Health and Fitness with Casey Ruff!

welcome to the plant-free md podcast with dr anthony chafee where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically 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 meat only products that 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 hello and welcome to another episode of balanced body radio i'm your host casey ruff and today we have another amazing guest to introduce you now dr anthony chafee is an american medical doctor specializing in neurosurgery who over the span of 20 years has researched the optimal nutrition habits for athletic performance and health it is his assertion that most so-called chronic diseases are actually caused by the food we eat or donate and in many cases can be reversed easily with dietary changes he is an all-american rugby player and a former professional athlete in england and america dr chafee has dedicated many years and a large part of his professional practice to the study and education of diet and nutrition and personally practices a fully carnivorous diet to this day with amazing results he began his university education studying molecular molecular and cellular biology with a minor in chemistry at the university of washington in seattle at the age of 15 wow which culminated in attaining his md from the royal college of surgeons he currently resides in perth australia where he specializes in neurosurgery and does private consultations and clinics in functional medicine and nutrition dr anthony chakey what an honor it is to welcome you to balanced body radio wow thank you very much for having me i appreciate it um i was trying to think back on some of the things that i was doing when i was 15 years old um i'm not proud of most of the things i did when i was 15 but i certainly wasn't studying uh neurosurgery that's pretty amazing um how did you get into college so early well i mean i was definitely doing a lot of stupid things as well i think i think i slept drunk at my first bus stop when i was 14 so you know i started off i started off early on a lot of things but uh you know when i when i was uh going into uh eighth grade uh i was 13 years old a buddy of mine uh john laney who's uh who's uh um you know he's a corporate attorney in seattle now you know he just came up to me and you know he was uh you know he and i were always you know uh did really well in school and and sort of we we would always uh uh you know just sort of challenge each other and we were the only two people that could sort of keep up with each other in school and so he came up to me and and just said hey there's this there's this program at the university of washington in seattle uh that if you take the sats uh you know at any time whether or not you graduate high school you can start taking classes as a matriculated student he said you know you want to do it i was like yeah okay why not i was like you know when is it they said oh it's next week i'm like next week i'm like how are you i can't do it next week like i don't have a book i haven't studied i haven't i don't even have any resources i said dude we're 13. like it doesn't matter just do it see what happens like that's a very good point and so we took it and we both did really well and so we you know we didn't do it in order to start going to college we did it just just to do it and maybe not have to do it again in high school but um you know we were always skip we were sort of skipping uh classes or skipping you know uh ahead in classes and you know i was taking you know a couple i would always be taking like two math classes per term so i was taking algebra and geometry and then i do pre-calculus and then go straight to calculus so i was doubling up on all my math and science classes anyway and so when i was in junior high i was going to the high school to take all my math and science classes because i'd run out in the junior high and by the time i was going into high school it's a three-year high school where i'm from it um you know i'd already taken all the all the math and science classes really and those were all my favorite classes and so i just sort of looked at it and i was like well you know i can just sit here for three years and just dumb myself down and just take all you know the stupid classes that i really am not interested in uh and then forget everything that i've done and then actually be at a disadvantage when i go to college or i can just go to university now and so i just did that because it didn't make any sense to go an accelerated rate and then be hindered by it you know because i would have i would have just gone really fast and accelerated really fast and then hit a dead point not been able to take any more classes and then i would have forgotten everything and then i you know and then i would have to sort of retake classes to catch back up so like that didn't make any sense and so yeah so i just went to went to college early it's amazing wow very proactive of you i love that i think when i was 15 after two years of taking french i could say i'm a pineapple and that's about all i could do um so wait way to take advantage of all those advanced classes and use that momentum to get yourself into college that's amazing um really excited to chat with you today we've talked to a lot of carnivores we're definitely big proponents of the carnivore diet around here um we've talked to a lot of people about the advantages of eating lots of meat we've even talked to people like sally norton who talks about the harms of oxalates and you know that can be found in a lot of plant foods but i'm really excited to chat with you as a plant-free md to talk really truly about the harms of eating plants and have like a really comprehensive um you know kind of a guide as to why plants you know are so prevalent in our diets and why maybe they should or shouldn't be but i would just like to talk about your story and how you first came across this you came across this quite a while ago and understanding that the plants really are not that great for us can you tell us about that yeah yeah so and that's my my approach to this as well and that's why you know call my podcast the plant free md because it's not it's not just about eating meat you know that's obviously a big part of it but the main thing is not eating all these other things that actually cause harm so you know i talked when i was first talking to to people about this you know they they would say oh yeah that's really interesting yeah you know that makes sense but you know i don't mind eating salad so you know i'll just keep eating salad and the point is it's not that you don't you don't have to eat salads you don't have to eat vegetables to get all your nutrition from you know because you can get all your nutrition from meat which is true but in fact you don't want to eat the salad the salad is actually bad for you so it's not just like oh hey you don't you don't have to do it if you don't want to it's like you shouldn't do it um the reason being yeah exactly the reason being is that you know plants are living organisms and they they want to stay living organisms all living things have a defense down to single-celled organisms and while animals can run away or fight back plants can't and so they have to use different means to this to defend themselves against predation they have all sorts of different different ways of doing that which are very very interesting but one of the main ones is that they just use poisons they are just toxic to animals and insects you know caffeine was developed as an insecticide and it's actually you know a neurotoxin it can cause seizures in people that are prone to epilepsy so you know these things actually do cause harm to us and they're supposed to you know you know plants don't want to be uh eaten by and large obviously there are exceptions in symbiotic relationships uh with certain animal species but that's how these things have developed and so some people say well you know like oh this plant doesn't want to be eaten so it uses poisons like oh but that cow doesn't want to be eaten either oh shush that doesn't that doesn't meet with a narrative i saw some uh guy say that specifically well the point is is that the cow can defend itself as well it just has different defenses because it's mobile because it can use kinetic you know kinetic defenses it doesn't need to be poisonous it's flesh doesn't have to be poisonous to the lion that eats it where you know a eucalyptus leaf does you know so i i mean i learned in seventh seventh or eighth grade biology that plants and animals are in evolutionary arms race plants becoming more and more poisonous so less and less animals can eat them so that they can survive and thrive or else they go extinct which most species of life have gone extinct at this point so everything that's come through the gauntlet of evolution is battle hardened including the plants and then animals you know also evolving to and adapting to being able to break down specific poisons safely so that they can eat a specific plant and then most thing other things can't eat that so that that's their conserved resource they don't have to compete for resources as much like you know pandas koalas you know giraffes and and uh and everything else you know these things eat plants but they eat very specific plants because they can eat that plant safety that plant they other other plants they'll die people know this this is common knowledge almost every plant on earth is quote unquote inedible meaning that it will kill you if you eat a small amount of it well then we have edible plants the only distinction there is that they don't kill you very quickly but that doesn't mean that they don't use poisons that doesn't mean that they don't use toxins they do it's just that we have some inbuilt inbuilt defenses