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16:30 · Mar 06, 2025

You're Not Getting Better On The Carnivore Diet? This Might Be Why...

Dr. Anthony Chaffee addresses complex health challenges faced by carnivore dieters, focusing on thyroid and adrenal dysfunction that may persist despite dietary changes. He explains that while diet accounts for about 90% of chronic diseases, some conditions may require additional medical intervention alongside carnivore eating. The discussion covers practical solutions for managing hypothyroidism, reactive hypoglycemia, and sleep disruption caused by hunger.

The episode also explores how carnivore diet benefits extend to neurological conditions like spinal stenosis and nerve impingement. Dr. Anthony Chaffee explains the mechanisms behind inflammation reduction through ketones and beta-hydroxybutyrate, while detailing how carbohydrates cause permanent tissue damage through glycation and Advanced Glycation End Products (AGEs). Listeners learn about mitochondrial improvements and optimal lab ranges for thyroid function.

Key Takeaways

  • Eat more fatty meat when experiencing hunger-induced insomnia, as your body's hunger signals indicate genuine nutritional needs that should not be ignored
  • Aim for optimal thyroid hormone ranges (T3 around 4.0) rather than just normal ranges, as standard lab ranges often set the lower limits too low for optimal function
  • After 3-4 months on strict ketogenic diet, mitochondrial count increases 4x and efficiency improves 4x through autophagy and mitogenesis processes
  • All carbohydrates cause glycation damage and form Advanced Glycation End Products (AGEs) that accumulate in joints and spinal discs, contributing to degenerative conditions
  • Hypothyroid and Adrenal Issues on Carnivore Diet - Sleep Problems from Hunger
  • Thyroid Medication Management and Optimal Lab Ranges
  • Iodine in Egg Yolks and Mitochondrial Benefits of Ketogenic Diet
  • Spinal Stenosis and Bone Spurs - Anti-Inflammatory Effects of Carnivore Diet
  • Glycation Damage from Sugar and Carbohydrates in Joint Disease

