Reversing Diabetes with Diet Alone!

hello and welcome to the how to carnivore podcast i'm your host simon lewis and you're tuning in to the plant-free md series with dr anthony chafee dr chafee is a surgeon nutritional researcher and former pro-rugby player he's been strict carnivore for three years and an on and off carnival for more than 20. dr chafee looks and feels like a real life superhero if losing fat building muscle finding focus and getting the most out of life is important to you you're going to love the plant-free md series hey everyone welcome to another episode with the plant-free md dr anthony chafee today the topic is diabetes this is an extremely important one because i've just done a little bit of googling and one in 20 australians suffer from diabetes and one in 10 americans suffer from diabetes so that's 10 of the population and a little bit more googling some of the common symptoms of early stage type 2 diabetes blurred vision poor wound healing yeast infections a lot of hunger a lot of thirst a lot of really unpleasant side effects and symptoms so uh dr chafee welcome i'm looking forward to diving into diabetes with you yeah thanks man me too cool so uh just to set the scene um for the slow ones like myself um what what is diabetes so there's a few different kinds of diabetes but traditionally uh they're referred to as you know type one diabetes type two diabetes um and um so type 1 diabetes is used to be called juvenile diabetes because we don't we generally saw this in the young and this is when your body stops producing insulin for some reason it's thought to be possibly autoimmune possibly your body after a viral infection has that's called molecular mimicry where your body has has antibodies towards something um like a virus or or some other pathogen and then that's close enough to these beta islet cells in your pancreas that make insulin that it attacks those as well so that's sort of what we're thinking now um but we're not 100 percent sure so is uh is certain to interrupt is type 1 diabetes is that caused by lifestyle or is that sort of something generally outside of people's control um it's thought to be outside of people's control it's thought to be uh you know through molecular mimicry or some sort of autoimmune uh issue but obviously you know as a you know we've spoken about and i've spoken about on my autoimmune uh uh episode um it's it's possible that autoimmune issues can be precipitated by uh environment as well and so the things that we eat and the things that we do can help stop that now once once your body has attacked your beta islet cells for whatever reason uh that they're generally thought to be gone uh however there's there are some studies and animal models showing that that might actually be able to be reversed actually through diet as well and diet and fasting called a fasting mimicking diet which we can get to um just as the just to finish with the definitions type 2 diabetes is uh was previously called adult onset diabetes in the middle of the 1990s you had a bunch of kids getting adult onset diabetes and and so they had to rename it instead of actually thinking for half a second realizing that something was going on that was causing this so type 2 diabetes is traditionally thought of as as peripheral insulin resistance so you have years and years and years of eating too many carbohydrates and sugar drinking alcohol and this sets in motion you're having high blood sugar all the time and your body needs more insulin and and your you actually get peripheral insulin resistance hyperinsulinemia where the high insulin levels are actually causing harm in your body high blood sugar is causing harm in your body by you know direct damage by glycating uh and glycosylation to various molecules so over the years you develop peripheral insulin resistance and now you need more and more insulin to get the same result just like any sort of you know drug uh drug tolerance issue uh you know you need more and more and more to get the same same sort of result and so eventually they might need to get go on insulin as well that is more thought to be more lifestyle and you can manage this with uh diet and exercise but it's still thought to be a progressive disease that this only gets worse it doesn't get better but of course in the carnivore community we actually see this absolutely reversing people coming off their oral medications coming off the massive doses of insulin and at least coming down to a minimal dose of insulin which is also what we're seeing in type 1 community as well their blood sugars are much easier to control because their their body's making the exact amount of blood sugar that they need they're not having these big swings because of what they're eating they have to take fast-acting uh insulins they can just take their low-dose background level of insulin and because their body is producing constant levels of blood sugar and glycogen that that's all you need you don't need these these breakthrough medications and these fast acting insulins sure so carnivore has been shown to help with both type one and type two is that kind of what you're alluding today yeah well certainly in symptom management okay and and certainly in uh progression and the amount of medications that you need so so for type one it's major benefit that we're seeing now is that it gets people on a minimal dose of insulin and they don't need to use all the fast-acting uh insulins and then you know you can get very difficult uh situations where you're get hypo hypo um hypoglycemic and you'll have you know drops and these are these are dangerous you can die from this and so you know when you're toying around with your your insulin all day and people get very good at this and practiced at it so um you know issues can be kept to a minimum but it's you know you do have to be very careful especially like you know teenagers and kids they really don't like it they don't like it they have to do this and they sort of rebel against it and say well i'm not going to do that and they end up really hurting themselves um with type 2 diabetes it is actually reversing the disease process yeah wow and as i you know talk about in other things that's that's because you know these things aren't really diseases they're actually toxicities and so you're getting this toxic uh byproduct these toxic sort of results of eating carbohydrates eating sugar drinking alcohol and that that toxicity manifests as what we call type 2 diabetes okay so you remove the toxin the