Why The Carnivore Diet Actually Works

humans just are you know meat eaters we've been eating meat for millions of years we've been apex predators for millions of years apex predators by definition or corn of Wars that's what I was doing get rid of these stupid plants and I just I just cut them out and and I felt massively improved for it and um to the point that I was 38 and I went back and started playing professional rugby again felt like a superhero I felt like I was 22 again and uh I felt better at 38 than I did at 28 playing professional rugby and so I started really digging into it saying okay what the hell is going on here you know what's the evidence for this what can we prove and as I was doing my own research and and reading about this stuff I was getting really excited I was Finding I found the whole keto thing I found thousands of studies on high-fat meat-based ketogenic diets which a carnivore diet is and I was like look you I mean these people are you know doing this and doing this and doing this and is affecting diseases in these ways like isn't this amazing you know my parents are very very um you know intelligent educated uh but interested people they're very interested in the world around them so they're very you know interested in hearing all the things that I was talking about and after a couple months of this my dad um and my mom who were both having health issues my mom had been s you know insulin dependent diabetic for 30 plus years at that point and my dad just said why don't we just you know to my mom just said hey why don't we just try this for a month see how it goes and so she decided you know she did it with him the their lives turned around I mean within a month it was it was remarkable the difference that it made my my father was diagnosed with with Parkinson's around that time and he was uh just had a bad complication after surgery where he had a very serious internal bleed on Warr and um uh thankfully I was there with him if um if I didn't if I wasn't there with him and recognize what was going on like he probably would have died because my mom said she would have no idea to have called an ambulance or take him in all he had was just back pain but you know people over the age of 65 on blood thinners if you have acute severe onset back pain um uh that's a bleed until proven otherwise and so I was just like right we need to get you in and sure enough he was bleeding and so um so he was in the hospital for for you know about a week was getting blood transfusions things like that and uh and that really set him back and so he his his health was uh you know very poor at the time and he was very weak and I mean I would it would it would be sometimes days between when I would hear him speak and when he would speak his voice was so weak that you just couldn't hear him unless you were right next to him within a month he's he's walking around he's talking normally he's just he's he's my dad again you know it was like you just roll back the clock 10 years and there's no sign of Parkinson's he's not stuttering he doesn't have a Tremor he's just just my dad again and um and then he started how long did he had the Parkinson's he I'm asking a very good friend of mine was diagnosed about a year ago and I gave her the diet Spiel and said that's the last I'm G to mention it her husband's one of my oldest friends I that once every three months it comes up but she's got this attitude I like she likes food she likes her wine she's got enough problems with the Parkinson and I keep saying just try it for a month one month strict see what happens maybe I decide it's worth it best case scenario won't do anything and you go back to your wine and your your Basta but uh I haven't had any luck so yeah well he had um he his doctor had been questioning whether he had Parkinson's for for a number of years there were some some sort of subtle signs that his doctor had picked up on uh but then it was confirmed um uh on on further testing and imaging as well showing that you know substanti Nigri had started to um sto being as active um but it wasn't it wasn't uh very profound at the time um but he was uh having memory issues and like I said you know there's a combination of things he was very very hard done by that um Hospital experience in that bleed but he memory issues were gone I mean he he started pulling out his old you know uh grad textbooks from Berkeley and things like that from his PhD and um and uh and then started going through you know his all his physics books and math books and things like that he started teaching himself Greek I mean it's just you know something that that a 78-year-old man typically doesn't do and he wasn't capable of doing even a couple months earlier and um and he just kept getting better and and both he and my mom started losing weight my my dad's um um yeah has has didn't really have many signs of Parkinson's after that his progression has been you know very very mild at I mean at at worst and um and then you but so it's it doesn't certainly not following the typical pattern of progression in parkinsonism for the last six years you really hasn't had any progression to speak of and so um you could you could see some sign some there he has a bit of a Tremor sometimes but it's not it's not always there you know difficulty getting going sometimes um but it's it's not anything close to what uh you would expect for a six year sort of on and also he's come off his medication you know he didn't he didn't like some of the side effects he was having with it and so he hasn't been on medications at all so you know no no medications and yet really no progression to speak of uh my mom reversed her diabetes in two months you know her HB andc went from 8.9 to 6.1 in two months as she was coming off medications and um now she's off All Med she you said she was insulin insulin dependent but she was type two she was type two yeah but she she burned she she was on insulin yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah type two but insulin dependent so um she came off yeah all her oral medications reduced her insulin down to a minimal dose within two months and now she's completely off uh her insulin and everything like that so she effectively doesn't have diabetes anymore and so yeah so they both they both improved rapidly and but you know it was um but that but that was you know it