Dr. Anthony Chaffee provides a comprehensive breakdown of human digestive anatomy to demonstrate why humans are evolved carnivores, not herbivores. He explains how humans have extremely low stomach pH (around 1.4) similar to scavengers, a long small intestine optimized for absorbing proteins and fats, and a vestigial appendix that proves we lost our fiber-digesting capabilities millions of years ago. Unlike true herbivorous primates with large cecums for bacterial fiber breakdown, humans cannot digest fiber at all and instead evolved four organs working together specifically to absorb fat.
The discussion reveals how the common belief that fat causes gallstones is backwards - gallstones actually form when people avoid fat, allowing bile to concentrate and crystallize in the gallbladder. Dr. Anthony Chaffee explains that eating adequate fat daily prevents stone formation by ensuring regular bile excretion, and cites how humans can absorb 98% of meat even as infants, while fiber requires medical elimination during digestive healing.
Key Takeaways
- Humans have stomach acid pH of 1.4, similar to scavenging animals, proving our evolutionary adaptation to breaking down meat rather than plant matter
- Gallstones form from avoiding fat, not eating it - consuming adequate daily fat prevents stone formation by ensuring bile doesn't concentrate in the gallbladder
- Human infants can absorb 98% of meat on first exposure, while adults absorb nearly 100% of properly prepared muscle meat with minimal digestive residue
- The human appendix is a vestigial cecum, proving we lost our fiber-digesting capabilities millions of years ago unlike other herbivorous primates
- Human Digestive Anatomy vs Other Primates - Stomach Acid and Carnivore Adaptations
- Why Humans Can't Digest Fiber - Lost Cecum and Appendix Evidence
- Gallstones Myth - How Low-Fat Diets Actually Cause Gallstones
- Carnivore Digestion Superiority - 98% Meat Absorption vs Fiber Problems
This is an auto-generated transcript from YouTube and may contain errors or inaccuracies.
to talk a bit about digestion everyone talks about the differences between different
animals and their digestion to say well humans are herbivores because we have digestion
like a cow or an herbivore this than the other or we're a carnivore because of you know the same
arguments but nobody knows exactly what means anything and what the main principles are and what
the main points are so when you're having these discussions here are some of the main points so we
are primates okay so we have a primate digestion okay so we're going to have adaptations in one
direction or another but they're fundamentally going to be primate so they're going to be
very similar to a gorilla or a chimpanzee or a tarcy or something like that but we're gonna
be having have some subtle differences so people think that because we have a similar
digestion to other primates that must mean that we're herbivores like those herbivorous
primates but not all primates are herbivorous and you know so that really doesn't uh make a strong
argument we have uh some things that are very uh typical for carnivores we have very low stomach
ph okay so it actually goes down to around like 1.4 which is extremely extremely acidic and this
is this is generally what we see with people um or sorry animals that are uh even you know scavengers
like vultures okay it's thought that early on in our meat eating heritage millions of years ago
that we were eating uh carrion and we weren't able to take down and kill animals ourselves because we
didn't have big teeth and cloths we were actually eating the remains of what other animals left
and we were figuring out how to do that we're getting smarter using tools and you know using
stones to crack open the skulls to get the brains and that was giving us nutrition we started
figuring out other ways of using tools as well and that's why our brains developed instead of our
teeth and our claws okay we also have very long small intestine okay and this is where all the
proteins and fats and and other nutrients and vitamins all get absorbed okay so we get a lot
of our the majority of our nutrition comes from there the vast majority of what we eat gets
absorbed in the small intestine so we need a longer small intestine just like other carnivores
our large intestine is actually very small so these these things are um a bit you know misnamed
really but you know small in the sense of length not as diameter which is what we call a large
intestine large because it's a bigger diameter so this is something that we don't really
see in in herbivores herbivores have a longer large intestine and in fact primates
when you look at them specifically they are hind gut digesters if they're if
they're herbivores okay so they have a very long large intestine and a very long cecum which
helps them break down plant material and fiber and actually get the majority of the nutrition
comes from that breakdown of that fiber okay so no vertebrate animal can break down fiber okay so
certain animals like a cow or like a gorilla have been able to basically farm bacteria that eat this
that eat this fiber and as a byproduct basically their waste are short chain fatty acids okay which
is or just saturated fats are 100 saturated and so that's what the animal actually absorbs okay so
what they eat and what they put in their mouths is not the same thing as what they absorb okay
what they absorb are these short chain fatty acids and and proteins that are a byproduct of those
bacteria eating fiber and breaking it down okay we can't do that that's how you know we're
not like other other primates and we're not herbivorous because we lost that ability millions
of years ago we have an appendix an appendix is a vestigial cecum okay in a gorilla or or a
chimpanzee it was very long like four foot long ours is about that big okay vesial meaning that
it it's an organ that used to do something now it does nothing and it has it for millions of years
because we haven't used it in millions of years okay and so the cecum that blinds out pouching