toxicity goes away and so that's what we see uh this sort of um reversible uh situation okay so when you remove all that and you go to a carnivore diet and you remove all yeah you do it with a ketogenic diet just just no carbohydrates or sugar alcohol um people people recover very very well their their blood sugars stabilize their peripheral insulin resistance can actually start to reverse as well and they come off their medications they come down on their insulin if they're insulin dependent as well you know my mother is a perfect example of that she was a type 2 diabetic for 25 years off and on good or bad control mostly not the best and her hpa1c which is a marker of uh how well you're doing and controlling your blood sugar over the course of three months uh was fairly high and she was on three oral medications and on a high dose of her background insulin because she was now insulin dependent because her her pancreas had burned out at that point and two months on a high fat carnivore diet she came off all three of her medications and reduced her insulin down to the minimal dose of uh 14 units for lantis and her hba1c went from 8.9 which is quite high down to 6.1 which is the upper limit of normal for a non-diabetic okay and her doctor just looked at her and said how the hell did you do this what the hell did you do did she tell them yeah she did yeah but you know her doctor's saying like look this is this is a this is a progressive disease this only gets worse we can mitigate this and slow it down with diet and lifestyle and medication but this only gets worse this doesn't just go away how the hell did you do this and you know my mom told her it was like well you know anthony's been doing a lot of research into this he thinks that we're actually carnivores and that's the type of animal that we are and when we eat outside of that this is what's causing these problems and you know just going there's a whole whole bit and you know she said you know she was interested in that and so i went in and spoke to her for like an hour and a half you know just sort of took over my mom's uh you know so you went in and you went in and spoke doctored a doctor yeah exactly and and uh you know we just we just spoke and ended up talking like an hour half you know took up a lot of time but she was her and her pa were very very interested in talking about all these sorts of things and she you know she's a very bright lady she's an md phd from harvard she has a phd in biochemistry from harvard and i just said it was like look you know we're looking at biochemistry all wrong you know we call this a fed state and it's the fasting state i completely disagree i think the so-called fasting state is our primary metabolic state that's where all of our heavy machinery comes to bear this is the metabolic state of animals in the wild because they're all fat driven they don't eat carbs wolves don't eat carbs or carbo load before they chase caribou for 10 hours and they and they do great we have studies going back to 1981 looking at wolves checking their blood sugar checking their glycogen and it's just rock solid the thought was at the time you have to eat carbs to burn carbs and they found out well no actually you don't and so you know the only reason that we call one a fed state and the other fasting state is because by the time we were able to look at our biochemistry at a molecular level everyone was eating carbohydrates so you know it was just natural they said oh when you eat it looks your metabolism looks like this and we don't eat it looks like this it's like yeah but when you eat anything except carbohydrates it also looks like this and this is again where all of our heavy machinery come to bear our body starts making blood sugar making glycogen making ketones and and it's very exacting it's it's so well controlled like anything else we see in our body so it's um you know it's it's very natural for me to look at that and be like okay that's that makes sense that that's our natural state as opposed to an insulin-driven state where that's blocking off all the mechanics of you yeah let's let's dig into this a little bit more so that you know your average person can understand so you're sort of uh differentiating between a fed state and a fasted state and what other kind of indicators that we use for a fed state and i'm you know i'm putting this in um in speech marks because this is kind of a term that seems to have been you know invented to suit carbohydrate consumption so what what are kind of the markers of that well so um and yeah you're right i mean because that's everyone calls it oh this is the fed say that's fascinating and people that have taken biochemistry and people don't think that that's just what it is it's in a textbook and a discussion but of course that's that's nonsensical there's plenty of things have been in uh textbooks that uh you know came out eventually um so when you're in a in a so-called fed state you're you're in an insulin driven state so your blood sugar goes up you eat carbohydrates your blood sugar goes up this sparks insulin and and so the thought was like oh well this is a normal pro set process you know you put in the blood sugar and then your your insulin goes up and this brings it down this is the normal thing you have and that's meant to happen five times a day as you eat your five meals throughout the day yeah exactly and so because you know because we didn't we didn't know just everyone who ate food this is what it looked like and then after you didn't eat for 24 hours it switched to this other one um but that that's it it's quite simplistic so when you put your when you you put in exogenous uh carbohydrates when you eat carbohydrates your blood sugar goes up blood sugar as i you know alluded to earlier causes direct damage to your body so by a process called glycosylation or glycation these glucose molecules physically fuse to other molecules this is this is part of heart disease where these things fuse onto like sdldl certain types of cholesterol and they make them uh defunct and your liver can't take them up and only their macrophages can take them up and they turn into these big foam cells then you add that to uh arterial wall damage and these things can actually get in there through the cracks these damage because they're they're that's what they're designed to do they're designed to go in and you know fix damage and fight bacteria and all of a sudden they just turn into these these bigger and bigger plaques so and there's a whole