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24:56 · Dec 12, 2024

What Is The Ketogenic Diet & How It Helps Millions Of People Around The World

This solo episode reveals why ketogenic diets represent the most scientifically validated nutritional approach in medical literature, with Dr. Anthony Chaffee explaining how carnivore diets function as the purest form of ketosis. Listeners discover groundbreaking research from Harvard showing ketogenic interventions can reverse treatment-resistant mental health disorders including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, with 28 out of 28 participants showing improvement when standard psychiatric care had failed for over a decade.

The episode exposes how modern chronic diseases - affecting 90% of medical cases today - mirror the exact pathological conditions we intentionally create in livestock through grain feeding. Dr. Anthony Chaffee presents compelling evidence that traditional hunter-gatherer populations living without agricultural foods experience none of these diseases, while Native Americans develop four times higher disease rates when consuming Western diets, and even domesticated pets suffer dramatically reduced lifespans from processed foods.

Key Takeaways

  • Ketogenic diets have thousands of randomized controlled trials proving efficacy for diabetes reversal and Alzheimer's treatment, making them the most scientifically studied dietary intervention in medical literature
  • Harvard research shows 100% of treatment-resistant psychiatric patients improved on ketogenic diets after standard medications failed for decades, with two-thirds achieving complete remission in just 3 weeks
  • India's population consumes only 3 kilograms of meat per person annually yet has 25% diabetes rates compared to America's 9%, demonstrating that plant-heavy diets correlate with higher metabolic disease
  • Chronic diseases cost the global economy an estimated $60 trillion annually by 2030 when combining direct treatment costs and lost productivity from premature deaths and disability
  • Ketogenic Diet Research and Carnivore as Ultimate Keto
  • Alzheimer's Treatment and Mental Health Breakthrough Studies
  • Harvard Mental Health Studies - Depression Bipolar OCD Schizophrenia
  • Global Disease Rates and Native American Health Comparison
  • Pet Health Crisis and Animal Agriculture Disease Patterns
  • Healthcare Economic Crisis - 46 Trillion Dollar Disease Burden

This is an auto-generated transcript from YouTube and may contain errors or inaccuracies.

[Music] there are new studies coming out all the time on ketogenic diets in general carnivore diet is a ketogenic diet and typically what a ketogenic diet is is you're eliminating out carbohydrates and you go into a different completely different metabolic State and you start running on your own body fat and you produce the carbohydrates ketones and glycogen that uh that you need and so instead of bringing in a lot of carbohydrates and shutting down your metabolism you actually are allowing your metabolism free a bit and so there there's more and more research coming out on ketogenic diets a corn diet is a ketogenic diet and um when you eliminate out carbohydrates you have to replace it with fat and protein where does that fat and protein come from it typically comes from meat and and most of the studies show that though it's a high fat meat-based ketogenic diet and a car carnivore diet is high fat meat-based ketogenic diet just you're you're cutting out the rest of the stuff too like vegetables so there are more studies coming out on on pure carnivore version of a ketogenic diet but those are a lot of those are in the works as well right but there are literally thousands of randomized control trials in humans on a high-fat meat-based ketogenic diet you know may include vegetables or not but the the main thing is being ketogenic and it is so the ketogenic diet is the most well-studied diet wow in the world there isn't a single other diet form that has the rigor of scientific testing that a ketogenic diet has and you know looking at specific end points and diseases so things like diabetes has been shown in clinical trials to be reversible with a high fat meat-based cogenic diet Alzheimer's uh a high-fat meat-based ketogenic diet has been shown in in experimental data in humans to be a better treatment for Alzheimer's than every medication ever trial whoa yeah that's crazy we know we have quite a lot of studies showing the benefits of fasting and so if you just fast for a period of time people can reverse a lot of diseases we see this in different traditional cultures and religions going back thousands of years that this this can be uh beneficial and we have studies showing that as well and so people argue well then you know this is just the key Jank diet sort of mimics the metabolism you be in when you're fasting and we know that fasting is really good for you so it's just making that what I argue that fasting actually mimics the metabolic State we're supposed to be in all the time anyway which is a ketogenic diet which is the same metabolic system pathway that most animals are in the wild so carnivores 70% of animal species are carnivores they eat just meat which is protein and fat and so they're on a ketogenic diet Lions have been found to be in ketosis and and that makes sense because they're not eating carbs but also herbivores