used to be where our ancestors would you know get their nutrition from fiber and that's
where gorilla gorillas and so forth that's where that packs in and they break down that
fiber and get the short chain fatty acids okay so we can't do that we've lost that ability
because we were eating meat for millions of years and that's just further evidence that
we're carnivores and that our ancestors and we are who we are because our ancestors became
carnivores millions of years ago okay so you know all herbivores that eat fibrous plants
are able to break down fiber to to a certain extent okay and we can't do that so that that is
a cardinal feature of us not being herbivores okay so the other issue is bile this is something
that comes up a lot people talk about how you know if you eat meat or you eat fat you're
going to get gall stones this is a supposition this is something that has been bandied around
because it sort of fit the you know the observable evidence but it is completely and utterly
wrong okay so in medicine we talk about the four f's for gallstones these are risk factors
it's not a guarantee but it's a risk factor female fertile 40s fat okay and or and
fair is another one you know people of of uh light complexion seem to
get this stuff more often but this is not one-to-one they say well this
person's fat therefore because they ate fat they've got they've gotten fat and they've
gotten gallstones but people don't get fat from eating fat they get fat from
eating carbohydrates and sugar okay so it wasn't the fat in the first place that
got them fat but what you do see commonly in this thread of people i mean think about it you have
you know a lady who's in her 40s just had a couple kids has a little bit extra baby weight
and wants to lose that weight okay wants to get her body back and so she goes on a diet well what
have everybody been told for the last 40 years is if you want to lose fat you stop eating
fat and so these people want to lose this fat they want to lose the baby weight so they stop
eating fat okay and that is actually the problem your body makes bile so that you can absorb
fat okay it's very difficult for your body to absorb fat without bile there's there's some
medium chain fatty acids which can just be uh you know absorbed you know on their
own but nearly all other fats need bile it's very difficult for your body to absorb bile
to absorb fat without bile okay your body makes a certain amount of this okay about 800 milliliters
to a liter a day and now you know maybe that can change depending on on what you're eating and
what your body requires and so forth but there is a limit and then there is a finite amount
of bile that it makes okay it's slow processed this is made and then stored in your gallbladder
okay then when you eat that it squishes it out and bile goes down absorbs that fat so you know
i mean as a side note it's kind of ridiculous for people to argue that fat is bad for us if we
have four organs working in concert just to absorb fat liver makes bile your gallbladder stores it
your pancreas secretes enzymes to break it down and your small intestine absorbs it into your body
okay you know that that's a lot of energy uh for your for your body and evolutionarily biologically
you know it doesn't make any sense for you to build that system and evolve that system if that
wasn't really really really important okay which it is all right so what happens to these people
that get gallstones problem is they don't eat fat right if you were to eat as much fat as you had
bile for which i take to mean as much as your body wants okay then you're going to excrete all
the all the bile that's in your gallbladder right every day so even if you were someone who had
some weird condition that meant that you would get gall stones in just one day you could never
get gallstones if you were eating enough fat you couldn't possibly because the bile wouldn't
be there in your gallbladder to form stones in the first place okay it physically cannot
take place if you're eating enough fat okay so you get these people that go on a diet
stop eating fat and then all of a sudden six weeks later eight weeks later when they go off
the diet all of a sudden they go oh that hurts because now their body's trying to squish out
the bile but there are stones in it and they get stuck and that hurts and they go to the doctor and
they say it's because you're eating too much fat well no actually it's because they weren't
eating fat okay and they stopped eating fat okay because your bile goes into your gallbladder
but it doesn't just run you know when it runs out of room it doesn't just sit there okay it you
know it concentrates okay not everyone knows this but even in the textbook it describes
bile as being able to get up to 20 times more concentrated than when it originally comes
out of the liver so there may be people that get more concentrated than other people and maybe
those people are more predisposed to uh gallstones maybe that'd be interesting to look into because
certainly not everybody gets gallstones even if they just stop eating fat entirely okay so
there's probably something else going on as well but you know the take home is if you eat enough
fat it doesn't matter you cannot form stones okay so bile goes into your gallbladder it gets more
and more concentrated more and more concentrated what happens to any hyper concentrated solution
at rest it forms precipitates you perform it forms stones okay that's what bile sludge is that's what
gallstones are okay and you see this in bariatric medicine as well because when people remove parts
of the stomach and the lower intes and the the the first part of the duodenum and the small intestine
and so forth or put in a sleeve and and what have you you know many different different surgeries
in that in that realm but a lot of these people much more than the rest of the population even the
overweight population will develop gallstones a lot of them do okay and i've heard this described
