How the Carnivore Diet Completely Healed My PTSD | Chad Myers

I felt hopeless I felt broken I just felt like this was going to be my life and my goal is to tell them you are not broken you are not hopeless there is a way out and if you're listening to this and you're a veteran the guy there is a way out there is hope and it's beautiful on the other side and you're probably going to be better off after this than you were before you went in the Army what would Dr Anthony chafe's prescription or recommendation be for somebody who feels like they're trapped in that situation I would definitely tell them they're not trapped you know this isn't a problem with them they're not broken their brain's not broken it it's just welcome to the plantree MD podcast with Dr Anthony chaffy where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically hello everyone and welcome to a very special episode of the plant-free MD podcast I'm your host Dr Anthony chaffy and today I have a very special guest uh Mr Chad Myers who goes by combat carnivore combat. carnivore on YouTube and Instagram here to tell us his story Chad great to see you thanks for coming on thank you so much for having me and uh we were talking a little but before I went from being like one of your biggest fans to like hanging out with you uh this weekend this past uh two weekends ago right in Wyoming and then you guys were so welcoming and then coming on the channel so thank you so much for having me it's awesome it's surreal yeah well you're very welcome it's a pleasure uh it was great to see you Wyoming I was I was an unexpected surprise it's always good to see um everybody that shows up to these um conventions and conferences and things like that because it's just yeah it's just a nice you know it's nice to see the talks it's nice to um learn from all the different sorts of speakers but it's it's also a really good social event because you get to meet a lot of people there as well so it was absolutely uh great to meet you there so yeah well thanks for coming out yeah but the testimonies blew me away I was like my eyes were watering I was trying not to cry when I was listening all these people just talk about um I don't know if you remember that uh elderly gentleman right he was like in his late 80s and he was talking about how he's like crippled on the floor every single night and bad arthritis he's like now I have a six-pack and yeah that guy he like touched my soul but it was just so cool to see so much healing and so much power in the movement of carnivore in one place so that was really awesome yeah that was really good hopefully next year it'll be uh even bigger they're trying to do new things they're rented out like Fairgrounds instead of just the the university and um uh the rumor is they're going to try to get like a full full Rodeo going so that that' be pretty pretty cool if they can do that that's cool it was already cool for me because this is like my whole life now like I've even considered like getting into farming just because I see that the industry is like hurting and yeah like it's changed my I used to work cyber security you know I thought that was going to be my whole life's career and I just like my whole life has changed because of carnivore so yeah it's interesting yeah very well you know to that end you know can you tell us a bit about yourself and and your story 100% yes I'm so excited to tell the story to people not because well I am excited because I healed but excited to speak to I think there's so many disenfranchised men out there in the world and we've learned that through like people like Jordan Peterson you know uh speaking out and as I've joined carnivore as I became a carnivore and join like this community I start to realize the reason why it's not only a narrative going on but like a poisoning of our society so um let's back up kind of like when I was younger I was completely healthy like in terms of I was like mentally healthy physically healthy athlete could do whatever I wanted um I remember when I was like 17 I think I was 16 or 17 I worked salmon fishing in Alaska you know like getting on these tiny little planes and figuring [ __ ] out and then I went to uh Hawaii oneway ticket when I was 19 and I was just kind of like this free spirit and then uh I joined the military and something happened to me in the military uh it's a long story it's to say it's unorthodox way I almost almost died and uh I went into anaphylactic shock and then they had to hit me with a EpiPen and I I ended up being okay and I was like w that was a close call but something happened to me after that where I started to slowly spiral downhill and I started to get all these problems and some of the worst problems were like this this panic attack this panic disorder that just wouldn't go away and I I got to the point where I was having these uh panic attacks frequently throughout the day where it was like debilitating where I felt like I couldn't move it felt like I wanted to die and it kind of stemmed from this phobia that my throat was going to close up like when I almost died while I was in the Army so it was like a weird PTSD thing and uh that led to this anxiety that the next panic attack was going to happen and then it became so crippling that I started having panic attacks while I was driving and I almost got into accidents while I was driving I felt like I was going to pass out and so then I stopped driving and then I was this grown ass man like having to get rides to work and then it got even worse to where I didn't even want to be alone like being alone because I I had this irrational fear that my throat was going to close up and no one was going to be able to like save me or I was going to hit my head on something or I don't know it's just completely irrational and that led to all sorts of other problems uh phobias and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse I went from being like this young adult that could do anything he wanted at any time to having this brush with death to just being like mentally crippled and then in addition to that uh the brain fog was so debilitating that I used to beg and actually pray for an hour of Mercy like an hour of mental Clarity please just give me an hour of functioning like a normal human being and that kind of was like when it started to get more suicidal like I wasn't actively like putting a gun to my head but I was like I wonder if I like stepped out in front of this car you know like different creative ways of dying where my family would still get my life support or my my life insurance rather and uh on top of all of that I was going through horrible physical symptoms like um I was a Jiu-Jitsu athlete and I would get overheated and panic while I was trying to work out doing anything so I stopped working out and stopped doing Jiu-Jitsu uh I would get about four to five times a week like acute flu like symptoms where it felt like somebody injected me with the flu and I was like throwing up massive migraine couldn't function digestive issues everything that you can think of from the head to the toes it felt like just horrible pain and it was weird because like once I would either throw it up or it come out the other end then it was like the symptoms relieved themselves within like 20 minutes it was so weird and I went from Doctor to doctor to specialist to specialist and I know you don't like them but I went to a chiropractor and I went to a chiropractor just desperation and they're like yeah we specialize in this kind of stuff and he put me on this weird meal plan with like that was cost thousands of dollars and I didn't have that kind of money you know back then so anyway like it was just non-stop and that happened for about 10 years um and what was cool is during that time I started to recognize that my diet was affecting all this where before the doctors will tell you you were crazy I would go to these doctors I'm like I'm pretty sure it's like my diet and they were like no it's probably psychosomatic go to The Specialist and you know was in my early 20s mid 20s with Scopes going in and out of me you know what I mean probably two times I want to say in my 20s trying to figure out what was wrong with me and they kept saying like you look healthy but they said I had like inflamed like infl but overall they're like you should be a clean bill of health and then I started seeing that my diet started triggering my panic attacks I I started appro I was uh going to school for Math and physics at the time and so I was trying to approach it scientifically I was like okay I'm going to limit my diet to unfortunately it was like rice and broccoli and then uh I started experimenting with all these diets and started researching diets and that's when I started getting into um this kind of like research realm of diet related to nutrition and mental health because 10 years ago that wasn't anywhere at least it wasn't online you know like as as uh an you know just a normal guy typing you how to heal myself anxiety naturally and everyone was trying to give me drugs and they were giving me drugs um I was trying to figure out how to get out of that na more naturally you know without chemicals being added to my brain that I knew was already messed up and uh I was balancing having four kids uh being in the military Government Contracting you know the whole nine yards and uh I started to get a little bit better once I cut out all my processed foods and then so I'm like okay like there there's some hope here and uh it took a few years to eventually come across a video of Paul saladino getting his ass chewed by some ladies from the doctor show and I was like he's kind of making sense and it was the first time I ever heard the idea of an ancestral appropriate diet because all you hear about is uh like fruits and vegetables and white rice and you know lean lean chicken you know and so I started learning about that and I remember from there I uh heard this other guy talking about fasting and I tried fasting I remember in my first 3day fast it was about day two um so I get like emotional uh my brain fog was gone and I was like like in tears like is this really happening is this is this the answer out of all the drugs and all the Specialists and wanting to die and like really just not eating and then uh after a couple times fasting I saw a video with uh and I wasn't out of the woods yet because every time I ate it still got bad but I I was on the right track and then I saw a video with you and Dr saladino and it was sounded extreme but everything you were saying doctor was so like profound for me but so like that makes perfect sense I don't know why I haven't stumbled