because herbivores that eat fibrous plants plants fiber strings of glucose you think okay well they're getting carbohydrates but in fact they don't eat they don't digest the the fiber no vertebrate animal can break down fiber cellulose I mean this is this is fiber and so it's actually they're actually feeding their microorganisms in their gut and as a byproduct they actually produce saturated fat and then the proteins die off and they absorb those as proteins so even cows and gorillas and and these sorts of fibrous animals that eat fibrous plants they're also getting the majority of their calories from protein and fat and are in ketosis so I think that's our natural metabolic State that's where all of our heavy machinery comes to bear that's where a lot of health benefits come from so some of these studies actually aren't aren't termed ketogenic diet or low carb because it's sort of a four-letter word in some academic circles they just don't want to hear about it the carb word yeah the carb or ketogenic they just think oh that's just a that's just a weird fat or something like that so sometimes they'll hide it and they'll say well since we know fasting is really good for reversing diabetes or you know helping this sort of health issue well what about but fasting is really hard so what about a diet that mimics the metabolic state of fasting so it's called a a fasting mimicking diet or fmd and so you can find a lot of of papers called fasting mimicking diets which is a ketogenic diet and they and they find that they have the same benefits as fasting if not more benefits as well so yeah there there's actually quite a lot of studies coming out uh recently there have been a number of studies actually large randomized control trials um in people over at Harvard um that's not published yet but it's in the works for looking at reversing and putting into remission major depression OCD bipolar disorder even schizophrenia wow with Professor Chris Palmer over at Harvard um and he's been in his clinical practice applying this to his population for years now and and finding you can reverse these these major major issues because you're fixing the metabolism he's arguing that these mental health issues are actually metabolic issues as well you get metabolic derangement it damages your mitochondria which are the powerhouses of the cell and when those don't act properly your your cells don't work properly and your neurons are cells and so your brain doesn't work properly you get these mental health issues and so you fix your metabolic Health you fix your mitochondria all of a sudden things start working better there was a that was done in France and it was um it was an Interventional experimental trial but it wasn't wasn't randomized control they just took uh 31 people that had treatment resistant major mental health issues so major depression OCD bipolar and schizophrenia schizo effective disorder and and these people were severely affected and they were treatment resistant it's it's it's really unfortunate but the standard of care that we have right now in modern medicine only only works well for about 10% of people with these serious mental health issues and then there's you know another 40% or so that get some benefit but not complete benefit and and the rest of it really does nothing for those are the treatment resistant populations and so they took just the treatment resistant population that sard of care just did nothing for for some of these people for well over a decade all treated by the same psychiatrist which is important so they're getting consistent continuity of care and they said okay would you be willing to go on ketogenic diet some of these people really couldn't live on their own they had to be institutionalized things like that and so they put them on a high fat meat-based ketogenic diet like a carnivore diet and they found that 28 of them were able to stay on a ketogenic diet for at least 3 weeks that was the minimum cut off and of those 28 people every single one improved and I think it was about 2/3 went into complete remission whoa and they were completely treatment resistant standard of care had not worked for them at all and so that was a major finding and now they're and now that's not that's not a randomized control trial but now they're doing randomized control trials and so that's that's some of the new exciting research over at Harvard and so uh that's that's yeah that's sort of been in the so you believe if every single human was on a ketogenic diet the rate of disease would go down oh my goodness yes absolutely the large burden of disease are these so-called non-communicable chronic diseases so things like diabetes heart disease cancer um mental health issues uh Alzheimer's dementia Parkinson's um autoimmune issues all of these things they cannot be passed on they just they live in your body and and you get them or you don't and people think well it's just part of getting older you just get unlucky it's genetic well if it was genetic then why is the prevalence of these things going up decade after decade after decade so there's more people in society that are being Afflicted with this well that's just that's just screening we're getting better at screening like I'm sorry but um you have somebody with crohn's disease and you have 30 bouts of bloody diarrhea every single day like you're not going to miss that you know so it's