to these things but we don't have immunities it's not like cows and grass you know where a cow can eat and there's different kinds of grasses and then some cows can't you know and cows can't eat certain kinds of grasses so when you're eating your evolved plant then you can do that but if your species hasn't evolved to eat a specific plant that plant is bad for you so you know we learn this we actually teach this to kids and anybody and people say why don't we know this or maybe they call on it you ask anybody who studied botany even taking one class on it they'll be like hell yeah actually that's true study horticulture one class on horticulture oh yeah no that's actually true you know all plants you know use some form of toxin that is a rule across the plant and fungus kingdoms just period that is hard fact that is hard science like it's that that's really not up for debate that that is a thing that exists in nature and just because someone doesn't know that doesn't mean it doesn't exist it just means they need to read more and i encourage everyone to do that just go to an introductory botany book it is there okay study you know take a book on horticulture it's there so when i was in in college at the university of washington i was taking cancer biology but i always knew i wanted to be a doctor and i was always interested in those sorts of classes so i was taking cancer biology and we were sort of going back over this the fact that plants use poisons you know to stop predation to deter predation and just cancer biology classes so we were looking at it in uh from a cancer perspective and so we were looking at the different amount of carcinogens that were in you know plants that we would eat on it on a regular basis and we learned that like brussels sprouts like the most reviled vegetable of all from all kids there's a good reason for that they had at the time we had already discovered discovered 136 separate human carcinogens just in brussels sprouts and mushrooms had over 100 spinach kale lettuce celery cabbage cucumber broccoli you name it everything had we were given a list look at page after page of all the different plants that you've ever eaten and every single one there wasn't a single one that had less than 60 carcinogens in it and so this is where that bitter taste comes from this is why kids hate the taste of vegetables you know when they first when they're first eating salads because they're they're much more closely attuned to their genetics and so that bad taste that's a very good indication that there's something bad there for you a bitter taste of a bad taste that is your your brain and tongue are sophisticated machines and that is their way of telling you there is something bad in there for you bad in there so if something is bitter it is bad for you right this is why medicine is bitter well what is medicine medicine is a poison that just causes more benefit than harm in certain circumstances but just like you're not going to take antibiotics every single day you shouldn't eat you know you know broccoli or or celery or whatever every single day maybe there's some medicinal purposes for that but maybe not but whether or not they do those medicinal purposes are only of of a net benefit when you're sick and when you're unwell and that's treating you for something so we were quite blown away by this obviously as i think everyone i tell that to is it's like that can't be real i thought the same thing i'm like what the hell is going on here we i thought he must be joking he must just be screwing with us everyone was literally looking around wildly like what's going on like who's who's in on the joke i was looking for like a ta someone in the back of the class that's just sitting there like smirking like he does this all the time there's no one and it slowly sort of dawned on us that like jesus this guy this guy's this guy's serious and you know and uh and i remember like just thinking in my head i was like you know but but vegetables are still good for you though right and he just looked at us and he's just like i don't eat salad i don't eat vegetables i don't let my kids eat vegetables plants are trying to kill you so i was like right screw plants and i just i just stopped eating them uh right away and you know i went to the store i just everything was a plant everything had plant product everything had some sort of product in it that came from plants be it you know grains or seeds or vegetables or fruit sugar obviously everything came from a plant and so i just ended up just getting eggs meat and milk these those were the only things i could find that didn't have plants and so i ended up inadvertently becoming a carnivore uh for several years at least five and i was playing you know professional rugby at the time was i was you know traveling all over the u.s and canada and then internationally and i was i was just most of that time was i was a pure carnivore and i just never felt better and i've never performed better and i've never played better and i've never i've never had such you know exercise tolerance and it was i've never been able to push myself so hard i've never recovered so fast except until now when i'm when i'm doing it again and my body does the same thing i'm 20 years older and i feel just as good you know and you know i don't have the time anymore to dedicate uh like i did before i was training you know sometimes anywhere from six to even 10 hours a day every day and so i was getting in absolutely insane shape i don't have the time for that anymore but when i do i can i could push myself much further than i could before and i recover nearly instantly and i get much more benefit out of that um so that was my introduction to it and then when i was in england playing i just didn't have the same access uh to food i don't know why but the steaks like i couldn't get them to brown in england i just couldn't do it i don't know if they like if they had a higher water content or something but like they only went gray on the outside and then i was i just kept cooking them until they brown but they never brown and so i ended up cooking these things well done and i just ugh you know i wasn't having fun with it and then so i i just couldn't figure out how the hell to cook a damn steak there i don't know i'm sure it was me but like there was something going wrong and um and so i ended up getting meat that was already cooked and and that seemed to be easier just because i was playing all the time and training all the time i just didn't have time to mess around and you know some of the times that that meat would be breaded like breaded chicken drumsticks and i remember thinking myself like oh that's a plant but is it that much does it make that much of a difference i'm like well you know let's just see it did it made a big difference i remember a couple months into it you know i was i was getting aches and pains and little you know niggling sores and and uh and just just little weird injuries and i was just like i was like oh i don't you know what the hell is going on and and i just wasn't i didn't have the same energy that i had i didn't have that same just like gusto for uh you know ex you know exercise that i that i had before and i remember thinking i was like you know what's what's the difference like what's going on am i just not pushing myself am i not training as hard like what am i doing or i was 25 at the time so i was like is that it is just 25 that's the crest and then you're just going downhill after that you know which is certainly what i thought when i was 21 22 you know my friends be like oh yeah i'm 25 so i'm still young so doing this i'm like dude you're dying like what are you talking about and then so i'm 25 i'm like am i dying it's like um but you know looking back it was that was when i i unknowingly switched off off of a carnivore diet and started eating these plants again several years ago i came across uh you know more solid information that humans actually are carnivores is that that's the kind of animal that we are and we were taught this we're taught that we're apex predators top of the food chain you know what what animal do you know of at the top of the food chain that eats anything except animals below it on the food chain i can't think of a single thing sharks and dolphins don't eat kelp you know for roughage you know lions don't you know enjoy a fresh garden salad every now that you know they just don't and so you know we're we're the same and so when we're when we step off of that when we stop eating our naturally evolved biologically appropriate species specific diet which is meat that's when we run into troubles and so all of a sudden everything just just i had this epiphany all of a sudden i started looking at medicine uh from that perspective that humans are animals humans are animals and the kind of animal that we are are a carnivore and we are a carnivore that are not eating and living as carnivores and this is where you start seeing this breakdown in health and it's it's a it's a sort of a poison exposure relationship when we get exposed to these these poisons in these plants especially in abundance we end up developing different diseases like heart disease diabetes you know autoimmune disorders and even alzheimer's and and autoimmune or sorry like autism like neurodevelopmental delays as well and and these have all been linked to diet and some have have a causative links as well such as autism so you know this is this is a very very important part of of medicine i think it's really the most important part because it's something so easy that you can just you can just eliminate this huge swaths of so-called disease because they're not diseases they're they're poisonings we're being poisoned and we're not getting enough of our appropriate nutrition and that's uh