Dr. Anthony Chaffee - 'Plants are trying to kill you!'

[Music] thank you okay well thank you very much for that kind introduction thank you all for having me here the title of my talk is uh plants are trying to kill you which of course is a very provocative uh title and and is meant to be but it's just it's trying to make people think about you know obviously this can this uh uh this community knows full well about the the danger of carbohydrates how this changes us metabolically and physically and biologically can cause a lot of harm but we need to remember as well that there are other chemicals and toxins that exist in the food that we eat they can also cause harm so uh let's take a think about this okay so just botany 101 plants are living organisms and they like to stay living organisms if you eat them they die and so they have defenses just like any other living organism and while animals can run away or fight back plants can't and so they use a lot of different things but poison is one of their main deterrents they use these defense chemicals to poison the animals that are trying to eat them and they have hundreds of different ones geared towards different animals insects and pathogens that are trying to eat them this is why most plants in the world are inedible we sort of know this intuitively if you got lost in the woods here and you ran out of food you wouldn't be able to eat any random plant most of them would make you very sick I don't think anyone is is going to be able to spot the vegetables in this picture right so you have to you have to know exactly what to eat and the reason is because there are these defense chemicals so here are just a just a few sort of categories of the ways that plants defend themselves or use lectins is something people are gaining more uh interest in there's tons of different kinds of lectins uh they use there's 2500 different plants you use cyanide that we know of there's different uh various toxins phytates tannins oxalates hormone disruptors nutrient blockers things that make you very sensitive to light and nightshades we've known about for thousands of years and yet for some reason we're still eating these things so again just does botany biology 101 I literally learned this in seventh grade that plants and animals are in an evolutionary arms race plants becoming more and more poisonous so less and less animals can eat them so that they can survive and thrive and animals becoming more and more uh adapted to the specific poisons in specific plants so that they can eat that plant and Survive and Thrive and this is where they get their dedicated food resources it's like uh koalas and pandas they eat a very specific diet they eat other plants they will they will get very sick the way I came to a the way of eating that I do which is really just meat and water is 22 years ago when I was taking cancer biology at the University of Washington in Seattle we went over how plants use defense chemicals in order to defend themselves we were looking at this from a cancer perspective so we were looking at Carson carcinogens and we learned 20 years ago that brussels sprouts alone had over 136 identified human carcinogens in them and that just you know white cat I'm telling you this is why kids no one likes brussels sprouts right you know and and that's why right you know that bad taste that bitter taste is is your your brain and your tongue which are sophisticated machines and they can tell you like hey this is bad for you spit it out you know so if you you know and that's what we would normally naturally do uh as a kid so you give an infant a piece of broccoli they will hate you for it you know you give them a piece of bacon you know and their eyes light up right so so yeah so we were learning that you know white white cap mushrooms had over 100 known carcinogens but also spinach kale lettuce celery cabbage cucumber broccoli literally given pages and pages of every plant that you've ever come across in a grocery store and not a single one had less than 60 known human carcinogens in them they were quite abundant we have research from Professor Bruce Ames from Berkeley in the 1980s that that actually went into this which we'll go on to in a minute we were quite taken aback by this obviously we were very very shocked as some of you may be right now and I remember thinking in my head well but vegetables are still good for you though right and our professor must have just read our minds looked at us like you guys aren't getting this and he just said I don't need salads I don't eat vegetables I don't let my kids eat vegetables plants are trying to kill you so I was like right forget plants and I just stopped and you go to the grocery store and everything has plants right everything's in I either is plants or has plants in the ingredients and I just walked around and I just came across it's eggs and meat I'm like okay so I just eat eggs and meat and that's what I did for a number of years and had massive health benefits I was I was playing professional rugby while in University and my athletic performance as well as just my physical health just increased dramatically it was just night and day difference and and again still feeling those positive results 22 years later so that's the thing is that most plants will kill most animals so it's not that some plants are poisonous some aren't it's that all plants are poisonous it's just that certain animals have have evolved the ability to defend themselves against specific plants but if they eat other plants they will get sick or even die so you have pandas and and koalas right they eat a very specific diet it's a very very monotonous in nature they don't have this big broad range of things that they eat very specific things you know there's 340 000 species of plant in the world quality one pandas eat one cows horses grazing animals eat grasses and they only eat specific grasses and then the the leaves of the giraffe eats are different from the leaves that a gorilla eats those are different from the leaves of the deer eats and so on and if