not it's not a screeny issue 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 there 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 um and you know cancer rates have have skyrocketed and they've more than tripled in the last 40 years now one in two people throughout the course of their life will get cancer holy crap one in two that's crazy yeah it is nuts it's a coin flip exactly and so then you look at you know places like India I mean they're metabolic they're some of the most metabolically sick people in the world they also eat some of the least amount of meat in the world they eat about three kilos of meat per person per year they have some of the highest metabolic disease and diabetes rates in the world America and and we talk about America or we we get get painted as being the sickest country in the world and having horrible metabolic health and everyone's overweight and just eating junk food and and evil meat that makes them all sick and but our diabetes rate is 9% and we have a lot of pre-diabetes about 40% pre-diabetic but diabetes is is is 9% Well India where they eat hardly any meat it's 25% that was published in the Lancet in 2018 and and that was looking at rural populations as well as urban populations they were both 25% so it wasn't just people living in the cities that were getting a higher Affliction rate it was everybody 25% and that's diagnosed and so people in India have a have a much much less access to medicine so it could be higher than that there could be more people that are diabetic and they just haven't uh haven't discovered that so uh yes I do think so 90% of the things that we treat nowadays as doctors are these non-communicable chronic diseases 90% of the mortality of the deaths in Western countries come from non-communicable chronic diseases 74% of deaths around the world are from non-communicable chronic diseases and so that is the major major burden of healthcare now you look at the animal kingdom you know deer don't get lupus right they don't you know typically get any of these diseases that we would see even animals in the zoo if they're being fed their correct diet and there are signs at the zoo is very clear say don't feed the animals it makes them very sick if they if they eat anything that they're not designed to eat and so they're saying don't feed the animals the thing that you're eating right now it makes them sick what it what is it doing to us wow or you know don't feed bread to ducks at the park because it can make them sick well give some diabetes wow right diabetes and and fatty liver I mean how do we make gr you know that's that literally means fat liver right right uh we stuff a tube down a duck or Goose's throat and we pour grains down right how do we get marbling intramuscular fat in steaks we give them a bunch of grains well in humans that's called myosteatosis it's a pathological sign that we see on MRI and that denotes very serious metabolic dysfunction so we're we're causing metabolic dysfunction in the animals because it increases the fat and pathological deposition of fat in the liver and in the muscle tissues because it tastes better wow Waggy right wagy exactly and and it doesn't matter that they're getting sick because we're going to slaughter them anyway but we get sick so the exact same practices that we're doing to animals to make them sick and make get this pathological fat deposition in their muscles and organs we're doing that to ourselves as well in the 1930s there was an article about um getting the poundage up on pigs and increasing their fat content and making them them bigger and uh bigger product and the way they did that was giving them grains um and also skin milk which was a byproduct of the cream and butter industry and so they was just sort of a throwaway product and they found that giving the combination of grains and uh skin milk actually increased their hunger and so they overate and when you're eating grains that can raise your insulin that can then drop your blood blood sugar and so you feel about down so you want to eat more but it also blocks a hormone called leptin which is your satiety hormone so you're blocking that and you tend to overeat and then milk has ques Morphin which you know cause a baby mammal to drink more because you're trying to encourage babies to get their weight up and grow and so when you drink that as an adult it still will trigger that hunger signal so you have this combination of grains and skin milk and all of a sudden there it says specifically in this 1930s article uh paper that that that the reason that this worked is because it they it caused them to overeat so what what is grains and skin milk that's breakfast cereal right right so we're doing this to ourselves and we look at these same diseases these non-communicable chronic diseases animals get them to too but only animals in captivity wow and so only animals that are being fed something outside of their typical evolved species appropriate biological diet and so you get dogs and cats which are known carnivores and yet we're giving them food and and kibble that has some meat in it so they get the nutrients that they need but it's it's packed out with grains so that because it's cheaper and you put something on it you know like put science in the name and you go oh this is supposed to be well science actually tells us that they're supposed to eat meat that's what