Hard Facts about the Carnivore and Vegan diets, with Dr Anthony Chaffee, MD

hello my name is dr anthony chafee i'm an american medical doctor specializing in neurosurgery but i've also done quite extensive research into diet and nutrition and how that affects health and chronic disease i've been interviewed by people such as dr sean baker and others of that of that genre and done debates and so forth between carnivore and and vegan advocates one quite recently with acne which is an australian nutritional medical board i just wanted to go over some of the points that i made in that debate we only had seven minutes to go over it so we had to rapid fire some of these things uh and unfortunately couldn't do much of a back and forth um but i just wanted to go over some of those points and just flush those out a bit and hopefully people find that interesting so just talking about just the the difference between vegan and carnivorism um so first of all we just have to look at what are humans as a species so animals all animals in the wild have species specific nutrition they have an evolutionary niche that they all evolved to have and that's going to be their optimal diet what they evolved on okay so you have to think in that context now what are what are humans all the big studies all the best data shows that we actually are carnivores as a species that's the kind of animal that we are now can we live on other things can we survive on them yes does that mean that that's optimal no we came from a riverous background we have some of those traits left over we have some people that you know had um you know the the agricultural revolution that has some defenses but again we're talking optimals what is the optimal nutrition for human beings um why does this matter well it matters because plants and other sorts of food we call it food but food is species specific so the food to a giraffe is different than food to a gorilla that's different than the food to a zebra that's different than the food to you know a bullying mammoth and a and a dolphin and so forth so you you need to eat what your species eats okay um you know you can ask any zookeeper they'll tell you that you know if you feed an animal something that you know doesn't eat the wild something it didn't evolve when it gets very sick but what does it get sick with it gets obesity heart disease liver disease diabetes cancer arthritis autoimmune disorders okay dogs and cats known carnivores and yet we give them grain and plant-based kibble and they get sick they get the same things we get the same things veterinarians are now calling these human diseases and they're saying that animals like pets household pets are are the amount of human diseases that they're seeing is is rapidly increasing it's gone dramatically up in the 1970s in america for instance the average age of the average life expectancy of a golden retriever was 17 years now it's nine years okay that's not from you know you know aggressive breeding it was already a pure breed okay that's from feeding it the wrong thing and it dies young all right that's happening to humans as well what veterinarians are calling human diseases we actually used to call western diseases because we only saw these in western cultures that had agriculture these were the diseases of the west okay you look this up you know in history books it's you know it's all over the place um and that's because we didn't see this in native populations right so in native americans and native australians and so forth these people lived as predominantly pure carnivores you know they might know which plants to eat when and if they were starving or to use medicinally but what they ate when they could get it and predominantly ate was a pure meat diet this is well documented you can go back hundreds and hundreds of years and see this okay they didn't get the diseases of the west except when they ate the food of the west when native americans and native australians eat a western diet they are four times as likely to get obesity heart disease diabetes cancer all the rest because they didn't have exposure to agricultural revolution like other other people did and so they don't have as many protections now the people that that had the agricultural revolution you know 8 000 years ago or so they have some protections but they still get these diseases i remember hearing hearing this fact uh about the you know being four times more likely to get all these diseases when i was a young child and i remember thinking to myself well doesn't that mean that the food is causing the disease because if they don't eat the food they don't get the disease and we eat the food and we get the disease just at a lower rate you know and what is it that they are eating that we're not what are we eating that they're not well i didn't know it at the time but the answer to that is they were eating pure carnivore diet they were omitting all these species inappropriate foods now you look at other studies there's quite a lot of studies a stable isotope study which looked at the bones of early humans and neanderthals and and were able to look at certain isotopes and see what they ate and were able to compare this to other animals of the day and they found that humans were not on carnivores but they were hyper carnivores we had a higher carnivore rating than you know lions and hyenas alive at the same time in the same area so this is this is a very very well established fact there's