across this before and I started following all of your recommendations and it was hard at first like the first two weeks were hell but like I kept going through it and now I like I became a new brand new bill of health I went from not even being able to be alone I traveled down to Brazil to earn my black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and I own my own school now and uh I learned a new language Portuguese and you know you follow puges and uh yeah and in the heart of Rio De Janeiro like going to like the dangerous favellas competing and testing for my black belt came back you know by myself and I own like I said I own my own school I compete here and competing as a carnivore has been something else but it's like given me my life back it's given me my marriage back because that was a huge strain on my family it's given me my mental Clarity back and like every once in a while like I remember I had some cheese not so long ago and the brain fog came back instantly and I was like God I'm so glad I don't deal with this anymore and my wife started it and now she's doing great because she was struggling with uh manic depressive bipolar disorder wow and she was dealing with a bunch of things so like we were both like mentally screwed up trying to raise our kids trying to like make the marriage happen and we are both just extreme burdens on ourselves and you being introduced to you and uh like going down the route of carnivore completely just learning more and more and more saved my life and saved like I would say my my marriage in a sense to the fact that how we were really strained for a long time and I didn't know how much longer I could exist I didn't know how much longer my marriage could exist I was holding on and uh we made it out the other side and now like we are so happy it's weird like my wife and I uh she's like my best friend I don't want to do anything without her I feel like a gaping hole when I'm not with her and so uh that I know this is and that's actually like the short version of the story however this is the thing is I I got really mad I got really mad once I started to realize I've been lied to and I started to realize how many veterans are in the same situ situation scenario now I started looking up the statistics which are completely unacceptable that 22 vets a day commit suicide uh a statistic done in 2021 showed that over 30,000 veterans have committed suicide while simultaneously only 7,57 I believe is a number I apologize if that number is wrong uh had died on the line of duty so we are four times more likely to die by our own hand joining the United States military than we are to die from an enemy of the United States yeah and I was like so there there are so many men and women who served on the line of duty who are feel the way I did and I I know exactly I shouldn't say exactly but I know what they're going for through I know the feeling of being trapped and not knowing how to ask for help and when you do ask for help the only intervention method is uh you are loved the world is better with you in it here's an SSRI and that's like all they know how to do and that's so disheartening when the message that you're giving in my story you know what I mean uh is we we can find a way out without drugs without a bunch of medicines and magical cures and so yeah and so that's pretty much my story is is I started to get angry and I I I believe and this is why I want I love talking to you I believe I know what happened to me I believe I I started to I rese researched it so much as much as I could uh what what was going on in my brain what was going on with my hippocampus and my amydala and how its relationship to uh junk food and processed food and uh you know the up up regulation is that the word you would say for bdnf and uh stem cell being released and human growth hormone being released that we never get access to and so then I started researching the military diet and it pretty much says in the M it says there's no fresh food in here this is processed food and you can live on this for up to 21 days in a row and it shows the studies that I like I watched this one interview uh study shows being on junk food processed food for one week has detrimental effects on uh somebody's hippocampus and therefore depression and mental state so there I am that's that's me in the nutshell uh I call myself the combat carnivore uh because I do Combat Sports like uh Brazilian jiu-jitsu um I a veteran um I I'm a carnivore and I believe we can heal the world with Stak strangles and stoicism and I think that we can heal veterans with Stak strangles and stoicism putting them in a place I know Jiu-Jitsu has helped so many veterans already and uh I think simulating combat is a great way to start transferring those memories from the hippocampus to the prefrontal cortex in a safe environment back to that hierarchy with camaraderie and community so I think Jiu-Jitsu is like one of the three pillars that people need to rebuild themselves if they're suffering from PTSD and now I want to ask you uh more about what what you think happens in that scenario and if my theories are correct so thank you for listening yeah no thank you so much for that um I should say that I don't I don't dislike chiropractors I have a lot of friends that are chiropractors um a lot there's a lot of rugby guys that play that that go into chiropratic um like Life College give scholarships and things like that for for R um the one thing is though is that is that some chiropractors sort of putting as like a business model like like it sort of sounds like that guy did it was just trying to churn something out just trying to sell you something sell you this big diet that costs thousands of dollars that people can't afford that I don't like and I've seen that be part of some of the teaching that goes into um Chiropractics uh is that they I mean you know you you are a small business owner when you have a medical practice or a chiropractic office you know as a doctor or a dentist or whatever um so you know learning some some business acument is not a bad idea but um the the ones that I've seen um you know they try to upsell things as like how do you get return customers how you get these things going how do you convince people just basically come back three days three days a week for the rest of their life um you know you're supposed to be helping people and getting them so they don't need you I mean that's the whole idea you know that's the whole treating them forever that's like the Goldman Sachs standard is it is it really a good business model to cure people from disease no we want to we want to treat the symptoms so that we perpetuate so we have a customer for life um and so some chiropractors I've seen sort of go that other way where they're just trying to they're they're just using people's illnesses as a as a you know a profit model and I and that's what I don't like um and uh but some I've seen they do really well a lot of like Physical Therapy stuff help rehabbing injuries and things like that you know I don't think that you can cure um you know major diseases by adjusting the spine you know just my opinion but you know um I think that there are there all help helpful ways but I just don't like the sort of the unscrupulous business practice that some of them get into um so just all my chiropractic friends out there just don't get don't get hurt by by that um but you know I think it's I think it's really important you know what you pointed out there was that you know the treatment modality we had is is that you know it's like hey you know you're loved you're important in this world those are all good things and here's an SSRI depression it doesn't come from an SSRI deficiency you know and diabetes isn't a metformin deficiency you know these are things that just can can paper over some of the symptoms but it's not it's not fixing the problem it's not getting the underlying issue and that's so important to to point out and and to have you know clinicians understand that as well but also just people you know if you're looking for a solution in your life it's a a pill can help and and some people do get helped by that significantly and I know people that have said that you know those sorts of medications I mean I've even heard people say that you know they were very suicidal and that Prozac saved their life and that they probably would would have killed themselves if Prozac hadn't come out when it did so that's great um but it's not addressing the underlying root cause it's just helping with the symptoms hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products there will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10% off off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25% off total all right thanks guys and may I ask a question about that of course sorry I didn't mean to interrupt uh but f as as far as my research went to look at this and this is one of the major questions I want to ask you uh it said that what was it 40 to 60% of the people who takeen SSRI uh see any effects from it and upwards of 30 to 50% only 30 to 45% or 50% I can't remember but as low as 30% feel remission or actually see remission of symptoms who take ssris and that there is enough of a percentage that it turns people more suicidal or increases their depression that they actually have to put the labels on both the adults and the children's uh anti-depressant bottles so I I was like is this really out of the last 23 years for veterans this is the best intervention method that they've come up with is are the numbers I'm saying are do you resonate with those numbers or am I was I reading an incorrect study no I think that's probably right you know I'm not I'm not in Psychiatry so don't know all the those specific numbers I would have thought it was probably a bit worse than that actually you know in in psychiatry in general mental health in general the whole gamut of different mental health issues um it's usually about 10% get um like full remission with standard of care so that's really not good and you know you get like another 40% that gets partial Improvement and then like 50% that just get treatment resistant you know sort of forms and so you know obviously there's going to be some variability within all the different sorts of things and you know schizo effective disord is going to have different sort of outcomes than than you know major depression but uh no it's not good it's not good at all and so I then that's clearly that's clearly showing you that it's not that's not the underlying cause the underlying cause isn't that you have a serotonin uh imbalance and you need to rebalance it