The Carnivore Diet with Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Today I am having a conversation with Dr. Anthony Chaffee. We discuss the carnivore diet in detail. 

Dr Chaffee is an American medical doctor and Neurosurgical resident who, over a span of 20+ years, has researched the optimal nutrition for human performance and health. It is his assertion that most of the so-called chronic diseases we treat as doctors are caused by the food we eat, or don't eat, and can be reversed with dietary changes to a species specific diet.

He began University at the age of 15 studying Molecular & Cellular Biology with a Minor in Chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle, which culminated in an MD from the Royal College of Surgeons.

Currently in Australia, he specializes in Neurosurgery and does private consultations in functional medicine while thriving on a carnivore diet.

Follow Dr. Chaffee on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/anthonychaffeemd/

https://www.patreon.com/thecarnivorelife

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00.090] - Kayla Barnes

Dr. Chafee, it's such a pleasure to have you here with me today.

[00:00:03.270] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Yeah, well, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to meet you.

[00:00:05.960] - Kayla Barnes

Absolutely. So today we're going to discuss a really, in my opinion, an exciting topic. So you post a lot and you have tons of education in the realm of carnivore, which is a super hot topic, very controversial. And as we were chatting about before, I started recording diet that I pretty much follow at this point in my life. So before we dive into that, though, why did you become interested in the medical field? Tell us about your beginnings.

[00:00:35.850] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Well, I just was interested ever since I was a little kid. I think it's a bit cliche to say, like, oh, I really wanted to do this since I was a kid, but I actually was that kid. I was always very interested in it had some very interesting doctors in the family that had done really, really cool and amazing things like setting up clinics all over Africa and driving between them and doing sort of eye surgery and general practice and things like that in there. And then my mom's grandfather, who had the 13th medical license in California, he's still to date the youngest ever graduate from Columbia Medical School. And and he was a surgeon at the advent of modern surgery, where they just invented anesthetics and just realized that sterile technique was an important thing. And so this was the first time they could actually do real surgeries open the abdomen, open the thorax, even open the skull. And so he was on the ground floor of that. And it was very exciting to hear these stories about them all, and it just made me very, very interested since I was a kid. And then in school, the math and science, especially math, were always my favorite subjects anyway, and so it just sort of fit in that, and that made sense that I would just go into that.

[00:01:48.450] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And so that's what I pursued, and I'm always very glad I did. I remember thinking as a kid, I really wanted to know just how the body worked down to a molecular level and just really understand everything that it is to be human and to be healthy. And obviously you need to sort of go into medicine and the medical fields to sort of understand that. And obviously no one's ever going to know that to that extent, but it's nice to be in the field, and I'm really glad that I went into that.

[00:02:17.930] - Kayla Barnes

Well, that's amazing and really intriguing. So how did you get from traditional medicine practice to where you are now? So just talk a little bit about the steps that you went through, because kind of what I've seen that you're talking about now is quite radically different than what we would hear from our doctors in the doctor's office.

[00:02:37.730] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Well, it's very different. It's very different from what I was even taught, except that I was taught parts of these things as well in my undergraduate degree in molecular cellular biology and chemistry, as well as in medical school, because I would follow different lines of research as well that would sort of complement my medical education. And all of these things sort of added up to show me that the picture that we were sort of being told for the last 50 years really wasn't accurate or at least very different. I'm still in traditional practice, so I'm specializing in neurosurgery, so I'm a neurosurgical resident. So that's my day job, is learning and doing neurosurgery. But I also have a very deep interest in the diet, nutrition, and how that affects our health and chronic disease especially, because I think that a lot of the so called chronic diseases that we face nowadays, like diabetes heart disease, even cancer, alzheimer's, autoimmune disorders, et cetera. That these actually are not diseases per se, but toxicities and malnutrition. Toxic build up of a species inappropriate diet and a lack of species specific nutrition. Any animal in the wild, they eat a very specific diet.

[00:03:49.280] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And when they eat outside of that diet, it can cause a lot of harm. And I think that that's what we're doing. Whether or not we were biologically designed to eat plants or not, we are not designed to eat all the plants that we are eating now. That is certain because no animal in the wild eats such a wide variety of plants. And the plants that we eat now didn't exist even a few thousand years ago for most of these things. They're all bioengineered, either through intensive agriculture or now GMO, actually, like splicing genes. So these things are absolutely not what we are designed to eat. And if we are designed to eat some plants, it's going to be some plants. It's not going to be all the plants that we're eating. And so I think that that's where we've sort of gone wrong. When I was taking my undergraduate when I was doing my undergraduate degree and I was taking botany, I was taking biology, I was taking cancer biology, and we learned how plants actually defend themselves. They're living organisms, and they like to stay living organisms. And so if you eat them, they die.

[00:04:47.700] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

So all living things have a defense. And while animals can run away or fight back, that's their defense. Plants can't do that because they're stationary. So they have to use other means. And one of those means is just by being physically toxic. And so they're going to be toxic to animals and insects that eat them. In fact, when they start getting eaten by something, they send out signals like, okay, I'm getting eaten by something, they start making more toxins, or like a fungus, they got fungal infection. They'll start making a toxin that will damage that fungus. This is why if you have produce and it's like oh, it has a bad spot on it. You know, what does that mean? I remember hearing that from my mom. Oh, you shouldn't eat that. It's not good anymore. Well, why is it not good anymore? Is because of the fungus? Because you can cut that part out. No, but the whole plant becomes a bit, you know, more toxic because now it's making more toxins towards that little fungal infection or that insect infestation. So that's just biology 101, certainly botany 101. And when I was taking cancer biology, we were learning this again, that this is how plants defend themselves.

[00:05:47.680] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

But from a cancer perspective, we were looking at carcinogens. And we learned that 22 years ago when I was taking this, that Brussels sprouts alone had over 136 known human carcinogens in them, that mushrooms had over 100, and spinach, kale, lettuce, celery, cabbage, cucumber, broccoli, every plant in the produce aisle. They all had 60, 80 over 100 known human carcinogens each. And they're quite abundant. We know from the 1980s that there's actually 10,000 times more naturally occurring pesticides in the plants that we eat than the pesticides we spray on them by weight, and that the naturally occurring ones are up to 500 times more carcinogenic than the pesticides, the industrial pesticides we spray on them. So the idea that, oh, if you just eat organic, it's really the pesticides that's the problem. It's not actually it's actually the plant itself. Certainly the pesticides don't help pesticides or poison on purpose. That's the whole point. They're helping the plant stop from being eaten. They stop even more insects from eating that plant. But the plant can do it itself. That's how it survives in nature. And we know this intuitively by the fact that if you get lost in the woods, you can't just eat any random plant.

[00:06:56.780] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Right. Most plants will make you very sick or even kill you. What does that mean? That means the plants are poisonous. That's what they're producing. So this is as true as spinach as it is of hemlock. It's just that we have defenses against the poisons in spinach. We don't really have defenses to hemlock. So hemlock will kill us within a couple of minutes, but spinach will just make us it's just less optimal. We have a lot of defenses. We can break down a lot of things, but we do have to break those things down. They do cause a bit of harm to us, and they certainly aren't as nutritious as me. So I think that all of these things piled onto each other can just cause ill health, and I think that's what we're seeing today in modern medicine.

[00:07:41.170] - Kayla Barnes

Wow. Yeah, I agree. And I think it's people find it so controversial because we've been told to eat plants for so long, and as you and I were discussing years and years ago, I tried a vegan diet. I personally felt awful. And now just eating meat and I do eat some fruit. So I'm excited to hear what you think, how you define each kind of version of the carnivore diet, because there's a couple of different versions, I think, floating around, but I feel better than ever, and it almost feels a little bit too good to be true because the food is so good. Like, to me, eating a salad, it tastes awful. I don't really feel great after it. So in the most basic terms, what do you define the carnivore diet as? Is it just meat and water and salts, or can you incorporate some other things in there, too?