also the isr study out of israel that showed that people were hyper carnivores going back at least two million years two and a half million years this is because likely the ice ages our ancestors about eight million years ago were herbivorous they split off because they started eating meat they started eating more meat more meat started having more human adaptations our teeth got smaller our jaws got smaller because we're eating softer and softer food we're not chewing on sticks all day like a gorilla and then our brains got bigger because we couldn't take things down with our mouth we couldn't take things down with our claws because we don't kill things with our mouth and our claws that's why we don't look like lions but we did develop our brains we had to develop our brains because we didn't have the claws we didn't have the teeth and so we figured out tactics and tools and figured out how to take down a woolly mammoth and take it up take it apart with tools and with our brains and that's why we live in houses and lions don't okay so why is it that you know eating outside of your species specific diet can be harmful to you well the reason for that is that plants are living creatures and they want to stay living creatures if you eat them they die all living things have a defense and plants because they can't move or fight back like you know an animal can who can run away or can fight you they have to use poison as their main deterrent i learned in seventh grade biology that plants and animals are in an evolutionary arms race plants becoming more and more poisonous so that less and less animals could eat them so that they can survive and thrive and not go extinct and animals becoming more and more adapted to specific poisons and specific plants so that they can eat that plant and survive and thrive as well but other things couldn't necessarily and so this was their dedicated food source so that was an evolution evolutionary advantage okay i think koalas pandas they eat one plant there's 340 000 plants in the world koalas eat one pandas eat one cows horses grazing animals they eat grass that's it the other things they get sick or they die you know the leaves at a giraffe eats are different from the leaves that a gorilla eats those are different from the leaves of the deer eats you mix those leaves around they all get sick or die so you know we know this inherently okay if you get lost in the woods and you run out of food you can't just eat any random plant okay everyone knows that you'd get very sick you could die people have died okay so you know this is this is a universal truth throughout the plant kingdom and the fungus kingdom okay is that plants use poisons if you think about it all plants are poisonous it's just that certain animals have evolved the ability to break down specific plants specific poisons and specific plants but if they haven't evolved to eat that plant that plant is bad for them and that goes for us too we've known since the 1980s from the work of professor bruce ames out of uc berkeley that plants vegetables things that we eat all the time or well not me but you know used to you guys anyway you know they contain quite a lot of poisons and they were comparing this to pesticides because they were trying to ban the pesticides in the 80s because everyone was getting sick and they said well you know it must be from the pesticides and you know he looked at that and he's like well you know really the pesticides we've been using for 80 years without any problem those pesticides and so he did the studies and he found that there's actually 10 000 times more naturally occurring poisons in the plants and the vegetables like spinach than there is in you know the pesticides we spray on them industrially by weight okay so that's 99.99 of the toxic elements are in the plant itself not the pesticide and he also found that it was much more carcinogenic than naturally occurring poisons were far more carcinogenic than the pesticides we spread on them industrially that's why we still have pesticides because he showed scientifically that you know the pesticides are just a drop in the bucket compared to the plant itself and if you're willing to eat the plant well you know the pesticides aren't really you know what you have to worry about okay fast forward to when i was taking cancer biology at the university of washington in seattle we were again you know learning things yeah that you know plants protecting cells by using you know chemical deterrence uh but we were looking at it in a cancer perspective so we're looking at carcinogens and we learned day one that brussels sprouts had 136 known human carcinogens this is 20 years ago okay mushrooms just white mushrooms had over 100 known carcinogens we were given lists spinach kale lettuce celery cabbage cucumber you name it they all had 60 80 or over 100 known human carcinogens each and we know that they're abundant you know based on the work of professor ames we were very blown away by this we thought that he must be joking he must be having a song and we're looking around wildly looking for you know who who's in on the joke and who's smirking but no one was and i remember thinking in my head but vegetables are still good for you though right and you must have read our minds because he just looked at us and gave us a funny look and 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 said okay screw plants and that was my start on a carnivore journey