Eating Dairy On Carnivore, and What to Watch Out For!

hello and welcome to the how to carnivore podcast i'm your host simon lewis and you're tuning in to the plant-free md series with dr anthony chafee dr chafee is a surgeon nutritional researcher and former pro-rugby player he's been strict carnivore for three years and an on and off carnival for more than 20. dr chafee looks and feels like a real life superhero if losing fat building muscle finding focus and getting the most out of life is important to you you're going to love the plant free md series hey guys welcome to another episode of the how to carnival podcast and we're back with anthony chaffee md the plant free md and today's topic is dairy i've had a lot of people reach out to me saying hey can i have dairy on the carnivore diet does dairy have sugar in it am i lactose intolerant how am i going to get calcium if i don't have dairy all these questions so today we're going to smash it out uh and talk all things dairy so anthony welcome yeah thank you very much how are you doing good man very good now i've never seen you guzzling down a carton of milk on your instagram is this uh is this something you do or what's going on no very very rarely like i just love milk and i i mean i do love milk but yeah it you know has it has enough lactose that this is going to cause a problem it's going to cause an insulin blood sugar spike and an insulin spike and um and that's just not what you want it kicks you out of your primary metabolism it starts making you you know glucose driven as opposed to running on all of your different energy sources such as blood sugar glycogen and ketones and so it gets you out of that primary metabolic state and puts you back into a uh you know a state where you're packing in fat and you're storing fat in your in your fat cells as opposed to utilizing the energy in your fat cells and so it's just a completely different uh way of functioning uh as an energy supply and so milk can do that as well and so and so i do stay away from that yeah yeah because even though dairy is an animal product it's got lots of fat protein but it also has a lot of carbohydrates it's got sugar in it yeah yeah yeah the lactose uh sugars is uh it's a disaccharide meaning that it's a combination of glucose and galactose just stuck together and that gets broken down into glucose and galactose as you could imagine so that raises your blood sugar you know it's not as bad as fructose you know from from fruit and honey certainly wouldn't touch that but it is bad for your uh for your body and your metabolism it bumps up your your insulin as well so high blood sugar is damaging and this this kills you this is what uh part of what kills diabetics by glycation the glucose molecule is physically fusing to various molecules but then in response to that your body raises insulin which is protective against this high blood sugar but it also causes a myriad of problems that that you really don't want and cause huge harm so yeah it's definitely best to be avoided every now and then fine but you know there's this this idea that you need to be that you need to eat carbohydrates and go back and forth because you want to be metabolically flexible that has absolutely no basis in reality or science and and evidence so i i was just talking to professor ben bickman of byu who has a biochemist and a professor of bio energetics at byu has been studying insulin on the body for over 15 years and asked him that very specifically you know because i always thought it was a bit of a bit rot but i asked him and i was like what are the hard facts on this he's like absolutely not it doesn't matter and he and he went through the exact biochemistry of it and what happens and how this stuff looks and how it can seem like that you know if you haven't eaten your carbohydrates you haven't you've been out of that state for a while you're just not storing insulin in your pancreas because you're not you're not just getting ready your body's not in this protective uh mode and and building up this tolerance because you know it's just anticipating this big jolt of of uh your glucose and so it's not anticipating that and so that breaks it down because your body is very efficient and then all of a sudden you do a glucose tolerance test and all of a sudden all your your insulin spikes or your sorry your blood sugar spikes like oh you're not not tolerant to this no but actually if you prime the pump and you have a bit of glucose before a bit of sugar before the next time you eat it it'll be primed up and you'll actually have a much better response um so there's this sort of false false picture that you get and i think that's that's leading people astray so the idea that you need to eat this crap in order to um you know keep up some metabolic flexibility is absolutely not based in in science or reality you you do not have to eat any carbohydrates just to just just go back to the pump analogy so so the misconception is that you need to kind of like prime the pump by eating carbohydrates so that it's ready if you do it some to to then absorb but the reality is what's what what's the reality like in the pump analogy i'm just not yeah so so when you're eating a lot of a lot of glucose and carbohydrates your your body makes more insulin then it's not just producing insulin when you're eating it it makes a lot of insulin and and stores it in the pancreas and gets it ready so just like there's more bladder is coming yeah so just like like you have bile in your gallbladder you eat a fatty meal you can just squirt out a whole bunch of bile right at once whereas if you don't have a gallbladder it just sort of slowly drips out it's a little different than that because you don't have insulin slowly dripping