that's sort of my approach to all this is is getting people the right you know species-specific food which is fatty meat and the fat is very important that's one of the most important parts that people are still afraid of though they shouldn't be it does not cause heart disease it does not cause diabetes it does not cause obesity it just doesn't and so getting people back on that and then specifically eliminating the different things that are harmful to them yeah no that's amazing i really appreciate that explanation i've kind of oscillated over the years that i've been carnivore you know between being very strict and also being a little bit more lenient like for somebody that's you know been on a strict carnivore diet they've resolved a lot of issues they're feeling great you know over time they can kind of add things back in and not notice so much of a negative effect but i wonder you know especially after listening to so much of your content how much of that is actually true and i wonder if we're giving up some of our most optimal you know feeling and and living because we're starting to introduce some of those things and you gave a great example in your podcast recently about you know early on you were very strict carnivore and then you ate some meat that had spices on it and i'm really curious if you could tell the listener like what happened when you included some of the spices you didn't want to be rude i believe you were with your family something we run into all the time um can you tell us a little bit about what happened as you you know kind of were more strict and then and then yeah you make a little bit of an allowance for some of these plants to creep back in what actually happens yeah so you know you can actually see you know the contrast pretty easily uh you know when you when you feel i don't feel a little better i don't feel a lot better i feel a thousand times better than i've ever felt my entire life you know including when i was a professional athlete not on this diet so as compared to myself um so when you feel amazing like that and you get something that slips back in and it has like little spices or whatever like you can actually feel that that actually affects you and so this is something that you know i encourage people to do go pure get rid of everything and just go meat and water for a month and then you don't think that you know you know black pepper is that big of a deal you don't think that coffee is that big of a deal okay be off it for a month try drive back in like you'll see a difference and if that difference is is is fine for you and you you don't mind that fine it's you know it's your life uh for me it's it's way too much i you know i i drink one cup of black coffee and i'm sore for for two days that's not worth it you know and you know i get a little bit of beans or rice mixed in with my food i'm trying to scrape it off but you know a little bit it stays on and my my back feels like it's in stabbing pain for four full days afterwards that's not worth it you know that no nothing tastes better than being healthy feels and i believe you're sort of talking about when when my parents were going uh carnivore my mom started to do this and so she was just making a big roast like a lamb roast and she put every single herb and seasoning she could find on this thing it was like literally like crusted green and i was like mom you know that's supposed to use plants like that's literally the whole point of this he's like no no no we're not having any any plants we're not doing a salad or anything this is just the meat this is just for the meat i'm like no those are plants and that's you know you're putting it it doesn't just go away uh because you put it on on meat you know if you like tip you know baggy of cocaine into your your coffee and it dissolves it doesn't just go away it's like oh no no it's just coffee i'm just having coffee like okay there's other things going on there though and so i you know i didn't want to be rude i was at my mom's house and i was sort of looking at them like i really don't want to eat that i kind of want to just scrape it off but you know i didn't want to sort of see i didn't want to be weird and scrape it off or be rude or seem rude and so i was and i was also curious because i was like well you know let's see let's see what this does let's see how this affects me and i'm always always interested in experiment and so i i had about one and a half pieces of lamb and i was clinically depressed for the rest of the night i was so upset i mean i was i was beside myself and you know i get bouts of uh you know low mood and i've had you know depression in the past not too uh you know such an extent as many people have but it's something that i've had to deal with and all of a sudden this came bam hit me just straight in the face and i was so upset and i remember at the time that night i was i was extremely upset and i actually i literally contemplated suicide not just like oh that'd be nice i i actually thought up a plan i was like this is how i'm gonna do it and i remember thinking to myself all of a sudden like thankfully i had some sort of you know uh part in me that was able to sort of look from the outside and say that's not normal i shouldn't be feeling like this you know there wasn't anything that happened tonight that should make me feel this upset and this sad and this low you know but i do i do feel this bad so this is pathological this is this is this is this is something wrong with my brain chemistry this this is an actual grief this is an actual sadness this is a this is something wrong and so i said okay if this is pathological you know obviously shouldn't do anything and so i'm just going to go to sleep and i'll try and sleep this off i'll see how i feel in the morning if i still feel like i want to do this in the morning i'll do it in the morning i literally i made it i made a deal with myself that that's what i would do i woke up in the morning and you know needless to say i didn't feel like that anymore i just felt more emotionally numb and i remember thinking myself what the hell was that about and i was i was thinking back on everything that was said everything you know the conversation at the table everything that happened and i remember thinking i was like there's nothing there that should have upset me like that was i just was i just completely overreacting to something or or was this the plants i was like well there's only one way to find out and so ate more of the stupid lamb with the plants on it and i was clinically depressed the rest of the damn day but at least now i knew why and so i didn't i didn't even think about suicide because i was just like now i just was able to focus that that you know of upset uh feelings towards the plants like to damn these plants i never i was like i knew plants were trying to kill me i hate these things keep these things the hell away from me and so now and and so you know i have this very strong aversion to these things because i know what they do to me they make me feel like garbage and i don't want any anything to do with that and uh and you're right you know we can we can sort of convince ourselves that well you know maybe i can have this back in or maybe maybe someone who has an issue uh derived from like leaky gut and autoimmune disorders after a while your leaky gut will heal your autoimmune issues will will take care and sort of slowly heal and maybe you sort of introduce something back on and and maybe early on because you had leaky gut because you had uh you know your body was more sensitive to this you know you would have you have a bigger flare-up well maybe now you don't have that much of a response so you fool yourself into thinking oh it's safe now it's still poison and it's going to build up in your body and it's going to break down your body's ability to take care of it and detoxify because we have a very limited uh uh ability to do that now our livers are awesome they can do quite a lot of uh detoxing but there's going to be some damage done and eventually you will overwhelm your system and and uh and cause even more damage and then you can just if you just slowly eke into it then people people will uh you know can fall off easier some people say that you know what i'm doing is too strict and that's going to put people off and they'll they're going to slip off i've noticed the exact opposite with my patients and with myself you know when you have a lot of gray area and you go oh yeah you kind of do this you can kind of do that and then things are fungible and you know there aren't just clear lines i can do this i can't do that um where is if you just do a pure carnivore diet it's the easiest uh prescription to follow in the world you know exactly what you can eat you know exactly what you can't eat my hard rule no plants or fungi no uh sugar nothing artificial that goes for sauces seasonings and drinks as well so you know seasonings pepper that's a plant honey that's a sugar you know artificial sweeteners they're artificial stevia it's a plant so you know you know exactly what you can and can't eat you just eat meat and you you feel great you can eat any time of the day or night it doesn't matter if you're not eating carbohydrates it doesn't matter what time you eat and you can eat you eat as much as you care to because your taste will tell you if it tastes good that means your body wants those nutrients and so you just keep eating until it stops tasting good it will eventually a steak will stop tasting good you just go look i don't really want to keep eating that you stop that's your body's way of naturally uh of natural portion control and so it's very very easy and and i think that when people blur those lines maybe it's maybe it's helpful to get them onto it in the first place that could