science tells us and then uh you know marketing agencies tell us otherwise right and and they get sick and they get obesity and they get diabetes and they get cancer and they get o um autoimmune issues and arthritis and they get um osteoporosis and these sorts of things but that's that's not typical and those disease rates have gone up and up and up in recent decades the average life expectancy in the US of golden retriever in the 1970s was 17 years W now it's 9 years so it got cut in half got cut in half and that I think that's directly because of the of the food that we're feeding them was there's a big shift that was when you started switching over to kibble was in the 80s and now vets are talking about how there's a massive increase prevalence in so-called human diseases in domesticated pets so these human diseases these non-communicable chronic diseases such as you know metabolic disorder diabetes and all these other sorts of things and those are human diseases well okay well what the hell is a human disease right well it's non-communicable so we know we're not passing it to anybody um and yet they catch it when they eat this other diet and you talk to zookeepers and they know you feed any animal outside of what they're supposed to eat they get sick and what they get sick with they get all the same things we get they get the so-called human diseases and I've spoken to some uh people and I sort of knew the answer ahead of time but asked him I was like do you ever give them like you know like grains or dog food or or anything like that and and the guy said was like are you out of your mind like you know if you give animals that garbage they'll get human diseases right so if you feed the animal human food they get human diseases when you don't feed them that food they don't get human disease that means directly that the food is causing the disease and we see this in um pre-agricultural population so the the Native Americans and the especially in the Great Plains and they had a lot of access to meat bison they would do a buffalo drop knock over a bunch of bison and and just eat those throughout the year uh other places they didn't have as much animals available to them so they had to sort of flesh out their meals with uh you know plants that they grew locally um but they also had specific ways of preparing them they uh maze was corn was um prepared with a process called nich talization which is a complex process to lower the toxic load and increase the bioavailability of the nutrients of corn um they uh had you know fermentation all these other sorts of processes that that we use to lower the toxic load of plants plants defend themselves by being toxic all plants are toxic they make about a million different defense chemicals in order to protect themselves from animals and insects animals are hard to catch they're hard to kill because they'll fight back they'll run away those are their defenses but once you get them and you take them down it's the most bioavailable and nutritious food that exists on this Earth plants are easy to catch they're just sitting there right so they they can't just be straight up nutritious their major defense is by being physically poisonous and so their traditional ways of eating plants are are you know was never raw food vegan or anything like that it very specific ways of preparing these plants to make them uh more nutritious but also lower the toxic load and so when you look at these pre pre-agricultural societies and anthropologists talk about this in these sort of 100 gather of populations that the the health issues that afflict them are very different than what we have it's basically infections and injuries child birth you know um mothers can die in child birth infam mortality rates things like that are pretty high but they don't get these chronic diseases and people say wow it's because they don't they only live 30 years that's not true you know right now PR um you know pre-agricultural hun gather of populations when they've been studied as long as they're not killed by something so there's a difference between average life expectancy from birth and how long you live if you die of old age and so since the infant mortality rate is much higher and you're you know fighting off Panthers and maybe you know polar bears and things like that up in the Arctic North with the Inu that that's obviously you know going to lower your average life expectancy from birth when they look at the people how long they live to old age actually people are living just as long if not longer than people today wow and they don't get these chronic diseases and after olist talk about this shift in the health issues and they look at just infections chronic disease infant mortality things like that and uh you know injuries being attacked by by lions things like that and uh and then when they go to post-agricultural sort of civilized sort of society they then have a shift and they get more of the diseases of civilization which also called human diseases which are also called chronic diseases and 100 years ago 150 years ago they were called Western diseases because we only see saw these diseases in Western populations we didn't see them in the Native Americans and the native Australians and the native Canadians and alaskans and and so on so they or the messai or the nette or these uh these populations that are still alive today and some of