Dr. Anthony Chaffee dismantles the widespread belief that fiber is necessary for digestive health, explaining why this indigestible plant material actually causes more harm than good. He reveals how humans lost the ability to break down fiber millions of years ago when our elongated cecum evolved into the small appendix, making fiber completely unnecessary for proper bowel function. The episode explains why constipation on a carnivore diet is often misunderstood - having fewer bowel movements is normal when absorbing 98% of food rather than passing undigested plant matter.
Listeners learn the simple solution to actual constipation: eating adequate fat to keep stools soft, regardless of frequency. Dr. Anthony Chaffee explains how fiber causes micro-abrasions in the gut lining, produces methane gas that slows colonic motility, and why medical professionals prescribe low-fiber diets when treating diverticulitis and inflammatory bowel conditions. The episode provides practical guidance on using stool consistency rather than frequency as the true measure of digestive health.
Key Takeaways
- Fiber is completely unnecessary for humans because we lost the elongated cecum needed to break it down into short-chain fatty acids millions of years ago, unlike other primates who still possess this digestive capability
- Normal carnivore bowel movements occur 1-3 times per week or less due to absorbing 98% of meat versus passing large amounts of indigestible plant matter - frequency doesn't indicate constipation
- Adequate fat intake prevents true constipation by keeping stools soft through oil content that repels water, allowing waste to remain comfortable to pass regardless of colon transit time
- Studies show increased fiber intake and more frequent bowel movements are the only factors correlated with diverticulosis, while meat and fat intake showed no correlation with digestive problems
- Why Fiber Is Not Necessary and Can Cause Constipation
- The Fiber Industry Myth and Nutrient Absorption Problems
- How Fiber Causes Gut Damage and Autoimmune Issues
- Diverticulosis Studies Show Fiber Increases Disease Risk
- Understanding Carnivore Bowel Movements and Fat Requirements
- Coffee, Artificial Sweeteners and Loose Stools on Carnivore
This is an auto-generated transcript from YouTube and may contain errors or inaccuracies.
all right guys dr chafee here just want to do a quick video on fiber and constipation something that i've gotten a number of questions about regularly and i've tried to answer here and there but i figured i'd just do to a one-stop shop for that okay so the long and short of it is you do not need fiber okay it is not necessary it is not good for you uh in fact it can it can cause problems okay they say that you need it for your bowels to move to increase motility um and you know kind of to an extent it can do that because it gives it something for your bowels to work on to move around by peristalsis but we also also see that there are studies that show that it increases constipation and it slows things down for a number of reasons one you can dry out your stools and it just turns into a block of wood okay and now you've got this big obstructive chunk and when people get older they get neurogenic colons and they just are just going to move slower anyway but the breakdown of fiber in your colon to a certain extent it can't break it down very well produces methane gas methane gas has been shown to reduce your motility of your colon okay so that's going to make it move slower and that you know thereby causing constipation because now it's going to have longer in the colon it's going to get drier and the simple thing to do guys is just eat fat because if you eat more fat it'll just keep that soft anyway it's already dry enough you can stay in there till christmas it'll still be soft because it's not going to change the amount of fat that's there okay main reasons you don't eat this stuff you can't digest it you can't break it down you don't get nutrition from it okay we have an appendix it's about that big it's a vestigial organ vestigial meaning that millions of years it did something now it does nothing right well millions of years ago it was an elongated cecum and this is where fiber packed into and broke down into short chain fatty acids which is what our uh for you know long long-distance ancestors that's how the major nutrition that they got that's what chimpanzees and gorillas and other primates that eat fibrous plants that's how they get their nutrition they break down fiber in this elongated cecum and they get the majority of their calories from short chain fatty acids right we don't have that ability anymore we cannot break down fiber anymore because we haven't done that in millions and millions and millions of years right so either way you want to look at it we cannot break down fiber we should not be eating fiber animals that eat fiber can break down fiber right we can't we shouldn't it was originally said you should eat fiber because you can't digest it because you don't get any nutrition from it and because it actually you know blocks the absorption of nutrients it gets in the way it's like physical tangles getting in the way of the enzymes to your food so it can't break it down properly and then the stuff that is broken down properly can't get to the borders of your of your small intestine to get absorbed in the first place and they were saying this is this is what you're supposed to do with this withdrawing all the diet fads in the 80s saying oh you should eat a lot of fiber because you can't get any nutrition from it and it'll reduce the amount of nutrition that you absorb that makes no biological sense you cannot say that that is how we were designed you know when when it's blocking the absorption of nutrients you know nature is wild it's killer be killed everything is so efficient with how it works there's no way that we would have been designed uh in any way through evolution or creation to uh to block our own absorption of nutrients okay you're just you're just not gonna make it up until the last century most people were struggling to get enough nutrients not struggling to keep nutrients