[00:08:30.930] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

I think, at the end of the day, I think people should just eat what they enjoy eating what they feel works for them, and what is good, what they want to, really. I mean, I think people are adults. They should make their own decisions. But I think for optimal health, it's just meat and water. Salt to taste. I don't think there's too much of a problem with salt. I don't use much salt anymore, and I don't think you necessarily need salt. But on a carnivore diet, if you're eating sort of a mixed diet, sometimes adding mineral salt can be beneficial. But I think that if you're just eating a carnivore diet, you tend not to. I almost use no salt at all at this point, but salting to taste, I think, is okay. So for me, that's what that is. And what that does is it really eliminates out all the different, certainly the different plant toxins as well. And fruit, you're going to get sugar. And sugar, I think, is a problem just because it can lead to overeating, it can lead to disrupting your metabolism. It changes you. Very simply put, by raising your insulin, it slows your metabolism and puts you into a fat storage metabolism as opposed to a fat burning metabolism.

[00:09:38.960] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And so you're not able to mobilize your fat stores properly. You're not running on all the ketones that you normally would be, which are very good for you. They're anti inflammatory. It's the primary energy source of your brain and your heart tissue. And so I think that that's a very good state to be in. And fructose itself is quite problematic because this has been shown biochemically from the University of California, san Francisco Biochemistry Department, one of the top ten research institutions in the world, that fructose is actually broken down by your liver into the same byproducts as alcohol, and so it causes the same damage from those harmful byproducts as alcohol. So you get similar damage to your body and get fatty liver disease, cirrhosis, even peripheral insulin resistance, which is type two diabetes, and is even implicated in such things as heart disease and now Alzheimer's. So I think that fructose itself is pretty problematic, and that's why I would avoid fruit, sweet fruit. Sweet fruit. Things with fructose are thought to be less toxic because that's why we think evolutionarily, we've sort of developed an affinity for the taste of fructose. That's the sweetest of the fruit.

[00:10:50.790] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Most other carbohydrates are pretty mildly sweet at best, but fructose is very, very sweet. And so it's thought that we've recognized that as basically something safe that we can eat short term and survive and it doesn't have any sort of acute poisons are just going to kill you. But there actually are toxins in there even like citrus that are known for having phranic tumorins that can cause all sorts of problems. This is why you're not supposed to eat grapefruit with several different medications because those free Ranchomerins have to be detoxified by your liver. And the enzymes that it uses to detoxify those things are actually what is used to metabolize a lot of medications. And so if you're using up all those enzymes because of the grapefruit that you're eating to break down those toxins, then you won't metabolize your medications properly and you either get toxicity from the medication or no efficacy at all because it won't metabolize properly. So either have too much or too little. So that's just one, but there are a ton of other ones. Even those franchemarans are in limes. They react to light and so UV light hits them and they'll actually bind to proteins and DNA and they can actually really damage your skin and burn your skin.

[00:12:05.530] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

So you can get lime juice on your hands, like squeezing limes out in the sun. There are people that have gotten like second degree burns on their hands just from the lime juice being in the sun. And so I think that fruit can be better, but it's not devoid of these defense chemicals. So for me, I just like eating just fatty meat and emphasis on fatty meat and water. Excuse me. And that's how I feel the best. And so just from an intellectual standpoint, just knowing what's in there, I'd like to avoid them, but from a practical setting as well. I've sort of sampled some of these things back in and I've seen that maybe it doesn't cause a huge difference. I'm not on the floor going to the hospital or something like that, but it makes me feel not as good as I was. Maybe my face gets a bit itchy, my asthma sort of acts up a bit or I get a stuffy nose just going, I didn't really like that, I don't really want that, or even drinking coffee. I don't get sore from working out anymore, ever. Doesn't matter how hard I work out or how long it's been in between workouts.

[00:13:09.450] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

I don't get sore if I'm eating this way, just meat in water. And then I drink one cup of coffee and I'm sore for two days. I was like, well, that's not worth that. This is one cup of coffee and I'm hobbling around for two days. So for me, I just keep it just meat and water.

[00:13:27.170] - Kayla Barnes

Okay.

[00:13:27.830] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Wow.

[00:13:28.200] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, I have done that before, but sometimes for me, and I'll just ask you a few questions about this, I feel a lot stronger in the gym, or maybe this is just in my head when I do incorporate some carbohydrates. So I started to incorporate some, and I only eat, like, once or twice a day, so I'm not constantly spiking my insulin. But I did start to incorporate some dates into my diet, which I know are very high in sugar. I mean, I've worn blood glucose monitors that whole I know what it is, but I felt stronger. Is there any correlation to that, or do you think that's just in my head?

[00:14:04.430] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Well, the thing is, you can sort of look at it a few different ways. First of all, you can look at the golden neuro body builders and, like, gonda and and surgeonubrey and things like that. These guys were jacked, and they were absolutely just just physical specimens. They were all basically carnivores. You know, Sergeant Newbrae would eat, like, £6 of horse meat a day. Gurunda was just steak and eggs. But Grandda especially, he has in his protocols that he would have, like, one sort of big refeeding carb day, like, on Sundays, and he thought that that's where you had to get your carbs. You sort of build up your glycogen, and then you get that through the week. And they found that the Monday Tuesday gym sessions, they felt great, really strong. Then by Wednesday, it was sort of petering out. By Thursday, they didn't feel they had as much gas in the tank. You can look at it that way, but you can also look at it from the standpoint of actually having controlled trials, which we've done with Professor Tim Noakes from South Africa, who's been in sort of the health and fitness sports medicine research side of things since like the he was a big you have to eat carbs to work out and all these sorts of things.

[00:15:18.200] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

He was one of the main proponents in voice and experts on that side of the argument for decades. And people come in like, what about this? No, absolutely not. You're dead wrong. And he switched around and like, oh, my God, I was absolutely wrong. So he actually is very much in the side of ketogenic training as well. So they did a controlled trial, and they had two groups of people, and I think it was actually done in Ohio. Actually, don't quote me on that, but I think it was the University of Ohio. And so they took two groups of people, and one was eating carbohydrates and normal sort of things, and but, you know, healthy food, you know, quote whatever that means, but with carbohydrates. And then, you know, a ketogenic group, and they had them go like, for, like I think it was like, 42 weeks of eating just a ketogenic diet. So made sure that they were fat adapted and their body was making all the glucose and glycogen and ketones, right, and that they were able to adequately run their body on those ketones as well. And after 42 weeks, they put them under stress exercises and tested their physical output, and they found that they're pretty much the same and they could propel themselves in the same way.

[00:16:37.340] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And then they switched the groups. And so they had the groups that were on carbohydrates switched over to the keto group. And again, 42 weeks, just big, long study, 42 weeks to make sure that they were fat adapt. And they know now that doesn't take nearly that long. It's like, at most three weeks for everybody. Most people will be before that as well, but they really wanted to make sure and so they switched the groups and they and they tested their physical output and they found that they were the same, they were performing at the same level. So it it shouldn't it shouldn't it shouldn't be it certainly shouldn't detract from your from your performance. One of the things is not being keto adaptive, not being able to produce the amount of ketones that you need, produce the glucose and blood sugar and glycogen that you need to perform at an adequate level, and then having your body really tuned up for that. So if you do eat carbs intermittently, it can sort of slow down that process. But for me, as I came from a professional rugby background, I played rugby high level for ten years before medical school and through medical school and beyond.

[00:17:44.470] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

I was an All American and played in England and all over the US and Canada and all over the world. And I did five years of that on a carnivore diet, and I did five years of that just on a normal standard diet, but clean, high protein, high meat sort of standard diet. And I can tell you it's night and day difference between my exercise potential during carnivore and outside of that, because when you are keto, fat adapted, whatever you want to call it, you can produce an unlimited supply of blood sugar and glycogen and ketones, whereas when you eat carbohydrates, it raises your insulin. And insulin, simply put, forces energy into cells, but it doesn't allow it to come out of cells. And so now your fat cells are blocked, right? So it blocks protolysis, it blocks lipolysis, so it stops your fat cells from actually producing energy and replenishing your blood sugar and replenishing your glycogen and your ketones. And so you have to keep eating carbohydrates so you can maintain that same energy level. You can still work out, but you have to just keep eating, keep eating carbs, keep eating carbs and drinking Gatorades constantly as you're running a marathon or something like that.