wasn't me trying to convince them because I knew yeah yeah well this is yeah it was interesting doing this diabetes book um and we could talk about the history there cuz fascinating to me anyway um but pushing you know keto or carnivore for people 20 30 40 pounds overweight it's you know maybe it'll help I mean I'm sure they'll get better but often they lose the weight that their life doesn't really change right you still don't like your job your marriage isn't any good being 30 pounds lighter isn't helping and then you know the tradeoff you don't I mean I think it's worth it but not everyone does I get that and they fall off the wagon it's like this carbohydrate addiction issue and then then so they go back to eating what they used to eat the next thing you know they've gained the weight back and keto is a diet that didn't work for them or carnivore is a diet that didn't work for them um but if you have diabetes and you're looking at a lifetime of medications and lifetime depending a lifetime of injecting yourself with insulin I mean um it's a much different sort of tradeoff now being healthy means a lot more to you being unhealthy means a lot more to you and so I always had this feeling that diabetes would be the sort of tipping point of this Theory because you could convince people you know look try this diet and you'll essentially be healthy or we can give you drugs um the Montreal physician woman whose name I'm going to forget now we tell you I'm glad your father's memory is terrific but I may have to give up my broccoli um she said she talks to her patients and she tells her patients look I can I can give you a pill or I could teach you how to eat yeah um now unfortunately we have the same or fortunately depending on how you want to look at it we have the same same situation with obesity and M GOI we can give you a shot once a week or we could teach you how to eat but if we teach you how to eat we can pretty much guarantee you're not going to have side effects you're not going to get inured to it it's not going to blow up in your face 10 years from now um if you prefer a drug prefer a drug and there nothing we can do about that but diabetes always struck me as a sort of place where you can go and and say look undeniably you can put this disease into a mission you can be healthy if you eat right okay no drugs no medications no blood pressure medications no blood sugar medications no worry about neuropathies and going blind and kidney failure and all the other complications of diabetes that Happ even to people who try to keep their blood sugar good control with drugs they still get these complications and we could teach you how to eat and it's good food hey everyone really happy to announce a new sponsor for the show for everybody down in Australia Stockman Stakes who are delivering highquality grass-fed and finished pasture raised beef and other meats flash frozen and vacuum sealed tood door something that I've been enjoying a lot of myself recently as well they also have a great range of specialty items such as high fat keto mints and carnivore beef and organs mints with liver kidneys and beef heart as well so use code chaffy today for free order of beef mints or another specialty gift along with your order at Stockman stakes. comom DOA and I'll see you over there thanks guys yeah good too yeah well you know to to that end know it'd be great to to hear more about your work with uh you know the rethinking diabetes book I saw a lecture you gave on that at the public health collaboration conference in in England I I was very very interested by it um one of the things that that interested me was you know some of the early treatments for diabetes before we had insulin and things like that were low carb diets were they not well that's the thing the the first physician to successfully put a case of diabetes into remission and write about it in the literature was a British physician named John R 1797 treating a colonel Meredith who comes in with all the symptoms of out of control diabetes he was obese he's lost a lot of weight he's hungry all the time he's thirsty all the time he's peeing buckets he's um R decides the way you diagnose the diabetes not just the symptoms but back then they would actually taste the urine in an ideal world you would have your assistant taste the urine and if the urine was a little bit sweet you knew that the guy had diabetes so I figured if the urine's sweet there's carbohydrates in the urine the guy is not metabolizing carbohydrates correctly and so let's give them a carbohydrate free diet and the original thing was sort of fatty rancid meat and blood sausages and and um he got rid of the rancid meat later and didn't have to eat the blood sausages all the time but the point is is Meredith got better actually lived for another 12 years and so R treats another patient he was in the military so he treats a general who when he's on the diet gets better he then goes back home and his local Physicians says Ah you don't have to eat that diet and he eats whatever he wants and dies like a month later um R writes a pamphlet about and he circulates the pamphlet to Physicians throughout the United Kingdom and he says look it worked try it on your patients and let me know this what they did before clinical trials was sort of you just tell Pat tell the Physicians what you did and they would try it on their patients and if it worked they would go from there by the mid 19 century this is a standard of care in diabetes for the US the UK and France and Germany in Italy Austria um all the major diabetes doctors are telling their patients see what they called the animal diet it was basically a key it was animal products and green leafy vegetables and then towards the end of the 19th century often the patients would show up um having experienced significant weight loss so if they were type one diabetics if they were kids they would be emaciated and they were hungry all the time and thirsty and peeing and um weak and that was a acute disease and they knew that these kids didn't live very long one way or the other although this animal diet would lengthen their lives and and the older people who would come in were people who used to be fat but now had lost a lot of weight so their pancreas had become exhausted and they had type two diabetes but they were now insulin deficient also so they wanted to