away from them that makes no sense all right so that's just just just dead wrong anyway so but people said you should eat fiber because you don't get nutrients from and everyone was getting constipated in the 80s because they all stopped eating fat just oh well you need you need fiber eat fiber well why didn't we need fiber before 1986 why is that exactly why isn't that you know no one suggested this before you know the 70s and 80s that doesn't make any sense if we just if we just had no use for this before that and then we just came up with these problems right so they're saying you should eat this stuff because it blocks nutrients and because you don't get any nutrition from it and it'll fill up your gut and make you feel like you're full and you'll trick yourself into thinking you're full and then you won't you won't be as hungry okay that makes no sense all right you you are not going to trick your body you're not going to trick your biochemistry right you're just not that smart and if you were smart you'd think about how your biochemistry works and how your biology works and try to do that all right so you know if you want to just you know eat something to take up bulk and not get any nutrition from it why don't you just eat a plastic bag you know so doing the same thing you know and you shouldn't eat fiber for the same reason you shouldn't need a plastic bag you can't get any nutrition from it you cannot break it down and it causes harm all right fiber causes harm it causes micro abrasions in your gut lining increases mucus secretion and immune dysregulation and it's you know anybody with autoimmune issues and crohn's and ulcerative colitis or ibs ibd they will tell you they eat fiber they have problems right when we are in when surgeons do surgery on bowel or someone has diverticulitis or appendicitis or treating conservatively they rest the bowel rest the bowel what do they do to rest the bowel they put them on a low fiber diet or even a no fiber diet because they don't want this causing harm okay well what does that mean that means fiber is causing harm it's making your bowel work when it when you want to rest it you don't want to overwork it you know and and we see from studies that it's actually the increased fiber content that actually causes diverticulitis or diverticulosis i should say and increase bowel motions that's because you're overworking the colon you're saying work work work work work well it's just like your heart and you have high blood pressure for years and decades eventually it's just going to give up because it just can't you can't hack it anymore and it fails and you go into heart failure right well this is colon failure diverticulosis that's these out pouchings of of the bowel and it just just starts failing the muscles start failing and fatiguing and going floppy it can't hack it anymore because you've overworked it that's what happens when you eat fiber that's what happens when you have multiple bowel motions a day it's not good for you you don't want to just keep moving this stuff at high speed it's bad it's bad for the organ you're overworking it you're damaging it all right so you know when we we see this in in uh you know in surgery we also see this in autoimmune issues and you know if fiber was good for you why wouldn't it be good for you in those circumstances if this helped heal and strengthen your bowel wouldn't you want it when your bowel was healing when you had ulcerative colitis and crohn's and you had to have these flare-ups wouldn't wouldn't fiber be good for you if fiber was good for you if it provided benefit wouldn't it provide a benefit during those times of stress as well but they don't it makes it worse all right so you need to think about that all right um people say that you need fiber because it can get broken down into butyrate and this is what feeds your enterocytes the cells of your intestine right okay that's technically correct but my answer to that is who cares because we have butyrate from other sources when you're in when you're on a carnivore diet and you're in a you know ketogenic state you make ketones right that's a major energy source one of the main ketone bodies is butyrate okay so you're feeding your enterocytes from the inside out you know my gut is not dying it's not just running out of butyrate and and uh and not being able to survive okay i've been doing this for you know five years 10 of the last 20 years and i eat no fiber whatsoever at all ever never at all ever the inuits don't either the messiah don't either and our ancestors historically didn't either all right and so that's wrong right so again i say this a lot but it really matters on how you address these things it doesn't matter how brilliant your theory is and it doesn't matter how smart you are if it doesn't agree with experiment it's wrong okay so we did the experiment i did it it's wrong all right they say you're gonna you're enterocytes are gonna die you're gonna get constipation you're gonna have all these problems and yet i didn't so it's wrong period okay um you know just referring back to that study there was a study with thousands of people that looked at you know contributing factors to diverticulosis they looked at constipation they looked at meat intake they looked at fat intake they looked at fiber intake they looked at a number of bowel motions a day they found the only things that were correlated with increased rates of diverticulosis were more fiber you eat more bowel motions you had a day they had they had a high correlation with diverticulosis none of the others did none of them people say traditionally well when you're constipated this is so dry and hard and it stretches this out and that's what causes your colon to fail wrong that is not borne out by the data that was a guess and that guess was wrong and so you have to scrap it right so you know most of the studies that say that fiber is good for you or are based on supposition or they're just epidemiological nonsense you know they're just they're just not good studies there aren't really any experimental controlled trials in this there's you know that that there's one study you know underpowered