Here's Why Everyone Quit Carnivore (Doctor Explains)

So, why is everyone quitting carnivore all of a sudden? Well, first of all, not everyone is quitting carnivore now or previously. I'm not quitting carnivore. Dr. Baker's not quitting carnivore. Dr. Sean Omara, Dr. Kilt, and so many others. Just a few vocal individuals who are now quitting carnivore loudly and saying that they get a lot of people saying they're having problems, too. Fair enough. If they want to do something else with their life, that's their life. However, more and more people than ever are coming to carnivore to find true healing. And many of them are finding that they're reversing diseases that here have never been able to be reversed before. And so why in God's name would they ever quit? And in fact, they're not. I have hundreds of patients who are still doing carnivore and not quitting. I have worked with over 10,000 people online who have come through my different groups. I am not getting a whole bunch of people saying, "Wow, this is not working for us." In fact, I get more and more messages saying, "This is working for us. This is really saving my life. This has really changed my life in all these valuable ways." A few years ago, Dr. Charadino decided he wanted to come off carnivore, but he's really still very animalbased. He's still eating predominantly meat, but he's just added in some fruit and honey and some other animal-based carbohydrates like raw milk and things like that. And he feels that that was right for him. Now, he feels that ketosis was a problem for him. And while I don't know what his main issues were, I don't think they were from ketosis because I've been in ketosis longer than he has. Quite a lot longer than he has at this point. So have millions of others and entire populations of humans have been in ketosis their entire lifespan and not had the issues that he has had. So regardless of the issues he had, I don't think they're coming from ketosis in any case. But that was his decision and he did that. So why are some people quitting? Well, some of them it just doesn't meet with their lifestyle choices. They want to have a larger variety of food to eat. They want to be social and not get pressure from their family and friends. Some people do bow to that social pressure even though they feel better when on carnivore. don't feel that they can maintain that because of all the social pressure. And that's that's pretty unfortunate because some of these people have actually found they have huge health benefits and felt so wonderful eating this way. And so coming off of that for social pressures is is a pretty unfortunate reason. We've seen Joe Rogan who's been a big advocate of the carnivore diet talk about how he will come on and off it possibly for some of these reasons, possibly because he would get quite bad loose stools while he was doing it sometimes. But generally that would resolve and it resolves for most people. Quite often people are just still drinking coffee when they go carnivore because they don't want to give that up and that can cause a laxative effect. And when you get rid of fiber which actually slows things down, it doesn't speed things up. That can cause loose stools. Also tea, caffeine, artificial sweeteners, magnesium supplements, and medications like metformin can also cause a mild laxative effect. And so some people can get loose stools because of that. Also, it can come from eating the wrong amount of fat. Your body has a limited capacity to absorb fat. And after that, 90% of the fat that you eat will go out in your stools and that can keep the stools soft, but a lot more than your body can absorb and that can cause loose stools as well. Some people stop because they aren't seeing the results maybe they want. And most of the time this is when they have a very specific goal in mind, such as weight loss, and they want to see quick results like they've seen so many other people get, and they want that for themselves. And so sometimes when their main goal is slow to come, they lose sight of all the other benefits that they may be getting. Some people have hormonal issues, metabolic issues that will just take time to heal before they start losing a significant amount of body fat. But you need to focus on health first and foremost. And how is your health? How are you feeling? Are you coming off medications? Is your blood pressure coming down? Is your diabetes reversing? Is your autoimmunity going into remission or improving? These are really important questions to ask and things to focus on. So keep an eye on the benefits that you're getting, not just the effects that you're still waiting for. I've seen a number of people who have said that they really like carnivore because they lowered their blood pressure. They came off their autoimmune medication and they had much more clear thought. They slept better and had many other benefits, but they didn't lose the weight in as quick of time fashion that they wanted to. So, I guess carnivore didn't work for me. Well, it sounds to me like it worked pretty damn well. It's just they lost sight of the benefits they were getting because of that one goal. So, if you remember that it's health first and remember to look on the bright side. Count your blessings. Look at the good things that are happening and other good