massive disease process that goes along with it but that's that's some parts so it's not the cholesterol it's a problem it's actually the glycation of the of the cholesterol of certain cholesterols that you get when you're eating fructose and sugar and alcohol so when you're in that state you know blood sugar is is at too high of a level is really bad for you so this this is what kills diabetics just that simple fact that their blood sugar is up all the time that's what breaks down their body that's what gives them you know peripheral vascular disease heart disease you know neuro uh neurological dysfunction and so forth their body just breaks down from the inside out and they and they have very hard lives if it's not well controlled and that's it and you control your blood sugar it's like you don't have diabetes because it's the blood sugar that's causing harm yeah and so the so am i right i'm saying these diabetics they're in the fed state all the time because they're constantly getting this blood sugar spike from the exogenous which was exogenous carbohydrates which is a good way to describe it because you know most people would think that carbohydrates can only be exogenous that are constantly spiking the blood sugar and then triggering the insulin response so it's just kind of is am i on the right track there yeah well yeah and then they you know you know most of us that aren't on a carbohydrate carnivore diet or ketogenic diet or in or in a you know you know this fed state and um and this is where like intermittent fasting comes in because you're just waiting out the clock on the insulin and then your body gets back into its normal state people feel a lot better they can work out more have better exercise tolerance to go run marathons on the on their fasting day where they don't need anything that day and and so on so they um you know people already see the benefits of being in what i call our primary metabolic state um and so you know when you you know when you have high blood sugar and your your insulin is going to be driven up defensively because your body recognizes this is dangerous and it's saying okay you know what the hell is this person done get that insulin up as quickly as possible so your insulin slams up insulin blocks something called proteolysis and lipolysis which are basically the abilities for your body to break down proteins and fats in order to get energy okay so in layman's terms it forces energy into cells it doesn't allow it to come out of cells and so you are forcing all this energy because you have way too much and your body's like get this the hell out of here and so you're just stuffing it in every cell in your body it goes in the body and into muscle you know into muscle and your brains and things like that and different organs that you're using but it also goes into places you don't want it stores it in glycogen which is fine you can use that later and it stores it into fat intramuscular fat you know fat all around your body but also intramuscular fat and so this is where like marbling on the cow comes from this is why they give them grain is to get that intramuscular fat and so you know we're doing that to ourselves so people who eat carbohydrates and sugar they they have marbled muscle and you know some some um bodybuilders and things like that say oh you have to eat carbs because it gives you that pump well no not really it gives you excess glycogen and uh retained water and intramuscular fat so that's nice that's not actually healthy it's really helpful if you're trying to just take up as much space as you can right yeah you know rather than necessarily be as strong or as toned or as healthy or you know have that really tight look if you're just purely trying to take up space sure exactly yeah you know some of these guys you know they they do a trip where they they'll eat some carbohydrates and things like that right before their competition and they'll just sort of swell up a bit you know and and if they want to do that that's fine yeah exactly it's exactly cutting sort of thing i think that's very counterproductive because you're just filling your muscles up with glycogen and fat and then that just has to go away eventually you know and so you just lost it and your own you're less healthy so that's what that's what it's doing in your fed state and you're it's basically you're just in damage control the whole time well you can't any system cannot be in damage control the whole time it's going to start you know falling and falling apart at this side so when you're in a a you know a fasting space so-called fasting state which i think is our mainstay that doesn't happen so insulin stays at a very low level just enough to you know keep things working properly but not so much that shuts down uh your body's uh metabolic working so now you can access your fat stores because when you're when you're in the the fed state the the carbohydrate state you cannot access your fat stores very important point that everyone should understand yeah so every everything you eat goes into your fat but now you cannot access your fat stores so this is like filling up your your car at the petrol station gas station and then just just putting a cork in it so it can't go to your your your engines like oh no this is this is just for you know when i get lost in the desert or something like that doesn't make any damn sense you know your your fat in your body is your gas tank you eat food that fills up your gas tank now you run on your gas you know petrol for whoever is listening and um you know that is what that is that that's the state that you're in in the so-called fasting state and so now your body can use its energy it can you know mobilize you know blood sugar glycogen ketones all these sorts of things your brain's major energy source are ketones that's what people think is glucose it's not you do not run on on glucose really when you're in the fasting state you always run on ketones your brain always runs on ketones and so this is actually something that's been theorized this guy uh dr bickman from byu who has a as an instagram page uh uh really interesting stuff you know he was talking about how um you know alzheimer's and so forth can actually be you know it's actually thought of as some people are calling it type 3 diabetes which is what i've mentioned in other talks it's a bit more of a metabolic issue that is similar to type 2 diabetes and so forth and yeah you can you can see this because they have peripheral insulin resistance in