you mix those leaves around they all get sick or die there are symbiosis between plants and animals obviously this is an evolutionary Trend in the ecosystem you have animals co-evolving with plant scale the Great Plains and grasslands have evolved with the big grazing animals they they work together symbiotically but also you can look at fruits with things like well fruit the plant wants you to eat them like well maybe maybe not they want something to eat them but not necessarily you because certain animals when they ingest these seeds those seeds will germinate in their intestine then that will uh on this plant so a good example of that is the cassowary bird here in Australia and elsewhere and they eat about 150 different berries and fruits and those will all kill you and they will kill basically any other animal that eats them because those plants want the cassowary bird to eat them because those seeds will not germinate if they don't go through a cassowary bird first and so if the Castaway birds leave an area those those plants and trees will die off and you know we have this they say you know like don't eat the red berries this is this is something that that people knew it identifies like the red berries like don't eat those right so most fruits are still actually going to be toxic to humans so this is the study from Professor Bruce Ames from Berkeley this was published in 1989 and he showed that just the natural plants and vegetables contain 10 000 times more naturally occurring pesticides by weight than the industrial pesticides that we were using on them and that they were orders of magnitude times more likely to cause cancer than the industrial pesticides in this case ALR which they were looking at specifically they were trying to actually get it banned and they were saying we're not going to get rid of this this is poison and it is spinach is worse so he at that point identified 42 different toxins that existed in just a plethora of different uh plants like everything I mean in the article you'll see it's just every single plant that that would exist in the in the produce aisle was there and 42 toxins 20 of which were shown to be carcinogenic in mice fast forward 11 years later when I took cancer biology we already know about 136 Justin brussels sprouts so uh there's more so even though we've talked about today about the who pushing you know fake meat and lab meat and all these sorts of things they still have a page that you can look up that all talks about all the natural poisons that are in plants and these this natural toxins in food as they call it does not talk about anything that exists in actual meat except for the um the Aquatic biotoxins but this is from algae you know the the the you know shellfish and fish eat the algae and that can uh make that toxic but you know this is why you avoid things uh you know uh that that are invested in that area um they talk about all sorts of different um different things like uh that Cyanide purana humorins lectins solanine mycotoxins and much more they talk about poisonous mushrooms as well think about this we eat mushrooms but there are over 10 000 varieties of mushrooms in the world how many of those don't kill you on the spot or give you a religious experience right yeah there's like five right and yet we think that because these five don't give us an acute stage reaction of that nature that not only are they safe but good for you which I think is a bold assumption to take with your health see like the natural toxins can cause a variety of adverse health effects and pose a serious health threat to both humans and livestock some of these toxins are extremely potent these are all things that we eat all the time they give examples of these things adverse health effects can be acute poisoning ranging from allergic reactions to severe stomach diarrhea stomach ache and diarrhea and even death long-term consequences include effects on the immune reproductive or nervous systems and also cancer So speaking earlier today about the effects of the mitochondria on cancer all of those carcinogens in in Plants damage your mitochondria so going into some of the the specific categories such as lectins lectins or protein that exists in in many many many different plants they have a bunch of different functions you actually have lectins in animal uh meat as well but they don't seem to cause any harm lectins these are probably developed antipathnogenic they're very very very old and so probably against pathogens and insects but there's obviously a lot of cross-reaction with other forms of life These are proteins that can bind to carbohydrates and so they can bind to carbohydrates on the surface of your cells and I mean and this is something that's been researched more and more uh you know Dr Paul Mason has has a really really good lecture on just lectins that he's done at previous low carb down under um uh venue and then people like you know Paul or Dr gundry wrote an entire book called The Plant Paradox talking about how toxic leptins are and then concluded that you should eat a plant-based diet which I don't think I would come to that same conclusion so you know we talk about we talk about a lot of carbohydrates here how that can affect insulin how insulin hyperinsulinemia can cause all sorts of different problems but what we don't necessarily know about is that certain lectins can actually bind to your insulin receptors and bind them more tightly than insulin and cause a greater intelligent effect can also bind to leptin receptors and leptin so this is um leptin is obviously a satiety signal so it'll release from your whole your adipose tissue and your stretch receptors when your stomach is full goes to your brain says hey we're full we're hungry or we're not hungry we we don't need to eat we have enough energy so you block that you block that off which insulin will do as well then you're not able to see your satiety signals and you end up over eating and you overeat and you overeat and this is why we overeat so this is another reason why people on a ketogenic