things will happen with time. But everything takes time. There are no shortcuts in life. You walk 10 miles into the woods, you got to walk 10 miles out. It took decades for you to get your health in this situation. It's going to take more than a few months to get you out of that. Some people report that they don't feel as good or maybe something's actually not well or maybe even getting worse. But there are generally reasons for this and workarounds that you can do or maybe do things a bit differently and you might get the results that you want. First of all, there's an adaptation period. Not everybody feels that they have the best energy in the first few weeks. It can take weeks and months to get fully fat adapted. Most people feel a lot better after a few weeks from an energy standpoint. Some people take a few months and that can be really hard, but when you get through that period, you feel a lot better. Also, sometimes different nutrient deficiencies or any sort of underlying medical issues could rear up their head at this point and would need to be addressed with your doctor and then that can often see people through as well. Then there are things like oxalate dumping. Some, not everyone, will have builtup stores of oxalates and they dump this out. That can come across as arthritis. You can have crystals coming out of your eyes or your skin. You can get brain fog. You can get joint pains or muscle weakness and other sorts of symptoms as well that can sort of affect everything. Look up my video with Sally Norton and look into some of the things that could be happening from oxalate issues. A major reason people don't get the results they want when they're doing carnivore is that they may not actually be doing carnivore in the first place. Carnivore is a very specific thing. It used to be called zero carb or no carb as well, but it's meat, eggs, water, period. When you include these other things, they can cause disruptions in your body, in your physiology. They can cause excess weight gain, etc., or slow down the weight loss that you're hoping for. Dairy can be pro-inflammatory, can even trigger autoimmunity. And so, if you have autoimmune diseases, you need to cut that out. Maybe go to just red meat and water. Everybody with autoimmune issues will always do better on just ruminant meat and water. Dairy also has some carbs, but even when it doesn't have carbs, they generally have quasomorphines which signal the baby mammal to eat more and to store energy so that they can grow because babies are vulnerable and they get eaten quite a lot in the wild. So, it's really important for babies to grow quickly. Well, when we have dairy, that gives us that grow, store energy signal as well. But for us, when we don't have bones to grow, our fat grows and so we gain weight. This can stall weight loss and it can also cause weight gain. Artificial sweeteners also do the same thing. So these keto treats and carnivore treats and things like that are really not a great idea because even though they technically don't have carbs, they still have chemicals that you don't want in your body. These artificial sweeteners have been shown to raise insulin which is the fat storage hormone and can cause and trigger weight gain. We see this sometimes in patients where they eat artificial sweeteners and their insulin goes up and they get reactive hypoglycemia where their blood pressure actually drops quite quickly because of that insulin response. Also, just because artificial sweeteners don't have calories like sugar does, even if it didn't do anything to your insulin, these are still chemicals that you're putting in your body. We are not combustion engines. We don't burn energy for fuel to keep us warm and move an engine. We are chemical factories and these chemicals go in our body and have chemical reactions. Arthril, which is also called monk fruit sugar, is now being associated with higher risk of blood clots. So, that's not a great idea. Stevia, which is a very common sweetener used even in things like electrolytes that a lot of carnivores use, has been shown in animal studies to reduce fertility rates in rats by 55% compared to controls with just one serving. This shouldn't be a surprise because the stevia plant that this comes from originally from South America has been used in South America for over a thousand years as birth control. So, we shouldn't be really surprised if this messes up your reproduction and possibly your hormones as well. A lot of times when people say they're doing carnivore, really what they're saying is they're just eating a lot more meat. And that's great. That's the food that you need. Those are the nutrients that you require, but other things can cause harm. And so it's really important to get rid of these things. And if you're ever having a problem, you're not getting the results that you want, or maybe you're not losing weight, or maybe you're gaining weight, first and foremost, get rid of everything besides meat and water and see how you go. the last several years and really going back further, people have tried to disparage a ketogenic diet, saying that being in ketosis is a stressed state can cause cortisol dysfunction and thyroid dysfunction. This is patently false. There's no evidence for this. In fact, the evidence in long-term studies in ketogenic