with these medications that um that allow higher you know serotonin sort of effect um or all these other sorts of things so it's not you know we think of this this this um chemical imbalance in the brain well maybe but why is it there in the first place you know and that you know well it's genetic well no because they weren't born with it you know they they it they developed it over time and so and and even with genetic issues when you have these concordance studies with uh identical twins and they have the exact same genes you know and one twin has a disease it's called penetrant sometimes they only have you know 40 or 50 or 60% of the time their other twin would get that disease as well so the same genetics and yet only sometimes will they get the same diseases with those same genetics so it's it's uh important to realize that it's a it's a you can have genetic predispositions and then environmental triggers and if you don't get the environmental trigger it doesn't matter if you have the genes um if you need both and if you get the environmental trigger and you don't have the gene then you doesn't matter either so you have to have both for a lot of these things um and so it's not it's not being C caused by just the lack of this pill you know because these these rates of of mental health issues and depression and schizophrenia and all these sorts of things are going up they're going up and up and up especially since the 80s and 90s they've gone up significantly since then and and that's change our diet yeah that I was gonna tell tell you about that it because you talk about this a lot then you and I have a a generational Gap right like um so my mom for example my mom's an immigrant from Panama right she moved here uh and my grandma when she moved here with my mom and my mom was younger uh she had always cooked her own food had you know the organs and and uh the innards and stuff like that and everything she ate was like grown from her own vegetable you know garden and that's I think I find that very interesting because my mom didn't cook for me at all really she was not about cooking it was like what happened in the 80s and 90s where it was like were women working too much where it was like and this is General I know it's but it was more about convenience it was like that that generational Gap like right when that hit where it's like well fast food is really easy as we're running around different sports trying to be a mom and be a you know a boss and so on and so forth do you think that there is like uh that's why it started happening to us 80s and 90s kids like the right there is when that that cultural shift happened as well where women went from cooking everything and being very connected with like nutrients and you know I don't know being part of the food making process to the convenient side of things I think definitely it has has a big part to play that a lot of things happened sort of at the same time they were vilifying meat they were vilifying fat and they sort of said Hey fat makes you fat that makes gives you heart disease all that sort of stuff so we just started dropping fat started dropping animal fat I should say and and reducing red meat and then what do you replace that with you replace it with plants if if meat's bad for you you have to replace with other things and especially red meat fatty meat so we start eating a lot more chicken but like lean chicken breast with the skin off and we ate more fruits and vegetables ate more cereals in particular and um you know that's a funny thing you know we I found a paper from the 1930s talking about how you fatten up uh pigs uh for lard that was a big big commodity back then was lard they found the best way to fatten them up and make them grow fatter and fatter and fatter and make more lard was if they um gave them grains and that would cause them to overeat you know the carbs raising insulin screwing around with your leptin and hunger signals and dropping your blood sugar so you need to go back and eat again but then mixing that with skin milk which was a byproduct of the of the fat and the butter and cream um industry and so was like a throwaway product no one no one drank skin milk back then so they gave it to pigs and they found that that made them fatten up even more because in this in this paper it said specifically it causes them to overeat and the combination of the grains and the milk skin milk caus them to ovy even more than one of them on their own brain you just describe my diet growing up breakfast cereal that's what grains and milk are yeah exactly and chicken if I ever ate meat like that's it so you know we've been fattening Hogs with skin milk and and Grains for centuries fattening for Slaughter and and we wonder why the obesity rate is what it is we're we have like the president or the CEO whoever from uh Kellogg's Kellogg cereals going on the news recently saying well as as as times get tough and food prices go up you know you can eat you can eat you can eat cereal for for dinner it's h you don't need to it doesn't have to just be for breakfast you don't just have corn flakes for dinner and lunch and oh you can eat it at anytime a family dinner with bowls of cereal like just you know get out of here and um and that and that's what we've been doing to fatten up hogs for centuries you know and and no no no no fat makes you fat that's what it is well I'm sorry it's not and um but yeah so during that time we vilified meat we vilified fat we started eating all this other garbage increased the amount of grains were eating increased amount of uh seed oils but tripled over tripled the amount of seed oils uh we were getting um by calories and also uh sugar and high fructose corn syrup starts massively going up because everything tasted like garbage you take out the the meat and the fat from it and at the same time the food industry started making these ready-made meals and um like the the package dinners and hungry man dinners and TV dinners and all these sorts of things and they marketed them very cleverly because they because they could buy it in bulk they could make these readymade meals uh that you could microwave you know the microwave came out and all that sort of stuff and they they could make these readymade dinners um cheaper than what you could buy the ingredients and make it for yourself from scratch and spend you know three hours making this whole big dinner and um and and spend more money and all this time so this saved people money and it saved them time so it was this huge thing so a lot of a lot of women were just like and just families in general like oh my goodness yes absolutely so it all became these these ready-made meals so so people knew how to cook but then like you know your generation My Generation all of a sudden they stopped you know because your mom would have learned how to cook from her mom she would have seen her do that but then that was right when they started having these package ready-made meals that were cheaper than the ingredients were than the raw ingredients were and so it was three hours of your day back and it was less expensive so this was just a no-brainer for a lot of people my mom just enjoys cooking so she always enjoyed cooking and so she just cooked anyway she cooked every every meal and dinner that we had pretty much we almost never ordered out we almost never went to restaurants we never Uber Eats or any of that garbage you know we just just ate homecooked meals all the time and so we all learned how to cook and so we all cook now and but then you had an entire generation of people you know like your mom who said well this is so much easier and cheaper we'll do this instead and then people like yourselves and a whole generation grew up they never learned how to cook you know they never learned how to cook from their mom and now they're dependent on those readymade meals because they have no idea how to cook right and so now you got them and so now all the prices went up up so now they're not it's not cheaper to buy the ready-made meals than it is to buy all the ingredients it's way cheaper just to buy the ingredients so it was a long game that they were playing and so they they destroyed the human capital um human capital is very valuable you know it it it it makes and generates money and so if you destroy that human capital all of a sudden you know that you're less self-sufficient you're more reliant on other people so if you can just you know repair your car fix your house you know you're just a homesteader and you're just doing everything on your own you are not valuable to anybody any of these industry they don't make money off of you right because you're self-sufficient so if they make you more dependent and more ignorant and more um or less able to care for yourself well then you have to pay other people to do the work for you and so that's that's sort of the idea and and they're trying to infanti eyesee more and more people these days oh don't worry about that oh we'll take care of you oh and it's sort of nice it's comforting you know like oh someone's going to take care of me that's nice um but it's it's keeping you trapped it's keeping you enslaved that's the new slavery is keeping you a slave um to these organizations and and and governments that have taken over your personal responsibility so that you can't live your own life and now you don't know how to live your life so speaking of which like ssris right they it's not addictive due to the semantics of the word but it is you like depend it makes you dependent and you like getting off ssris is horrible yeah so not only do they break you then they make you dependent and then they give you a drug that's like a repeat customer and I was looking at the pharmace pharmaceutical companies and how much they Lobby it's like 1,00 over 1,600 employees people being employed to Lobby like think about how big a a corporation would be with 1,600 employees yeah that's just their lobbying like Department that's insane and uh right behind them are insurance companies food companies it it all makes sense that they make the laws it makes sense that they're the only ones allowed to write prescriptions it makes sense that 20 years have gone by and this is still the best intervention method for the people who gave up their life and security for our country it's it's insane to me and so I want to ask you then how does this happen with the brain so for for what I looked up because you talked to me about the mitochondria I really want you to talk about that but before like can we go like macroscopic and talk about okay when you're in places or in situations of prolonged stress it causes your amydala