diet often reduce the amount that they will eat naturally but sometimes you'll actually see that the lectins are also having an effect and when you draw drop those people actually lose weight as well there was a study looking at people with ISO caloric intake and just one just removed lectins and they all lost weight and the others didn't and it lost a significant amount of weight it's also implicated in things like Parkinson's disease they actually found that lectins can actually track up the vagus nerve and get into the substantia and damage your cells there and are implicated and thought to be a part of Parkinson's or at least a contributing factor to Parkinson's demonstrating this there was a study in 2015 out of Denmark where they looked at all the people who had a vagotomy where they cut the vagus nerve between the 1970s and 1990s sort of mid-mid and they found that in this population there was a 67 percent reduction in Parkinson's rates interesting going on with lectins there's wheat germ of gluten in which I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with this is another lectin this combines to the carbohydrates surface antigens on your uh enterocytes in your in your intestinal lining and this can damage them it can destroy them it'll also destroy these tight junctions where these cells are literally stuck together and giving barrier protection against things getting in your body that aren't supposed to get in your body so when you damage those tight junctions now bacteria and other chemicals that would normally not get into your system like lectins will now get into your system and cause all sorts of problems like by Nature insulin receptors lipopolysaccharides are are are coming from bacteria can also bind the toll like receptors and this causes an inflammatory Cascade and and they can also through molecular mimicry is now implicated in autoimmune diseases so these lectins obviously are foreign agents they get into your body and your body doesn't like that and so it attacks them with with antibodies some people the genetically susceptible sometimes they have surface antigens that look similar to these lectins and other other foreign objects and so now this there's a spillover effect of these um of these antibodies that now attack your your normal cells and this can be demonstrated as far back as the 1800s with Dr J H Salisbury For Whom the Salisbury steak was named after who did a 30-year research project into optimal nutrition for human beings and wrote an entire book called the relation between alimentation and disease basically saying the relationship between disease and what you eat which is my entire argument this has been made before and he found that people that this was long before processed sugar that he found that people that stop the implants just a a pure meat and water diet really you advocated red meat and water we're reversing things like rheumatoid arthritis Crohn's ulcerative colitis this was a century before we had any significant medications that would that would help this was devastating when you got this and he found that people would reverse it people today are doing this all over the world people may know of Jordan Peterson his daughter Michaela Peterson who had such severe juvenile juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and she had two joint Replacements of her ankle I believe her hip when she was 16 years old she eliminated um she went keto first and eliminated out a lot of different toxins and nightshades in particular and had had very very good results then she dropped all the salads as well just went to Pure meat and water diet now she's off all medications and she's having kids and she's healthy she has not had a single flare-up she had salad once and that gave her a flare-up and she said right never doing that again right so that's I think very interesting as well so you have these cyanogenic cyanogenic glycosides and these exist in things like cassava root which is a very important root which we'll talk about also almonds and bitter almonds they are they respond to damage and so if you once you're chewing an almond or a bitter almond or cassava that will release this cyanide so it's normally not in the tissue just when it's being damaged right so this is this is a defense mechanism uh the cassava root there's there's bitter and there's sweet the sweet or both of them combined account for the third most important source of calories in the tropics and is the primary source of calories for over 500 million people in the world so this is this is a very important source of calories and it contains cyanide the bitter cassava will kill you if you eat it the amount of cyanide that it has in it so it has to be specially processed and they and they make the they grow the bitter cassava because if they have a problem with herbivores coming around eating their crops well they're not going to eat this one because it'll kill them right and so that has to be specially processed but it doesn't get rid of all the cyanide in it and so long-term exposure to even low-grade cyanide can cause serious thyroid and neurological damage and quite seriously and so we don't have have that really as a staple here but people do eat almonds and people don't realize that 400 to 800 grams of almonds can be a lethal dose of cyanide in an adult and yet we give this stuff to kids and sell them in grocery stores which I think is wild right and then there's bitter almonds you know which are just the inside of like a peach pit or stone you crack that open it looks like a little shriveled up almond that's very bitter because there's a lot of cyanide in it and one or two of those chewed up crushed up we'll release that cyanide can be a lethal dose of cyanide in an adult there are things that cause direct toxicity Hemlock is a very well known uh toxic plant uh what it has is a Gaba receptor antagonist where we'll block your Gaba receptor and you'll have intractable seizures and be dead within minutes even half a leaf is enough to kill an adult kids that have made little whistles out