diets actually show no rise in cortisol and no damage to the thyroid. In fact, in hospitals, in modern medicine, we use ketogenic diets to actually calm the negative effects of high cortisol levels from things like Cushings disease and other pathologies that cause high cortisol. So, if a ketogenic diet made high cortisol higher, that would be a really bad idea to put someone on a ketogenic diet if they had Cushings because that would make it much worse. But, in fact, that's what you use to treat this. As far as thyroid function is concerned, I have hundreds of patients who have come in with thyroid dysfunction. They've improved their thyroids. Many people have Hashimoto's, which is an autoimmune disease. That's the number one cause of hypothyroidism in the Western world. And all autoimmune conditions that I've seen respond very well to a carnivore diet. So, people's thyroid functions improve. Also, you're removing all the plant toxins that can cause thyroid dysfunction. There is an entire category of plant toxins called groitrogens that cause goiters which is a damaged dysfunctional thyroid generally large. That's what what why it's called a goiter. These grogens can block the uptake of iodine into your thyroid and to all of your cells and cause thyroid dysfunction. So you eliminate these things out and thyroid function can improve. You're also going to improve certain nutrients such as zinc and selenium which are required for the conversion of T4 into T3. And quite often when you see someone who says, "Hey, my T3 is slightly lower and I'm not converting." It's almost always from low zinc and selenium. People understand about selenium, but they don't remember zinc is also required to convert T4 into T3. Then when we check these levels of zinc and selenium, usually people check the serum levels and these are not accurate. You have to look at the red blood cell levels, what's inside the cells to get an accurate depiction of what your levels are. Also, the reference ranges we use are just averages for the community and the average person in the community is sick and malnourished. So, that's not a very good average to look at. And so, you have to look at optimal reference ranges to see if you fall in the right range. Also, some people say that their thyroid might be an issue. Again, it's not ketosis because we have studies spanning years showing no thyroid dysfunction in human populations on a ketogenic diet. However, some people overdue organs. Things like liver can have a lot of vitamin A. And while you're unlikely to get a a lethal dose of vitamin A that causes serious harm, even slightly high levels of vitamin A can cause suppression of your thyroid. So if people are having thyroid function reduction, that could be a reason why, too. But here's one of the most common reasons I'm seeing people say that they're leaving carnivore, and it goes into progression something like this. They're not quite full carnivore. they might be using a lot of dairy because there are a lot of videos out there with recipes to make carnivore interesting so people can have some variety and they almost always use a lot of dairy and again dairy can cause weight gain. It can cause increased inflammation and that can cause problems for some people especially if they're consuming a lot of it. So for people who haven't been told that dairy should be avoided especially when you're trying to lose weight they might find that this is causing problem or even weight gain. Then there's been this trend saying that if you're losing weight on carnivore, you should go really lean or maybe just go lean in general because animals in the wild are pretty lean. I did a whole video on this showing that that's completely untrue. And our ancestors actually ate a very, very highfat carnivore diet. We were hunting mammoths. We're hunting whales and we were keeping the fat. That was very important. Native Americans made pemkin from the buffalo that they killed and they mixed that the fat and the lean. They got 2 g of fat to 1 gram of protein, 80% calories from fat. So, in no way were our ancestors eating lean meat if they didn't have to. But some very influential people with large followings have been pushing this lowfat carnivore approach and it makes sense to people who haven't thought about it or haven't been told about it. And so they say, "Okay, I'm going to go low fat." Well, that's a problem because fat contains essential nutrients, not just energy. And in fact, if you're eating very low fat, you can actually get something called protein poisoning, where you're getting too much protein that's getting converted into ammonia and then ura, and it overwhelms your liver's ability to turn ammonia into ura. As you get high ammonia levels, it's actually make you quite sick and you can actually die from this. People in the Louiswis and Clark expedition who were not eating enough fat, they were actually dying of protein poisoning. This was called rabbit starvation. And yes, one of the symptoms of rabbit starvation or protein poisoning is rapid weight loss. So people can lose fat very quickly. And so in these crash courses, I guarantee you'll lose this much weight programs. They can actually do this, but they're doing it at a cost to your health. And so people are getting very sick. They feel awful. They have terrible