even though i didn't realize it at the time i just knew that plants were trying to kill me i'm not going to eat plants so i went to the store and i just bought things that didn't have plants you know everything has plants everything someone else makes is going to have plants and sugar and things like that so i was just walking around there was nothing i could buy and you know came across some eggs okay eggs eggs don't have plants in them you know meat meat doesn't come from plants milk milk doesn't come from plants so i just ate eggs meat milk for five years i was playing you know hilo rugby at the time i was training sometimes eight ten hours a day while in university i couldn't get tired i couldn't run out of energy i couldn't get sore i don't get sore anymore that soreness is actually from the toxic elements in the plants causing inflammation pain and swelling and making you stiff and sore which is a deterrent plant is saying do not eat me i'll make you feel bad but we eat this stuff all the time and so we always feel bad we don't even realize we think that's normal it's not normal okay so you know since then i've literally felt like a different breed of human my body works in very different ways and i was i was experiencing this in you know my rugby in my athletic career i was playing professionally in england and i remember slipping off of that without really realizing it and i remember thinking to myself a few months in you know i didn't feel as super human as i normally do like you know what's going on i'm not training as hard you know i was 25 like gosh am i over it now my body's just breaking down you know i figured out later that it was it was because i you know some plants had mixed in because you know some of the meat was breaded and you know i wasn't really thinking about it i was like well you know it's not is it that much does it make that big of a deal well it did it made it quite a big deal okay so you know there are other things in plants so that's sort of a general thing but let's talk about some specifics okay any botanist on earth can tell you this and they can tell you a lot more you know this is any any introductory botany book can show you this as well okay there are quite a lot of things all right so quite a lot of plants um poison you by making you very sensitive to light okay there's a thing called celery dermatitis where people eat a lot of celery or handle celery pick celery and things like that they get horrible burns in the sun they have to wear hats long-sleeve shirt gloves because they will absolutely scorch in the sun okay think of how many vegans have a good tan okay lives they do this as well they have oil and the skin this is an unripe fruit those seeds aren't ready yet that tree does not want you to eat that so if you start grabbing that picking that pulling that it doesn't want that so it soaks this oil in your skin you have very bad burns you know we have documented you know second degree burns just from sun exposure after handling lives actually happened to my younger brother uh as a child we didn't know what what it was we thought it was like an allergic reaction but no this is what it was then think about cyanide there's 3 500 different plants that use cyanide that we know of almonds are one of them okay there's different amounts of cyanide in almonds but anywhere from a pound to two pounds of almonds so you know 400 800 grams of almonds is a lethal dose of cyanide in an adult and yet we give this stuff to children tell them that it's good for them so that's that's pretty wild to me that that we do that and we just play these games with kids and then you know just almonds have been containing cyanide is not uh you know a little known fact that that's a widely known thing and yet you'll say oh well yeah there's cyanide in it but they just assume that they're really not that much there's quite a lot you know i've sat down and just eaten handfuls of almonds while watching television and easily eaten half a pound you know that's that's half a lethal dose of cyanide that's insane and so even if it doesn't kill you like that's not good for your body okay there's nightshades you know deadly belladonna tobacco these things are quite harmful they contain saline among other things this can kill you okay we avoid belladonna this is something that people have used as poisons going back centuries and people knew for centuries that you don't eat nightshades and then all of a sudden we we forgot this or or thought that it didn't really matter that much but potatoes tomatoes eggplants peppers these are all in the nightshade family and they all contain saline and other toxic elements 70 people a year still die from eating potatoes potatoes okay but it's not that far-fetched think about it i'm sure you know most people have learned that you take potatoes you need to keep them in a dark place or in a cupboard or something like that because if it turns green it's bad you can't eat it well what is bad meat it means it's poisonous and it's deadly poisonous it starts growing a root you have to cut out the whole root or just throw the whole thing away because now that's poisonous deadly poisonous that can kill you people that don't realize how bad that is eat it and they die or you know because they have to if they're starving i suppose but that's a serious thing and even though a normal potato when it does when it's not in those forms is it isn't necessarily going to kill you it's not