your brain as well so you have insulin resistance now you know your body can't get you know blood sugar into these cells very well can't utilize them very well your brain is also part of that so now your brain is not really running on uh on full steam and so you start slowing down and actually you can have people with these tangles and these plaques that that are indicative of alzheimer's but if they don't have the peripheral insulin resist and so forth they don't actually get the disease and so what's more important is your body's inability to get energy into your brain cells and so when you go into a ketogenic diet and have been many studies showing that a high fat ketogenic diet actually is a better treatment modality for alzheimer's than every other medication that's ever been trialled for alzheimer's okay and dr vikram bickman was uh you know saying that this is this is because when you go into a ketogenic state now you switch over to ketones now your brain is getting a lot of fuel because your brain wants to run on ketones it can run on glucose it wants to run on ketones yeah i might just might just jump in there that anyone who's ever experienced ketosis and particularly maybe for the first time um it was a pretty extreme experience for me uh and i feel like you know you sort of you tap into it's like that movie limitless with um bradley cooper and you've just got like this epic energy and you're running nice and smooth and uh and you can concentrate and just keep on chugging uh yeah so yeah i totally agree with you if people want to be successful we should be in the in a state of ketosis more which is uh is similar to this what we're calling a fasted state which it sounds like you know doctors talk about it as if like you know or you could really you could occasionally enter a fasted state you know before a surgery or something or you know and maybe do intermittent fasting but the reality is that you could be in this fasted state all the time where you're supposed to be like you're supposed to be yeah yeah well you look at all animals in the wild like i mean almost all of them they're they're all in this ketogenic starvation state like okay so you know and people that don't really understand this to just look at biochemistry and say oh fed state fasting state and just and just you know there's always the things like you know uh you can think outside the box you know the box is you know uh you know here to for um you know prescribed you know knowledge right so we're saying this is in this box is fed state fasting state can you think outside the box and say well actually it works better if you flip those two around you know and say and say that the fasting state is actually a primary state and the fed state is actually a pathological defense mechanism of your body trying to protect you from from hyperglycemia there's one one more point about the um you know the so-called fed state um you're throwing energy into cells you can't allow it to come out cells you can't access your fat cells but it does something more insidious which is it blocks a hormone called leptin which i've spoken about before leptin uh is released from your stretch receptors in your stomach so when you eat a big meal stretches out it releases leptin your body was awful i'm full but the majority of it coming from your fat cells and so this actually tells your brain how much fat that you have how much energy you have in the tank and so when you're eating these sorts of things insulin goes up insulin blocks leptin and now your brain can't see it's slept in it doesn't know how much energy it has yeah and so it thinks that you're hungry and now your blood sugar's dropping because your insulin stays up for about 24 hours and again you can't mobilize energy when your insulin is up so now your blood sugar's dropping your brain can't see its leptin so you get a signal that you have zero energy reserves and your blood sugar sugar's dropping and your brain sends out a panic signal that says if you don't eat now you will die and this is why three times a day people go oh my god i'm starving and they're panicked you know you see these you know funny videos on on the internet and things like that of someone just freaking out screaming like i wanna you know taco bell whatever it is and they're just losing their mind every day 12 hours they're losing their mind and it's funny because like they're obviously not starving to death but they're so panicked and they're so emotional because their brain really is sending them a signal that they will die without food and that's very distressing and this is what causes people to overeat because they don't have a natural stop mechanism whereas in carnivore ketogenic you have you naturally stop because you know meat stops tasting good when your body doesn't want it your body recognizing my brain can see its leptin and so forth and things it tastes better meat tastes better when it wants that energy and then at a certain point you know it's the best thing that's right when i first i started eating a steak it's the best damn thing i've ever eaten in my life every single day never gets tired or something because oh don't you get bored of that never because by definition when i'm hungry that's gonna taste good and so it tastes amazing at first amazing amazing amazing really good good it's okay it's all right and i get to a point where just go like you know i'm really not enjoying this anymore and i naturally want to stop so it's natural portion control that you have if your brain can see your leptin that you don't have that when you're eating carbohydrates and so forth so people talk about you know fasting and how beneficial this is and there are plenty of studies that show that and you know for for all sorts of different reasons and then they say oh well a ketogenic diet and a carnivore diet well this just mimics fasting and so you get benefit you you mimic some of the the benefits of fasting that's all it is it's just fasting fasting is really good for you and you're just mimicking fasting or fasting gets rid of this poison that's really bad for you and mimics your your evolved metabolic state that you're supposed to be in at all times anyway and because we call this a fasting state because we think of this as a stress state which is not you know if you're if you're starving you're in a stressed state but if you're just in that metabolism that's not a stress state because you're you're not stressed your body's eating you're getting nutrients and so forth um