of the stems in America have been known to be poisoned or even killed it's very very toxic oxalates is something that people know a bit about they cause inflammation and damage in your body they also bind minerals they uh are being associated with kidney stones as well tannins they can block digestive enzymes slow growth and at high doses can even cause kidney damage or liver necrosis at high enough levels seed oils or just poison as soon as the oil gets out of the plant it becomes very unstable and is very pro-inflammatory and oxidative and there's a direct correlation with the rise in seed oils and the rise in cardiovascular disease sort of the opposite with animal fats and there's actually an interesting paper that I've read coming from the 1970s where they actually found that seed oils were a very good immunosuppressant and they were saying this works great for people that are getting a kidney transplant they're not rejecting their kidneys the problem was they were all getting cancer and so they had to stop that so then you have hormone disruptors this this sounds like what it is it disrupts your hormones you have phytoestrogens that can that can have an estrogenic effect in your body uh I was speaking to someone uh just last week and they said that their doctor uh their oncologist because they had breast cancer didn't want them eating red meat because of all the hormones that were in uh meat but look at this the estrogen that's in uh red meat for three ounces of lean red meat is about three point for hormone treated cows by the way 3.9 nanograms of estrogen per three ounces whereas the phytoestrogens in soy is over one million nanograms per three ounces so don't eat meat what do you replace it with you place it with plants that have even more phytoestrogens and you know the birth control pill has about 35 000 nanograms you know a fertile woman will make you know over a hundred thousand nanograms of estrogen a day so you know 3.9 nanograms is really not doing anything so this is taken out of content and it really matters that it's taken out of that context it's been shown soy has been shown to reduce reproduction in sheep lower sperm counts and can derange your your sex hormone ratios nutrient blockers these are like the tannins and the oxalates which can bind different minerals there are also different things that will just stop your own enzymes from working and digesting your food properly so soy and wheat both have Proteus Inhibitors that block your protease from your pancreas from actually breaking down normally bioavailable foods like meat the Protein that's in plants is is not bioavailable if you think about wheat for example 80 percent of the protein in wheat is gluten and that is completely unavailable to us to be used as protein and then what little left over is bioavailable and able to be digested is now going to be hindered by this protease inhibitor and that wheat protease inhibitor actually also stimulates the tolac receptor which increases inflammation phytase you have phytic acid they're in some plants these will bind to minerals making mineral salts and they will stop your body from being able to absorb these like calcium and magnesium and then it's it's an unbreakable Bond we we don't have the Machinery to break those two apart so when we eat these nutrients and we take in things like oxalates and tannins and phytase we are actually not able to absorb and utilize those nutrients so just because it says it on the packet or this has this much of this nutrient doesn't actually mean that that's available and accessible to you and so I think that we really do need to re re-examine our recommended daily allowances because it really does matter whether or not you know what you're eating is going to change what you actually need to take in because you're just not going to be absorbing certain things and all of these rdas were developed at a time when everyone was eating a mixed diet fiber there's a lot of there's a lot to do with fiber but just quickly it can actually be a physical barrier between the enzymes and your your food stuff that's come in and so it can actually to get in the way of that they won't break down as much and then there's a physical barrier between the breakdown products and the Lumen of your intestine so you won't digest and absorb as many nutrients when you're eating fiber and this was touted to be a good thing in the 1980s say oh you eat more fiber this will actually stop you from absorbing nutrients isn't that great you'll lose weight right I don't know I don't think that makes any biological evolutionary sense anyway certainly wouldn't wouldn't give you a survival advantage to limit the amount of nutrients you're getting from food most animals are starving to death rather than you know getting fat in the wild uh photosensitivity is is quite interesting uh this is uh there's different furana coumarins that I mentioned before especially in the Citrus and carrot family and so things like limes just the juice of limes have these ceramicumerins in them and then when they get on your skin they react with light and they are activated by light and they will bind to proteins and DNA and cause permanent damage and there are cases of kids who have had second-degree burns just from squeezing limes in the sun um then you have celery and parsnips these also have these foreign which will make you photosensitive and um and celery itself is there's actually a a an ailment called celery dermatitis where celery Pickers and handlers they're picking a bunch of celery all the time they actually get very photosensitive to get these horrible burns like you see here and these are pictures of a couple of sheep who have gotten into uh some some plants that they normally wouldn't eat normally you see this in pasture pasture-raised animal livestock not not wild animals they usually know what to eat but this is when you're stuck in a passenger sort of run out of the things you want to eat you end up eating things that you wouldn't normally and you end up getting hurt and so this is this is showing