[00:19:00.040] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

You have to keep doing that, whereas if you're not eating any carbs and your body's fat adapted, you will produce the exact amount of blood sugar and glycogen for whatever you're doing. I sort of think of it like I'm sure that with a lot of training that you do and the people around you about how distanced athletes will talk about how if you work really hard, you'll eventually run out of energy, and you'll hit the wall, and that's it. You just hit the wall, there's no more energy. You just have to stop. Most people will stop at this point, but distance athletes and endurance athletes know that if you keep pushing and you keep pushing and you keep pushing, eventually you can break through the wall, and you get to the other side, and you get your runners high, and you get in a state of euphoria, and you can. And you get called a second wind or a runner's high, and you just run and run and run and run and run, and you just feel amazing as you're doing that. What that is biochemically, is you've been eating carbs, and so your insulin is high, and so you only can run on the carbs that you have in your system and in your glycogen and the available blood sugar, but that has a limit, and that will run out.

[00:20:03.970] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And so if you're not just constantly popping Gatorades, you will eventually hit the wall, and because you will run out of that available glucose and glycogen, and so you won't have available energy because your insulin stays up. It has a long half life. It generally stays up for about 24 hours after you have a big carb meal. And so you don't have the ability to replenish that blood sugar and glycogen. And so you just really feel awful. But if you push yourself and push yourself and push yourself, you can force your body to then switch back into that metabolic state where you're producing energy from your fat cells and all of a sudden you just wake up. You have all this energy because now you're producing fat energy from your fat cells. And now you can just go and go and go. And you're making the harder you go, the better you feel. Because now the harder you go, the more energy you produce, the more energy you burn, the better you feel is why we take stimulants and coffee and all these sort of things, because it makes you burn energy, and that makes you feel alive.

[00:20:57.890] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

So I always am in my second wind. I'm always in the runner's high. The harder I work, the more energy I produce, the better I feel. So I don't take a pre workout drink or something like that to go to the gym. I go to the gym so that I can get energy, because when I start working out, produce the exact amount of energy I need to work out, sitting here talking to you, I'm producing the exact amount of energy that I need to sit here and talk to you. When I go to the gym, I will make the exact amount of energy I need to do whatever I'm doing. And because you feel better when you burn more energy, you will want to work harder. So it's this positive feedback loop. I work hard, I burn more energy, I feel great, I work harder, I feel better. And I just keep going like that. And that's why I can have gym sessions that last 4 hours because I just don't want to leave. I just feel better and better and better the longer I'm there. And you don't really get that when you're eating carbohydrates unless you have to keep sort of giving yourself stuff to propel that state.

[00:21:56.290] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

So I think that in the long run, if you get sort of fat adapted, Keto adapted, whatever you want to call it that, you will find that you have a significant advantage, especially in those long term endurance sort of competitions or exercises. Short term, sure, you can do that. Certainly in a carb state. As a Ketogenic state, I think you can have very similar workout experiences and get a lot out of it. And if you're not Keto adapted, that adapted, you probably will get better workouts in the short term, but eventually it'll match up as we've seen in these controlled trials. And I think that for the longer, bigger workouts, you'll have much more potential and available to you if you're in the sort of the Keto side of things.

[00:22:45.590] - Kayla Barnes

Interesting. Well, I'll have to go back to it and make a really specific log because before doing carnivore and then now on what I would call carnivore ask, I was so strict to Keto. Like for me, food is not something that's a reward. Actually, yesterday at Thanksgiving here in the States, someone had asked me what do you eat for pleasure? I said I don't eat for pleasure. Food doesn't matter that much. I just eat it for performance and for a living, really. But when I was keto, I think you're probably right. I probably did actually have more sustained energy. So I'll have to go back to just like the strict carnivore. I think you just get acclimated because I feel so good all the time. My energy is great, my sleep is amazing. I wake up, I get sun, I do everything. I feel incredible. So for me, I can also have a little bit of dates. And I actually have a metabolism tracker. I've tested this before. I can eat like over a half a box of dates and within 2 hours I'll be back to burning fat for fuel. So my metabolic ability to go between burning fat and burning carbs is really good.

[00:23:55.600] - Kayla Barnes

So it probably doesn't affect me that much, I guess. But not saying that I couldn't be better if I went back to more of a strict fully carnivore diet, which I'm totally open to doing. And I should just for a while have to report back then with all of these amazing benefits that you talked about, why have we heard that meat is so bad for us?

[00:24:17.730] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Yeah, I mean, it goes back away, but probably the most impactful bit of disinformation was the 1977 declaration from the USDA that cholesterol causes heart disease and that saturated fat raises cholesterol. So they said the recommendations were to not eat saturated fat, cholesterol. And that's a problem because meat and eggs especially have a lot of saturated fat and cholesterol. So overnight, they became bad for you. So before that, we were always in a state of basically malnutrition. Everyone was basically just needed to get enough, and they weren't often able to unless you were quite wealthy. And that's why wealthy people tended to be healthier. They had better access to food and certainly had better access to meat as well. And then at the point we had an abundance of food, you didn't necessarily have to just worry about that. So this was the first time USDA, or really any other governmental body in America said, don't eat something as opposed to get enough of everything. And that really changed everything. So overnight, meat became bad for you because it had cholesterol and saturated fat. And I remember even as a kid, you can still see it now in candy aisles, like, fat free candy.

[00:25:31.030] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Like, okay, it's still candy, but it's a buzzword, and it's a marketing term. Fat free. Fat free, fat free. So fat became bad, and everything with fat became bad. And then by default, everything without fat became de facto good for you, because fat is the only bad thing on earth, right? And so anything else is okay. So that's why fruits and vegetables and grains and even sugar actually became substituted in for the calories that we were missing with meat. And in fact, everything tasted pretty bland when you take the fat out of it, because any chef will tell you that is flavor. And so now everything's pretty bland. They add a bunch of sugar to it to make it palatable. Now we have this hyper palatable, processed, sugar filled carbohydrates, which basically cause you to overeat. Let's talk about the insulin going up. When you eat carbohydrates, insulin blocks a hormone called leptin, which comes from your stretch receptors in your stomach, but also mostly comes from the fat cells in your body. And that tells your brain how much energy you have in reserve. That's like a running gas gauge. And so insulin will block that into your brain actually doesn't see it's.

[00:26:41.210] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Like, if you're just always on empty and you just have no idea how much gas is in the tank, he buys, oh, gosh, okay, do I need to stop? And then, because insulin stays up, your blood sugar can actually drop down too low, and you feel pretty rotten, and your brain gets the signal that you have zero energy reserves and your blood. Sugar is dropping. And so it gets this panic signal that says, if you don't eat now, you will die. This is why three, four times a day, people are like, panic eating carbs, and they're just getting so upset. Term hangry where people just getting so upset because they're hungry. It's kind of funny, but that's a really distressed state. Their brain is telling them, you need to eat. You're going to die. And they get frantic. And of course, they're not going to die. They have weeks and weeks and weeks of energy available to them in their fat stores, even if they're quite slender. And so that is a sort of a pathological state that you really shouldn't feel that way. So I think that that inherently will cause you to overeat.

[00:27:39.820] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Sorry. I remember I've gone completely tangential. What was the original question? I want to double back there.

[00:27:46.710] - Kayla Barnes

So why have we been told for so long that meat is bad for you?