be helpful for some people but i think eventually it's it's a much stronger position to be in if you're only eating meat and water a lot of people if they sort of are eating other things and dabbling they're mostly eating meat i find that they're the ones who never really go full and they're the ones who slip up a lot more because it's not as big of a deal to them they're not thinking like i don't want that anywhere near me and also they don't they don't necessarily feel as good they feel a lot better than they did but you know that last getting rid of that last little bit of uh carbs and and animal and and plant toxins actually make a huge difference because it's that first initial introduction that actually has a big weight of effect on our system and they sort of derail our hormonal system and our metabolic system uh you know all day potentially and so you can add on to that and make it worse but you've already done a significant amount of disproportional amount of damage as well so um yeah that's why i do just pure meat and water myself yeah i love that i love how you kind of went into detail about that as far as like the restriction because a lot of people would listen to this and say why can't you live a little like you're only eating meat that's so restrictive like but but but they don't understand what you mentioned like you you don't know what you don't know or how you could possibly feel for me it was sugar like i always thought i could like moderate it like if i had it every now and again it would be fine and last summer when i started eating a pie i couldn't stop eating the pie even though i didn't want any more pie and i stayed up all night i was sweating my brains out my anxiety was through the roof and i decided that day like this is not worth it this taste is maybe fine for 30 seconds but it's not worth it and so i don't consider it restrictive to never have sugar you're right it is so much more simple to walk through a grocery store or go to a restaurant and just say like oh great see all those aisles i don't go there there's no reason for me to be in those aisles i know where my food is i can go to those sections in the store be out of there in three minutes and and you know know exactly what my diet's gonna be and it's really enriching and filling and i don't get anxiety it's not restrictive at all yeah well yeah exactly and it does make shopping so much easier like i mean the entire store is something that i just don't care about you know and so i'm not looking at oh gosh what do i need i was just like go to the meet pick up some steaks done and uh you know i sort of like have fun shopping what meat looks good today and um and then i just i don't waste my time on anything else uh you're you're exactly right i don't think it's restrictive at all it's a very good point you know what what i think is restrictive uh is diabetes diabetes is really restrictive you know being 200 pounds overweight and having your back and knees hurt constantly i think that's restricted i think you know having autoimmune disorders and alzheimer's i think that's really restrictive i think your children not growing up to their genetic potential and maybe even having uh you know extremely bad uh you know developmental delay such as autism i think that's very restrictive i think that that restricts someone's entire humanity and it's something that's completely preventable it's something that that doesn't need to happen so i think that it's very freeing i think that you know i'm free from buying all the all the processed garbage at the store i don't have to get bought into all the different you know ad campaigns and marketing propaganda for the new super food and the new this and the new that i know what the superfood is i know exactly what my body needs i just get that and my brain works and my body works to its genetic potential that's very freeing i give my body the fuel that it needs so that i can live my life you know it's it's sort of uh strange now you know i look at you know the world one and now that i'm on the outside of this looking in it's very funny because you know i'm not beholden to restaurants and bars and coffee shops for my entertainment social social exposure most people are and you know we surround ourselves by by by food and drink and that and that's the entire makeup of our of our social interaction like we you know people can't just hang out anymore they can't like go and do things like everyone says all that's me for coffee let's meet for drinks it's me for lunch there's me for brunch just me for dinner like can you actually hold a conversation with people if you're not you know eating you know like i i can i think it's it's quite you know it's quite uh uh you know engaging when you're actually able to to talk to somebody and actually do things so i think that's restrictive i think having to eat you know five times a day and the only time because you have to eat so often that's where you have to surround your social experience with is with eating i still go out to eat with people i still go to coffee i just drink water and i eat meat there's always meat on the mail unless you go to a vegan restaurant which i've done with my friends and just drank water you know it's not that hard i don't care and um you know it's like what you're saying with the sugar that is you know fructose is a drug it's an actual drug it actually gives a dopamine response to the addiction centers of your brain just like cocaine heroin and methamphetamines and there are there are mri studies actually showing um that the same areas of your brain that die off from using methamphetamines and cocaine and heroin uh through this this this dopamine response dopamine actually turns your your cells your your their excitatory so your neurons are firing if your neurons are firing for too long they die you know they they have to turn off and rest or they die and so you know you keep pushing this and stimulating and stimulating and stimulating all of a sudden these things die off sugar does the same thing and so sugar this is what that's what we've been calling this a sugar high for decades since i was a kid anyway i'm sure before that as well you give these things in they're bouncing all over the wall and then they're coming down they're getting ah give me more and they're just freaking out you know you imagine a 27 year old coming off of heroin doing that you know and it's sort of the same thing except they haven't been you know socialized uh the child has but it's the same reaction they're just freaking out and they want their drug so this is this is addictive as a drug because it is a drug and so you do find yourselves you know getting getting uh trapped in eating which is why you know when people say like oh you know you can you can have a bit of fruit and honey i think that that's that's uh all well and good maybe they're well you know the people that that that uh uh you know you know promote that you know like dr saladino and carnival aurelius i you know you read their stuff they're very well meaning you know they say like look this can cause organ dysfunction um you know if you don't get if you don't get uh you know carbohydrates and fructose you don't though you really don't you know your your body makes blood sugar and glycogen and it even actually makes fructose in certain uh and certain isolated uh areas but you know the uh was it the national institute of science and the or national academy of science and the institute of medicine both said that the the requirement the data requirement for carbohydrates even the lifetime requirement for carbohydrates is zero grams zero you do not need these things to survive or to thrive or else the inuits wouldn't be here because there are no carbohydrates or sugar or honey or fruit at the north pole and our ancestors came through 30 000 years of of ice ages at a time and there were like you know several of these and so you know if we weren't able to survive exclusively on meat we wouldn't be here no one would be here and there's there's tons of indigenous tribes that don't eat any fruit or honey and exclusively eat meat their whole lives and you know maybe in every now and then they have some if they have exact access to it but quite often people don't and so you know you can't live generationally only eating meat unless meat has absolutely everything it needs for you in the proportion you need it and and that's what we find you know and so um i so i think that it's it's it's probably a bad idea for people to reintroduce honey and and fructose containing uh foods such as fruit simply because it's a drug and it's bad for you because it's broken down in the same to the same byproducts as alcohol in our body the uc san francisco biochemistry department showed that conclusively in 2009 that's what it does and so you get the same diseases from those breakdown products from fructose as you do from alcohol so you get fatty liver disease cirrhosis diabetes heart disease now it's being you know shown to to be implicated in cancers and alzheimer's that that's not something that that you want that's certainly not something you want to give your kids and screw with their body you know this is this is being implicated in alzheimer's which is a very serious you know fatal neurodegenerative process you know what's that doing to a developing brain what's it doing to a fetus it's not going to be good you know i can tell you that and so i think that it's it's um i think that it has to do with with other neurodevelopmental delays such as autism there's multiple different kinds of autism autism autism spectrum disorder there's a spectrum of of symptoms and kinds of autism well to me that means there's a spectrum of causes as well and i think one of those causes is is exposure to uh sugar and carbohydrates in the