good for you okay and then there's carbohydrates and so forth which fundamentally disrupt your your metabolic system and so forth uh which is maybe a topic for another time but you know i argue that you know what what people call a fasting state a so-called fasting state is actually our primary metabolic state is the primary metabolic state of nearly all animals in the wild that's where all of our heavy machinery comes to bear okay so when you're on a carnival diet you're in that metabolic state just like a cow just like a gorilla just like a wolf just like a lion okay so what else about plants well we know that we can't be vegan or herbivores because plants you know lack very vital nutrients did you you cannot get from anything else okay okay so if you need to supplement to supplement vegetarians need to supplement they're generally quite deficient look in india they have high rates of vegetarianism and so forth but they're generally ovolacto vegetarians so they are getting some animal sourced nutrition but they're also very nutrient deficient they have quite bad um nutritional deficiencies they they're very uh you know they're very deprived in that sense of nutrients okay so if you need to take supplements obviously this cannot be something that we evolved on because we didn't have supplements and and gnc 50 000 years ago even 100 years ago really for the things that we have available now we certainly didn't have them hundred thousand thousand years ago two million years ago when people were living as hyper carnivores as we've seen from all the studies okay so if you need to supplement then by definition your diet is deficient okay so that can't be our evolved diet that can't be our optimal diet there are quite a number of things b12 d3 k2 you're not going to get enough vitamin a you have to eat three pounds of carrots a day just give enough oh sorry six pounds of carrots a day just to get enough vitamin a a day okay so that's not going to happen you're not going to do that and then there's other things the essential fatty acids such as dha and so forth this does not exist in plants you know we make some of the essential fatty acids that we need we don't make that much we don't make enough okay and that is what grows your brain that's what grows your nervous system and if you don't get these insufficient amounts your brain will be underdeveloped and you also your brain will start to decay there's quite a lot of large studies showing that higher saturated fat intakes higher animal fat protein and so forth in the diet protects against alzheimer's protects against dementia protects against parkinson's actually protecting his heart disease okay we'll get to that later so on a carnivore diet you don't need to supplement okay the inuits didn't do it i don't do it the native australians didn't do it you know genghis khan and mongol horde who just ate horse meat drank horse blood they didn't do it uh and you don't need to do it okay because it's it's our evolved diet if it's our evolved diet then by definition it has everything that you need now there's an organization called sips s-i-p-p-s this is a group of pediatricians in italy and they've come out with this they said flat out you know any any diet that you need pharmacological supplementation is a bad diet it's not a good diet and this is not something that should be pushed on kids this was in response to people trying to push a vegan diet for children which is honestly criminal there there have actually been cases of of vegan mothers who are breastfeeding and their children dying from the breast milk because it's so deficient in the nutrients and probably have a lot of toxins as well okay so that's quite harmful you know kids that are raised vegan have much higher rates of autism have much higher rates of short stature reduce you know uh bone mineral density muscle density and so forth this is bad for them okay the autism thing that there's quite a lot of studies that show you know correlation with food and so forth that you know more meat higher saturated fat during pregnancy protects against autism however there's causative studies as well um out of i think the university of texas at austin they showed that there was a type of autism and what is autism autism is a misdevelopment of your neurons okay so your neurons didn't develop properly didn't work quite right for whatever reason and you have a certain form of autism so one of those forms of autism was found to be caused by a lack of carnitine carnitine is thought to be a non-essential amino acid meaning that we make it but not everyone makes enough of it not everyone makes it at all and so they found that if you don't have sufficient amounts of carnitine carnitine is you know integral for the development of proper development of neurons and so if you don't have that you can't develop it properly and you'll get a specific kind of autism well carnitine doesn't exist in plants it doesn't exist in fungus it only exists in meat to some degree in most animal source foods but there's a ton of it in red meat okay what is the first thing that vegetarians do they drop red meat because that's the worst right no actually it's the best vegans they don't need any mammal products at all okay so they're not going to get any carnitine at all so if you have a vegetarian who just cuts out red meat and their kid doesn't make any carnitine at all well you know the chicken and fish and you know eggs and so forth that