[00:27:51.270] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

That's right. Yeah. Very sorry. That was the main thing, because we were told that was bad, and so therefore, meat is bad, but we actually know that that's wrong. The Journal of the American Medical Association. I see the University of California in San Francisco published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the top medical journals in the world in 2016. Actual internal documentation from the sugar companies back in the 60s detailing how they knew that there was researchers coming out saying that sugar actually caused heart disease. And they're like, well, we need to COVID this up. And so in their own documentation, they detailed how they paid off three Harvard professors to falsify data and publish fraudulent studies to make it appear as if cholesterol was causing heart disease when it was actually, in fact, probably sugar. And one of those professors was named head of USDA, and it was he who authored and published that 1977 declaration that cholesterol causes heart disease, and he was bought and paid for. It's a paid shill of the sugar companies. Ansel Key is also a paid shill of the sugar companies. And he doctored and falsified and cherry picked data and published fraudulent studies.

[00:29:01.170] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And now maybe he did some good work, and maybe he'd put out some good research. We have no idea if he did or not. We have no idea. Everything's tainted now, because we know that he was bought off. We know that he doctored certain studies, major studies that put him on the on the scholarly map. And so everything that he's done is is completely suspect. Now, in my mind, it goes back even further than that, though. You look at the 7th day Adventists in the 18 hundreds, they noticed that people that ate a lot of meat, they were just more viral. And and this would make you more basically prone and eager to procreate, because that's what we are biologically supposed to do. We're supposed to be healthy and go forth and multiply, that was a problem for them. They thought that lust was a sin. And so anything that made you feel lustful and like you wanted to have sexual procreate, that that was a bad thing. Not understanding that, that's actually a sign of good metabolic health, of good hormonal health. And your body is telling you, hey, you're healthy. You've got the resources and health to have kids, go have kids.

[00:30:11.750] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And that's a fundamental biological drive, and it's a very healthy drive. If your reproductive health is waning, that's a sign that there's greater problems. And right now, the sperm counts drop by 30% since the 1970s. Infertility is at an all time high in both men and women. So this is a sign of ill health. And then things are going very wrong in our health. Eating meat countered that, but to them that was a sin. And so they were like, okay, well, if you don't eat meat and you just eat vegetables and things like that, that actually counteracts that. You press it. You don't have these lustful feelings. Well, yeah, because you're parenting unhealthy, and your body is telling you, like, yeah, you're not going to make it. You're not in a good position to have kids right now. And they thought that was a good thing. And so they've been pushing this for a long time. And they're in charge of loma. Linda, California. They have a medical school there that's attached to the 7th dad dentists. They own and operate, I think, like 82 medical centers and hospitals and tire medical groups around the country.

[00:31:17.610] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And they put out a lot of data. They put out a lot of well, not even data. It's all garbage. But a lot of studies pushing this plant based vegan agenda, anti meat agenda. University of Washington in Seattle actually just published a paper, just reviewing all of the studies, looking at basically vilifying meat, and they found that they were just sloppy and very poorly done, lazy studies. And that actually, when you look at the data, there's no sign that meat was actually bad for you according to their own research, which they misrepresented. And so there is a concerted effort to vilify meat, and there are certain parties involved in that. 7th day Adventist, they have their own religious bent that for some reason they just are really stuck behind. I don't know why they can't grow with the times and realize that those lustful feelings that this was all predicated on was actually a sign of health that would be responsible of them to do that. They haven't gotten that yet, that far yet. And then different industries, like the sugar companies, they're protecting their interests. And so they were putting out fraudulent studies, and that's illegal.

[00:32:38.450] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

That's not what you should be doing, but that's what it is. And I'm sure there are other motivations as well, but those are two of the main driving forces and now you just got this big weight of inertia behind it and now it's in the realm of everybody knows. Well, everybody knows if that's bad for you, everybody knows that cholesterol is bad for you. And so now it's sort of perpetuating itself. But those are the origins now. So we just have to sort of work against that and show the background, the history, and the fact that, no, this actually is not bad for you, and the cholesterol is not bad. Cholesterol is a really important just to go on another tangent, cholesterol is a really important molecule in your body. First of all, every single cell in your body is cholesterol. I learned that in 8th grade biology, that the cell membranes of every one of our cells is made out of cholesterol. It's a double layer of cholesterol. I remember looking at that and I was like, how is cholesterol bad for us? We are cholesterol. Like, that doesn't make any sense. I was like, Well, I'm just a kid.

[00:33:37.620] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

I don't know much yet. Someone will explain it to me later. But looking back at analysis, that's that wisdom from the mouth of babes. It's like people haven't been when you're young enough, you can sort of look at things and spot the bullshit, really. You haven't been indoctrinated. You haven't had your mind closed off to the realities that are staring you dead in the face. And sure, there could be reasons why cholesterol is still bad for you, even though we're made out of cholesterol. Sure. But the fact is, it's not. The original studies, you know, were based on on fraud, and they actually haven't found now all the big meta analyses, all the big studies, looking at all the data, looking at randomized controlled trials with tens of thousands of patients that they were doing in the just, like, covered up because they're like, well, this doesn't show what we want to show. Show that that saturated fat and cholesterol have no relationship to increased levels of heart disease. In fact, they have an inverse relationship. So the higher your cholesterol, the lower your rates of stroke and heart disease and vice versa. The lower your rates of stroke and or the lower your rates of levels of cholesterol and LDL cholesterol, the higher your rates of stroke and heart disease.

[00:34:48.750] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Cholesterol is really important, right? Every cell in your body is made out of cholesterol. Your brain is made out of cholesterol, and your hormones are made out of cholesterol. Vitamin D is synthesized from cholesterol. And all your sex hormones like testosterone, estrogen, progesterogens, glucocorticoids, mineralocorticoids, everything made in your adrenals, like cortisol, all of them come from cholesterol. There are something like, I think it's like 26 or 27 intermediary steps between cholesterol and testosterone and estrogen. And every single one of those intermediary steps is a hormone that has an important role in your body. Every single one comes from cholesterol. So this is a very important molecule, especially in reproductive health and just normal pubertal development. And if you don't have enough of it, you will not develop properly, you will not be able to function properly. So this has been a big detriment to our health just simply by eliminating out something that's so necessary for our health.

[00:35:55.010] - Kayla Barnes

Well, yeah, I agree. I think that the whole debacle over cholesterol is going to be one of the biggest mistakes of our time. I mean, there's going to be many from spraying glyphosate all over everything to cholesterol, and I think it's really going to be one of the biggest mistakes. And they still push it so hard. I've had higher cholesterol. It's not anything crazy, but I don't see it as a problem at all. I actually see it as a good thing. So I'm hoping that you agree. So how long have you been on the carnivore diet in this way?

[00:36:28.890] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

So I started 22 years ago, almost 23 years ago now, when I was taking that cancer biology class, and we were learning just how toxic plants were and how carcinogenic they were. And I remember thinking at the time in class, first of all, we were blown away, and everyone was, like, looking around wild, like literally thrashing around wildly, like, looking around like, who's in on the joke? This has to be a joke. And like, looking for like, a ta in the corner, like laughing, like, he always does this, but we realized that, wow, he's not joking. And I remember thinking in my head, I was like, but the vegetables are still good for you, though, right? Even though they have all these carcinogens? Even though I hated vegetables and never wanted to eat them, but that was just so ingrained in my head. And he just sort of looked at us and read our mind. Just gives us a funny looking he said, I don't eat salads. I don't eat vegetables. I don't let my kids eat vegetables. Plants are trying to kill you. And so in my head, I was like, right, screw plants.

[00:37:28.570] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And I just stopped, like that day. And I went to the grocery store and just went through I'm like, well, what do I buy? Everything has plants in it. Everything either just is a plant or comes from plants. Grains, pastas, bread, produce, clearly. But anything in the pre made foods packaged everything. Everything has plants in it. And I was just walking around. I was just like, mystified like, what the hell do I eat? And I just came across some eggs, and I was like, okay, eggs. Eggs don't come from a plant. Meat meat doesn't come from a plant. Milk milk doesn't come from a plant. And that's all I did was just eggs, meat, milk. Mostly just eggs and meat. I have some milk every now and then. I don't really do much really any milk now, just because it has enough lactose in it that can raise your insulin and sort of kick you out of your primary metabolic state. But at the time, I was just avoiding plants, and so that's what I did for five years. And I felt absolutely amazing. My athletic performance just went through the roof. I couldn't get tired, I couldn't get run out of energy, I couldn't get sore.