genetically susceptible and so what's obviously you need you need you need a you know genetic predisposition and an environmental trigger to get get most of these things some things are just you get poison you eat poison you get poison but some of these things uh you you need to be susceptible to it you'll have other problems if you're not susceptible to it um but you know i remember when i was a kid as well uh we moved up to uh kirk in washington is when we first came across costco and you know we went there and it was like summer break when i was a kid and they had this 10 pound pack of gummy bears and gummy bears were hands down my favorite candy like love these things and i was like oh my god can we please get these i don't know how i convince my mom to do it we almost we always never had sugar in the house which was was a blessing but she ended up getting this for me and my i remember gorging myself on just handfuls of gummy bears all day i was just playing video games and eating gummy bears all day every day and i remember getting through like you know several handfuls and like really enjoying wow this is great this is great got to the point where it started to taste gross and i really didn't like it but i could not stop eating this stuff i just kept doing it my mouth was all felt all like grimy and and uh and and coarse and i was just like my my tongue was all raw and and it was horrible and i did not enjoy any single one of these things and i kept thinking that i'm like i just really don't enjoy this is gross i just couldn't stop eating i'm like why am i still doing this why am i doing this and i kept thinking i'm like maybe this will be good this time no it's really not okay maybe this time no it's really not and you know the next day i remember waking up and like i got my i still have gummy bears i can do that i'm like oh why am i doing this to myself again i'm like all right well let's see what they taste like today they tasted good again at first within a couple handfuls it was gross again i just kept eating the damn things and then after that point i'm like okay i'm just gonna work my way through this and just power through and just finish these damn things off so i can stop eating them it was you know if that's that's not good you know you shouldn't you shouldn't be doing that with anything and so um you know that was um that was my sort of experience with that and you know so this is this is that's that's that compulsive eating you know and it makes you think you're starving when you're not carbohydrates in general do this uh they raise your insulin which blocks leptin which is comes from your fat cells to tell your brain how much energy you have in storage and so it's like a running gas cage and you know when you block that it's like breaking your gas tank so it just looks like you're running on on empty the whole time and so you're going oh i got to get gas i got to get gas i got to get yes you're just constantly you know filling up and you're spilling gas all over the place but you don't realize it because you're like oh i'm on empty i'm on empty so your brain is uh is telling you you're starving to death you need to eat you need to eat because your blood sugar's dropping too because when insulin is up it it forces energy into cells it doesn't allow it to come out of cells and so now you can't make blood sugar you can't make glycogen you're not making ketones and so you have the only energy you have are these exogenous carbohydrates that you've eaten and the glycogen that you've now stored because of them and then when you start running out of that your blood sugar starts dropping off and you start getting all upset and and tired and think oh gosh i really need to eat something so we do this three four times a day why is that you're eating thousands of calories you're eating way too much eating way more than you actually need and yet you're still hungry and you still feel awful and so you know that that that means that something's broken you know your senses you know that are that are ingrained and and finely tuned over millions and millions of years of evolution they don't just break like that you know and why does why do things taste bad if they're good for us that doesn't make sense either you know things can taste good maybe sugar that's an outlier you know but we recognize is that something safe that we can eat short term so that we can get what we want but it's going to damage us long term but if something tastes bad it is bad that's just that's just a rule and so you know why can we not trust our taste why can we not trust our our hunger and satiety signals you know that doesn't make sense but when you're eating naturally you can listen to all these things and so that's when you know you're you're more on the right track so you know it's um it's a very harmful substance sugar and carbohydrates in general and you know they make you hungry they make you overeat they're addictive and so people start off adding in a little bit of honey like oh i was told i could eat this great and they have some honey they have some sugar and it tastes good and they like it it makes them feel good of course it does it's a drug people like drugs you know that's why they do drugs um but they're drugs and so you're going to you're it's going to catch up with you eventually and so you know and you know you know these people say like oh a little bit of honey and fruit okay but it starts off as little but this is a drug you know i'm sure your cocaine habit started off as a little bit of cocaine every now and then as well problem is that a little bit can turn into a lot very easily with addictive substances and i've worked with many patients who've listened to that advice and basically found it as an excuse to to refeed their sugar addiction and so they started eating carbohydrates again they started eating fruit again they started eating honey again and it started off as a little and a little more and a little more and a little more and they're like oh this is good for me i can do this and then within you know five six months they're back eating you know pizza and donuts and all sorts of garbage and they put on all this weight and they're sick again and then you know uh you know some of them have seen you know me talk about this and they they they've approached me and just said you know wow this was this was the exact cycle that i that i took and now you know having a look at this i'm like yeah i've just got to get rid of everything i've got to get rid of the sugar as well and so i think that it's it's important to realize that and i think it's important to understand that you really don't need carbohydrates you flat out don't you certainly don't need fructose there are no biochemical processes in the body that require exogenous fructose and can't be accomplished by something else none so you don't need this stuff you certainly don't need it and i i would argue that you really don't want it either yeah i'm really glad you brought that up that was something specifically i was going to ask you about there are popular carnivores like the ones you mentioned dr saladino carnivore aurelius you know they were pushing a lot of organ supplements for a long time and i don't know if they still are they're not people that i follow anymore i do have a high respect for them and they were you know definitely people that helped me with my understanding of the carnivore diet for a while they were pushing a lot of organ supplements and we had a listener question that was related to this i've never made this connection but eating too many organs and then because you're eating too many organs needing supplements and carbohydrates to supplement um your diet and now we see these people eating honey eating fruit eating fructose like you said eating juice which i you know i get a lot of questions about this and it's people get really confused about it and so how would you address that i know it's something you just kind of answer but but this is like really specifically something that's on a lot of people's minds yeah well i think the thing is true with juice i mean where was that in our evolutionary past you know if you if you're going to go by you know like you know what where we came from and how we evolved we certainly didn't evolve with juice i could tell you that and that's was there a juicer on the walls in france yeah just there with a stick blender a pineapple um you know no and the fruits that we have now for juicing these things are are man-made you know the original mango is a very tough fibrous not very sweet plant with a massive seed and barely any fruit you know it's not the same thing we've been you know you know selectively breeding these things in a concentrated manner in order to make them as sweet as possible that's not that's not what we found in nature um so it's very very different drinking juice certainly didn't happen it just didn't but you know that's something that that i was very surprised by with carnivore really especially started saying oh no no actually you know i was wrong you actually need fructose you actually need sugar or else you'll get you'll get you know thyroid dysfunction is what he was talking about at the time um and i've read one of his his uh you know posts on it and um you know he cites different studies but the problem is is that you can get a study that says anything that you want you need to be able to analyze these things and look at it as like wait this is talking about some very small mechanistic process you know does that what does that translate to on the bigger picture the bigger picture is we actually are carnivores that's actually the kind of animal we are and we actually existed exclusively on meat for millions of years okay so if we needed fruit in order to survive and thrive we would