right to send stress signals to the hypothalamus which releases your fight ORF flight chemicals and therefore um a signal gets sent to your hippocampus to remember what caused that for the future and the more prolonged stress you go through without at the same time being able to uh replenish the nutrients or the energy or however you want to look at that with things like bdnf what happens is your amydala becomes swollen and your hippocampus becomes like uh atopy I guess like atrophy there's a word that's yeah look at the brain doctor knowing exactly uh but yeah and so what what I see here uh is it's so one is that the the process is that what we're kind of looking at um it almost almost certainly that's going to be you know a major factor it's it's hard to say exactly what causes all of these things um you know because you can get you can go look on a on a More macroscopic Level look at the the areas of the brain like the hippocampus and you know when you we see atrophy in the hippocampus is is strongly related to things like depression but also memory and and other sorts of issues and bdnf specifically stimulates the the hippocampus as well so very important for that this is why exercises is actually good for your memory is because it it upregulates bdnf getting out in the sun getting UV light in your eyes on your retina stimulates bdnf as well proper food and nutrition do as well so all those things definitely um and and looking at things from a from a macroscopic level you can certainly see those changes um but then what's going on on the microscopic level like you mentioned uh mitochondria mitochondria you run the cells you know they're the they're the called organel so they just the organs in the cell and so they're running around doing things so the the mitochondria are the they're called the powerhouses of the cell because they generate ATP which is the cellular currency um of the body but they they don't just sit there pumping out ATP they physically move in the internal C skeleton of the cell and move up and down and go to this surface area and and give energy to this little machine on the surface that shoots out a whole bunch of neurotransmitters or sends a signal down a neuron or you know tells it to um you know do its job in some other way so the mitochondria are the ones running around doing things and when they start breaking down and slowing down and U not having enough of them then those processes start to go by the wayside and when you're talking about neurons and your neurons not firing properly then you're talking about your brain not working properly and so you're going to get dysfunction I don't think that you know thinking about [Music] um you know when when you think about sort of depression I think it's I think it's more that your your brain and your body is telling you it's just like there's something wrong there's something wrong with this there's like this isn't working properly there's there's some harm being done and that's being manifested as like depression and and then schizophrenia is is a much uh more profound version of that you're actually hearing and seeing things that aren't there because you can't interpret reality because your neurons aren't registering the information coming in properly which is pretty wild and so a a big part of that has to do with the internal internal functions of the cell so mitochondria so if the mitochondria are broken and Destroy and they can't carry about these these processes properly you're you're going to get dysfunction in your brain going on ketogenic diets has been shown to increase the amount of mitochondri you have and the um increase the efficacy of those mitochondria because they turn over and recycle old damaged mitochondria um just by having low insulin if you have low insulin chronically as a as a well low as in normal then you're constantly turning over these mitochondria you're constantly turning over these older cells called autophagy but you don't have to fast you don't have to starve yourself for that that's a normal housekeeping process is just you you will be turning over these cells and these organel normally it's when your blood sugar goes up and your insulin goes up that insulin blocks autophagy it insulin goes up too high you can't access your fat stores if insulin goes up too high you can't uh turn over your old cells and your old mitochondria because it stops those actions so like I said you know insulin is a very important molecule I I stress this in sort of all of my talks it's extremely important extremely busy and so when you get your insulin down to normal levels with a ketogenic diet like a carnivore diet and you're not P pulling in all these other toxins that screw things up you can go through autophagy you can replace and recycle and upregulate your mitochondria as well but then also you're getting you're you're the benefits of a carnivore diet on top of a ketogenic diet is there are all sorts of neurotoxic chemicals that affect your brain and your brain chemistry that now you're getting rid of and I've seen so many people improve on a ketogenic diet but some of them really have to go to a full carnivore diet meat and water only before they really see full resolution of of their symptoms I would say I was that person because every single step I made made me better significantly and it's hard to admit this and I never admitted this even to my wife but I was the closest thing I could relate to it was like schizophrenic like there'd be certain times where I would hear like either like just horrible music or like like muffled talking or just weird things and that is completely gone thank goodness I was like I was scared to tell somebody cuz like they're going to put me in a psych house and you know I don't know all the all the things but I used to freak out because of that completely gone now and uh so yeah I that kind of makes sense with everything you're saying uh the my question when you were talking about that is you said there's like toxins that go in the brain I know I think I've heard you say that the brain becomes insulin resistant right and then then ketones are the only thing that can cross the blood brain barrier uh and terms of getting nutrients to the brain it is can you kind of like explain that relationship between because I try to explain that that uh dementia Alzheimer's they are calling like type three diabetes in like kind of a inal sense right but could the this PTSD because and this is why I'm asking this question I believe that humans are badass I believe that the human species was the most Alpha badass awesome people on the planet and they're to handle traumas I've like watched you know these shows where um like other animals like go through a lifethreatening scenario and they're like half bleeding and then like they just move on to grazing again and it's like uh humans had to have been the same way there's no way that like one bad thing happens and then we go out we everything was trying to kill us like the environment was trying to kill us the sun was trying to kill us the water was trying to you know like everything and those those are our ancestors our genetics just getting getting a meal just reproducing just learning something new was life-threatening and would probably cause our generation complete trauma just living one day as one of our ancestors there's no way that the trauma we're dealing with puts us out for the rest of our life one of the statistics I was going to say earlier is that out of the 8,000 veterans that commit suicide a year 5,000 of them over 5,000 of them are at the age is 50 years or older which is the opposite Trend that we see from World War I and World War II vets who had a peak of PTSD and suicidality and then they got better over time we're seeing the exact opposite which tells me that it's chronic and so could it be that like this PTSD and this chronic stress is like uh and and we talked about this a little bit at the wedding since the brain is only like 7% of your brain of your body composition in terms of mass right but takes up over 20% of the body's energy requirements and so like when you're stressed in those States could you like overclock your brain and could PTSD in this chronic stress be the fact that you have like almost like early onset like dementia because you overworked your brain and you're being fed over there nothing but garbage food in addition the military uh the military diet is tobacco you know nowadays uh the what's it called The Vaping um and what energy drinks right those are like the three Staples in the military and they're really like vending machines with energy drinks while at the same time someone's suffering mentally so could this all be related and that's kind of my question to you and that's kind of like why I think happened to me it's like something happens to you or over stresses you and you simply don't have the nutrients like you're either insulin resistant or yeah I I'll let you you dive in on that I I no I think you're totally right I mean I think about like the the the savagery of World War I it was the first time we had large scale mechanized Warfare we didn't have like all these conventions and rules like you could just do anything they were going around and going into the trenches with flamethrowers just torching people alive and mustard gas and all these other sorts of things they had bayonets they didn't just have knives on them they had a triangular sort of uh prism sort of shaped uh knife on it so that you stab them so if you didn't kill them it would leave a really big weird gaping hole that would heal really strangely and would leave them uh you know crippled and chronically injured and in pain the rest of their life that's illegal now it's against the Geneva Convention that you could do that then so you could you know you had like tanks going through for the first time with flamethrowers just just just doing horrific things to people and you know you got you know Jr tolken and CS Lewis you know professors at Oxford after that they fought in World War I you know they were in the battle of the psalm you know and in fact they had a lot of I used to call it shell shock but they had you know they that negatively affected such a large amount of people they called it The Lost Generation people who fought in that um and then you had you know the the World War II generation as well like you said there there's just a different relationship between that that PTSD that that shock of like just seeing the savagery of war and all these horrible things um and then coming back and trying to you know reintroduce yourself into just the the normal society um they got better you