because they just don't think about it and they're they're still thinking within the box they probably haven't even learned about the box because most people who talk about this sort of stuff have never taken biochemistry so they don't know what they're talking about um they you know they think well this must be a starvation state this is a stress state and so you know this this can't be good long term you know you can't do that and so you know you're and i've heard you know one one guy say you know this is this is your body is just tricking your body into thinking and starving to death and then getting the benefits of well starving to death and i was like you tell me one benefit of starving to death except you're now dead and i don't have to listen to this nonsense yeah yeah that was a whole mumbo-jumbo yeah well it is and so it's just like you know you get um this thing you're getting benefits of you know of of being in a starvation estate well no fasting puts you into the metabolism you're supposed to be in so this is the metabolism we're supposed to be in we have other studies too um there was actually to do with diabetics there was a study with with animal models basically showing that again fasting was very beneficial and that for fasting for a number of days longer than better you know within within you know you know within reason but if you were able to fast these animals for at least four days a month you could actually significantly reverse and pull back on type 2 diabetes as well as type 1 diabetes so you get better control obviously the type 2 diabetics are going to get the same results you would from a ketogenic or a carnivore metabolism or just fasting because uh this is this helps reverse uh peripheral insulin resistance normalize your blood sugars and and just essentially it's giving your body a break from the poison that's causing the problem and that's really what's doing it and your body's just getting back to normal um but very interestingly they found that they were that some of the animals could actually regrow their beta out eyelid cells in their pancreas and actually start producing insulin again which is not something that we thought was going to be possible now this was only in animal models but i think they're trialling this in human models but because they said that well fasting gives these benefits but you know fasting for four days in a row that's really hard for people to do that's not really nice and so they came up with this fasting mimicking diet so this is a diet that mimics fasting basically a ketogenic diet carnivore diet and so this tricks your body into thinking it's fasting and then you get these benefits from fasting but you know if you're eating something that provides all these massive massive benefits maybe you should stop and think and say maybe that's what we're supposed to be eating all the time maybe that's what we evolved on maybe biologically that's what we should be eating maybe biologically these other things are causing harm because you remove those from your diet you don't get the harm anymore i i don't know how to make it more simple than that that's really straightforward and so they do this fasting mimicking diet and they finally they get the same results so again this is this is further evidence that this is really just how we're supposed to be eating this is the biochemical state that we should be in all the time and that the closer you get to our biological heritage which is a carnivore heritage the better you're going the better you're going to be the healthier you're going to be carbohydrates and sugar absolutely some of the worst in the world but you know you can be on ketogenics and still eat a bunch of plants that have you know toxic elements because they don't want you to eat them and so they're trying to deter you and so they're trying to make you unwell and so [Music] obviously getting closer and closer and closer to carnivore you somewhat sort of available it hopefully i'm on the right track uh but a a regular diet where you're eating a lot of carbohydrates spikes your glucose level you get an insulin response if you if people do this too much that causes or brings on type 2 diabetes and it's been proven in studies that fasting or a fasted state can reduce the the symptoms and actually reverse type 2 diabetes the the hidden truth is that a carnivore diet or some form of ketogenic diet is actually also now considered a fasted state which it's clearly not because you're eating but because it's not spiking you glucose and then you don't get the insulin response it's called a fasted state so really you can get the benefits of fasting or the so-called benefits which have been shown in these animals who had to fast for four days which is hard yakka i've never done that you know i don't think most people would enjoy doing that you can get those same benefits by just simply not eating carbohydrates and not eating plants that have toxic chemicals in them um and therefore you know you're gonna function better and you can actually reverse type two diabetes is it is that more or less yeah yeah yeah and i would i would sort of say as well you know you know going keto a carnivore saying that gets the benefits of fasting i i would i would say the other way around that fasting gives you the benefits of being on a ketogenic carnivore diet really from a metabolic state being being the right metabolic frame i mean if you want to endure four day fast by all means go for it yeah well yeah and that's fine some people do i mean i don't i don't recommend fasting if you're on a corner or diet you don't you don't need to you just listen to your body your body will naturally limit uh calories for what you're doing you know when i when i was back on this um you know last sort of four or five years i at first had that excess fat something i wasn't massive but i definitely haven't had a weight i could lose and so i ate much less because i just even though i was working out like crazy i was back you know playing rugby and lifting weights very heavily um because i could again i just felt amazing um you know i was eating a lot less than i am now even just to maintain and that's because my body wanted to use my fat first so i knew that it was there it saw the leptin said i don't know we don't need all that much and so i was eating much less and i felt weird about it you know first because i was i i felt i was like well i just worked out you know i just did a three-hour gym session and a three-hour rugby session like