[00:38:28.140] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And my ability on the rugby field and my ability to just manage my life with going through university and playing rugby seven to 8 hours a day, going to the gym and things like that, just became so much easier. And I just became like an absolute force of nature on the rugby field. And it was just night and day difference, and I was just getting better and better and better and better and better. And my growth was exponential. Of course, everyone else was geometric. I just very shortly became absolutely, hands down, the fittest person around on either team. It wasn't even a question. I just felt very good from that. When I was in England, playing professionally over there, it was just a bit more difficult to get the meat that I wanted, and some of it was breaded. And I was like, well, does it make that big of a difference? Poisonous, dose dependent, and maybe just a little bit. It's not that big of a deal. You can always rationalize any stupid decision. And so I did. And so I started eating some of these, mostly just meat and eggs still, but then just some breaded chicken, like crumbed chicken, and that was enough.

[00:39:42.080] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

I remember a couple of months into it just sort of feeling like a bit of aches and pains and just little sort of niggling injuries. And I remember thinking to myself, I was like, why don't I feel as just superhuman amazing as I normally do? Am I just not pushing myself as hard? Am I not working out as much as I used to? I was 25 then, so I was like, am I crested the hill? Am I just dying now? And I didn't know what it was. But looking back, that was the beginning of the end for that, because what that sort of crumbed meat was doing was it got me out of that mindset of I'm needing no plants whatsoever. And so looking back, sort of five, six years ago, I sort of came across information saying, like, no, actually, biologically humans are carnivores. That's the kind of animal that we are. And I was looking back, I was like, that's why that's why I felt so amazing that I never felt better in my life than at that time. And that was it. I was doing a carnivore diet. I was living as we're biologically supposed to live, and I was eating a biologically appropriate, species specific diet.

[00:40:47.080] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And I was seeing the benefits of that. And that was when I started not feeling as well as I normally did, was when I started eating even just a little bit of plants, and they sort of slipped off from there. And so I was like, right. I knew it. I knew plants were trying to kill me, get rid of these stupid things. And I just started just eating, just straight back to meat and water. And that was it. And I instantly felt amazing again. And it was a long time after that, it was like I was just 38. I just turned 38. I was just back from a medical mission in Bangladesh. I was volunteering as a doctor and the refugee camp, helping the Rohingya refugees who were escaping actual genocide in Burma. And so I was not in shape. I was not exercising. I wasn't anywhere near my normal form. But then, like, two weeks on a corn of or died, I'm like, I'm going back to playing rugby. I feel amazing, like, I'm doing this. And I felt great. And I was able to run and compete and play or practice, train with these people that are professional athletes in Seattle.

[00:41:55.420] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Seawolves right when the Major League rugby started, my team in Seattle that I grew up playing with won the first two Major League championships, and I was playing with them in preseason, well, actually stopped. I was going to play with them, but then I went on that medical mission. And then when I came back, I was like, okay, I want to get back in shape and do this. I was feeling amazing. And these guys had all been training the whole time I had been gone, and I had not been doing anything. But I was able to keep up. I was just step by step. I was at a desert. I did not look like I was in shape, because I was not in shape, but because my body was being propelled by its optimal nutrition and diet, I was able to do very well. And within a couple of weeks, we did fitness testing. I was in the top five of 92 person squad, and that's with only literally working out for a couple of weeks. But I was eating a very optimal diet. And so now I just have no interest in eating anything else.

[00:42:51.270] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And my exercise potential is right back where it was. I can just keep working out and feeling amazing, and I don't get sore. And even when I don't work out, I'm able to maintain my physique and my health, because right now, I haven't been able to go to the gym. And I'm literally months. It's been very busy for me recently, but because of the way I eat, I'm able to still maintain a certain amount of muscle mass. I'm not as bulky as I used to be. I can stack on a good another 1015 pounds of muscle if I work out steadily, but I maintain the same body fat percentage as well. So it's actually quite nice from that standpoint. Too. So there's quite a lot of benefits that I've seen, but that's sort of the sort of the broken arrow approach to carnivore that I've had is that I started off pretty strong and then I sort of slipped off of it. But now I'm back going on it for the last sort of, five, six years, and it's going to be a lifetime decision for me unless something radically changes in my understanding of all this, which can happen.

[00:43:51.280] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

I always keep an open mind, but if I'm right about this, then I'm not ever eating another plant again unless I have to, to survive. That's it.

[00:44:01.290] - Kayla Barnes

Well, I agree with that because they really don't taste the best. I mean, tastes infinitely better than a piece of kale, that's for sure.

[00:44:11.950] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Think about that too, right? Because why would we have evolved to hate the taste of the things that were meant for us, right? That doesn't happen. Nature is natural. It should be able to happen on its own and just perpetuate itself. We shouldn't need to read about the right diet. We should be able to just eat intuitively. Sugar is a bit of an outlier, but again, sugar shows us that this is something safe that we can eat and survive on. And it's addictive. It actually gives dopamine hit to the addiction centers of your brain, just like cocaine, heroin and meth. So it's actually an addictive substance. So that's an outlier. But if something tastes bad, then that certainly is your brain and your tongue warning you off saying, hey, this is bad for you, don't eat this. So it's naturally you just put that you naturally want to spit that out. So look at any infant that you give a piece of broccoli to, it's instantly. It's just this look of horror and disgust and it'll spit it out. And so I think we should listen to that. If something tastes bad to an infant, especially because they're more in tune, they haven't been browbeaten and had their natural senses taken away from them, that if that tastes bad naturally, you should really think about avoiding that.

[00:45:19.910] - Kayla Barnes

Okay, well, what camp are you in when it comes to organs like liver?

[00:45:26.010] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Fine. I mean, it's certainly nutrient dense, but that can be a problem because if you're just eating liver, you can actually get vitamin toxicities called hypervitaminosis. And vitamin toxicities can be just as dangerous as vitamin deficiencies. And so this is why, like Inuit up in Alaska and northern Canada, they traditionally would not eat the organs at all. They would just eat the skeletal muscle, meat and fat, and they would feed the organs to the dogs. Well, it's a little different because they're eating marine mammals and they have a much higher level of different nutrients, but especially vitamin A in their liver. And so you can get reached toxic levels of vitamin A very quickly by eating a seal liver. And you really can't eat any polar bear liver at all because it has such a high amount of vitamin A, it will kill you. So if you eat sort of any amount of the polar bear liver, it's going to be toxic. So cal livers, nutrient dense. And if you're eating sort of a nutrient poor diet, like a standard American diet, liver is probably your best friend. I mean, that's going to have a lot of nutrients that you're missing out on.

[00:46:38.340] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And depending on what you eat, you actually need a different constellation of nutrients. When you're eating carbohydrates, you're eating a mixed diet. You need vitamin C measured in milligrams, whereas when you don't eat all that and you're just eating a carnivore diet, you need vitamin or even a keto diet, you need vitamin C measured in nanograms, so 1 million times less. And so that's a major difference. And that's true of other nutrients and vitamins as well. So you need different amounts. And it was also Ansel Keys who came up with all the RDA. Again, everything that guy touches is suspect. And he was studying these things at a time when everyone was eating a mixed diet. So even if that was fully above board research, it still is only applicable to people eating a mixed diet. So if you're eating a mixed diet, liver is a great idea. When you're eating a carnivore diet, you get everything you need from skeletal muscle meat. Most people, some people, maybe they have slight differences in their metabolism, in their physiology, and they might need a bit more liver. And I've met a couple of people that fit in that category, but literally, literally two people that I've ever seen that doing long term carnivore and eating enough and eating the right things that have maybe like a bit of a folate deficiency or something like that.