know it was it was hard to deal with but then they they got through it and now it's it's just sort of getting worse and worse and worse like you said it's it's it's a chronic issue it's a progressive chronic issue where it's like you've had this trauma you've had this problem and instead of being able to recover from it and get better it's just getting worse and worse and worse until you're like no I can't deal with this anymore I have to go so something's different isn't it and so I think it's I think it's definitely um something I think that that it follows the same pattern of increased prevalence and severity that we're seeing in all the other mental health issues which are only going up and getting worse and I think that it's absolutely to do with not necessarily just insulin resistance but with um with just eating processed junk food and just eating the wrong sort of food that's screwing up our brain insulin resistance sure because if you have insulin resistance and you have chronically elevated insulin you are going to suppress your your body's normal Mechanics for cleaning up your cells and your mitochondria you just are and so if you have insulin resistance you have insulin resistance of the brain a you're not going to get energy properly into the brain that's a big one and long before you get Alzheimer's because Alzheimer's you're getting this atrophying of the brain too you can actually see this on on MRI and technically you know you can't really diagnose this until you see it on autopsy or you take a biopsy or something like that but you know those those sorts of Tangles that they've um they've associated with or said were causitive of Alzheimers that study actually has been shown to be fraudulent there's so much [ __ ] in medicine and Academia and uh just in the last couple years they found that the people that made that paper um that said that Alzheimer's was caused by this these um these protein tangles in the neurons uh that they they basically doctored their their evidence and their study to make it look like that so that they could you know publish a you know you know a profound study and and make their names and get you know tenure if they didn't have it already and um and so it's fraud but you get this shrinkage of the brain you can see that on MRI you get this atrophying of the brain and so the that's that's an end stage insulin deficiency or insulin um resistance sort of things so long before that long before you've damaged the brain and and you know kept it from it's required sort of nutrients and energy for long enough that it starts to atrophy and Shrink you're going to get dysfunction and you're going to the the actual functionality of the brain is not going to be able to to work it's not going to be able to work properly because you're not getting enough energy to the brain you're also not going to get enough fats and and nutrients to the brain your brain is made out of fat and cholesterol it runs it's supposed to run on ketones and it's made up of fat and cholesterol too so if you're not getting all this fat you're taking a bunch of medications that destroy your your cholesterol metabolism you know that's that's not going to be good for your nervous system there are endless studies that in the peer reviewed literature discussing how vital cholesterol metabolism in the brain is the brain makes cholesterol it's so important for the brain to have it because your brain is made out of cholesterol that it makes its own cholesterol and that if you disrupt the normal uh cholesterol metabolism of the brain this causes very serious neurological dysfunction and yet we're doing everything we can to cause metabolic dysfunction of our cholesterol metabolism so I mean it's it's going to be multifactoral but I've seen more and more evidence of things that like PTSD responding to ketogenic diets in general and in particular the studies on ketogenic diets by and large the most successful ones that show the best the best results are ones that are actually ketogenic because something says low carb and there like yeah they eat you know um under 150 carbs a day and it's just like that's not low carb sorry that's certainly not ketogenic and um and uh and then you know so the lower the amount of carbs under 20 under 10 zero they get successively better and more successful and the ones that specify you know eating animal fats and meat those are the ones that do best I mean there are some animal studies that show that like oh well there's some ketogenic diet you know shortened teirs or something like that that was a rat study that came out recently and like when they're definitely in ketosis we checked their ketones and the fat we used was Crisco okay so fine so you gave them engine lubricant and uh and you're blaming the ketogenic diet on this I mean like I'm sorry I have some I have some thoughts um so the studies the studies that show the best outcomes are actually ketogenic and eat fatty meat so being in ketosis is really important getting the ketones in the brain ketones can reconstitute into fatty acids rebuild the structures of the brain two-thirds of your brain including the cortex is um is optimally and preferentially runs on ketones so you have enough ketones and you have enough glucose your brain will only run on the ketones unless you start dropping the ketones then you start filling up the gaps on glucose so um real quick when you say cortex when you say cortex do you mean neocortex like the outer layer of the brain yeah okay sounds good yeah yeah yeah so outward part yeah so the so the major out you know outer loes that we we use to you know think and and um make us human right it's like our separation for to make us human yeah give us give us give us our rational thought things like or sometimes sounds yeah yeah okay sorry I just had to make sure because okay sorry yeah carry on sorry I didn't mean to interrupt I just wanted to know what that cortex was yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah neocortex yeah the the outer layer the two-thirds of the outer portion of the brain um is um optimally runs and preferentially runs on ketones and um but you know not only that you need these essential nutrients you need DHA and EPA you don't just need Omega-3s that that's the thing that bugs the hell out of me is that people say well you need Omega-3s so get some flax seed no you don't need just generic Omega-3s for your brain you need specific Omega-3s you need DHA and EPA that's like saying well you just need liquids liquids any liquids are fine you know because you need water and water's a liquid therefore you just need liquids okay so vodka and gasoline are fine then that's what you need just anything liquid is fine of course not you need specific liquids you need specific Omega-3s you need DHA you need EPA for your brain 20% of your brain is DHA and so if you're not getting this from your diet and we don't really make it very well ourselves you're going to have a deficiency and your brain's not going to work properly you don't have enough you know fat soluble vitamins that come with the animal fats that exclusively exist in animal fats like D3 and K2 you're not going to be able to uh function properly uh getting up B12 B12 only exists in dietarily in meat and so especially red meat and you require B12 to uh molinate your axons and your nerves and so when you don't have enough B12 those that milin starts to fray and break down you get demyelination and you get nerve damage and there's a study out of Oxford in 200 8 that showed that people under a certain level of of B12 it was like around 330 PES per liter and down after five years they did annual MRI studies and they found that found that their brain shrank by 5% volume and the thing is is that the that level of B12 is like halfway to 2third up the normal reference range so a good half to 2third of that so-called normal reference range is it clear deficiency where people are getting neurological dysfunction damage and brain shrinkage but because so many people are deficient in B12 the re reference range is being rored to match that average because these reference ranges are not optimal so your doctor look at this go oh well it's in our range well your range is wrong your range is an average you're treating that as as an optimal range that's what they treat as long as it's in our range oh that's what we got to do so you're you're saying that's optimal that's the best you can do and if you go above that it's too high you go below that it's too low so you want to be in that range and so they're treating that as an optimal range but that's not even what it's it's advertised at as it's advertised as an average range and the average person is fat sick and malnourished the average person has critically low B12 this is why a lot of vegetarians and vegans they say well my my b12's fine I bet you it isn't because you're just going into that whole average that because everybody's deficient and so when you have low B12 you're you're going to get neurological dysfunction as well so everybody that comes into my office um that is on a whatever diet unless they've been on Carnivore and they're coming to see me to help optimize their carnivore diet they're just on a whatever diet even if they're on like really oh I try to eat really healthy blah blah blah they're all deficient in B12 all of them are sort of in that range of you know below 400 Pam per liter in US numbers Pags per milliliter it'd be sort of below 500 um they're in that sort of dangerous critical level that it's like this is this is bad this is causing harm and so eating actual meat ketogenic meat-based diet these are the these are the the diets and the studies that show the best outcomes for mental health for diabetes for cancer for all these other sorts of things it's really really important especially for mental health that you get you enough you get in ketosis you're getting ketones but you're also getting the proper nutrients for your brain and then you're eliminating out these neurotoxic chemicals that can come in plants and processed foods you know one one of the things you mentioned that junk Foods just making you know people dumber and things like that there was a study um recently in rats they put them in sort of this you know like a a big tank of water and there's just this one little platform there and it all looks the same it's like sort of this milky substance and a white uh platform so it's it all sort of Blends in so it's just it's very subtle to see they put normal healthy rats just getting their normal sort of chow or whatever which probably isn't all that great for them anyway um you know they can get on the post in