not be here because we wouldn't have made it through the ice ages the eskimos right now would all be dying they'd be dead you know you can't go very long with with extreme hypothyroidism you don't make it and let's say that it's it's you know sort of borderline and then low level hypothyroidism just to make you miserable but it doesn't kill you which you can it can kill you your kids are going to be screwed because hypothyroidism in a woman when she's pregnant will will make that that fetus develop completely abnormally it's actually there's actually a condition called cretinism doesn't know all the best insults are all used to be medical uh terminology you know like you know someone call someone a that's that's a real thing it's high it's congenital hypothyroidism and they get very specific uh facial deformities they're short stature so they're very small and they're very severely intellectually delayed and impaired and so this this is a very serious issue this is this is not a joke um and so if you had an entire race of people an entire um civilization that was exclusively eating meat and all getting hypothyroidism all their kids would be getting cretinism that lasts exactly one generation and you're dead that's not gonna work you know so that doesn't even pass the smell test you know um and certainly juice doesn't um but um you know i like carnival realist i like saladino you know i i point my my patients um you know to their resources regularly uh before i had you know my own uh my own things to show them i i still think they have great resources i mean i disagree with them on this one but that's one of the few things i disagree with them on so i still think they're they're great resources i just i just think this is this one uh is i certainly just uh differ with um you brought up the organs and that's something that that i've conjectured and i'm not their doctor i don't know uh their their medical history uh or anything like that which is just something that i've thought about from a first principle sort of you know basis when you're eating organs you know they're saying you should and they do yeah they do have you know supplement lines and and i think carnival really has like a dried liver snacks or something like that and then they really say like liver is really important organs are really important and you know i agree they have they're very nutrient dense what was that word it's dense they're nutrient dense they have a lot packed in a little do you need that much that's the question you know you if you eat the bite of a polar bear liver you will die from vitamin a poisoning that's that's a well-known fact okay well liver has a lot of vitamin a this is a fat soluble vitamin and so it stores in your body you don't just pee out the ax the excess like you do vitamin c or vitamin b you know so this will build up and it'll store up and then you can start having problems you can have problems that go on for years because this is that soluble it doesn't really go away that easily it's actually kind of hard to clear and so vitamin a can build up if you're eating things out of out of proportion now if you look you know even even dr saladino he shows that all the you know these different tribes like the hats though they'll they'll make a kill and they'll get this sliver and it's like they're like treating it reverently and they pass it around everyone takes a small bite but what are they doing they're taking a small bite and how often are they hunting they hunt an animal they take that down depending on the size of the animal depending on the size of the tribe you know maybe they're they're eating one animal for every few days for everyone and they're getting one liver and so they gain like a bite every few days maybe even every one day it's one bite the rest of their their meals are are largely skeletal muscle meat you have to think to yourself how many hundreds of pounds of skeletal muscle meat and fat are there in a cow compared to every one pound of liver it's literally hundreds to one okay so you know if you're nutrient deprived and you're on a standard american diet you're not really getting very good nutrients in black liver is your best friend you know but if you're on a carnivore diet skeletal muscle meat and fat have everything that you need in the proportion that you need it by definition because that's what we evolved on and you look at the eskimos you look at the inuits look at lewis and clark they did not eat the organs they ate the meat they ate the fattiest of the meat lewis and clark you know obviously you know the very famous expedition across america you look you read their journals they're super interesting i was just talking to someone about this today you they they talk about how you know when they would hunt they would eat the fattiest parts of the animals they found that people that didn't eat the fattiest parts died they weren't if they weren't getting enough fat they died they fed the lean bits and the organs to their dogs they ate the fat the dogs ate the lean stuff and the organs they can survive on different things than we can we need the fat we need the skeletal fat and then even the abdominal fat but you know we get all the work the the vitamins and things like that that we need from the muscle and fat so if you're eating organs that's fine if you enjoy them but i go by taste as well if liver tastes good go for it your brain's probably telling you something hey you're a bit deprived get it eventually it will not taste as good probably um raw raw organs taste very different though like raw liver for some reason tastes so much better than cooked liver it's like it's just a different thing altogether but this has a lot of vitamin a and so if you're eating you know you know half a pound of organ of liver a day you know that's completely out of proportion with with the amount of meat that you're eating you know you're eating two pounds of meat and you're eating half a pound of liver you know that's four to one as opposed to 200 to 1 you know or 400 to 1. so you're eating this stuff out of proportion and if you're doing this regularly ongoing and ongoing and ongoing you are going to build up um these these fat soluble vitamins that are going to get become reach a level of toxicity called hypervitaminosis hypervitaminosis a is well known and well described to suppress your tsh your thought your your thyroid stimulating hormone which will then reduce the amount of thyroid hormone produced by your thyroid this will give you low thyroid and so you know dr saladino and carnivore aurelius all of a sudden they're like oh i'm just eating i'm just eating meat liver and obviously liver is just the best thing ever so that can't be it and my thyroid's taking and i feel like okay here's this little study that that sort of says that if you have the you need to sort of carbohydrates to do this you're forgetting the fact that our bodies make carbohydrates we have blood sugar we have glycogen that didn't go anywhere and you do get little spikes as well so you kick yourself out of ketosis you know we eat you know a high protein or a big meal with a lot of protein in it it will kick you out of ketosis for a little bit and then pop you back in because you you make a corresponding uh uh amount of glucagon to actually you know take you out to get your blood sugar back down to normal but you do have this as transient spikes okay you drink some milk does the same thing so they're looking at this and saying you know this must be i need to eat exogenous carbohydrates but as we know we have we have hard evidence that we don't need any carbohydrates our entire lives or else we wouldn't be here and the inuits wouldn't be here and also this is this is something that's well described you know again by the national um the institute of medicine and the national association of science it's very clear they're like yeah no we you don't need any carbohydrates and you know that's appealing to authority like obviously you know just because they're in charge doesn't mean that they're right but you know i they do support their statement in this one um so when you're eating carbohydrates it actually increases the amount of vitamins that you need this is why people you know look at carnivore diet and say well this doesn't have enough vitamins and minerals you can't survive this doesn't have enough well actually when you're only eating meat you're not eating carbohydrates you're not eating uh you know fruits and vegetables you actually need less of these vitamins a lot less you know instead of 10 you know instead of needing milligrams of vitamin c you need nanograms of vitamin c okay big difference orders magnitude several orders of magnitude difference okay so what happens you have hypervitaminous again this is complete conjecture but it's it's possible that someone who has hypervitaminosis can then eat carbohydrates and all of a sudden their requirement for those vitamins actually increases as well and there they have too many vitamins and now you know their their need is here so they have they have a toxic level but now they eat carbohydrates and now that brings about their demand up as well so now they're sort of it evens them out a bit that could be what's happening i don't know but i do know that meat did not cause that and not eating carbohydrates did not cause that that's a fact you know and you only need to look at the inuits and the fact that ice ages happened to to know that also i've i've been doing strict carnivore for quite a lot longer than they have people like dr baker have as well um or maybe similar amount of time and uh but then there's all sorts of people you know like kelly hogan she's been you know 10 11 years just meat and just water you know charles washington even longer than that there's people have been