they're eating probably to a small degree isn't going to be sufficient source of carnitine to develop their brain properly and they'll get this form of autism and then vegans who eat no animal source protein at all and get none of these nutrients get no carnitine even if they have a slight deficiency they'll get this form of autism as well so this is this is quite serious and honestly you could argue that this was child abuse to do this and that that may ruffle some feathers but i think if you think about this and you understand you know the science behind it you know it's it's hard to argue that it's not obviously you know people aren't doing this intentionally if they were then that would certainly be child abuse parents want to do the best for their kids by and large and sometimes they'll put them on a vegan diet because they're being told that this is the best thing but i can tell you for a cold frozen fact that is the worst thing you can do for your kid okay so you know this cannot be a our evolved diet all right it has poison it doesn't have the proper nutrients it has low bioavail low bioavailability of the nutrients that it does have you don't really absorb the proteins that it doesn't you say you know you know that's 30 grams of protein from plant source versus 30 grams protein from animal source you will absorb nearly all of those 30 grams from an animal source you will you'll absorb very little of the 30 grams of plant protein we've seen this in tons of studies patients with stomas where they you know they have to have a bag where their feces come out you know they say you have to some sort of surgery some sort of issue they have to rest their bowel or maybe remove their bowel we can see this we can see that when you eat animals animal protein you absorb nearly all of it it's not coming out in the bag or is it plant protein like soy and so forth that almost all that comes out and so this gets down to your colon your you know the bacteria you start getting work on it you get you know nasty byproducts okay so so what are some other things you know you think about you know sugar sugars and everything um this is something that you know we enjoy but it's something that's thought to be evolved because we recognize this is safe because there's nothing really that can change fructose which is the sweet part of sugar that is acutely poisonous for us to kill us that day so we recognize this as a quick hit of energy that we can survive on and then get our normal meal okay but long term this causes a very serious problem it's also addictive it gives it it gives a dopamine signal to the addiction parts of your brain just like cocaine heroin and meth and it kills the same areas of your brain as meth to the same extent as meth okay we see this on mri studies okay then in 2009 dr robert lustig from ucsf published um i i thought you know quite quite brilliant work and published dozens of things since then written books and so forth i'm sure you guys can look them up i'm sure most of you have heard of them they showed that fructose acts in your body is broken down by your liver to the same by-products as alcohol okay and you get the same disease profile from those breakdown products as you do alcohol okay because it's the same thing you have fatty liver disease cirrhosis diabetes heart disease okay it's even you know indicated in cancer it feeds cancer and so forth lustig is trying to show or trying to see if he can show uh if there's a causative nature of fructose with cancer and you know and then it's associated with alzheimer's and so forth okay so you know this associated with alzheimer's you know this is able to influence the brain and potentially cause alzheimer's serious degeneration uh you know fatal degeneration of an adult mature healthy brain what's that doing to a children's brain what's it doing to a developing brain or a fetus it's not gonna be good okay so you have to think about this you know kids like show they like sugar yeah of course they do it's a drug even cocaine they'll like that too you know i'm sure people have seen on youtube that little you know two-year-old kid uh i think probably in indonesia where he like smokes three packs of cigarettes a day and they walk you know he just really likes it so you know you know he seems healthy so we'll just let him keep smoking he's like yeah he's healthy now that's not gonna last too long okay so what dr lustig also showed was that it's sugar that is actually the the disease process involved in heart disease not cholesterol okay it actually is it metabolizes into sdldl vldl and these things are then glycated and you know are part of the inflammatory process that then precipitates atherosclerosis okay it's not from the cholesterol you get from animal fat okay so cholesterol was actually never the problem and that's something that's that's come up more recently you know in 2015 uh the journal of american medical association jama reported and published actual internal memos from the sugar companies back in the 50s and 60s and so forth talking about how there was there was studies you know showing that or suggesting that sugar caused heart disease which now we know it does okay and at the time they said okay you know we need to cover this up and so in their own words they 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 really sugar and one of those professors was named head of the usda in 1965 and then magically the usda declares unequivocally