you know in a few seconds you know they they they know where to go then they give the rats the equivalent of like you know just junk food processed food um with all like the the seed oils and processed carbs and things like that and um and sugars right and it and it takes them five six times as long you know and they're just swimming around they're swimming around they just can't find this little post they can't get out of there they don't know what's going on it's Dam it's caused brain damage and this is only after you know a week or two eating processed foods it's caused brain damage and I don't know if that's if that's intentional um if people are if you know people out there trying to screw with people's brains for some sort of Nefarious purpose to you know make them easier to control and manipulate you know if you're sick and you're miserable and you're just trying to struggle to maintain you're not looking at high level moves you know like you're just you're just trying to survive you know you're just going to work and coming home and feeling miserable and just trying to live your life and have some sort of happiness at some point and you're struggling you you can't look up up here what these [ __ ] are doing and and how they're manipulating politics and economies and all these sorts of things because you're like I I can barely I can barely function in my own life I I can't I have no processing power available to worry about that so I don't know if that's intentional but certainly you talk about that right like bread and bread and circus right in Rome circuses and and I mean that's talked a lot about in like the mocking J series right uh the what do they call that the Hunger Games if you ever read that it's like that to a tea but we're be coming that but uh bread and circus it's like take away the meat give us bread and entertain us and I think we are a nation that is strung out like our dopamine and our other neurotrans or other hormones that relate to dopamine we're just like constantly strung out with information and you know uh people don't like to talk about but like porn and information and food it's crazy like the three hardest things that were to come by for our ancestors was to eat to learn and to reproduce and now we can get all three in the first five minutes of our day and I wanted to ask you what would your suggestion be to Veterans who are coming back from combat and they they feel like they're trapped with PTSD and I I what not only with diet but like lifestyle like um getting out in the sun like you talked about like circadian rhythm what the M the microplastics are doing in the water what fluoride is doing in the water like what kind of I know what I've done but I want to hear what would your advice be to Veterans because the thing is I felt hopeless I felt broken I just felt like this was going to be my life and my goal is to tell them you are not broken you are not hopeless there is a way out and if you're listening to this and you're a veteran the guy there is a way out there is hope and it's beautiful on the other side and you're probably going to be better off after this than you were before you went in the Army and you talk about predispositions they they were they did a study and people who had uh uh what's it called decreased size decreased volume of their hippocampus were like 30 times more likely to develop long-term PTSD and like um so the thing is what would Dr Anthony Cha's like prescription or recommendation be for somebody who feels like they're trapped in that situation well I would definitely tell them they're not trapped you know this isn't a problem with them they're not broken their brain's not broken it it's just they're they're being exposed to things they're screwing with their body and their brain that's going to happen to anybody and when you put somebody in a very high stress situation uh seeing and and and potentially having to be involved in pretty horrific things uh and you and you're stressing them out and putting these horrible chemicals in their body something's something's got to give and so um it's not them they're not broken it's just their environment they need to change their environment and so uh even if you can't go full carnivore just get rid of the junk food get rid of the processed food get rid of the seed oils the sugars and the processed carbs eat whole food eat meat eat animal fat your brain's made out of animal fat you need those nutrients they're not just calories they're it's an essential nutrient they're essential fatty acids that you have to have especially for your brain or you get sick and die they're essential fat soluble nutrients that you have to have or you get sick and die and so these are vitally important nutrient sources that you need for your body and your brain especially if you can cut out carbs cut out carbs go ketogenic you will see your brain and your and your attitude and mental health improve dramatically if you cut out these carbs and start eating a lot more fatty meat um and if you can go all the way carnivore I would definitely do that Dr Georgia Eid who's a Harvard trained psychiatrist and was a professor at Harvard for a while she wrote a book called change your diet change your mind she goes through the stepwise progression just cut out the junk food okay now try to limit carbs okay if you can get rid of all your carbs even better and then if you're still struggling and it's still not everything that you need go carnivore she has a whole chapter on just the carnivore diet and how this can be the best method to improving mental health including PTSD and then like you say you know there's other sorts of things sleep is so important I mean sleep is everything uh that's that's how our body and our brain repairs itself and that's when our neurons start turning off and Recycling and clean up all this damage that has happened uh throughout the course of the day every minute we're awake we get low-grade brain damage and when we're sleeping that's when we repair that so it's vitally important to prioritize sleep get out in the sun like I said you know if you get sunlight in your eyes you are going to trigger bdnf brain D drive neurotropic factor which will stimulate the hippocampus and other parts of the brain to grow and build new connections uh and stronger Connections in uh throughout the brain that's of course that's going to help you exercise it's going to do the same thing going to increase bdnf it's also going to improve your hormones it's going to help regulate growth hormone which helps keep your tissues young and and under repair um in uh women it will optimize their hormones and men will optimize your hormones high intensity exercise sprinting lifting weights those are the ones that are jiujitsu exactly so high intensity yeah that high intensity shorted work yeah right I because you know I I fought uh pancre since I was a kid you know it's a high intensity you are busting your ass you are working even if you're doing your kickboxing or boxing or whatever and you're just wailing on the bag and just training you just you just go maximal exertion as hard as you can for as long as you can take a break do it again all those things are great and it's also fun it gets uh it gets your your body moving it gives you something to do and get your mind off of and away from all these negative things as well um it probably gets you into a social group you can actually start having you know different sorts of friends outside of your your normal friend group and that can be really helpful and cathartic as well for um these these sorts of things um being in the sun physically in the sun those UV light that penetrates your body if you ever took a a flashlight in a dark room and put it on your hand it glows right through that that light comes right through light penetrates actually quite deeply especially sunlight is very penetrative so the like the UVA in particular can penetrate quite deep the infrared can penetrate and um and that actually stimulates the mitochondria in your cells throughout your tissue so being in the sun is beneficial for your mitochondria as well so all of these things have a big role the biggest biggest role is going to be all the chemicals you stuff in your face every single day and so that's your food and so if you're putting in a lot of chemicals that are harmful to your body because we're not combustion engines we're not a steam locomotive we don't burn the food that we cut get in we're not burning coal for energy so it doesn't matter what the calories are calories are are meaningless into this discussion we are chemical factories that interact with chemicals we're bringing in food that are that are mixed bag of chemicals and those chemicals will get absorbed and interact in our body in in various ways and so if you're putting the right chemicals in you're going to get the right reactions you're putting the wrong chemicals in you're going to get the wrong reactions and you're going to be harmed by that so that's the vast majority of problems today just comes from that simple thing but there's more too like you said getting in the sun getting um you know out in the sun in the in the mornings getting your circadian rhythm uh set exercising in a particular way and um uh you know drinking clean water all these sorts of things with a filter on it because yeah they put all sorts of nasty stuff you know FL do you have do you have an opinion on fluoride and microplastics microplastic yeah so a lot of microplastics have been found um actually in U in uh brain tissue and in testicles every single example of like in these studies they they they um took testical samp every single uh testical sampled um out of the study on dogs dogs they all had microplastics in their in their balls you know and then then in the brain um actually just I just saw a study on this the other day I can't remember the exact amount but in the in the brain tissue they were finding finding a like a significant amount of microplastics you know like like a few like I think it was like a few grams of plastics like in the brain right so this is this is getting wild again these are chemicals that that have never existed in nature we've invented these things and now we're putting them in everything and they're getting into our bodies and these chemicals are going to have chemical interactions our bodies don't know what the hell to do with these things and so we don't know what the outcomes are going to be we found that they can be very um disruptive to our hormones as well they can they can cause a lot of um hormonal disregulation a lot of estrogenic effects um and uh and then but the reality is