as well you know something changes metabolically when you when you when you lose weight really
fast that somehow that makes you form these stones okay maybe it does but you still want won't
form stones if you get enough fat and what is the commonality between these people these people
are really serious about losing weight they really don't want to be overweight anymore they're going
through very dangerous life-threatening surgery and can threaten your life and it can threaten
your quality of life and can threaten your your happiness going forward i've seen um several
people that i know personally have had you know very bad results from this and have serious health
issues afterwards so this can seriously affect you but they're very serious about this and so what
do they do they're going to stop eating that all together and i've heard people say this when they
get the gallstones they say you know that can't be because i have not eaten any fat in months and
you know to me that that's why they got gallstones okay so it's not that they lost a lot of fat
or lost a lot of weight quickly it's how they lost a lot of weight quickly it's by just
completely eliminating fat altogether okay so these are all things that point in the direction
of we're carnivores because we're meant to be eating fat right the reason we've been told not
to eat animals and not to eat plants is because they have fat but that's actually very obvious
that we should be doing that because we have four organs working together in order to make uh
make it possible to absorb fat okay and we have very low ph uh stomach acid and this is a side
note so a lot of people will get better digestion if you don't drink water sort of two hours before
after a meal because you keep that that uh stomach acid more concentrate so you'll break food
down better okay so we've got very concentrated ph okay we've got a long small intestine we've
got a short large intestine we have a vestigial appendix not a cecum we can't break down fiber
we've got uh four organs working to absorb fat okay um you can argue day and night about the
anatomy of these things i'm sure someone has a rebuttal to why i'm completely wrong even though
they're wrong but it comes down to functionality we don't break down fiber at all period okay
so it's really hard for us to process any plant material at all that contains fiber okay we break
down liquefy and absorb meat very easily even even infants and studies in the 1950s were showing that
when being fed meat for the first time or anything for the first time they were being given meat
they would absorb 98 of what they were given okay dr salisbury of the salisbury steak he made the
salisbury steak specifically because you ground the meat in a very specific way to get the gristle
out and you just had the muscle meat and you just had the fat you didn't have the gristle and
the connective tissue and they were finally you absorbed basically 100 of that so people that
had very serious digestive issues like you know crohn's and ulcerative colitis and and so forth uh
and it was 100 years before we had any treatments for this you know these people had horrible
digestions they had extreme pain they were at bloody diarrhea constantly every day and so these
people really needed to rest uh their bowels and so forth and so that's why salisbury came up with
the salisbury steak so this had like zero residue and they could just rest and this is what we do
in surgery as well for the general surgeons when you have diaviculitis appendicitis says you're not
treating surgically you're treating conservatively you will rest the bowel by giving them a low a
low fiber diet you know if fiber is so good for your digestion it's so good for your intestine why
why do we need to get rid of it when we're resting your bowel you know that that doesn't that should
should make you ask questions now maybe there's an instance that that that that's holds true but
it should make you wonder if this is so good for your body wouldn't you wouldn't you want it when
your body's trying to heal that exact organ no in fact there are studies that show that um the
only you know correlation between you know eating all these sorts of things and diverticulosis
which is the outpouching the failure of the the distal colon that can then get infected and
so forth and get diverticulitis and cause you big problems the only things that were associated with
increased rates of divertic diverticulosis were increased number of bowel motions a day increased
fiber intake okay you're overworking the organ you're making this work work work work work and it
finally just fails just like heart failure you're pumping against a high gradient of high pressure
all the time and after several years you know just wears out you get you get failure well this
is colon failure okay and that's because you're overusing it you're overworking it okay whereas if
you eat a low residue diet like a carnivore diet or you're not eliminating waste all that often
because there's there's no waste to eliminate right then you know that doesn't that doesn't go
into failure you know and that just just another thing you know say that you know you can't you
know you can't really digest meat that just stays in your intestine in rots for years if anybody
thought about that for more than one second they realize that's insane because your
digestion is a tube it's a one-way tube it just goes out and so if you
weren't digesting this you'd just be crapping out lumps of meat every day but you
don't you crap out lumps of wood which is fiber that's what we're we're excreting and we're being
told oh no no but that's that's good for you we absorb this so easily and yet we don't absorb
it at all we don't break it down at all okay we cannot break down the fundamental structure of
plants which is fiber we break down and absorb basically 100 percent of animal tissue so i hope
that was informative i hope you guys like that and yeah let me know in the comments what other sorts
of videos you'd like to hear about take care