you know i'm going to be doing the same thing tomorrow so like i really need to eat i hadn't eaten that whole day but everything in me was saying like steak just doesn't sound good right now you know what i tell people like the steak doesn't taste good that means you're not hungry and i learned this myself firsthand and i was like well i should i should eat because you know that's what you think i need to eat today so i can use that energy tomorrow you need you know carbs to burn carbs wrong you have a gas tank my gas tank was full i didn't need to to fill it up anymore um so everything just sounded like oh i don't want to eat i don't want to eat but i was like oh i should really eat something so i took a long time to cook it did like a reverse sear in the oven like took a couple hours just took my time with it and eventually i was just like okay yeah i guess i could kind of you know eat something so i started eating i got i don't know a quarter away into this steak amazing ribeye steak which is beautiful and i just thought to myself i was like i really i'm just not enjoying this i just want to stop and so i did put it away did my whole workout the next day felt fine then came back and i had my steak there it's dry it's cold it's hard it tastes absolutely amazing it was unbelievable how good that thing was you know and that and that's the power of taste and that's how you should listen to that and so my body was telling me this is how many calories you need this is how much nutrition you need stop and you know and and so it was it's it's perfect and so you know when you're eating like that your body just works so much better and you can fast and you achieve the same metabolic state but but you don't have to and it's not it's not important to if you're eating a carnivore diet because your body will just naturally limit the you know the chloric intake anyway how hungry you are yeah there's there's something deceptive when it comes to satiety with carbohydrates um and you you don't realize that until you start experimenting with a carnivore or a ketogenic diet and you start to discover that hey um if you actually eat too many eggs that last egg your body's just gonna say uh-uh this isn't pleasant or um and it's the same with steak like you said or like when i have you know homemade like beef mince or anything like that like you just know straight away like i am enjoying this anymore i'm putting it back in the fridge i've had enough whereas you compare that to like a bowl of cereal um or you compare that to eating cake or nutella or all this sort of stuff you really can keep going and because the flavors can be so different as well um and your body just says yeah i'll have more ice cream i'll have more whatever it is that's really sweet it's um yeah interesting yeah i i see that with um my patients as well who are trying to lose weight and and they've obviously you know had you know portion control issues and and i i think that i don't think that that's quite fair they don't they don't have portion control issues i think they they just didn't know how to manage their own portions it's that they're eating carbohydrates and sugar and that's deranging their their hunger signals and so forth so they don't they don't realize how much they need and and when they've gone past that so it's really not their fault um you know there's other people just like they're just hungry all the time and miserable and just just hate their life you know and other people choose not to to live like that and um but when i get them on a on a carnivore diet i always explain to them they're hungry hunger signals are going to be very different and that they should use taste as their measure and if it steak doesn't taste good they're not hungry but if it does taste good they are and so they should listen to that and eat meat when it tastes good until it stops tasting as good and you know and you naturally just want to stop i i try to explain that to you because i've run into this issue but there's always there's always a few that sort of don't take that to heart and i see them in a couple weeks and some of them will ask them how's it going and like i hate it i hate this i hate eating meat it's just horrible i'm just not enjoying this i just hate it and and you can tell they've come into the office looking for a fight and they're just like oh and like i want to go so just ask him you know i was like okay well does it always taste bad like even at first when you first start the meal does it taste bad then and they go well no at first it tastes really good but i get halfway through and just tastes horrible and i have to force feed myself for two hours to finish the meal and you know then i of course explain to them well that's that was your body telling you that that's all you need you know because when you tell people you can eat as much as you want the operative word word there is want you know when it starts to stop tasting good you're feeding yourself you clearly don't want to eat anymore and so they make this big old thing that's a that's a portion of size that they're used to eating and say oh that's what i'll eat today you get halfway through and you start hating it well that's as much as you wanted you know and or at least as much as your body wanted and so it's uh it's very important to look at it that way but you know we get the opposite problem with people that are quite skinny and underweight because they've had they've had the other problem they've been basically starving themselves people with with uh you know eating disorders bringing the anorexia and so forth they don't eat enough and their and their hunger signals are very different so they never feel hungry anymore so they go oh i just don't need to eat and so they end up not eating enough and getting problems from that i had that problem when i first started because i just didn't realize that you know what that my hunger signals would change so much because i was doing this 20 plus years ago and all i was doing was just not eating plants because i knew plants had had harmful chemicals i didn't want them in my body and i was inadvertently doing a pure carnivore diet and i you know i wasn't eating for days at a time while going to university full-time and training in high-level rugby seven hours a day eight hours a day and i wouldn't eat for three four days in a row why was that because i just didn't realize it you know i i had i was very time poor and so i'll get up in the morning and i'll go straight to classes at university