put weight back on these people because they were mated both the kids and the adults so you get rid of the carbs and you replace those calories with fat because they knew that protein would stimulate being converted to glucose so by the early 19th century the diet standard of care is this high fat diet that famous American diabetes specialist Elliot Joselyn says like that butter is the butter and heavy cream are the best friends of diabetics basically that's what you that's where your calories are coming from and they could keep these people alive inde definitely Joselyn got into uh medicine be into diabetes research because his mother had diabetes and he he went to Germany to study with these great German diabetologists and they taught him how to do this high-fat diet and he came back and put his mother on and she outlived everyone in his family nice um and then 1921 insulin is discovered m okay and insulin is a wonder drug insulin was to diabetes what w groi is to obesity today um they give type insulin to these emaciated kids who on the brink of death from uncontrolled type 1 diabetes and you can resurrect them and that's the kind of Physicians talked about was sort of this religious terminology they never seen anything like it people could be in diabetic Comas keto acidosis give them insulin bring them back to life they thought that was beyond hope um but the kicker is that insulin's this extraordinarily powerful drug and one thing it does is it causes hypoglycemia it lowers blood sugar so much it was hard to figure out it was how to dose it you had to do it by basically trial and error with each patient um they compared it to Morphine they said imagine if patients could dose themselves with morphine um and how many patients You' lose it's like thank God you had to use a needle and you know a hypodermic because you could the doctors could control it on some level but the low blood sugar would kill people so uncontrolled type 1 diabetes would kill them if they're kids over the course of weeks or month or adults over the course of years but the antidote The Cure insulin could kill them overnight so now you go from basically treating these people with the diet that had zero carbohydrates in it for all intents and purposes to having to tell them to eat carbs to balance out the insulin and so the diets become ever more carbohydrate Rich because the patients don't really want to be on diets the doctors don't want to deal with keeping their patients on diets especially if the patients are kids it's like it's bad enough having type 1 diabet IES without never getting to eat an ice cream cone or a birthday cake ever again so they decide the patients do better they just give them a lot of insulin and let them eat is whatever they want let them eat the birthday cakes and the ice cream cones they're going to do it anyway this way at least they'll be following our directions and yeah you try to convince them that they should dose the carbs so that they eat a set amount at every meal and every snack to cover C the insulin properly but they go again from you could think of it as having two levers you could pull to control blood sugar one is the diet just carbohydrates raise blood sugar don't eat them and the other is a drug let's give them the drug and then we'll let them eat the carbs and we'll hope the drug solves the problem and because you're replacing insulin that they thought they had lost everyone assumed that would solve the problem and it didn't short stories by the 30s these people are wait excuse me one second I knew I should have brought water up to my office but I didn't Anyway by the 1930s these people are getting all the manifestations of um the complications of diabetes uh kids who had been kept alive for 10 15 years on insulin are now getting they're going blind they're having kidney failure the neuropathies limbs are being amputated arteriosclerosis is blooming in every vessel in their body and now they're dying prematurely and still tragically young like in late 20s early 30s um the Elder patients are getting the same complications and the doctors assume that the problem is poorly control blood sugar you're not doing a good enough job controlling blood sugar so how do you control blood sugar better higher doses of insulin longer lasting insulin new insulins new Oro hypoglycemic drugs nobody ever stops and says why don't we just tell them not to eat carbohydrates and as soon as somebody does somebody else says Ah they don't they're not going to go on a diet or if you don't eat car will have to eat a lot of saturated fat and that'll kill them from heart disease so um again the history is fascinating and the revelatory thing to me was that even as this idea of evidence-based medicine came in in the 1970s 80s 90s and doctors started saying we have to have a strong evidence base for how we're treating our patient you need randomized control trials to demonstrate that what you're doing is to do and better than other approaches they grandfathered in some approaches they never really thought about the Alternatives because at the time that evidence-based medicine emerged there weren't they they had long ago forgotten there were Alternatives and so this idea that you treat diabetes with drug therapy rather than diet was grandfathered in and then they start doing all these randomized controlled trials and the trials all fail all their beliefs fall apart as soon as they start to test them but this is where we were talking before they they don't change their minds they don't change what they're doing despite now knowing that what they're doing isn't working and People Like Us come along and say look don't eat carbs yeah it sounds complicated but it's not just some foods aren't good for you don't eat them and you'll be fine and they look at us like we're Nut Cases bad diets we know how that you know it's a very strange situation to be in 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 carnival 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 yeah yeah very I um I was speaking to a doctor and he said that he sort of saw this from from the inside and it really woke him up that uh a patient would come in and they look at it their hba1c like o it's starting to go up it's going up it's going up that's not good we're going to have to increase your your medication we're going to have to increase your insulin