that cholesterol causes heart disease saturated fat increases cholesterol stop eating both and it changed the world okay think about it after this declaration you know late 70s you know early 80s they you know the the the food habits of americans changed dramatically and the rest of the world sort of started dropping like dominoes after and they all started seeing the obesity and health and chronic disease epidemic that americans first saw in the 80s okay well you know you know richard feynman said it doesn't matter you know it doesn't matter how brilliant your theory is it doesn't matter how smart you are if it doesn't agree with experiment it's wrong so the theory was that cholesterol from fat from animal fat causes heart disease okay so in america we reduced our our cholesterol intake by 30 30 percent reduce red meat by 33 percent increase fruits and vegetables by 30 and 40 percent respectively and also sugar and carbohydrates and so forth what were the results is with hundreds of millions of people what were the results the obesity rate tripled heart disease triple stroke rate tripled cancer rates tripled type 2 diabetes autoimmune disorders alzheimer's parkinson's neurodegenerative delay such as autism all these things increased exponentially and they all increased at the exact same time okay these things almost didn't exist before then now they're the only things we treat right so heart disease tripled when we reduced cholesterol okay you can't say that cholesterol causes heart disease when you reduce cholesterol and heart disease increases dramatically if anything you can say it's protective and that's actually what we're seeing now in the studies there's quite a lot of big studies that came out in 2015 and beyond that back this up if with hundreds of thousands of people found that people on statins were either equivalent or having worse outcomes okay why is that this is something that's supposed to that's supposed to be saving so many lives no it's not it stayed with 60 000 people over the age of 65 on statins and people that were on statins with lower cholesterol were having worse outcomes all right status have side effects um and you know you have to you have to take that into account when you take any medication you have to contend with the side effects so this is doing something that now we know you don't need to do and it has side effects so something you really need to think about this isn't medical advice it's just general you know general knowledge okay this is something you should really take seriously and think about and you know and re-examine the studies there are other studies with hundreds of thousands of people finding that people with higher ldl cholesterol so-called bad cholesterol are having less heart attacks less strokes they're cardio protective they're neural protective okay you know people keep keep pushing this and there's the you know there's a cardiologist that was on the other side of the debate was arguing for the vegan side and we didn't really get a chance to sort of go back and forth but i just wanted to ask him if you think that cholesterol is the end-all be-all for heart disease tell me why 50 of people who have heart attacks have low or normal ldl cholesterol answer that one okay so if you look at that there's not even really association and now we actually know that all those correlative studies that proved that cholesterol caused heart disease were actually fraudulent okay and you look at the framingham studies there's a cardinal study in in cardiology showing a strong association with total cholesterol and heart disease the problem with that is that they misrepresented their own findings they concluded something that was not supported by their own data and this has come out okay but not everybody knows about it and that's a problem okay so you know you'll hear different people say well you know i went vegan and everything got better okay maybe not everyone does though it depends on where you're coming from and where you're going to all right you know i ask people because they think vegan they oh i just dropped meat and that's the only change i made i started calling myself a vegan then good things happen and so i asked them okay so you kept eating cookies and cakes smoking cigarettes drinking alcohol and they say oh no no no i i stopped going out to eat i don't eat any you know any sugar i don't yeah i don't use uh you know sugary sauces i don't drink alcohol i make whole food this that the other blah blah blah okay so they're making a lot of changes and and one of those major changes they're getting rid of added sugar and alcohol and so forth and but they're blaming the meat okay so you know this is like saying like oh you know i went vegan and stopped you know doing coke and smoking cigarettes and gosh as soon as i stopped eating meat i felt so much better like well you know there's a couple other things going on there chief so and that's what you have to think about okay because also you know the the omission of one harmful substance isn't enough there there are myriad harmful substances in the world as we know because every single plant has thousands of them okay and they all have different ones predominantly so you know you get rid of one bad thing let's say meat is bad for you okay but what about all the other bad things for you okay so that's not a really good argument okay because just because something doesn't have arsenic doesn't mean it also doesn't