of washington and then straight from class i go to uh my university of rugby uh university of washington runway practice that started at 3 30. and then as soon as i finished that i went to my my senior uh training for with seattle um seattle saracens and would train until you know nine o'clock at night and sometimes i'd go to the gym after that and so you know that was a lot of training and and i didn't really have much time and then i had to go home and i had to you know study and read and things like that or you know go to the gym and so maybe i'm getting home at like 11. you know sometimes 12 and i had to be up early in the morning to go to class again and so often i would just be like well i don't have time to eat i wouldn't feel hungry so i just drink a bunch of water and then pass out um every now and then i would you know come home a bit earlier i you know would have managed my time a little better or finished the workout earlier and i would um i would sit there and be like oh i you know i have like 45 minutes before i need to to go to the bed i should i have time to cook and i was like yeah and i should eat something because i didn't eat yesterday and i was like yeah i don't think i eat the day before that i was like did i eat the day before that and i'm like okay well i really need to eat something then because like i've not been eating enough and i noticed this as i was going along i was like i'm really not eating enough i'm really barely eating any calories but i just never felt hungry and so it was just you know i was i was listening to that and you know people on the other side listen to it and eat too much but you know i was i have had the other problem so i ended up i ended up getting um undernourished and i got to the point where i i started actually uh you know feeling worse the more i worked out because i just my body had just run out of its stores and it was just like now it's causing harm by working out um and uh you know i sort of started eating more after that but you know it was it was a while there that i wasn't eating enough and so then i have your patients and and you know friends and just people talk to you that get on this and if they're quite underweight they tend to eat very little and so i try to tell them if you're feeling a bit off you're feeling a bit tired or or something's just not right think to yourself does this mean i'm hungry am i hungry try eating meat or eggs if that tastes good that means you're hungry and you need to eat until it stops tasting tasting good and then you can relearn your hunger singles now i know when i'm hungry or when i'm not it's very easy for me to tell but i couldn't and and most people can't either yeah that's just that's interesting the hunger receptors because it is a you know it's a different feeling it's not uh my blood sugar is crashing oh my god i'm hungry you know i needed sneakers it's um yeah it's i'm running low on energy something doesn't feel quite right here i don't feel like doing any training you know just something's off totally different yeah yeah that's um i'm just gonna just kind of jump just mention one thing too um you know when you're talking about training you're talking about metabolism and all sorts of things insulin plays a big role in this um you know it's an anabolic uh substance so it causes you to store energy into cells make those cells grow and so sometimes people take this stuff in order to force that reaction which i don't i think is very counterproductive um but we see this in you know type 1 diabetics where they stop making insulin so their insulin levels are zero their metabolism is like 20 higher 25 higher so it runs faster so they lose a lot of weight that's one of the first signs of someone who has type 1 diabetes is that they're peeing a lot that's what diabetes means you pee a lot diabetes mellitus that's what this is it means it tastes sweet so because you're peeing out a lot of blood sugar because your body can't use it um either because you're resistant to insulin or because you don't produce insulin and and i swear to god doctors actually would taste pee in order to figure out if there's diabetes mellitus or insipidus and that's that's yeah that's not not a job for me anyway and um so they lose a lot of weight one reason obviously being because they can't utilize their blood sugar uh but also is because they jacked up their metabolism and metabolic rate and when you get people on insulin that dermatasement actually normalizes and it goes back to what it's supposed to be now think of the converse of this now you have a type 2 diabetic who is chronically hypoglycemic and hyperinsulinemic so their insulin levels really high all the time that's going to really suppress their metabolism and their their body's ability to utilize energy because it's saying store energy store energy store energy store energy and so you know this is why you can you can get the sort of the two-pronged attack you're getting peripheral insulin resistance that goes along with weight gain it doesn't have to be there are you know significant proportion of people that are metabolically unwell they're sort of this skinny fat people that that um that still have metabolic syndrome but are normal weight um but if this this does go hand in hand slows down your metabolism you're not able to utilize energy as well you're not able to work out as hard you're not able to lose weight as well because of this uh high insulin state so that's that's something to consider too um you know this is another added benefit of getting onto a carnivore diet and so forth is that you're going to normalize your insulin which is going to normalize and and most people speed up your metabolism this is also important for heart disease as well this is something that i was in a debate just a few days ago with act in the australian college of nutritional and environmental medicine we had a panel of uh very famous cardiologists and then me for some reason and um yeah very very uh honored to be amongst all these people they're very very um a stat very well established and internationally renowned people and um you know one of one of the major themes that that was brought up there was that the people that we argued that cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease and we need to rethink what we're doing here we want that debate quite handily and one of the things that my colleagues were saying was this this really is more to do with high insulin states and this you know being in a hyperinsulinemic