there's only like 75 people and they looked at people that had you know gut issues and bloating and pain and they were just eating whatever they were eating and they split them up into several groups and they had one group eat more fiber one just stayed the same amount of fiber one reduced the fiber and one just completely eliminate the fiber all right and contrary to uh popular opinion you had the exact opposite effect that you would have thought traditionally right so people that ate more fiber got worse people that ate the same amount of fiber surprise surprise they stayed the same ate less fiber they got better ate no fiber completely resolved okay so this is an underpowered study there's 75 people but you know it's it's a you know it's at least interesting and it's something that go counter to these epidemiological studies that are no way shape or form as strong as even a small uh you know trial like that all right because that's an actual experimental trial where you are changing parameters and you are changing one you know factor you're trying to keep it to one and then you're seeing what happens okay that's an actual experiment and if done well it shows way better information than any epidemiological study all right so what is fiber fiber cellulose what is a tree fiber tree is a cell cellulose all right sawdust is fiber right and in fact if you don't believe me look it up because they add sawdust to a lot of different foods to increase the fiber content because now fiber is classified as an essential nutrient right so oh you need more fiber the more fiber the better the more of an essential nutrients you get the better well no that's not true because you can get top you can get toxicities on any sort of vitamin even even the vitamins that we need or will die right so uh that's wrong and also it's not essential you know the amount of fiber that you need throughout your entire existence is zero grams throughout your entire life that is not essential what essential means is that if you don't get it you will die okay that does not happen with with fiber all right that is completely wrong that is it you know complete uh you know a misrepresentation of just the word essential all right they've completely bastardized that it's wrong so that's fiber in a nutshell you don't need it it causes harm stay away from it um now let's talk about constipation constipation uh you know people think of as just not going that much so in you know people go carnivore they're just not going as often and they're freaking out oh my god i'm just constipated i'm so constipated i'm so constipated and they're thinking that this is just tied up and you just have this some big ball of mass and it's just not moving anywhere well that's not the case because you're absorbing 98 of the food that you eat at least and if you're eating less gristle you're going to absorb even more than that all right so the vast majority of the food that you're eating is going to be absorbed all right contrast that with plants fibrous plants the vast majority of what you eat will not be absorbed and that will have to come out the other end because you can't absorb it has to go out right so most of this will get absorbed therefore you'll have very little waste it's in the name it's waste it's wasteful you don't need it you didn't need it and you don't want it so your body's getting rid of it all right so you have very little waste with me because you actually want almost all of it okay so you're going to go less often so don't be surprised if you only go a couple times a week maybe even once a week maybe even less it doesn't matter as long as your stool is soft right so it still goes by you know the bristol stool chart and it's just about a matter of consistency it's not a matter of frequency so if it's soft and and and comfortable to pass you're fine all right if it's dry and hard that's constipation all right if it's dry and hard what does this mean that means you're not eating enough fat usually all right as i've said in other videos it takes bile to absorb fat mostly you can absorb a bit of fat without bile most of it gets absorbed with your bile and you run out of bile you only only produce a certain amount a day and i i you know i think that means that that's how much fat your body wants in a day all right so that's how much body bile your body is producing that's how much fat your your body wants to bring in after that it just spills over you know it's just a just a spill release and it goes out you're probably going to absorb some of it after that but not much all right that little that that excess fat is what's going to keep your stool soft all right it gets into your stools it keeps it soft oil repels water it's already completely desiccated so it doesn't matter how dry your stools get in the in the colon it's still going to be the same amount of fat it's still going to be soft so your stool can sit in there till christmas it's still going to be just that nice soft consistency all right and and why are we fighting against this anyway why are we fighting against our nature our colon is supposed to draw out water from our stools it's supposed to conserve water so that we don't have to take in so much water because sometimes it's difficult sometimes we don't have access to water and you will die from thirst and dehydration so your body needs to be efficient at this you can't just be dumping out water all the time we didn't always have plumbing we didn't always have access to to clean water it's actually very recently that we had that so it's very important for your body to conserve water and when you have fat in there you can conserve all the water that you want and it'll still be soft well what's the other side loose stools all right so if you're eating a lot more fat than your body can absorb it's not gonna harm you it's just gonna come out and that's going to come out as loose stools all right and you know people that remember back in the 90s they had the the uh the fake fat potato chips called like olean where your body tasted like fat so you you like the flavor and you could deep fry chips in it oh you don't absorb it and so your