doing this for decades in the west and then of course all the the you know the the human populations you know living naturally that just don't eat anything except meat that's it so we know that's not it and if you know they're doing something similar to what i'm doing but they're getting different results it means they are doing something different that is significant and i think that the main difference between them and i and kelly hogan and the inuits is that they're eating organs they're eating a lot of organs and even taking supplements for organs i'm not there and kelly hogan's not and the inuits aren't you know i don't i don't i don't take that stuff i don't i don't think you need it um and so that's that's what i think is probably the difference and might be what's going on there yeah no i really appreciate that thoughtful answer um it is you just really have to look at the context of the diet and realize that a lot of you know the rdas or things were recommended is based on a diet that if you're eating carnivore you're not eating you don't need the same nutrients and you know i always felt guilty for not getting enough organs in my diet i never liked the taste you're right about like frozen and raw i think frozen and raw liver tastes way better than cooked liver and smells a million times better um and you know getting some of it i think is important but but i just i never noticed the difference that i got a lot of it versus getting some and i think just going out and pushing this idea that you meet a lot of them i it really makes you kind of stop and think whether that's the right message or not so i really do appreciate that um i definitely want to direct our listeners to your podcast which i absolutely love i told you um before we started recording when i found your podcast i resorted excuse me all the episodes and started from the newest or the i'm sorry the oldest to the newest i've been listening to them in order which is really great um all kinds of different topics you really address you had one of my absolute favorite favorite favorite rants about um baby formula which is fantastic i recommend it to anybody um record number of f-bombs in the first like 30 seconds i love it um and you also talked you know about you know talking to other vegans people that don't necessarily see eye to eye with you or with me and you know i i want to preface this question by saying i i don't care and i'm pretty sure you don't care whatever anybody chooses to eat however they decide to live their life whatever fundamentals whatever they feel about animals is totally totally fine i support that i'm not going to be the one standing at the corner of the street yelling at everybody that they need to not eat a carrot you know what i mean but i do think there's a lot of harm in telling people that if they don't eat in that particular way then they are going to be harmed and so i guess the question is for you why is it important to have the discussion with people that don't necessarily see eye to eye with you to at least bring some of these things out to light to talk about yeah well i think that i think that everyone makes their decisions um you know for a reason you know there are a lot of vegans that i that i've met that are very conscientious they've really thought about this either for their health or for the environment or you know just being nice to animals and i get that these are all very important things i completely agree with that and i and i and so you know my outlook would be the same as theirs you know i want to do what's right for my body i want to do something that's beneficial to the planet not harming it i don't want to you know have have a bunch of animals suffer and die needlessly i don't you know the sad truth is that you know we are uh heterotrophs something has to die for us to live that's just that's just a fact plants are living things too they actually have a nervous system they feel and respond to pain they scream i don't know if people know that they scream you start cutting into them or insects start eating them they send out chemical signals and they they aerosolize them they go out to the other plants around them their families and tells them like hey we're being eaten by this bug we're being attacked defend yourselves and so they'll start making more poisons to that bug another bug starts eating them they'll make another signal and they'll start producing a different toxin to that bug okay so these aren't just dumb inanimate objects you know they they actually are complex living organisms so you know let's say well they're not as as as good as a cow fine i can i can buy that but what people don't realize is that you know there's a study in australia that actually showed that you have to kill 25 times the number of sentient animals to grow one pound of plant-based protein which is not as bioavailable as as animal protein by the way so it's actually more of a disparity if you actually want usable protein to every one pound of animal protein so you're killing 25 times the amount of animals you're killing all the snakes although all the gophers all the uh rabbits you know all all the different birds and squirrels that are in that field and you're tilling it up you're grinding up animals uh when you're when you're going through the field and plowing that up you're getting all this runoff from the pesticides it goes into the water poisons the water kills all sorts of animals um you know and then you're and you have to kill all the animals that are coming around eating your crop you know they they have you know people out there shooting deer and pigs and kangaroo and you know anything else that comes in and and screws with their crop they have to kill these things those animals don't get eaten necessarily i mean sure some do but so these animals are dying needlessly whereas you know you you raise a cow you know you have a you have a relationship with that you have a social contract you take care of it then it takes care of you you keep it safe from harm you you raise its children you feed it you you protect it from predation you heal it when it's sick you uh fix it when it's when it's broken and then you know you take care of them give them a good life and you know there's no nice way to kill something but you know our our means in the west with the pneumatic hammer and you know electrocution are as close to instant as it is possible to get and so a lot of these you know very disturbing videos that come out about the slaughterhouses they're in third world countries and often they're they're actually hammed up on purpose to really scare the animals and roll them up and be extra cruel to them and extra nasty to them in order to just show something evil and and and these are actually being encouraged by the peta people saying yeah really mess with them try to hurt them so that we can show how evil this is no you're being evil you are torturing that animal oh it'll save other animals you are torturing that thing and that is not what's happening uh it's certainly not in in western avatars and slaughterhouses so i think it's important for people to understand this stuff and i agree with them i think that you know we should take care of animals we have we have a responsibility that we're going to we're going to eat these things we need to give them a good life we need to give them a clean death that is that is our responsibility and you should abso and we have laws that protect this you know you you're cruel to an animal that you're raising you go to jail and you should but also you know you have you have a protected interest if if you're raising that animal for market because it's a commodity if you hurt that animal if it dies of sickness or injury you don't get paid you know and so you could end up losing your farm losing your business or just not making money so you have a vested interest to actually protect that animal to make sure that it's healthy and happy and grows up strong and healthy so these animals get protected whether or not this person you know likes animals most of them do most of them actually really care about animals and work really hard to to make sure that they're okay um so i don't have a i don't have a problem with anyone eating the way that they want and i certainly don't have a problem uh you know with people who are honest about what they do people go vegan for a number of different reasons and and by and large they you know there's some of the vegan activists that are pretty toxic but most of just the normal people they go vegan for really honest reasons and you know they they want to improve their health and they've just been so like oh wow they watch game changers go wow god that all just makes sense because you know they don't know any better and i've seen i've seen doctors taken in by this and then i sort of point out the glaring holes in this thing go oh yeah no okay yeah no obviously that that's garbage but you know it was a very well done piece of propaganda and i i mean propaganda literally that was that was a piece of propaganda there was no veracity to anything those people are saying it was just a convincing lie that's all it was and it was a commercial you know james cameron was the was the executive producer of that funny enough he owns 140 million dollars worth of a pea protein company we'll look here yeah it's funny you need all this protein you got to get protein protein protein but you can't get it from meat because well that's so bad but look at this i've got this right here for you look at that isn't that convenient i mean it's it's a con it's an absolute calm and you know and that's you know that that's the name of marketing is that you con people into buying your product so i like having conversations with with uh vegans and vegetarians just because hey i want