out you will come out in a very controlled manner but when you're when you eat uh carbohydrates if you've been eating a lot of carbohydrates you you will have pre-made a lot of insulin and store that in your pancreas anticipating a big you know carbohydrate-driven meal and then as soon as that comes in boom it dumps in a big load of insulin however when you're not eating a bunch of of carbohydrates it doesn't do that your body's very efficient it's not going to make something uh unnecessarily it's not going to expend energy unnecessarily because you expand that energy unnecessarily you die off your species doesn't survive because everything is so tightly controlled uh in the wild you have to be very very careful and so when you're not eating carbohydrates your body's just not making a whole bunch of insulin in in preparation for a big glucose rich meal and so that first hit you know you will get an insulin response your body will get this stuff down uh but that that initial uh hit of glucose will raise your blood sugar more than in you know uh and others other times but you know if you take if you take some you know drink some milk even or or something like that take in some carbohydrates you know a couple of days before you take this glucose tolerance test you'll actually get a better response than anyone else because you're actually you're you're you have no insulin resistance you have no metabolic issues with that it's just that you haven't you don't have this insulin ready to go uh unless you sort of prime the pump as it were so you there's no there's no such thing as this metabolic inflexibility or flexibility you're always going to be flexible these are processes that that exist in your body and and and will continue to exist in fact you get you you get inflexible when you eat a bunch of carbohydrates because that shuts down your body in so many different ways and causes disease uh to agree you know to in all sorts of different ways okay metabolic flexibility is a big topic we'll go into that another time because i've got a few questions but sticking with the milk um a big one is do people need calcium from dairy no you don't uh you get everything you need from meat and there um there were studies that actually looked at areas that you know drank a lot of milk and had a lot of calcium and they actually found it this didn't really significantly help uh their bone density or osteoporosis and and in fact in some instances suggest that uh they they didn't have as good bone density as these these are going to be multifactorial obviously there's a lot a lot of other things yeah with hormonal health as well but that it didn't show any you know clear benefit these people drink you know had a lot of dairy and got a lot of calcium and it actually didn't show that they had you know much better results with with bone health um and so that's actually um people have read the book uh lies my doctor told me by dr ken berry yeah he has a chapter in there talking about calcium specifically yeah about that specific yeah calcium and dairy and uh and and those studies that i that i mentioned there he goes into further detail and actually cites those sort of works as well if people want more sort of information on that i would recommend they go which is a great book anyway it's very very very informational information heavy and very can very expensive yeah it's great yeah and uh yeah so yeah you don't you don't need that you don't need the calcium you get everything you need from meat i mean you know going through the ice times like we haven't had animal husbandry for all that long and there are there are plenty of of civilizations like the ancient ethiopians i i mentioned with you know herodotus chronicling ancient ethiopians meeting the persians and they talking about they just you know they drink the cattle of their milk or the milk from their cattle and and and they're fine you know the messiah do this as well so i mean there are civilizations and populations that thrive on dairy and that's that's fine but that's that's certainly not everyone and and a lot of people in the world uh can have serious problems with it so you don't you don't need it anyway and you know when we're coming through the ice times through the ice ages we you know we didn't have you know herds of cattle with us it's i don't you know i haven't seen any evidence of that i don't think we were hurting at that at that point now we were still just exclusively hunting so we were hunting animals we weren't drinking their milk yeah exactly and at that point yeah and and certainly you know there's a there have been a number of ice stages so maybe the most recent one maybe some people had started you know uh livestock husbandry at that point i don't know i haven't seen any information on that um to suggest that but let's say that they did the one before that they definitely did and the one before that and the one for that and the one three million years ago when this all started they did not uh that we know of and actually so that might be a good segue into like modern cow's milk versus ancient cow milk i think i think you've mentioned something to me about this before in that like in terms of fat content maybe well it yeah well it depends on it depends on the breed but like the messiah themselves like the the animals that they have they have they have more fat percentage so they have like eight percent milk fat so eight percent of the fat whereas ours is like three three and a half to four percent okay but you know we've been milking other things you know like cleopatra apparently like donkey's milk is like the mo is like super rich and super creamy and that was like the new surprise because like you just sounds right like yeah donkeys don't have