energy. They're losing their hair. And their health is really suffering. This is because they're getting protein poisoning. And then people tell them that, "Oh, that's all comes from being in ketosis, and that's such a harmful, stressful state." So they say, "Okay, well, I'll add back in carbs." And sure enough, they feel better because now they're not having protein poisoning because they're getting more of their calories from something besides protein. They could have just added more fat and had a better result because they were going to be still in ketosis and they were going to be getting the nutrients they needed from the fat. In fact, most people are finding when they have a weight loss stall and they're doing strict meat and water, they find that increasing the fat actually helps push them through that fat stall as well. This is because once you raise your calories from anything besides protein up to around 90% you get your protein below 9% you trigger a hormone called FGF21 which increases lipolysis or fat burning by 400 extra kilo calories per day. So this is where the sugar diet comes in where you're just eating copious amounts of carbs and sugar. And sure if you get your protein down low enough you will trigger FGF-21 and you will trigger more lipolysis so you can still lose weight. But if you do it with fat, you get the same trigger of FGF-21, except that you're not poisoning yourself and harming yourself from glycation or protein poisoning on the other side of the spectrum. Also, studies show that when you're in ketosis, so you're not having carbs, you're using fat instead, that this actually triggers a 350 point increase in your basil metabolic rate. So you're burning an extra 350 calories a day just for doing nothing. And on top of that, you trigger an extra 400 kilo calories of lipolysis from FGF-21. Doing this with carbohydrates may get you the FGF-21, but it's not going to get you that extra 350 point increase in your basil metabolic rate. So you get 400 instead of 750 if you do it with fat. And also you're getting a lack of nutrients, a lack of fat, soluble vitamins, minerals, a lack of essential fats, and you're also causing massive amounts of glycation by adding in all that sugar and carbohydrates. So that's just a brief rundown on some of the reasons why people are calling it quits. But a lot of it comes from just not actually doing carnivore in the first place. Most of these issues will have reasons behind them or someone will have an experience before and they say, "Hey, I went through this. This is what I did and this is how you get through it." When I work with my patients, I take it for granted that there is a solution somewhere because this is our evolved diet. So why would it not work for everyone? Put it in a different context. Call this what it is. This is the optimal human diet. This is the optimal nutrition for humans. Or as my friend Dr. Ken Barry says, this is the proper human diet. Can the proper human diet work for all humans? It really should. Can the proper human diet help if you want to lose weight? Yes. Can the proper human diet be safe if you have kidney issues? Yes. Can the proper human diet be helpful in all these different situations? Of course, it can because it is optimal nutrition and optimal nutrition is optimal nutrition. So because I work from that angle, assuming that there is a solution and something that we can change and improve to get them the results that they want and should be getting, I don't give up on this and I keep looking and keep testing and keep trying to find out what's going on until we find it and then fix it. And because of that, I've had a very good success rate with my patients. I have not seen them have these health issues that people are describing and I have not seen people quit in the ways that some influencers are talking about now. If people want to quit carnivore or keto or whatever, that's their business. Everyone's entitled to do what they want and they feel is best for their body. But the problem is that some of these people are saying this will happen to you. This is a stress state and this will make your life worse. No, it won't. Even if there are a few people that are having issues, that doesn't mean that tens of millions of other people who are not having issues will have issues down the road. This is scaring people off and it's scaring people off from even starting in the first place which is not okay because sometimes this is the only thing that might actually save these people's lives. Then you hear a lot of people talking about biochemistry in ways that really shows they've never actually studied biochemistry saying that glucanogenesis puts your body in a stress state and raise your cortisol even though that absolutely does not not according to the textbooks and not according to the studies in humans when they do this. Also, there are multiple pathways of glucanogenesis, but they focus on protein degradation for glucanogenesis, which is actually the last resource your body is going to use when you're in ketosis. Until and unless you run out of your fat stores, you will not break down your muscle tissue to use as energy for glucanogenesis. The main pathway is the glycerol pathway that comes from breaking down our fat through ketosis. This is happening anyway. And you have