your your health and your performance obviously that's going to uh improve uh your health and your longevity as an athlete as well so this improves your body composition it can also improve performance uh and Longevity is so important which people don't don't uh take in a full account people especially athletes top athletes they're willing to do anything to their body as long as they're able to keep playing professional sports and and they don't necessarily think about the long term there's a lot of uh NFL players lineman and things like that they're extremely metabolically unhealthy they carrying on a lot of different a lot of extra weight and they're just eating all this stuff maybe they're doing Peds and um uh taking uh you know steroids and things like that in order to improve and enhance their performance um and at the cost of their health and and they think well I have to do this because this is how I can perform this is how I can compete this is how I can keep my my job and feed and provide for my family and um the reality is no they don't there's a much better way of doing this in all aspects in all respects so um this is something that um that many of us have have seen I've certainly seen it in my personal life so it made a lot of sense to me because I'd experienced that firsthand and then looking at the data and the research and the science behind it it it it made perfect sense and then seeing this these results in others is um is uh it's not really surprising to me do we need more research absolutely there's always you can always do with more research but I think there's more than enough data available to start applying this to your patients and to yourself as an athlete and see what your results are understanding that you need a period of adaption and uh given that period of adaption you should get these biological and physiological benefits as well and um and so it's definitely worth a try it's not going to hurt you we know that meat's not going to hurt you um but it could very well help you very much and uh so just the for the clinicians out there don't be afraid of um of um you know recommending this to your patients from a concussion point of view and also from a performance point of view thank you very much [Music] [Applause] [Music]