[00:47:56.490] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And yeah, eating some liver, great source of folate. So that's a good idea. I also think about it. I think it's fine to eat liver. I think it's fine to eat organs. I don't think that they're strictly necessary for everyone, maybe some people. And I think that you should always think about it in the context of the animal itself, right? So if we're really doing this naturally, and there are certainly tribes that would eat the organs and do all that, that's perfectly true. But what they can't do is eat more livers than actually exist in that cow, right? Because if you take down a buffalo that has enough meat for one person to eat for two years, right, it has one liver. So you're going to get one liver for the next two years in a proportion of that animal. So eating a pile of liver every single day, that's not really feasible if you're a hunter, right, because you're not going to have that much liver available to you. So you're eating some liver every now and then, sure. But I don't think you need to eat like a ton of liver or other organs on a daily basis because you wouldn't find that if you were just processing an animal yourself.

[00:49:08.990] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, that makes sense. And plus, I will say I don't know too many people that think liver tastes very good. I eat it, but no matter how many times you eat it, it still does not taste very good.

[00:49:21.010] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Yeah, cooking it takes a lot of away from it. I have found that raw liver tastes infinitely better than cooked liver. I've never liked cooked liver. I actually enjoy raw liver. So I've actually counted I've had liver three times in the last five years, probably ten or twelve years. But certainly since being full on back on carnivore, I've had liver three times. All of those times I hate it raw, or at least very lightly cooked. When I prepare my steaks, normally if I was salting it, I would just sort of give a light dusting salt on it and let that salt soak in. Putting the refrigerator on a drying rack helps sort of dry it out and that salt soaks in actually makes it taste very good. Concentrates the sort of beefiness flavor, gets some of the excess water out, browns a lot better as well. I'm not really salting now, so I'll just do that. But I'll still do that drying process. So for the liver I would do the same thing. I would take you sort of thin strips of liver, light bit of salt, put it on the drying rack and let it dry out a bit.

[00:50:23.000] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And then it would sort of get sort of like tacky and gummy. I almost had the consistency of like a gummy candy, which I actually liked, but it was like meat candy. So that's perfect. That's right down my alley. It actually tastes a lot better. So all of a sudden I just sort of had a bit of it. I'm like, oh my God, that's amazing. And one of the early nutritionist, Adele Davis, who actually bang on the money for a lot of things, which is quite interesting given that she was in a time that you really didn't have any sort of sophisticated ways of measuring things, she was just sort of paying attention very closely and figuring things out. And she was a big proponent of eating raw liver, especially back in pregnancy and things like that. I remember always thinking I'm like raw liver. That sounds appalling. Now I'm right there with her. I'm like, yes. Adele. Yeah. Like absolutely down with the raw liver. Or you just then sort of do like a bit of a seer, but the insides raw tastes so much better. It's like a difference between ahi tuna steak, like a sashimi tuna and like a can of tuna.

[00:51:29.430] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

They're just entirely different things. It's so different how that makes it. But yeah, I think that if you get to the point and that's the thing too. When I would be eating those. That liver, it tastes really good. And I'd have like a bit of bit and I'm like, yeah, that's it. That's all I want. And after like a few days I'm like, yeah, that's good. And you notice that maybe people coming, especially coming from like a nutrient deficient previous diet liver, they're just like, oh my God, I love liver, it tastes really good, or whatever, but eventually it'll just be like, man, I'm not really digging it. I think you can take that and run with it because I think that when you're eating these things, like meat, you get this positive feedback. It tastes good every time when you're hungry because your body is saying, yes, get this in. So you get that positive feedback, but eventually that positive feedback goes away. And because your body's like, yeah, we don't need it anymore. You can stop now. And then if you keep eating, you'll actually get a negative feedback and then you start not enjoying it.

[00:52:26.300] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Where people that are used to eating huge portions, they go on a car on a more diet and they say, well, I hate this because it takes me 2 hours to finish the meal. It's like, no, you were finished 2 hours ago when your body started rejecting the meat that you were eating. That's your body telling you to stop. And so I think the same thing applies to liver. If it tastes good, especially sort of raw or whatever, then that's fine. But as soon as it starts going like, I'm not really enjoying it anymore. You're done, that's enough.

[00:52:54.710] - Kayla Barnes

Well, good. That's a good evaluation of that. And yes, sometimes it's not so bad, but sometimes I'm just really not into it. But I do know the nutritional benefits, so they are amazing. So if you're lacking and just having a standard American diet, I agree with you completely that it could be really helpful. So when it comes to cooking, what about Char? No Char. How do you cook all of your meat?

[00:53:21.890] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

I'm not too worried about Char. The studies that looked at the chemicals that were in Char and saying all these are associated with increased rates of cancer, they were using levels that were just thousands of times higher than you would get in like a burnt steak. And so it's not really relevant, right, because we're not eating that quantity of Char and we're maybe probably not getting that much Char all that often. And just like, you can sort of break down certain toxins in your plants, you can also break down some of the problematic things in the chart. So I'm not too worried about that. We've been cooking meat. We have some evidence going back at least 780,000 years. Some people think even further, like, you know, one and a half million years, maybe more. And there was and there's even evidence that we've been cooking like using sort of like indirect heat, like like. An oven sort of thing, like 700,000 years ago or something like that. So we've been using fire for a long time. We've been using heat for a long time. And when you're cooking over an open fire prior to whenever they figured out ovens, you're probably going to deal with some char.

[00:54:40.730] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

So I think that we've sort of been in that space and our bodies have sort of adapted to that long before we ever started eating plants. That was only, like, 8010 years ago. So we've had much more time to adapt to char than we do to chard. Right. I think that's okay. Obviously, it doesn't really taste great when you burn the hell out of it, so it's not really in your best interest to do it. But I think a bit of char is not that big of a deal. Most of the time I'll use, like, a pan, like a cast iron pan. And I'll put, like, tallow in that actually quite a little, probably like half an inch of tallow. And then I'll sort of basically almost, like, fry it on each side. And it's almost, like, deep frying it because there's that amount of fat in there. And because it's a bit dried out, it browns really well. So it gets this brown, crunchy, crispy texture and shell, which is actually really, really nice. I really like that. So that's what I mostly do. And then, as I mentioned before we went on air, australia has really taken it to heart that fat is bad for you.

[00:55:47.550] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

So they've bred the cows to be more lean. And so it's very hard to get like a fatty steak here. And even then, they'll actually trim off just every spare ounce of fat on there. So even if you buy like, a ribeye, it's not like a ribeye that you'd get in America. There's almost no fat on it. And so it's only like the marbling that you have get any fat out of these things. So I have to add more fat. And so I would add tallow, sort of spoon over the tallow. And that actually does help with the browning, and it makes it taste better. But also you're pouring the fat back over onto it and so you're getting that again, that rendered fat. And then I'll melt butter into it as well, which makes it taste amazing. And I don't have a problem with dairy, really. Some people do, and so they need to use other fats. But for me, butter is fine. That's what I try to do. So I'll cook those steaks, brown them up, crisp them up, but they'll be generally pretty rare or blue in the middle, but like, crispy and seared only.

[00:56:50.690] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

So basically a seared blue steak and then with some butter on it. That's pretty much 99% of what I eat.

[00:57:00.310] - Kayla Barnes

Do you eat once or twice a day?

[00:57:02.790] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Usually once, usually once, yeah. But unless I'm working out so if I'm just sort of going around doing work and just doing normal, sedentary hospital life, then eating one big, fatty meat meal a day is enough for me, and I feel good on that. And I feel much better during the day if I don't eat. That's why I always eat at night. But if I'm working out and I'm actually able to get to the gym or use my X Three bar and actually do proper workouts, then I find that I'm much more hungry and I'll eat twice a day, so I'll eat basically double. So I'll eat the same big meal twice a day. But yeah, it definitely depends on my exercise and energy output.