just the the burns that these uh these animals can get nightshades nice literally we've known about these things being harmful for thousands of years and yet we you know just like Belladonna deadly nightshade and tobacco they create they use a toxin called solony among other things but we regularly eat potatoes Tomatoes eggplants Peppers capsicums all these things are nightshades and they all produce solenine what we forgot when we adopted these uh the use of these things from the new world from in uh from North and South America was that the people eating them in those areas a were poor didn't really have access to meat and so they sort of had to for survival and B they process these things in a very specific way the tomatoes they you know when they're green they have a lot more solony so you have to wait for them to vine ripen then they would blanch them take the skin off take the seeds out that's where the you know the the highest concentration of these poisons were potatoes were used to peel them now oh well that's all where all the the nutrients and vitamins are is in the skin like right that's where all the poison is too it's a barrier protection against something going in and eating it you know I I think most people would have grown up with one of their parents telling them that when you have to keep potatoes in a dark cupboard and if it would turn green you have to throw it out it's bad it's bad what does that mean it means it's toxic it has a toxic level of solanine in it or Sprouts roots and that's bad too you have to cut out the entire eye or throw away the whole potato because it's bad um apparently some people's mothers didn't tell them this and so if you look it up 70 people a year still die from eating potatoes potatoes right so this is just a picture of a of a gate of a of a garden in England that has cultivated and brought together a lot of these very very toxic plants so the to the extent that if you get close enough to these things they they can kill you just by by some of the chemicals that they're exuding and in fact some the Hedge groundskeeper um has actually actually succumbed to that and died from one of the plants there and and and you know just just to jump back think about lectins Bryson is another lectin right this is this is a deadly deadly poison comes from the the the um sort of the skin of uh Castor beans and even just a few milligrams of this will kill you invariably so does it contain nutrients yes plants do contain nutrients they're living things they have things that are good for other living things but this comes at a price and they're also not as bioavailable as we think this is why I think we need to redo these rdas because it's a very different story if you are excluding these nutrient blockers and digestive disruptors so I think rdas for someone doing keto or or just meat is going to be very very different than otherwise does it have anything in vital essential nutrients that you have to have that you cannot get from meat well no it doesn't and we have endless examples of this going back through Antiquity but even current examples today you know the the Maasai the Inuit the Nanette and all of our ancestors have lived through uh you know previous ice ages and things like that where we didn't have access to all these different sorts of plants and they and they really relied on a meat-based diet they did fine I've been doing I've been doing this for literally decades you know and there are other people have been doing it for longer than I have you know coming from a Western European background and does it cause harm yes I think I think that it does I hope that I've made that point clear to you I mean there's thousands and thousands of different defense chemicals that these things use and and have just sort of scratch at the surface of these um but they do and now why is this important to to us as people and specifically doctors well the fact is that this these defense chemicals cause a large burden of harm and illness in the population and and we're not treating it as such we're thinking oh this is a disease we need to treat the disease we're not recognizing this is a toxicity we need to remove the toxin okay and let the body heal naturally you know and we're pacing over this and and saying well here's all these treatments not thinking what the root cause is I'm pretty sure no one here would argue that type 2 diabetes is caused by a metformin deficiency right so we need to look at what's causing this right and I think that it's uh these these these toxins um you know and in animal husbandry we actually have known about this for a long time there are a number of different ailments that are directly attributed to the animal eating the wrong thing such as the blind staggers the slobbers paralytic tongue big head limp neck Crazy Cow syndrome and we recognize these as coming from eating the wrong thing I think now as doctors we need to recognize that a lot of our chronic diseases are actually plant toxicities and what I would argue is that the so-called chronic diseases that we treat are not diseases per se but toxicities and malnutrition toxic buildup of species inappropriate diet and a lack of species-specific nutrition namely too many plants not enough meat and so that's what I call just the toxin toxin theory of modern disease I think we're looking at this incorrectly and because we're looking at this incorrectly we're going to get incorrect treatments just you get the wrong diagnosis in the hospital you start someone on the wrong treatment that's not going to help them it's going to hurt them and I think that's what we're doing and that's why we're not having as very very good results even though we've we've spent billions trying to treat these diseases they're only getting worse and so I think that that's because we're looking at them incorrectly so as every doctor's been saying the last 50 years make sure you eat your vegetables I would say don't don't eat your veggies and um and just at least something to think about anyway thank you very much foreign [Music]