um you know they don't have big udders like um like a cow and and so it's harder to get it was more prized and so uh cleopatra would bathe in in ass's milk and um and that was like this big thing and um because that was that was just the most prized it was most creamy and and uh and um so that was why they really liked it so there's different kinds of kinds of milk but yeah uh it's been easier to to to have the dairy industry be you know with the cows because you know they they produce a ton of it and it's easy to get it off of them uh but yeah but anyway to roll back to it yeah you don't need it to get calcium you get everything you need from uh from meat by definition like this is just this is this is how we evolved and um you know just like you know lions and and all other carnivores they get all their calcium just from eating meat as well and yeah and so that that's not an issue you don't have you don't have to eat dairy if you if you want something that's fine but it comes along with problems as well like the lactose and milk but you have fermented milk products that a lot of that lactose is gone not necessarily all of it but it can be all of it but i was going to ask about that it's like you know butter and ghee that's that's the fat from milk that's this doesn't that i'm pretty sure there doesn't have much lactose in it or carbohydrate right so that consuming that stuff is different to uh to drinking like you know a big glass of milk because the glass yeah does have the lactose it does have the carbohydrates in it yeah no it is very different yeah and and so ghee would just be the fat butter would be the fat with the milk proteins yeah they would wouldn't really have any lactose in it and you know but there are some people that do have problems with the milk proteins and you know so even maybe even a bit of butter is going to set them off you know you know people talk about you know a1 protein versus a2 protein a2 protein being less inflammatory and this being better for you and it is but a2 is still you know can lead to inflammation as well it's just a lot less okay because there's a whole product around a2 milk i think it's really popular really popular in asia because a lot of asian people have lactose intolerance well that wouldn't that wouldn't affect lactose so that would be yeah that would be the protein casein proteins uh would be different kinds of proteins and some would be more or less inflammatory um and so there is huge milk out there you can you can buy it in the store i've seen it regularly and and it is better it has it it causes less inflammation but it still causes it a bit and so if you're sensitive to this that that can be a problem so i always always caution people with autoimmune diseases to be you know very wary of dairy especially early on when they're still quite unwell and they might have leaky gut and things are getting through easier more easily than than they would otherwise they can have more of a problem and to really avoid dairy a lot of people with autoimmune issues uh can't can't really handle dairy in any form and so it's just it it's just to be mindful of that and and you know i always recommend people just go you know pure as a driven snow for at least two weeks if not a month and then maybe try something you know adding something back in and seeing and then all of a sudden you have eggs and you're like well that doesn't work for me or you try in uh you know a glass of milk and you just sort of feel a bit crummy and it's not where you want to be so you know don't use it or even cheese and yogurt and butter um but yeah they can be they can be pro-inflammatory the other problem uh with dairy is that you know whenever you talk about like yes dairy is okay but it's not but you don't have to have it and it's and it's not optimal because it isn't it doesn't have all the nutrients that you need meat is the meal meat is what is going to give you all of your requisite nutrition and if you're drinking a bunch of milk or or a bunch of dairy products you know first of all you're going to be getting lactose is going to raise your insulin which is going to disrupt your your hunger signaling pathways and you're going to be hungry and you're going to overeat anyway okay so that's something that you don't want to do because it's going to block leptin and leptin tells your brain that you're full from stretch receptors in your stomach but most importantly and more abundantly it comes from your fat cells and so your brain knows how much fat you have how much energy you have in reserve and so now you have blocked your leptin and your brain thinks you're you're out of energy and now your blood sugar is dropping because your insulin is up and then your brain gets a signal uh a panic signal that says hey if you don't eat you're gonna die because you're you don't have any leptin so you don't have any fat and your blood sugar is dropping so that's why people get very very upset and and and agitated yeah and so you can get that with milk you can get that with lactose and so to be mindful of that but also you're just not going to get all the nutrients and so you're you're still going to want to eat meat and so you this can you know have you eat more than you you may want causes inflammation which causes you to retain water causes all these other problems as well and so a lot of people actually will end up putting on weight uh or stalling their weight loss or maybe not getting this the same uh amount of weight loss they normally would i've seen this um you know with my brother when he did this early on because i you know i tell people this i try to tell them i only use this as a condiment have it very sparingly only really eat the meat melt some cheese on the meat if you want