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

[Music] hi doctor hypothyroid adrenal issues carnivore for 1.5 years now um still doesn't work Dr brigh doesn't get why I don't get better on NDT um but still not improving can't uh sleep because of hunger interesting uh also reactive hypogly hypo I'm assuming hypoglycemia what to do well first of all eat more um you know if your if your body's telling you to eat and you're you're so hungry that you're you're staying up then you it's keeping you up at night I would I would eat more eat more fatty meat um you know there there unfortunately there are other things than than just the food that we're eating or not eating that can affect our thyroid and our adrenals um but this accounts for a lot of them so there could be other outside exposures and other sorts of things that that are you know endocrine disruptors and you know Fates and all these other sorts of scents and perfumes and thises and that and shampoos and Plastics and all these other sorts of things that can screw with these things or it could be something else completely entirely unrelated um and that you that you won't be able to manipulate by changing your environment unfortunately and and you know probably about 90% of things that we treat now as doctors these non-communicable chronic diseases things that absolutely are preventable but that also means that temp % of things are things that that don't fall into that category so uh it could very well be that you have something in that 10% that is um is is going to be have have an outside cause from your diet lifestyle and environmental exposures so you know it may be that there's something in your environment that's causing a problem you know from a diet perspective just going as strict line diet as possible possible you know making sure you have all the the requisite vitamins and minerals B12 folate zinc magnesium vitamin D iodine these sorts of things and and taking the medications that you need to to support you know to to replace and augment your own body's ability to make thyroid hormone and hormones from your adrenals Etc uh that's very important I mean these are very important hormones that uh that you need you can feel pretty pretty rotten as a result of not having them in normal levels and that's something that uh you know an endocrinologist or U even you know functional medicine practitioner should be able to help with hopefully and so I I would definitely do that I would definitely pursue that and then you just you make your diet and lifestyle and environment as healthy as possible and and see if that helps and and if it does then and you can come off these supplements and medications wonderful and if not at least you have the medications there to help you and and that really is the the purpose of uh medicine is to help fix the things that you can't fix on your own and so you do everything that you can and in as best you can and then you fill in the gaps with medicine that's that's my entire philosophy with medicine now I that's I I look for diet and lifestyle interventions first and foremost and I fill in the gaps with medications and maybe I I'll I'll do that you know someone is hypothyroid um and they they really are symptomatic I'll put them on thyroid medications short term fix their dying lifestyle and then you know eventually be able to take them off of that and um and and but it helps them in the meantime while their body is recovering and that's very helpful because people can feel pretty pretty lousy and be quite sick and have other sorts of problems as a result of not having adequate levels of these these different um hormones in their body so so that's that's important as well so hopefully that [Music] um that can help I mean you know do work with the doctor to make sure you're getting on the right doses of these things as well try to get into these optimal ranges as opposed to just the normal ranges you want to get into you you don't want to just just barely get pressed the lower limit of the the the normal lab ranges because those are typically low anyway and so if you're just on the borderline if you're you know I mean you're saying that you know there these lab ranges that say like T T3 of three is perfect and you know three to 5.5 is perfect and so three is great and 2.9 is is a catastrophe like oh they're basically the same aren't they you know so if we're calling 2.9 bad we should probably be thinking about three is bad too so you want to be more into the middle of that range but four is where I'd like to see people's teeth three and so you know um you working with someone um you know like Dr brigh or someone else who you understands more optimal reference ranges and uh and can get you there you know and um and then working on the diet lifestyle side of things um to hopefully you know reverse any sort of environmental issues that could be from your diet or something else uh that could be triggering these things and and letting your body heal but you know at the end of the day you know even if this was something that was caused by your your your diet or um or something else there is such a thing as damage done and if there was something that was sort of permanently damaged and curtailed functioning of your endocrine organs such as your thyroid or your adrenals it may be that they can't recover enough unfortunately so that's just again something that only time will tell so hopefully that that that works i' just be as strict as possible get your vitamins minerals and everything else just teed up and give your body the best chance it has to recover and good luck with that hey everyone really happy to announce a new sponsor for the show and for everybody down in Australia Stockman staks who are delivering highquality grass-fed and finished pasture raised beef and other meats flash frozen and vacuum sealed to ad 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 sts.com and I'll see you over there thanks guys to get more iodine should uh egg yolks be soft I don't actually I don't actually know that um iodine is I gets denatured from cooking I don't I don't think that it does uh maybe someone in the comments uh section knows one way or the other but I've never heard that that iodine um gets denatured by cooking it so I don't I don't think that it um is something you have to worry about from that standpoint so um you know again you know if it's um you could certainly get iodine and egg yolks depends on what the chicken's eating depends on the soil that the chicken is being raised on depends on the soil that you know that that the food of the chicken is coming from if that's feed or if that's worms and bugs um it still matters what goes on in the soil so um so yeah so uh but I don't I don't think I don't think cooking it um is uh is a concern for that not that I know of anyway just cook them the way you like them I think uh Unice booknow thank you very much for the Super Chat uh Unice says hi Dr chaffy is four times more mitochondria really realistic it is actually yeah so um there there was a a study I came across years ago when I was first sort of looking into all this uh that showed that after about 3 to four months on a strict