body just passes this stuff because your body couldn't absorb it at all and uh and i swear to god one of the one of the one of the cautions on the label was may cause anal leakage that's not a that's not a very good selling point uh just just you know the sound of that is awful but what is that that means that you know you have you have excess fat in your stools it you know it's going to be more loose it's going to be more oily and it's going to you know it's going to come out in a more dramatic fashion so if if that's the case you're only eating meat and water then you know you should just pull back on the amount of fat you don't need to eat as much fat and then you just balance that out so you always know exactly how much fat you're getting on a carnivore diet buy your stools now there are confounding factors because coffee will give you loose stools that will increase the motility of your gut and that will push things through faster than you want and your body doesn't get a chance to absorb the water and it'll go out in dramatic fashion and then also artificial sweeteners artificial sweeteners are notorious for causing osmotic diarrhea so it gets into your colon it sucks water into your colon and then that flushes out and you have then you have very loose watery stools people go carnivore and they and some of them i never did some of them have loose stools and just you know torrential diarrhea for weeks maybe it doesn't stop maybe it goes months you know quite often these people are still drinking coffee still using artificial sweeteners usually in their coffee well guess what guys this is going to cause a problem maybe it didn't cause as much of a problem before but that's because you had just so much more gunk in your gi tract that it just sort of you know didn't you know shift the load quite as well and it didn't come out you know in such a in such a mess but because you're not really absorbing or sorry because you're absorbing all of this stuff you know you don't really have much solid matter to to to go out so there's a lot more liquid stuff and you're just pushing that stuff through and it's just all coming out in a watery mess so don't drink coffee don't use artificial sweeteners right especially if you're having that problem and you want that problem to stop if you are not having any coffee any artificial sweeteners you are only eating meat you are only drinking water and you are still having loose stools and it's not an infection you're not sick or have fever or anything like that pull back on the fat just pull back on the fat and usually that will sort things out i've seen one example where you know people were eating less and less than you know fat and they still sort of having having a bit of problem and you know it's still likely to me that they were probably just having a bit too much fat but you can also go the other way because if you have way too little fat you can actually get uh you know diarrhea loose tools from the other direction you can also get overflow diarrhea this is something very common in elderly where you actually get so constipated you have a solid block of matter there and then there's just this liquid just squirting all around it and then you end up having loose stools and watery diarrhea and then also you have this big you know plug that comes out and a lot of diarrhea after that and then it sort of starts the the whole issue back over again so there are some combinations there are some exceptions and there are some nuances to this but most often you're getting constipated you know because you're not eating enough fat you're getting loose stools because you're either drinking coffee and artificial sweeteners and this is just going to be more sensitive to the loose stools when you're on a carnivore diet or you're eating more fat than your body can handle and it just it just goes out so you're not going to hurt yourself you're not going to you know if you're eating too much not too much fat because it's not going to harm you i don't i don't believe it will harm you because most of this stuff goes out and you will absorb a small percentage of that usually like medium chain fatty acids without bile but most of it will go out okay so most of that is not going to get into your body and give you excess uh you know calories and fat and cause a problem all right if you really really really overdid it and you've got that small percentage absorption you're sure or if you're taking ox bile or one of those supplements that can force your body to absorb fat more than what your body wants and yeah okay you can you can screw up the works but you are doing something there okay and you don't need to do that so if you're just letting your body work naturally it's going to have this spill over and it's not going to cause any harm to you it's just going to be inconvenient and if you don't really care about that and you like the fat that you're eating it's fine but you know if that's an inconvenience to you which it would be probably an inconvenience to most people just pull back the fat a bit okay all right guys i hope that's helpful i hope that's uh you know sort of answered some questions that you may have had um you know if you like this please like and subscribe to my channel my podcast and if you think that there's someone who might find this useful or beneficial maybe have this question please share it with them so they can they can learn about this as well and hopefully uh you know overcome any problems that they have either you know with their worry about whether they need fat or if they're having problems with constipation as well all right okay guys thank you very much appreciate it and we'll talk to you soon hey guys thank you very much for taking the time out to listen to what i had to say if you like it then please like and subscribe to my youtube channel and podcast and if you're on youtube then please hit that little bell and subscribe and that'll let you know anytime i have a new video out which should be every week if not more and if you could share this with your friends that would help me get the word out and let me know that you like what i'm doing thanks again guys