maybe put a dollop of sour cream on some uh you know ground beef but like really you know that's it should just be a condiment used sparingly and people hear that and go oh okay i can have dairy and they just they'll just start eating blocks of cheese drinking tons of milk and just eating just buckets of plain yogurt yeah and and and then they have problems my brother my brother ran into this because he was one of these um people that sort of you know just heard the dairy was okay and and didn't hear the you sparingly part of it and and he started eating just a ton of dairy and drinking a lot of milk because it's good it tastes delicious and you get carb addictive as well this is this is part of that cycle and you'll end up overeating so he ended up gaining back all the weight that he lost prior you know initially from going carnivore and so he just you know he just realized he's like i cannot have dairy he'll very rarely now but he just he doesn't have it uh like that and so it's like every now and then he'll use it as a condiment and i've i've i've had the sensitivity it's like i was like okay cool you know dairy's good for you i'll get into the made by account and i've guzzled it and for me it just like just put on weight really quickly and i can't stop and it doesn't make me made by cow particularly i love it tastes so good doesn't make me feel sick or anything like that but in terms of just putting on fat probably a little bit of muscle because there's heaps of protein in there but just a lot of fat it's not what most people want maybe if you're like 14 and you're trying to be a front rower in rugby and you're trying to play 10 kilos in two weeks it will actually i reckon that's the best thing you can do but most people i speak to aren't trying to put on white definitely not trying to put on fat yeah and you know if you think about it you know i mean i i i don't want to like sort of uh you know blow the argument that that you know sometimes like vegans or vegetarians are used it's like you know that's that's food for a baby cow how dare you stolen that mother's milk was like easy but i would agree in the sense that we don't need we don't need to to drink milk or or have dairy uh after we've been weaned we don't need it and so yeah it's a trait you know yeah exactly and so it should be it should be treated as such and so it may be it's something nice and it as an addition but it's not something that you need and it's not optimal and so if you're worried about optimizing your health and optimizing your your your performance and your growth and your development as a child or development of your children and your and your aging then that's something that you should uh be mindful of and use it sparingly because because no matter how you look at it meat is going to be better you know even if milk isn't a net negative for you it is for some people but let's say it's not let's say it's still a net positive meat's going to be a much bigger positive and so you're still losing out on that disparity and yeah and but that's the thing too i i've had so many friends do that as well and like i don't know what it is but like in perth um you know when costco came in they started selling like these big tubs it was like it was two kilo tubs of halloumi cheese and um and so when i tell people i was like yeah you know you can have some cheese but melt it onto me don't use it all the time the same thing i say same exact way every time i'm soaked when i get more and more careful than i say and that's it i said oh i can eat cheese and that's the only thing they eat and they go and i swear there's so many people that that um after i told them this um you know they're saying like oh yeah i'm just you know having i'm just not really losing as much weight and going in like all the stuff that they're eating it turns out that they've just been eating buckets of halloumi cheese and nothing else they have not eaten other things and so they just get they just get these two kilo tubs of halloumi and like that's just what they eat for like a week or two and they'll have some meat here and there but like the majority of what they're eating is just tubs of halloumi cheese and you know it's it's funny but it's kind of funny but it's kind of frustrating you're like i never said that i said specifically don't do that but but you know it's it's it's nice you know we like it but it's not optimal and and you don't want it you don't want it replacing uh a lot of meat and that's and that's something that people do is that they'll eat so much of it it will replace the meat that they're supposed to eat or they're getting the meat that they're supposed to eat and this is in addition to that and so they're getting more than their body wants and you you can overeat if you force feed yourself you know of course you can no you can overeat that stuff just just with pleasure i i reckon to kind of build on this point that you're saying a good way to start might be like eat your meat first and maybe your eggs wait five or ten minutes and then if you're still hungry and you want to treat it's like yeah you have a little bit of you know a bit of dairy a bit of halloumi glass of your whatever whatever floats your boat but yeah fill up on the meat first yeah i think so and and uh you know and and again you know use dairy as a condiment to the meat as opposed to a separate part of the meal in and of itself or just a separate meal that's the k pointer okay yeah and so you know if you have cheese on meat and you eat those things together fine yeah but if you're just eating chunks of cheese and then you go eat meat then you're then you're messing up you know okay so how do you do it anthony everyone loves hearing about what what you're eating so how do you