we we really don't know the full impact of these things because we just have no idea because they're brand new novel chemicals and they're making new Plastics all the time because they get you know like the different BPA oh it's BPA free it's it's like oh okay well it's BPD and BPZ and BPG they because they they change it just slightly and so now it's not that that one product that you're worried about but it's nearly identical and has the same effects sometimes worse and so it's just it's all a con and so don't use Plastics use natural materials use glass or ceramic or um you know Metals as well people have a problem with aluminum you know I don't know about aluminum cans but there's sometimes aluminum cans have plastic Linings which you definitely don't want all these other sorts of things so there's a lot there's a lot there's a lot of issues that and a lot of exposures that we have to be careful about um the makeup industry you know there are so many uh hormonally disruptive products essential oils and then the the makeup that that women use and the creams and I mean you just look on the back of a bottle of moisturizer 50 ingredients none of them are in English you know it's just all just weird chemical yeah none of that should be going on your skin I just I just learned about that yeah yeah like I just learned about that you never want to put anything on your skin that you want to eat yeah yeah and that tripped me out that like how absorbent our skin was tripped me yeah out it scared me now that actually brings me to my one of my last things is I just this is kind of like Vindication for me I I'm forgetting the name right now it's killing me that I'm forgetting the name but what's the process of your body going into like releasing digestive uh acids and enzymes before food even enters your body do you know that phrase I can't something phase the but it's like 20% of your stomach acid and other processes start before food even enters your body just by smelling it seeing it anticipating it and so I have been kind of on this thing about reconnecting with your food we're so disconnected from our food like when we eat whenever we touch food it's usually processed food and if we don't if it isn't processed food we usually have like a fork and knife and so we're even distant from our food from like being scared to like touch it and I think uh what would you say about the importance of like touching your food like for example maybe not using a fork and knife and being more like our ancestors and like grabbing your food and that contributing to the digestive process because digestion and the entire process of it is actually fairly like a fairly fragile process I learned I was taking the nutrition course at Peterson Academy um and uh he was getting into this about the Circadian rhythm and uh digestions role in that and how uh digestion starts before like 20% of it starts before you even put food in your mouth and so I was wondering reconnecting with your food that like it makes sense that almost every single thing that humans used to do was about their food they would study their food they would track their food they knew their their food's favorite food they knew like by looking at the ground and the grass like which way the their prey probably went to the point where they gutted it they cleaned it they preserved it um they butchered it and then they touched their food for every single process through and I wonder how important that plays a role into our digestion and separating ourselves from our food from the fact that we don't like butcher it the fact that we hardly cook it anymore the fact that we don't even touch our food or no anything about animals and starting to demonize animals to say they're like killing the planet you know I mean with greenhouse gases I was going to see if you had an opinion on on reconnecting with your food because I don't think we have a healthy relationship or almost any relationship that our ancestors like like anything that would sort of resemble what our ancestors had with their food yeah I I think that um that that probably does play a big role you know that preprandial phase where you sort anticipatory sort of you know phase where you're smelling the food you're getting ready your mouth starts watering you start thinking about these things your mouth Waters that's that's what you're describing you know your body start making these digestive enzymes and producing acid and things like that because you're anticipating uh some food so you probably do lose a lot from that you know when you're you're stalking your animal you're stalking your prey you're hunting it you're much much more in tune with it and then you you take it down and and then you were cutting it up probably does have a lot to do with that um even just the the act of cooking it probably does a lot of that you're smelling these you know the the smells of cooking you're you're sort of getting a bit more you know it's hard to not pick at the at the food that you're eating you know and sort of snack on it like as you're cooking like as a as a cook you just sort of want want to do it because you're just so excited to sort of eat it so I think that that sort of anticipation is lost when we're just sort of getting a bag and putting the microwave and then bringing it out you don't have that that sort of anticipatory um phase it's like your body's not it's like your body's not primed you know like before it was like it's getting prepared and now it's just getting food and food it doesn't like into its body without like any preparation and now it's playing ketchup yeah you know uh I just wondered if you like had looked into that if that I think that greatly can negatively impact our digestive processes yeah I I haven't looked into it specifically but it it does um it makes sense to me just thinking about it you know having that that early anticipation and you know and just thinking about it because the thing is is that every time because I do cook I do cook all my meals and I I've always prepared all these sorts of things and so I'm always um involved in making my food I'm I'm taking it out I'm cutting it up I'm you know I'm not butchering the entire animal but you know I know buy in bulk and so I'll cut up a whole big slab of meat I'll put the steaks on it and I'll take those out my hand and I'm not afraid to you know grab you know raw meat or raw chicken you know it's not icky it's just fine and um you know I think it's like satisfying almost like a satisfying feeling to touch feeling to touch the food you know yeah and it's you just sort of get over it you know I mean at first because we're just told they're like oh there's germs oh my goodness oh you're gonna get some freaking germs you're fine just wash your hands if anything but um if um you know if if I'm like driving I H I have you know just brought steak with me in the car and U maybe I'll cut it up into chunks and use a fork but sometimes I'll just make a T-bone and I'll just have that on a plate and I'll just hold it by the bone and I'm just eating that like a like a meat lollipop you know as I'm driving of going like a road trip or something that was that I just had car Stakes you know and that's what uh that's what I had um I haven't I haven't looked into you whether how much that affects it especially like the touching the physical sort of thing but I I wouldn't um I would absolutely think that just the act of cooking and having those smells and looking at it and anticipating it is definitely going to do that because I've certainly noticed that in myself to the point that when I get home and I'm I'm anticipating this so much and I want it so bad like I can't even wait for the hand to heat up I just I just started eating the steak raw because I'm like I need to eat this you know hey everyone really happy to announce a new sponsor for the show and for everybody down in Australia Stockman staks who are delivering highquality grass-fed and finished pasture raised beef and other meats flash frozen and vacuum sealed tood door something that I've been enjoying a lot of myself recently as well they also have a great range of specialty items such as high fat keto mints and carnivore beef and organs mints with liver kidneys and beef heart as well so use code chaffy today for free order of beef mints or another specialty gift Ong with your order at Stockman stakes. comom and I'll see you over there thanks guys and yeah like when you read a book they talk about how like reading an actual physical book is a lot better than an ebook because you're seeing the progression you know like as you go through you're feeling it you're experiencing it and so like that's why I was kind of asking like do you think it goes back all the way to hunting because it's like oh I didn't get the catch so I'm not going to eat later but I did get it so it's like oh you know like your body knows every single process on the way through so knows when to prepare that it's like it's so intertwined and entangled with the like your life is so entangled with the food that you eat that it it's kind of like matching in every step in a harmonious way and um but this leads me to my last question is grass-fed versus grain fed I've heard you talk about it a lot but I just want to kind of throw in a caveat because you kind of say like in the Olympics it's like grained beef is like second place it's still better than everything else right and um Gra I accid oh sorry yeah grain finish so I actually accidentally uh ran into this experiment where we're kind of like in the middle of a move and I'm shopping at a new store now rather than driving all the way across town for my butcher shop and they are grass-fed grain finished but I was only buying grass-fed and I didn't even realize I was doing it I was just getting the stuff that looked the best and uh like for the last three days I have my energy level is just like through the roof like I already felt incredible on Carnivore like my life was saved and now I feel like even more of like a superhuman like the amount of um I guess like energy and willingness and just like I know excitedness to be alive at every step is just been incredible and then I'm thinking what am I doing differently because I'm like I'm still getting outside I'm still getting in the sun I'm still grounding and then I realized like oh I'm getting like different meat and I realized all the meat I've been buying is grass-fed and so I don't that was weird to me because to me it wasn't that big of a deal but I'm I'm kind of like in a bias now that I think grass-fed might be extremely important and maybe like a missing thing do you would what do you have