and then they go to The dietitian and The dietitian says oh looks like the doctor's increased your insulin now you need to increase your carbohydrates because now you have too much insulin now you're going to need to increase I have a minimum number of grams of carbohydrates and then the the next you know three months they come back in oh your hb1c is up again going to have to go to your insulin again and then your carbohydrates again and it it just kept going like this it's like when are you you going to figure this out uh that this is uh that you're causing the problem that you're trying to fix I spoke to a type 1 diabetic who said why I couldn't ever do a ketogenic diet because I have to have carbs because I'm diabetic and so I have to take insulin because I'm diabetic and therefore I have to eat carbs because I'm diabetic it's like you you've got those backwards this is so one of the I had a I'm a big fan of epigraphs epigraphs are epigraphs a little quote that starts a chapter it's usually an italics um I love these things I love quotes about good signs and bad signs I had an epigraph at the beginning of rethinking diabetes it was from a patient a young man with type one diabetes who I had interviewed he had actually had he had been a chef and became a journalist so he interviewed me when I published my sugar book the case against sugar and I he had told me that he had type 1 diabetes and I said oh I got to interview you when I because I'm going to write a book about diabetes so um he's telling me about being diagnosed in his mid-30s with type one and in Russ wallan and when you're diagnosed with any chronic or any disease you're right you're thrown into disease land you know nothing about it you've been living your life thought you were healthy and suddenly it's a whole world of complications and consequences and terms and drugs and treatments and processes you've got to learn about and this happens to him with Ty one and he's getting his his uh diabetes educator and his physician are explaining to him what the issue is and they say you know look you've got type 1 diabetes your body doesn't make enough insulin and anymore so when you eat carbohydrates your blood sugar goes crazy so we're going to give you insulin and then you're going to you're going to keep eating the carbs to balance out that insulin because otherwise you'll get low blood sugar and die so he says wait let me get this straight so I've got type 1 diabetes uh my pancreas is failing me carbohydrates are the problem insulin is the antidote and you want me to eat the problem and take the antidote why don't I just not eat the [Music] problem and the doctor he said the doctor looked at him like he'd never thought about this in his whole life he was like mystified by this idea it's like rather than eat the carbs take the antidote just don't eat the carbs that you don't have to deal with the antidote and any every drug comes with drug doesn't exist it doesn't come with complications con quences and side effects um he also said the doctor says to him well you know people find it very hard to comply to that diet people don't adhere to it and he said well if I had just told you you that I was going to take up a exercise program on an hour a day would you have told me oh people find it hard to run an hour a day I wouldn't wouldn't want you to get disappointed if you can't keep it up and the doctor like no of course not I'd advocate for your exercise then let me try the damn di in see what happens if I don't stick with it I don't stick with it don't tell me in advance that I shouldn't try it because I might not stick with it because I'm going to miss my ice cream cones and my pasta it's a crazy world um and now with again with these new glp1 drugs we've got a whole new world of new drugs that everybody loves I don't doubt for a second that they're better than insulin this is one of the other crazy parts of this history so like I said insulin's discovered and purified 1921 and tested in early 1922 on these young kids in Toronto um at the time they have no way to measure insulin levels hormone levels in the bloodstream so they assume that they know they're different types of diabetes this acute form that kids get and this chronic form that older heavy people get but they assume they're all insulin deficiency diseases so you treat the kids by giving they don't make insulin so you give them insulin and you treat the older people you also give them insulin because they're insulin resistant you have to give them enormous amounts of insulin but you give them insulin because they got an insulin deficiency disease so you think 40 years later somebody finally comes up with a test an assay that allows you to measure insulin other hormones accurately in the bloodstream and the first thing they notice in their papers very first papers they ever published type 2 diabetes is disorder of not low insulin but High insulin so people have high blood sugar and high insulin they must somehow be resistant to the insulin therefore they have insulin resistance so now you're giving a patient whose disease is characterized by high levels of insulin more insulin to cure it and instead of saying to themselves wait a minute if it's a disease of high insulin maybe we should figure out a way to lower the insulin and that'll fix the disease and they never say that I mean I and when I say I never said that I read an enormous amount of the diabetes literature and I cannot find more than two or three people suggesting and quickly being shushed or like n i don't never work but suggesting that if it's a disease of high insulin the treatment is not is not more insulin but figuring out how to lower the insulin the way you lower the insulin is you lower the carbs so you get rid of the carbs you bring the insulin down bring the blood sugar down and patients's fine the problem is that they can't eat carbs so don't eat carbs that's my Jewish New York way of phrasing that I do do accents and the combination group uh where they were given uh keto and Dawn they didn't die at all and on Imaging they found that most of the tumors had completely disappeared or at least significantly reduced when they sacrifice the animals and look at them histologically uh the cancer cells are basically just all dead in most of the cells so it's very interesting there are larger studies being done now Cedar Sinai