how would you incorporate dairy if you do with your meal i i use butter i like butter and i don't have a problem with it um if people have problems with milk proteins then they should just use ghee or tallow tallow's imminently better actually and so if you have access to a grass-fed tallow just just use that if you want to add some some fat to your meat um i don't have a problem with butter so i'll use butter and i'll also melt that on if the if the steak is too lean or the meat's too lean uh that's pretty much all the dairy i use at all just butter butter and game that's it yeah and i generally don't buy cheese these things are just they're addicted because you do enjoy them and so like if you buy a bunch of cheese you just saw something oh that's good you want to cut off a chunk of cheese and just snack on it i don't i don't like snacking i think i think that if i'm hungry enough to snack it means i'm hungry enough to eat and i should have a meal of meat and i should just get it get it over with and so you know and when you're in that sort of snacky phase and you just kind of want to eat something that means you're hungry and you should have a meal but b you know if you if you don't then eat then you're going to eat you know stupid things that you you probably shouldn't eat and so you just need to recognize that and so i don't i don't like having cheese around for that but if i were to have cheese like the only time i really have cheese is you know maybe have like a you know like a a you know meat board or something like that and there'll be uh little slices of cheese with the meat you know i'll eat those together but that's that's very rare like there's you know my my all melted on burgers i've tasted it and so i'll melt things on on uh burger patties and that's it and um you know so those were the only times i'd really had cheese and then sometimes i'll get some sour cream and and put it on again like hamburger meat and um you know just sort of stir fried up and then put some of that on there maybe some cheese in there as well but um very rarely but it's always a condiment it's always on meat and so it's never never by itself you know i saw my parents when i was first doing this my mom was was cooking uh some meat had like a roast in the oven and it wasn't going to be done for a while and she's sitting there with my dad with this giant cheese platter with a whole bunch of just cheese cut up and they're just just chowing down on cheese and i was like well hey mom you know you really shouldn't just eat cheese on its own it should be part of a meal with me it's like well this is part of the meal we have dinner cleanings like that is not going to be done for an hour and you're going to fill up on the cheese which is not optimal it's not going to have everything that you need that's going to upset a lot of cheeseboard lovers here just happened yeah i know um like cheese and wine as well and i've already weighed in on that too um unfortunately uh that's even worse but you know just have it with meat you know have a meat plate you know meat plates are awesome and and and have some cheese in there with it but you know that was the thing you could fool yourself very quickly you know saying oh i'm gonna have a i'm gonna have meal i'm cooking a steak and you just sit there and you just eat half a block of cheese while you're waiting like you're gonna you're you're going to uh do something new stuff that you're not wanting to you're gonna get you know more calories you're gonna get uh you know more dairy and meat and you're either gonna offset the nutrition that you're getting from meat so you're not gonna you're gonna be a bit deprived or you're going to you know eat more than than your body would have asked you to otherwise because it you know you added in a bunch of you know fat and protein and now your body actually wants the rest of the nutrients and so it wants you to eat that in meat and so you end up overeating and especially if you if you're doing uh carbohydrates and sort of lactose in there is going to do that totally all right summarizing dairy should be treated as a condiment uh dairy has more milk particularly has carbohydrates and sugar in it so it can spike your glucose and it can make you it can block your leptin so you just get hungry and you want to eat more and more and more um oh calcium you get enough calcium from just eating meat so you don't need to worry about eating dairy for calcium yeah absolutely yeah and you know and some people just have real problems with with dairy because it is going to be a bit pro-inflammatory uh even even with a2 a2 milk so just be mindful and if this is this is reacting with you then then you are one of these people that really does need to strictly avoid it and there are others people out there especially with autoimmune issues should be very careful with dare i would say just cut it out completely and then after a few months after your autoimmune issues have resolved maybe trial it back in and see how it affects you but it's sort of it's sort of a loaded gun for autoimmune sufferers because it it you know it's just it's just too big of a risk i think you know if i if i had an autoimmune issue i i probably wouldn't even test it in a few months i'd probably just stay the hell away from it in general you know but you can test it but i would definitely get that stuff out of your system completely um and and then really be healthy and let your body completely recover uh and before adding that stuff back in so you can really see what this does to you and if it's uh if it's safe for you to to have or if you even want it you know and just so you can give get the proper information for sure okay great advice thanks man we'll uh we'll chat again sounds good