to make sure that i'm not wrong you know and so you know i test my my knowledge and experience with them and maybe they'll bring something new to the table this is something i did early on because i didn't want to be one of those guys that only looked at their side of the argument you know john stuart mill said that if you only knew well to paraphrase if you only know your side of the argument then you don't know much if you haven't heard it heard the opposing argument in its most persuasive form from the horse's mouth then you don't even know what the argument is you don't know what the discussion is so you need to go and you don't hear it from yourself you know that's why i tell people don't just listen to me i'm not trying to straw man anyone i'm not trying to you know i did a quick series on you know things that vegans say and i had this vegan cardiologist i had a debate with uh it was a three-on-three debate and it was just and and so i didn't want to just paraphrase oh this is what he said i played the tape this is what he says and i just went through point by point this is this is why i disagree with that this is why i think it's wrong and i and i you know put resources to provided resources so i think people should listen to that and i tried to do that i tried to go to different you know vegan um you know doctors and nutritionists and they'll go to their websites go to their youtube channels and just okay what am i missing you know you tell me what am i missing and you know i found that all of these things were based on fallacies some of them were outright lies and fictions or they stay you know we quote something oh this happened you look it up i'm like no that actually didn't happen or most things are based on the lie that cholesterol causes heart disease which it does not that's been definitively proven to be fraud you know the journal of american medical association published in 2015 actual internal memos from the sugar companies back in the 40s and 50s detailing how they paid off three harvard professors to falsify data and publish fraudulent studies to make it appears if cholesterol was causing heart disease and to exonerate sugar and say that it was safe and just an empty calorie that's where that that phrase comes from um and and other professors from around the country as well such as um uh was it keys what's his stupid name ansel doctor yeah yeah that that fraud he was bought and paid for as well he came up with the rdas so he was very very famous uh uh for that and he did this thing called the seven nations study and he was like wow this is this is really conclusive you know you found you studied these seven nations and the more cholesterol they ate you had a parabolic increase in heart disease well the problem with that is that he actually had full uh data for 23 different countries and that they had no correlation with heart disease so in fact there's no correlation at all between heart disease and and increased cholesterol and heart disease um you know and you you know when you show correlation that does not prove causation just like there's a correlation between uh ice cream sales going up and shark attacks you know there is a correlation that that doesn't mean that you know sharks like eating you know sweet fattened children who have just eaten ice cream you know uh you know when the summer months come in it gets hotter people you know people buy more ice cream they also go in the water where the sharks are so that's where the correlation is however so correlation is not causation however if you show that there is no correlation that proves there is no causation you cannot have causation without first having correlation so we know that there's no causation because there is no correlation um and so ansel keys was a big player in that but you know these harvard professors that i mentioned before one of them was named head of the usda and it was he who authored and published the 1977 declaration that cholesterol causes heart disease and so we should stop eating and stop eating saturated fat stop eating meat stop eating eggs stop eating red meat especially start eating more fruits and vegetables more grains and everything because they didn't have cholesterol in them and so this is what most of the vegans hang their hat on is this cholesterol theory of heart disease and they base everything on that well we know that that's false we know that and so whenever you have anything based on a false premise you have to throw it out and then start from scratch and that's something that they haven't done yeah that's right i would direct anybody to nina tyshall's book their big fat surprise um she goes in detail about dr ansel keys and how he came up with his theories this horrible horribly done study with with you know that graph that you mentioned but it contrasts that with all the data points to be had they were all over the place it looked like a shotgun where yeah you know there's there's data everywhere yet you're cherry picking the ones that best suit your case and you just very poor data to prove your point which doesn't prove anything it's ridiculous so i'm really glad that you brought that up and i'm really appreciative of you that you are able to have those conversations with people in a way that's really respectful and you're not shouting again from the street corner that this is the only way and you're not calling people names you're just talking about facts and trying to bring that to light and i think the more that we have the more we can push this message through um i definitely want to be respectful of your time you're ahead of us by like 14 hours which would be like way past my bedtime if i was stopping at the time we're at um we would love to have you back any time to continue this discussion this has been super engaging um really love you know how much study you've done how thoughtful you've been about this how you're combining both anecdote with yourself and with your patients but also the scientific facts and the studies that have been done it's all very very thoughtful and and again we really appreciate that uh dr chafee can you tell us where people can go to find you and connect with you in your work uh yeah well well thank you very much yeah so um i have a youtube channel that's just anthony chaffeemd um chaffey spelled with two f2es and uh and that's why i post a lot of videos and a lot of my content i also have a podcast which you mentioned the plant free md and that's on you know apple google spotify amazon you know whatever uh platform that you use and that generally has the audio version of uh of the videos that i would put on youtube but you know sometimes there's just stuff that's exclusive uh to that as well like different interviews that only have audio um and then you know i'm i'm very fairly active on uh instagram as well i have a lot of posts there that um that i try to like you know comment on different aspects of of diet and nutrition and evolution um and just sort of you know try to put the facts out there and also you know we'll publicize there and on on facebook when i'm uh publishing uh a new video i try to do at least two videos a week on youtube and my podcast sometimes three and um and so i sort of do those as a premiere and let people know when that's happening and then i have and then my my instagram is just anthonychaffeemd as well i have um twitter which is just anthony.chaffey and um and then sort of similar sort of things there um i'm trying to sort of broaden out onto different platforms like unfortunately tick tock which is just like the bane of uh i think society right now but i sort of put on a few videos there so i just put on different different clips and show clips and maybe some short videos that i do there um and that's that's most of it i i have developed a website called the carnivorelife.com and that is um it's under development i haven't i haven't actually you know dedicated a lot of time to it yet because i haven't had really time to but i plan to start putting up uh my basically my blog post that i've put up on instagram they're now sort of lost in the shuffle maybe they're more difficult for people to find but i think that that people have found very useful at least they've told me they found them very useful and i'll start putting those up online and then putting you know testimonials from uh different patients and and uh friends and family that have done this and and their personal experiences with that as well to see about helping people we do a weekly um q a session i started a patreon um for that and so people that can you know like it's like three dollars a month or something like that and that entitles you to join these uh weekly q a sessions with myself and um uh my friend rina over in in sydney she goes by the five minute body on um on instagram and so we try to do that and um yeah that's pretty much i think that's most of it okay probably great yeah we'll link to all of that in the show notes i don't know why i mentioned bedtime you clearly never sleep no yeah yeah i was on call this weekend and so i've basically been working the last like 62 hours i had like a couple hours of sleep last night i had maybe two hours of sleep saturday night wow yeah that's amazing yeah i can i can definitely tell you based on myself and people that have coached once they start eating this way they have way more energy and it's a lot easier to get by with less sleep so that's fantastic we're really appreciative of your work um just totally exhaustive um stuff that you're able to put out red dot grant finch casey thank you so very much for everything you do and thank you for appearing on our podcast today we really appreciate you thank you for having me i really appreciate it absolutely and this has been another episode of boundless body radio [Music]