have cyanide okay which you know plants do okay and then you have to think okay well just because it doesn't have meat doesn't mean it's good for you oreo cookies are vegan cigarettes are vegan alcohol is vegan cocaine is vegan heroin is vegan okay just because calling something doesn't really you know tell you much it just means no meat so you know that's that's not really doing much for you okay you have to you have to think past that all right so you know let's go to you know you know just a general thing one of the other things that vegans have a problem with is uh you know saying that animals are bad for the environment but they couldn't be more wrong animals are vital for the environment animals aren't part of the environment they're part of the ecosystem okay this is a system of plants and animals living together and they all have a part to play okay animals recycle nutrients that eat the dead dead leaves the dead wood the dead grasses and then recycle those nutrients okay they eat down you know these dead plants and so forth and then they make room for their new plants to grow up because otherwise they're getting blocked out by the sun this happens all over africa and to combat this they try to burn off all these fields of dead grass because there aren't enough animals to eat them down and if they don't burn them down so that the new grasses can grow up and the new plants can grow up they'll turn to desert because the next nights will just die and they'll die and they'll die and they'll just turn into a barren land so they're burning a billion hectares of grasslands a year in africa just in africa and one hectare burning one hectare creates more pollution and worse pollution than 6 000 cars do in a year so this is a wild wild problem solution is animals um we are losing about 27 billion tons of topsoil per year okay that's an area the size of kentucky every year this is because of farming when you grow a farm when you grow crops you necessarily have to destroy an entire ecosystem you kill all the plants you kill all the animals you grow one crop and you kill the animals that are trying to eat them those plants draw out nutrients out of the ground and that can eventually become barren this is why we have to use large scale fertilizers and so forth just to just to grow anything well and when you till this stuff up the winds can hit it the you know the rains can wash it away and you wash away topsoil you blow away topsoil this is what happened in the dust bowl in america in the 1930s the middle of america one of the most most verdant areas in the world this this all of a sudden was turning into a desert they couldn't draw it grow anything it was i mean dust storms all these sorts of things locust swarms it sounded like a bible story and people thought it was i thought this was this was for people's wickedness and so forth then they figured out no this is actually from farming we're killing massive massive long tracks and things blowing up they're losing the top so and so forth things couldn't grow because there was no top so topsoil takes an insane amount of time to grow it takes about 500 years to grow half an inch of topsoil one centimeter okay and so we almost did that to the middle of america we almost turned it into a sahara desert and then we figured that out and you know you know re revamped our entire farming structure and we were able to hold that off but we're still losing an area the size of kentucky a year okay you only do that for so long that is a that is a very finite resource now i say the sahara desert for a reason the sahara desert is man-made that didn't used to be a desert we have satellite infrared images showing that there were human civilizations all across what is now this here a desert egypt used to be jungles not deserts we have soil samples that were tested in the 1990s that found that actually when the pyramids were built when the sphinx was built they were built in jungles okay then they had wide scale agriculture they didn't really know what was going on and this all turned to deserts okay in the you know the egypt having now river flooded every year and the silt would replenish the nutrients from the soil i learned that when i was a kid well what does that mean that means that it has to replenish the nutrients every single year they're saying this was why they were so prosperous and they could grow so much well you have other places that don't have a nalo river they don't have that and they stop all these nutrients out of the soil and they start stop growing they turn barren they turn to desert people like alan savory who's down in zimbabwe he's actually found that if you take massive herds of animals bunched and moving like you like a like a like a bird would in the wild they can actually revitalize deserts he's reversing deserts he's been doing this for 40 years or so going through massive deserts and turning them green and verdant he's done ted talks he's on different sorts of things written books and textbooks and so forth very interesting guy all right uh there's a guy dr peter peter ballistic who's who i've spoken to very interesting guy he's a phd in forage agronomy should look up his stuff he talks about the science behind this the size behind uh you know animal agriculture and husbandry and how that affects the environment and how vital and necessary it is for for the health of the world okay so you know people always ask me you know what do you eat you know