state that this is actually a driver of of uh the heart disease state and so forth that has has to do with a lot of things but you think about it your insulin is up that's because your blood sugar's up and your blood sugar is causing glycation to all these cholesterol molecules and so forth and it helps drive this disease process so there there are a lot of benefits to going on a carnivore diet you know metabolically reversing diseases you know preventing heart disease and so forth you know weight loss and just feeling good all the time it makes such an impact in your life just that that simple difference of eating carbohydrates not eating carbohydrates changes everything and so this is why you know i tell people that like you know the last five percent of going pure has about 95 percent of the benefits because if you're eating a little bit of carbs that's gonna be enough to jack your insulin up and stuff up your metabolism for an entire day and so if you're eating low carb a lot of people that eat low carb depending on how low it is it's not low enough they end up feeling rotten because they can't produce energy and they're not they're not eating enough carbohydrates to make them feel good at all so it's definitely something that i advise people against doing if you're just going to go you know completely without carbs uh if they're going to to make the jump yeah that's an interesting perspective something that we should dive into on on a whole other topic which is kind of like that metabolic flexibility um i i totally agree in terms of the experimentation and feeling and experiencing what you feel like running on zero carbohydrates because if it works for you i mean it is fantastic you feel great with energy and you know you just want to get more done um all right dr chafee to sort of wrap things up as i said at the start in america one in ten people have diabetes uh in australia 1 in 20 so slightly lower but chances are you will know someone who is suffering from diabetes or you might be suffering from diabetes yourself do you have a a little bit of advice for them yeah i think that i think it is vitally important to at least go on a ketogenic diet especially if you're someone who suffers from from diabetes or is a pre-diabetic or has family members that are diabetic because type 2 diabetes um you know maybe more uh you know except there may be a genetic component to that and people are more susceptible uh to that so if it runs in your family that that could be an issue but it's going to be better for everyone if you get away from carbohydrates and sugar um you know we're talking about you know in america around 10 i think it's like 9 of people in america are diabetic those people account for 75 of the medicare costs in america okay so that it's a huge burden of disease it's extremely expensive it has all these problems that uh you know are precipitated from them lots of opportunity for pharmaceutical companies lots of opportunity for pharmaceutical companies yeah exactly and so and this is why i write for pharmaceuticals to help you know mitigate this disease as opposed to figuring out how the hell to get rid of it which is what i'm trying to do and you know so when you consider that that that's already taking up that huge burden of of cost on the health care system of every country um and it just in america nine percent account for 75 percent of the medicare costs right now we realize that 40 of americans of the other americans of the rest of the population are pre-diabetic okay so ostensibly if they don't change what they're doing and you know if things remain as they are they won't uh in a decade or so you could have nearly half the population of america being a diabetic and now having to incur all these costs a lot of these a lot of these costs come from people being diabetic for a long time and they break down slowly so it's not gonna be like you go diabetic bam you have this really expensive thing to treat but um eventually it you know this is this is accounting for 75 percent of the budget and now you have you know you've quintupled your disease burden you know what's that going to do i mean that that is a major major factor in healthcare crises because a lot of them one of the major crises in healthcare is funding this so whatever whatever system you think is going to be best i certainly have my own opinions whatever it is if you keep increasing the disease burden of very very costly disease it's just going to run out of control and when you if you can just reverse that by having people not do something i mean what's cheaper than not eating something extra you know you're actually saving money and so you not do that and now all of a sudden this disease goes away and that significantly reduces the disease burden in the country and and it makes these people's lives so much better like it i don't care who you are um you know living with diabetes is not fun and and you know maybe people like cake more than they like living without diabetes that's you know i'm sure there's going to be a few of those but that's that but if they you know didn't have to a lot of people don't want to a lot of people don't want to live with diabetes and if they had the option like my mom did who's a big foodie she loves cooking loves all these things it's very hard for her at first but she had such a great outcome with her blood sugar control and coming off medications that she said okay well this is just what i have to do now there's just no two ways about it and so having that as an option for people i think is uh just very important and to at least think about and consider and understand this is the disease process this is the toxicity process this is why it's happening and this is what you can expect if you keep going down that path yeah yeah i absolutely agree i mean what do you have to lose if you're suffering or you're looking or you're looking to avoid suffering from type 2 diabetes the ketogenic diet has been proven to help the carnivore diet is going to be even more effective yeah science is there give it a crack yeah absolutely yeah and and you know we've been treating diabetes type 1 and type 2 since the 1800s with the ketogenic diet yes this stuff isn't new that's the other thing this isn't a breakthrough yeah exactly yeah and we just we're just sort of rediscovering what everyone knew for a very long time yeah oh man all right well that was a great chat um all about diabetes thanks chafee you were on today um appreciate it until next time absolutely