these triglycerides. So we have a glycerol backbone and then three fatty acids that come attached to that that goes to the liver. The fatty acids get turned into ketones and the glycerol just automatically turns into glucose. The glycerol pathway does not I repeat does not require cortisol. Although cortisol can elevate this process it is not required. Then they'll say well epinephrine or adrenaline this is required for lipolysis to break down the fat in the first place. Of course it's not. Glucagon is the main hormone and there are many others. Even cortisol can break down fat and cause lipolysis. But glucagon is the main hormone that causes lipolysis and triggers glucanogenesis. When we have someone in the hospital who is in a coma because their glucose is too low and their blood sugar is too low. We don't give them an injection of cortisol. We don't give them an injection of adrenaline. We give them an injection of glucagon because that is what drives the major pathway of glucanogenesis which is glycerol pathway. So often you'll see people speaking very confidently about very complex biochemical reactions. And unfortunately to the lay person this sounds pretty good. But to anybody who's studied biochemistry it's obvious that they have not studied biochemistry and really have no idea what they're talking about. So to recap most people are not quitting. In fact more and more people are joining every day and finding amazing results as you would expect. When people do have problems there are myriad reasons why this might be. And in my experience, they all have solutions that can be found out and worked around and helped so that people get positive results and improve their health and lose weight if they need to. And very importantly, being in ketosis is not a stress state. It does not elevate cortisol. And it does not damage your thyroid or any other hormonal function. In fact, adding back in carbs will raise insulin even in spikes and that insulin will disrupt your hormonal and physiological balance. And just the glucose itself, even coming in spikes and being down in an hour later, it's the area under the curve. When that glucose is up, it is causing excess amounts of glycation which damages the body. This is what kills diabetics. High blood sugar damages your vessels and everything in your blood vessels. So this is what causes damage to the blood supply to your organs. Number one cause of kidney failure is high blood sugar, diabetes. The number one cause of adult onset blindness is high blood sugar, diabetes. The number one cause of getting your foot amputated or your leg amputated is high blood sugar diabetes. And there are so many other problems that just come from high blood sugar damaging your body. So your body has to elevate insulin and get all of these other processes out of balance just to protect you from that glycation. So why do we think that adding more sugar and adding more glucose and insulin is a good idea when there is zero evidence that being in ketosis is harmful? That's our natural metabolic state. That's a natural metabolic state of nearly every animal in the world. 70% of animal species are carnivores, so they're just eating fat and protein. But then also herbivores that eat fibrous plants, which is most of them, they don't break down that fiber into glucose. It's the bacteria and microorganisms in their gut that eat the glucose from the cellulose and produce saturated fat as a result. And then those microorganisms die off and get absorbed as protein and nutrients. So even cows and gorillas are not running on carbohydrates. They're running on fat predominantly. Gorillas get 70% calories from fat, 30% from protein, very little from carbs. Cows can get nearly 80% calories from fat, 20% from protein. So, there's a lot more than I can say on that subject, but I'll save it for another video that I'm going to do about adding back in carbs and why this is a bad idea. Spoiler alert, if it rots your teeth, it's going to rot your body. No animal in nature eats food that rots their teeth because if you lose your teeth, you lose your life. You can't eat, you can't function, you can't live. The bacteria in your mouth that grow on carbohydrates are actually the same bacteria that rot your teeth and cause cavities. Your oral health is a window to your overall health, especially your cardiovascular health. And so any food that rots your teeth, causes cavities and decay is obviously not what we're designed for or what is most beneficial for us. Thank you everyone. I hope that was helpful for people to give you a little bit of confidence is if this is something that you'd like to try out. Again, no one cares what you choose to do with your own life if that's your choice. But you shouldn't be made to feel concerned that you're damaging your health by doing this because you really are not. I've had so many people who are having great results on carnivore message me saying that they're worried that they'll have health issues down the road even though they're not having any now. So just listen to your body. If you're getting better and you're feeling better, then don't worry about what anyone else has to say. But this will hopefully reassure you that being in ketosis is not harmful and you do not require carbohydrates. Thanks everyone. We'll see you next time.