[00:57:51.910] - Kayla Barnes

Do you agree that quality really matters? Do you eat mostly grass fed, grass finished meats?

[00:57:57.850] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

I try. It's a bit difficult here, just with the markets and what's available. When I was in America, I like to go straight to the rancher and I actually bought a grass fed finished cow that I know just ate grass its whole life. And that was amazing. I definitely felt the best on that. Actually smelled different. I don't know if you've come across this, but I heard through different sources that actually older cows actually had a better taste. It was like a stronger, more concentrated beefy flavor. And that like in Italy and Tuscany and things like that. They think that everyone else is weird because we basically veal a year or two old cows was theirs are like 1015 years old, and they're like, yeah, it's so much better. And so I tried that. So I got a cow that was ten years old, grass fed his whole life. It was amazing. It was the best meat I've ever had in my life and even smelled different. It smells like just fresh and amazing. You're just like, oh, my God. And I just felt supercharged on this stuff. It was much more lean because that's just how grass fed cows are.

[00:59:03.300] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

But I just felt supercharged. I didn't need to eat as much and I didn't need to eat as often, and I felt infinitely better. If you look at sort of the studies and different sorts of things for the outcome markers that they were looking for, they didn't find too much of a difference between the two. I think there clearly is. I mean, the animal is eating what it's naturally supposed to eat. It's going to be healthier and it's going to have a higher concentration of good nutrients. I think that you don't need to throw out the good for the perfect. If you don't have access or can't afford grass fed and finished meat, I think that it's perfectly fine to get. I get a lot of my meat from Costco because I can buy in bulk and it's available, and I don't really have any good grass fed options here. And when I see it, I get it. I will do that. But I think of it as sort of the gold and silver medal at the Olympics. Like, silver medal lost to gold, but silver medal also beat everyone else on earth. So if you can get grass fed and you can afford it, then that's fine.

[01:00:13.960] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Then I would recommend that. But if you can't, getting a grain finished steak is still better than eating basically anything else. Certainly better than any plant or vegetable.

[01:00:28.570] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, I'm pretty lucky here. I do usually grass fed grass finished everything. What do you think about wild meats? I've been kind of dabbling into antelope, bison, axis deer. What do you think about that?

[01:00:42.990] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Yeah, I think those would be great too, because they're going to be living naturally. They're going to be eating naturally. And just like a grass fed, grass finished cow, I think you're going to be healthier. And if you talk to hunters and you talk to actually just had a guy on my podcast, Adam Kavanaugh, who just basically went rogue and just went out into the bush here in Australia and just quit his job. He had a very high paying job in the mining industry here in Australia, which is a big industry here. And he just wasn't really healthy. He was having his health problems and started eating more and more meat based, hunting him more, just going back to his roots of just hunting and camping with his dad as a kid. He just went, yeah, I'm feeling so much better. My health is getting so much better. He's like, yeah, I'm just going to do this. And he just quit his job and just went out in the bush and built a sort of teepee tent sort of thing and just like, lives there, hunts and just eats meat. And he was saying that when he's eating store bought meat, he has to eat a lot more and he doesn't feel as good.

[01:01:42.370] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

When he's just eating the wild animals that he catches, he feels a lot better. He eats a lot less. He doesn't need to eat as much because he's getting more nutrients. And he said he just gets, like, absolutely ripped. He gets completely jacked, more so than he would when he's eating store bought meat. I think there's definitely a difference. I think the animal is going to be much better. I think when you're eating wild game, though, you do have to be a bit more cautious of parasites and things like that. We have defenses against parasites, but they can still get you usually have to cook it more thoroughly, especially depending on the different animals that you get. You won't get trigonosis from pork farm raised pork in America. It hasn't been a single case of trigonosis in farmstock pigs in America in over 20 years. But it does exist in in the wild and wild pigs, wild bears, even deer and things like that, you'll you can get those sorts of things. But I think that, yeah, absolutely would be great. And if people are able to go hunting, that's going to be the best quality meat.

[01:02:52.880] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

If you can't get grassfed, beef. But yeah, I think if you can get either of those two, that's definitely the premium.

[01:03:01.770] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, until I start just having my own cattle and farm in Montana. And I've been talking about that on my podcast and on my Instagram, so everyone knows that it's coming, but very excited for that.

[01:03:13.020] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Yeah.

[01:03:13.460] - Kayla Barnes

So if someone wanted to just get started, it's really just as simple as, like, toss out all food products, essentially get some tallow. You're okay with butter? I put butter on everything. So glad to hear that is approved by you. And just keep it simple. I mean, it also simplifies your life incredibly. I'm all about really simple eating. I don't want to put a lot of thought into what I have to eat that day. So when you eat like this, it makes life so simple. What are some of the top health conditions that you have seen or experienced that you can speak about that have helped people by switching over to this diet?

[01:03:49.610] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Yeah, there's a ton, but everything that I mentioned there, like, in the so called chronic diseases, which is the majority of things that we treat nowadays as doctors, is all of those things are imminently benefited by a carnivore diet and just eliminating out these things that I think are directly causing these problems. So type two diabetes, first of all, it just goes away. I don't even think of that as a disease. I think of that as carbohydrate poisoning. Dr. Robert Lustig, who did a lot of the research on Fructose, showing how damaging it was to the body, actually says that let's call it what it is. It's processed food disease. And I think that I think he's right on the money there. And I think that's how we should really start approaching medicine now, recognizing these are toxicities and malnutrition. And if you recognize malnutrition and toxicities, you're going to approach it differently. Instead of needing a pill or a process to to fix you, you just you just get rid of the offending agent. Right. So a lot of these things will come down to that. Diabetes. Absolutely. We've been actually treating diabetes type one and type two since the 18 hundreds with a ketogenic diet.

[01:05:00.490] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

We've been treating epilepsy since the 18 hundreds with a ketogenic diet. Before that, they found fasting, fasting work. That was the only treatment for epilepsy for millennia. And then someone figured out that you could actually do it with a ketogenic diet as well. That's why the ketogenic diet was developed, was for diabetes and epilepsy migraines as well. And these are still being used, in fact, for epilepsy. But it's funny, some neurologists will say that, oh, my God, no, don't go on a ketogenic diet because, yes, it'll stop the seizures, but if you ever come off the ketogenic diet, then you'll start having seizures again. It's like, okay, genius, you just stopped them. You just stopped their ketogenic diet, so now they're going to have seizures, right? So it's not really too informed of a decision to tell people to stop doing something that naturally stops seizures, because if they ever stop, they'll get seizures. I mean, they're not thinking there. So those are things that we've already been in the literature for literally 100 years or more that we treat with just diet. Another one is autoimmune issues. And these, again, have been in the literature since the 18 hundreds.

[01:06:11.090] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

By putting people on a pure red meat and water diet, you can cure rheumatoid arthritis, crohn's ulcerative colitis, and other other such autoimmune diseases. And this has been in the medical literature. There have been multiple books written about it since 1800. Is what you know what a Salisbury steak is? You know what that is? It's like a bunch of hamburger.

[01:06:31.990] - Kayla Barnes

So it shows up in, like, steak, right?

[01:06:34.490] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Yeah, it's like, it's like yeah, it's just like yeah, it's called a Salisbury steak, and it's yeah, it's just a hamburger patty, basically. And it shows up in TV dinners and things. That's the only time I've ever seen a Salisbury steak. It's a TV dinner. But what it was I always thought it was like a place name, like, named after, like, Salisbury, England, but in fact, no, it was named after dr. JH. Salisbury, who was a New York doctor in the 18 hundreds, who did a 30 year research project into the optimal nutrition for human beings, was trying different things, trialing different eating this, eating that, seeing studying the effects on people and how it worked. Living with the Native Americans who were just eating, you know, buffalo, and they were high fat carnivores, and they were, you know, living to be 110, 115 years old in peaks of health. You know, they weren't, like, dying slowly in a nursing home for 40 years, turning to dust. They were spry and able to go around with a pack on their back, following the buffalo herds day in and day out at a very great age, only eating meat.