ketogenic diet because of autophagy mitophagy you know the cell turnover and the mitochondrial turnover and then mitogenesis making more of these mitochondria that after 3 four months you have four times the number of mitochondria in your cells and they're four times as effective and efficient because they're newer faster better better versions right so uh yes that's very realistic and in fact after after that your your body keeps improving your mitochondrial function and number and so even up for up to two two and a half three years you're you're still steadily increasing the number of mitochondria and their functionality so yeah that's very realistic Dave Clark thank you very much for the Super Chat Dave says my wife was just diagnosed with spinal stenosis and bone spurs I'm very sorry to hear that her arms go numb and hurt at night when she sleeps I tell her no more carb sugar uh carbs or sugar and line diet might work um thoughts on this well it can certainly help I have I've seen quite a lot of people with u you know similar issues with um um even like canal stenosis and certainly pamal stenosis and impingement on the exiting nerve Roots but even um yeah yeah with with very similar sorts of conditions improve from a symptom point of view certainly it's probably not going to get rid of your bone spurs I I don't think that it that it will um I do know people that have had improvements in bone spurs I don't really know exactly what the hell is going on with bone spurs and why they're they're they're growing and and sort of calcifying and blbs on the on the surface of your bones but uh some people do improve those things it's something you just have to sort of look on an individual basis to see if that helps but for everybody it will reduce inflammation ketones beta hydroxy butyrate directly blocks something called the nlrp3 inflammosome which causes inflammation as the name would suggest and so inflammation levels come down you're also excluding a lot of different plants and harmful nonsense like sugar and carbs which increased inflammation in the first place increased inflammation will have increased pain and neurological dysfunction and so you're reducing the amount of inflammation coming into your body and you're directly reducing the amount of inflammation that is left by having high levels of beta hydroxy berate 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 so those are all good things and those can all improve neurological function and ketones just in general improve neurological function and so I see a lot of people with radiculopathy their upper limbs lower limbs um either way that improve from a symptom point of view they don't have this shooting pain and numbness and and so on um and so that's that's very beneficial even though it hasn't reversed the underlying pathology it has made the damage that that underlying pathology is causing and and the pain p and then symptoms that it's triggering to lessen which is really good I mean that's the whole whole point it doesn't matter what your scan looks like if you don't have any symptoms right so if we have someone that has like a just a horrible scan we're seeing all this stenosis oh geez those those nerves all look impinged when we do an exam we look at somebody and they had to have absolutely no symptoms you're not going to operate on that person right because you know first Do no harm surgery causes harm you're cutting through tissue right you're damaging and destroying things and sometimes it's necessary to do that to free up a nerve or something like that but if you if your patient is not symptomatic then you're only causing harm you're not actually going to provide any benefit by freeing that nerve up because it's not causing a problem the nerve is still functioning right so uh yes it can definitely help you know one thing to remember with sugar and carbs is that they cause glycation so all carbohydrates and sugars are carbohydrates carbohydrates are sugars I mean if you take organic chemistry that's what they're called that term those terms are interchangeable right so people oh well carbohydrates aren't the same as suar Jesus Christ it's it's literally a synonym right so we call Sugar just table sugar but those are carbohydrates right glucose fructose disaccharide they're bonded glucose and fructose right so uh these are sugars carbohydrates are sugars sugar are carbohydrates it's the same it's the same word it means the same thing and so carbohydrates all carbohydrates so all sugars all carbohydrates all cause glycation they all will physically fuse as non-enzymatic um binding between the the carbohydrate molecules and other molecules and cause very serious damage and permanent damage it's called glycation and so you get a build up these soal Advanced glycation a end products AG they literally age you right and they age your tissue and so there are there are plenty of studies I found any number of studies on you know when you're cleaning out a joint and cleaning out all this damaged gross cartilage and arthritis out of a joint they've looked at it and they found that they're just replete with uh ages these Advanced gation end products so this damage from sugar carbohydrates right and so this has also been found in the diss in the spine as well causing degenerative disc so when you have degenerative disc and dis and degenerative spinal conditions and you test those things you take take it to the lab you'll find that they're full of advanced glycation end products these AES this damage from sugar and carbohydrates so in the short term for her position right now yes it can definitely help her from a symptom point of view long term it will it will help reduce and maybe even prevent this damage from progressing which is very important so it's going to stop this problem from getting worse hopefully so there's a lot of benefits uh by doing this um even just eating more protein that's been shown plenty of times in studies to improve your outcomes with surgery so if she does have to go down the surgical route down the down the road she's going to have much less inflammation she's going to have much better wound healing and she's going to have have a higher protein diet she's going to recover better and she's going to have um you know lower risk of post-operative infection and better wound healing and things like that and better wound healing corresponds with a lower risk of post-operative infection and things like that so I I think there's a lot of benefit to doing this I think you're you're definitely right on the the right track here and hopefully that helps her enough that she can avoid surgery um but it will definitely help her and um and can help prevent uh this issue from getting worse and affecting other areas of her spine and nervous system have any autoimmune issues I don't have any specific health issues that I um have have to deal with I just feel better in general so I just naturally gravitate uh there anyway um but yeah if you find that you're doing better um with a bit of other other things mixed in that could be a reason why and either way if that's what you feel the best then do that
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