like I know you've talked about a lot but would you mind like kind of putting your two cents on that yeah I i' I've never felt better in my entire life than when I had a 10-year-old uh grass only cow it had only eaten grass its entire life it was 10 years old had a lot of time to to lay down a lot of nutrients and and build up a lot of nutrition and health and I felt super charged on this stuff it was like I I literally it was just like it was it was next level I and I know exactly what you mean like I felt like a superhero on Carnivore and then I had this stuff and it was just like you know I was you know I was Superman instead of Spider-Man it was just like oh my God it's just like next level superhero and so no there's definitely a difference I mean there's there's objectively a difference you have different um constellation of of fatty acids and um and relationship and and amounts of DHA EPA and Omega six arachadonic acid um but also the micronutrients you know there are regeneratively raised grass-fed and finished uh Farms that have published their results and they're ACC you know uh compared to USDA is um four or five times the number of micronutrients so there's an objective difference you know how much of does that have on overall health longterm and getting diseases or whatever you know we don't know we don't have any studies on that um for just General Health people do pretty well well they well for the studies that we have which are limited because they're not just on carnivores they're on people eating a mixed diet with you know organic grassfed and or just you know grain finish they don't see much of a difference in health outcomes um for whatever Health outcomes they were looking at for however long they were looking at obviously all those studies are going to be limited in to large degrees but there is an objective difference and I certainly felt a subjective difference I felt a lot better when I ate that um the thing is though that not everybody can do that it was a lot cheaper to get that cow it's cheaper to buy an older cow it's a CO cow they were going to just sell that as as hamburger and I wanted it as steak so they were able to get more uh for it and I I got for it less too because they they split the difference they're like hey look I normally don't make as much so I'll charge you less than I would normally charge for a a young steer but more than I would normally get and it's a win-win for both of us great how would you how would you find that like if I were in the United States how would I go about finding some that scenario so you can you can go to a butcher and they'll sort of do the leg work for you but they'll charge you double so whatever it is if it's like you know $3 a pound from the um from the farmer uh from the Rancher they'll charge you six seven bucks a pound just for you know doing the extra leg work and that's usually all and it depends you know beef prices gone way up so it's probably more now um but when I was looking at it four or five years ago six years ago seven years ago it was that was about what it was um but there are websites I can't remember the name of it because it's been so so many years but there are websites you can sort of Google around try to find it where you can find uh people that do um grass-fed only livestock and grass-fed milk and pasture raised eggs and things like that and you just um and so there's a whole website that has that and you just put in your zip code and it'll show you all the different uh ranchers that do that it's just all grass-fed and so I just called them I just called like three or four of them and just said hey I'm looking for the oldest animal that you have just had it whole life yeah yeah and u and uh and uh yeah and and that's what I'm looking for I want to look at in the stakes and and what would you be your price and so I just called around there were a few different people and they quoted me different prices and then one said yeah you know I mean we're actually going to call a 10-year-old cow from the herd in a couple months and um you know you could have that one and I was like great let's do it I ended up getting for $1.75 a pound was grass-fed its entire life has never eat anything except grass and um it was amazing it was absolutely amazing one of the things you got to do you talked about the fat right like the fat was yellow in it you're saying it's like dark yellow our Fat's dark yellow that's supposed to be yellow Fat's supposed to be yellow a lot of the nutrients in there um give it a yellow tinge and so when you're finishing it on grains and you know dead hay you know it sort of lightens it up because there's not as many nutrients and um so it's um what was I gonna say oh yeah I'm so sorry I I interrupt that's okay um you know most people uh you can't necessarily do that you know but if if you can if you can get if you can do the The Upfront cost of expenditure just buying that because it's going to cost a few thousand dollars to buy a whole cow so maybe you go into it with your friends and or family and you each get like a quarter or something like that it's much cheaper uh to do it that way and you're getting it for much less per pound but you get the whole you're going to get a lot of hamburger you're going to get a lot of roasts and things like that and it's not going to all be steaks you know so you have to you know learn how to cook and look how learn how to cook these different cuts but also um when you do that especially with grass-fed animals because they don't have the marbling that other grain fed animals do but they do have subcutaneous fat and they do have visceral fat as well and obviously they have the organs uh and the fat around the organs you need to tell them not to trim any fat off you so keep all the fat that you can anything that gets trimmed off and any of the intraabdominal fat put that in the in the um in the ground be ground beef right yeah so you get and did you live only yeah did you only live on that cow for like a certain period of time like you didn't eat anything else but that cow for like a range of time yeah that was I got that just before I moved down to Australia and then um left the rest of it with my my folks and so yeah that's that's all I ate for months months and months and months amazing how did you feel yeah yeah tell me a little bit about how you felt like no I just amazing I I just had tons of energy normally when I eat like a big stick I just be a bit lethargic and just want to chill out this was like gave me superpowers I was just like I just bouncing off the walls I had energy for the rest of the day I just I felt great and so yeah it was a big difference it was a very big difference uh in how I felt and um can you do that in Australia you can yeah um and so now I get I get meat from uh you know grass-fed finish you know pasture R sort of stuff you know the people that that sponsor me Stockman Stakes they do all grass finish pasture Ray sort of stuff and so I I order all from them so uh and it's great it's absolutely amazing you know the 10-year-old cow that's just been eating uh grass its whole life it has a different smell to it too you can just smell the different nutrients and things like that other steaks just sort of smell a bit you when they're raw they don't have much of an odor to them um this did it had it had this fresh smell it was just like just invigorating had this just made your eyes wide and you're like oh my God that just smells amazing and uh is that do you think evolutionarily because like do you think that's probably the animals we hunted it's like the Young Bucks were harder so we would like Target the older bigger one no we we we we're unlike other Predators where a lot of predators uh most Predators go for the the young or the elderly or the sick or someone that's falling behind we were able to see by the shape and the size who the alpha was who the biggest ones were and those were going to be the healthiest because they got the they got the best access to food they were the healthiest and the strongest and so we're like well that's the best one so we were actually taking out the best and so uh but yeah you know you're that smell I me you're smelling the nutrients and you're smelling um you know the different things that can be beneficial to you um and so if it has more of that or like woo there's something good there you know I think that that speaks to the amount of nutrients um Chad unfortunately I have a yeah meeting starting and unfortunately I gotta run I'd love to keep talking to you but um ran out of time um so great to talk to you man um really I'm so glad to hear that you've done so much better and changed your life and and gotten your life back as well and now you're out helping other people and spreading the message and helping other other um you know veterans and combat veterans especially because that's it's so important like you said it's it's an absolute uh just travesty that so many people are finding that their lives are so hard and hopeless that they have to take their own lives especially when they' sacrificed so much for for the rest of us so thank you for all that uh where can people find you and and see more of your work um and I'll send the link to you so hopefully it'll be in this video uh in the description but combat. carnivore is my Instagram my YouTube My League tree uh I try to make it uh the same all the way around and like I said I'm trying to help as many veterans as possible steak strangles and stoicism I have the most uh comprehensive online Jiu-Jitsu intro course ever for people who watch chill Rogan and jao willing and uh they're like want to get started with jiujitsu but they feel like a barrier I literally take people from inside their car to like inside the gym to feel comfortable so I'm trying to bridge that Gap I'm trying to talk to people about carnivore I'm trying to give them a practical life philosophy that helps guide them through the dark times like if sto ISM so that's who I am and thank you Dr chy for doing exactly what you do you're saving lives um I know you saved my life and it's was a pleasure to be on the show oh well thank you man I really appreciate that and I do hope it's helping anyway I'm really glad that it helped you so Chad thank you so much for coming on I'll put all those links down in the description and people um can find you there people you know please do go and check out Chad and see more of his Works he's doing great stuff uh thank you man really good to see you um yeah thank you have a good one I appreciate it 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 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