them are still living in a traditional way they don't get these diseases um in Australia when I first went down to practice there I was told that basically day one that if you if you got a an Australian Aboriginal patient uh whatever age it said on their sticker basically add 20 years to that because they just age so much more quickly and they develop diseases more quickly and so if you had someone in their 30s and 40s you had to consider them in a geriatric population start thinking about the heart diseases and the Cancers and the afflictions that affected 60y olds 70 year olds and things like that why is that because they well because they they age more quickly but I think it's because they haven't been had been exposed to agricultural food uh for very long you know our ancestors would have had thousands of years to climatize and and be accustom and try to build up some sort of resistances to the toxins in Plants but the Australian Natives and the American natives especially in you know certain parts uh it's really only last 10050 years that they've been exposed to this you know some some areas they did have agriculture um but the large majority of their diet was was meat especially in the Great Plains with like the Bison like they had access to meat all the all the historical records I found to be very consistent that when they had access to meat they would just eat meat and they'd sort of fill in the gaps with plants if they had to um but then there's places like in the Arctic North where you know the innuit are the First Nation people of Canada now there's no plants growing up in the Arctic Circle you know you're not you're not cultivating any crops not growing potatoes or anything like that and so they just ate meat and they have uh when eating a western diet they get more sick Native American I I heard this when I was a kid that the Native Americans when eating Western diet had four times the burden of disease chronic disease obesity heart disease cancer diabetes all these things than uh the rest of Americans wow and I remember thinking at the time that well doesn't that mean the food is causing the disease because if they don't eat the food they don't get the disease we get the food and we get the disease just at a lower rate and what's a nonwestern diet what are they eating that we're not and vice versa and you know no one told me at the time but they were they were carnivores they were predominantly eating meat and uh and then you know the the plants that they grew and prepared in in specific traditional ways you know on top of that as well but they weren't having any of the the highly processed garbage uh they were eating a lot of meat whenever they could and um it was just a very different different diet and lifestyle and when you switch away from that you start seeing a massive increase in disease and it and I I think that is the true Health Care crisis and we argue about what health care System we want do we want a public system or a private system or something new that we haven't thought of yet it doesn't matter because any system is going to collapse and crumble under the weight of the the growing burden of the chronic disease epidemic uh Harvard University uh School of Public Health published a massive study looking at the economic burden of chronic disease just five chronic diseases uh heart disease or cardiovascular disease COPD diabetes cancer and mental health disorders just those five so obviously a lot of other ones as well they are very expensive and costly just those five they found that um in 2010 I'm going to give rough numbers here so forgive me but around worldwide we spent about $8 trillion in treating that in the direct and indirect costs of treating those diseases by 2030 it's estimated to be up around4 trillion dollar trillion with a t right and so that that's worldwide so it's it's nearly doubled in that period of six years uh or 20 years yeah so 2010 to 2030 okay got it and so um but then they looked at more than that they looked at the the cost to you know the the loss opportunity cost so people not being able to work not being able to take care of their family not being involved in the economy getting on disability these other sorts of things um and they found that that between 2010 and 2030 we're basically going to spend around $ 46 trillion in Lost opportunity costs so that's $ 46 trillion out of the economy that we don't have access to and the biggest one was premature deaths so people dying young someone having a heart attack in their thir and not being productive for the next 50 years or 40 years however long you're productive and um that they found in 2010 to be around $23 trillion a year lost to lost to the world and by 2030 they're expecting that to be up around $43 trillion a year that we're losing so the burden of the healthare crisis is not just the 14 15 trillion dollar a year that we're spending it's the 43 4550 trillion do and lost opportunity and early deaths that we're losing from the economy as well so we're realistically thinking about 50 60 trillion dollars a year that we're losing out of the economy right that could be going towards very useful things and just being more productive as well so any any Healthcare System is going to collapse and crumble under that and it's not going to be able to survive and so we we need to fix that
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