get me on a meal plan these sorts of things this is the easiest way of eating that that exists you know exactly what you can eat you know exactly what you can't eat you know there's no rules as far as you know you have to have to limit calories and limit this and do this this many macros and so forth you don't need that this is natural nature will take care of it you eat what you're hungry for you eat what tastes good and it will stop tasting good when your body has enough nutrients that's just a natural response things taste better when you're more hungry when your body wants those nutrients more so you know if a steak doesn't taste good you're not hungry if it does taste good you are so you eat what you want to eat you eat when you want to eat you don't have to eat in the morning or night you don't have to intermittent fast or anything you only need to do intermittent fasting if you're eating carbohydrates because you're trying to run out the clock on the insulin get back into that primary metabolic state i mentioned earlier so really what you eat is just meat salt water okay any meat that you enjoy from any animal it doesn't matter fish chicken beef lamb it doesn't matter you just want to get enough fat okay that's very important animals in the wild get about seventy eighty percent of their calories from fat native americans they would cut off the back haunches and leave them and they would take the rest of them because there wasn't much fat okay they'd make pemmican that's 50 50 fat and meat right so the fat's very good for you think of the inuits and so forth people living up north they blubber okay they're not fat okay and that's another thing you don't see fat animals in the wild i remember thinking that as a kid you know why are animals just so you know so muscly and tough and we're just you know we're not you know we're just the only squishy animal on earth it was explained to me that you know they exercise all the time because they're in the wild so they're constantly moving constantly exercising but that doesn't explain animals in the zoo you know you have a you have a lion or a zebra and you're living in a closure the size of this room that's the definition of a sedentary lifestyle they're not going anywhere okay have you ever seen a fat giraffe fat zebra fat lion no you know they're not fat you know they're ripped they look like they're on steroids right that's because they're eating what their species evolved to eat they're eating what they're supposed to eat and if you eat what your species evolved to eat you will look like that as well i've been doing this for years and years and years people ask me all the time you know during covent and so forth you know how do you work out how you work out all the time you're like you're so uh anything you know very good shape and so forth and i'm like i haven't been to the gym in three months you know i've done push-ups twice i've gone running once and they just don't believe me but that is it this is this is what the human animal looks like when you feed it species appropriate nutrition and obviously when you work out it does even more than that i've played professional sports i you have a long background in exercise and so forth and so you know when i work out i work out a lot harder i know how to work out i know how to push myself and you know i i get more out of my workouts when on this way of eating and i retained it longer it doesn't it doesn't just go away you know i can maintain under 10 body fat just with with eating as much as i want to and care to every day my body just naturally it does that and yours will as well it will get down to the body fat that your body wants you to be at genetically okay so eat the fat um my hard rule as far as what to eat is no plants no sugar nothing artificial okay that goes for sauces seasonings and drinks as well okay so think about that when you're looking at ingredients list generally if something has an ingredients list you shouldn't eat it because it's going to have a bunch of plants and sugar and crap like that that you don't want the other question is alcohol do i drink alcohol very rarely less than once a year okay and if i were to drink i would generally drink you know hard stuff like just just straight vodka or something like that because i don't want all the mixtures i don't want all the sugar i don't want all the the crap this i can beer and wine and so forth you know whether or not i enjoy it that's not really the point um you know because i i found that you know with my workouts and things like that it takes about three weeks to get you know from drinking one time from going out one time not even getting wrecked or having a horrible hangover but i noticed that for three weeks i can't work out as hard i don't feel as good i don't have the energy that i have i don't have the sleep that i had for three full weeks okay so it takes that long to get out of your system and you know frankly i would rather feel like a superhero 24 7 than feel drunk sometimes okay that's just you know my choice um so that's it i hope that wasn't too much for you guys i hope that just covered a lot of bases and and that you guys found it helpful um if there's anything else i mean i'm gonna go into some of these things in much more detail and and expand on them as well and if there's any specific questions that you guys have and want me to address in video just let me know and i'll try to do that okay all right thanks guys