[01:07:35.820] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And so he found that it was long before processed sugar, all that garbage. But he found that people, if you just stopped eating all plants and just started just eating red meat and water, that you could actually get rid of all of these different diseases. And he wrote a book called the Relation between a Limitation and Disease. So a limitation being what we eat. And so he wrote a whole book basically arguing what I'm arguing now, which is the things that we're eating are causing these diseases, and when you stop eating them, they go away. And so rheumatoid arthritis. We were talking about Michaela Peterson before she got onto a carnivore diet because she had very bad juvenile reactive arthritis, like a rheumatoid arthritis sort of thing. To the extent that she had to get two major joint replacements as a teenager, which is insane that you have to go through that as a kid, that's a very bad sign for the future, because that's a very aggressive disease. The younger you start getting one of these diseases, the more aggressive it's going to be, generally. And so she obviously had a very aggressive form.

[01:08:42.070] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

She went on a carnivore diet. She has no problems anymore. She's off all her medications and she has no flare ups. And she's not the only one. This isn't just a one off case. There are tens of thousands of people around the world that are doing this now and coming off their medications and stopping their autoimmune diseases. I see in practice people with Hashimoto, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, because I'm in neurosurgery during the week and on the weekends, I have a private practice in functional medicine and metabolic health. And we try to try to get people off medications as opposed to putting them on medications. And we incorporate a lot of diet and lifestyle changes to affect that. And one of them is we try to get people on at least a ketogenic diet and eating a lot more meat and fat and get them on a carnivore diet if they can if they can tolerate it or if they want to. People with Crohn's, people with ulcerative colitis, I noticed that they'll improve within weeks. Their symptoms will come straight down. They'll be able to come off their medications, they'll stop having 20 bouts of bloody diarrhea every day, and everything will settle down.

[01:09:48.810] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

They'll feel a lot better. And within three months after getting a biopsy of their intestine, they'll have no sign of disease on biopsy within three months. I've never seen it go past that. Past three months. Hashimoto takes a bit longer, but it will constantly improve. Their thyroid function will come up, their antibody levels will come down, but it can take longer. It can take like over a year, year and a half, things like that. Not everybody will recover full thyroid function because at a certain point, there's such thing as damage done, and the functionality of that organ isn't going to be back to its previous standard. However, it will significantly improve for everyone. I haven't seen anyone not improve. Autoimmune issues are a major, major one. But even like heart disease, people with their coronary artery calcium score can reverse that by just going on not even necessarily a carnivore diet, but just a low inflammatory diet, getting rid of things that are going to precipitate diabetes and metabolic disease, really. Sugars, processed carbs, alcohol, smoking, all these things, you get rid of those and you can actually start reversing your own heart disease. And a carnivore diet is a very good example of that, because it's the ultimate elimination diet.

[01:11:06.640] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

You're eliminating out everything that can possibly cause something to go wrong in your body. And so there's a book by a very famous cardiologist in England named Dr. Ascend Mahoutra, and he wrote a book called A Statin Free Life and basically arguing exactly what I just said there, not necessarily by doing it by a carnivore diet, but he said you can do it with a carnivore diet. That is certainly one that meets those criteria and then overeating as well. And obesity, obesity is sort of the smoke as opposed to the fire. It's not a disease in and of itself. It's a marker of things going wrong metabolically, but it's not the only one. There are many people that are metabolically unwell that aren't overweight, but that can be part of it. One of the good things about going on a carnivore diet is that it really is really, really good for weight control and getting rid of excess of post tissue. Like I was saying before, if you're not eating carbohydrates, you're only eating meat. You're going to be in what I think is our primary metabolic state. We call it a fasting state, but I don't think that's right.

[01:12:14.810] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

I think that that's our primary metabolic state. That's where all of our heavy machinery comes to bear. And the only reason we call it a fasting state in a fed state is that by the time we were able to look at biochemistry at a molecular level, everyone was eating carbohydrates. So we said, oh, when you eat, it looks like this, and when you don't eat, it looks like that, right? But if you eat anything except carbs, it also looks like you're fasting. And you're not fasting. You're eating two 3000 calories a day. So that's not fasting. That's not a fasting state. That's just a non carbohydrate driven state. And I think that that is our primary state. And when you're in that, you're again in a fat burning state as opposed to a fat storage state. You're not having high insulin. That's not blocking your leptin. You're not getting crazy hunger signals that they're telling you to overeat all the time. And so you can actually listen to your body and you can listen to your natural instincts, and you will naturally eat the correct amount of calories and nutrition that you need to maintain your body.

[01:13:12.750] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And your body will prioritize your fat cells or your fat energy and use that first, and you will slim down to a very reasonable body fat percentage. And you would just maintain that just by eating intuitively. So I think that it provides a ton of benefit and just people just feel better too. They just feel better than they ever have in their life. They have so much more energy and depression, anxiety, psychiatric issues. That's a whole other thing. Dr. Palmer just wrote a forget the name, just Blanket, but it just sort of got published this last few weeks. And he's showing he's doing randomized controlled trials with people with schizophrenia. He's finding that they're just going on a ketogenic diet can actually reverse schizophrenia and major depression and OCD and bipolar. This is amazing. That's amazing stuff. And they're actually looking at things like even cancer, and certainly now they're coming out with different studies, looking at psychiatric disorders, looking, this is actually a metabolic issue from a dysfunction of your mitochondria. And that's definitely where cancer is coming from. Cancer is a metabolic mitochondrial disease. It's not a genetic disease. There are many cancers that have no genetic changes, but they have wonky mitochondria.

[01:14:29.930] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Right? In a tumor cell. There are tons of different tumor cells that have genetic changes and others that don't, but they all behave as cancer. Why is that? Because they all have damaged and disrupted mitochondria. And that's what that comes down to. One of the top cancer researchers in the world is a Professor Thomas Seafood from Boston College. He was formerly a professor at Yale, and neurobiology guys published well over 150 peer reviewed studies and publications and articles on on cancer biology. And he's just like, this is just how cancer biology works. And this is what I learned when I was taking cancer biology. This is how these things work. So these things come down to metabolic diseases and disruption of our processing of energy and how our body and metabolism work. And so I think when you just get into your normal metabolism by doing that on a ketogenic diet, or better yet, a carnivore diet, you're going to seriously improve a lot of these things. So there's so many there's so many issues that people go on a carnivore diet, and they just go like, I didn't even know that was a problem.

[01:15:35.040] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

And then all of a sudden, my aches are gone. I don't have back pain anymore. I've had back pain since I was 15. I don't have back pain anymore. Some rice or beans get mixed in with my food. My back feels like someone's stabbing me for four days. It's hard to get out of bed. What is that about? And so you get rid of this stuff out of your system, and all of a sudden your body just works the way it should have been working the whole time. And you realize that you felt like trash your entire life. And that's exactly what I thought. I looked back and like, my God, I felt like garbage my whole life because I never had a frame of reference. I never had something to compare it to. Now I do. Now I know what feeling good actually feels like, and it's a far cry from everything I've felt before in my life.

[01:16:18.730] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, I think that's amazing. And as we talked about before we started the podcast, if you put your mind to it and you want to get better, you can do anything for a month. So worst case, let's just say it doesn't work for you, even though we both pretty much know it will. Then you wasted one month, you have the rest of your life. So I think you should just consider it if you're listening to this podcast. And you brought a ton of science to the table. And like I said, this is pretty much how I eat. And I went fully carnivore and I'm going to definitely go back just to try it out again and make some notes. But thank you so much for your time.

[01:16:58.790] - Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Yeah, you're very, very welcome. Glad that we had the opportunity to talk.

[01:17:02.500] - Kayla Barnes

Absolutely. Me too.