Plants Are Trying to Kill You! | Dr Anthony Chaffee

hello and welcome to the how to carnivore podcast i'm your host simon lewis and you're tuning in to the plant-free md series with dr anthony chafee dr chafee is a surgeon nutritional researcher and former pro-rugby player he's been strict carnivore for three years and an on and off carnival for more than 20. dr chafee looks and feels like a real life superhero if losing fat building muscle finding focus and getting the most out of life is important to you you're going to love the plant-free md series hey welcome back to another episode with the plant-free md anthony chafee and today we're talking about a topic that he's very well versed in and the topic is plants are trying to kill us so welcome dr chafee yeah thank you very much good to see you good to see you um so dr chaffee first question is how did this all start how did you discover that the plants salads vegetables that we're told are so healthy for us are actually trying to kill us uh yeah so when i when i was my first got into carnivorism without realizing i was getting into carnalism as i've said on on you know in different outlets uh it's because when i was you know 19 20 years old i was taking cancer biology at the university of washington and you know we were looking at things um you know from a cancer perspective but we were looking at plants and so forth and actually how they could cause cancer and have carcinogens naturally occurring in them um this isn't something that's that's too wild you know i learned in seventh grade biology that plants and animals are in an evolutionary arms race plants becoming more and more poisonous so less and less animals can eat them so that they can survive and thrive or else they go extinct animals becoming more and more adapted to specific poisons in specific plants so they can eat that plant and survive and thrive and other things can't eat that so that becomes their dedicated food source and also um uh yeah protects them them uh from the poisons in that plant but that doesn't mean that they have protections from poisons in other plants so they can only eat that plant as well so they can become hyper-specialized as well so we were learning this all again but from a cancer perspective looking at carcinogens and we learned over 20 years ago that we had already known about 136 known human carcinogens occurring naturally in things like brussels sprouts white table mushrooms had over 100 spinach kale lettuce celery cabbage cucumber you name it all these things had 60 80 or over 100 known human carcinogens each and they were actually quite abundant there was a professor bruce ames from berkeley who published a large paper in 1989 showing that 99.99 percent of the pesticides insecticides in a plant occur naturally in the plant as opposed to what we spray on them industrially this was because in the 1980s everyone was eating a lot more plants and people were getting quite sick and so they said well we're eating healthy we're not eating meat we're not eating you know nasty fat and cholesterol which was you know here to up to that point thought to be the only bad thing that you could ever eat and everyone was getting sick um and so they thought this must be the pesticides and so people rightly pointed out that we've been using pesticides for many many decades and had never had these problems these were new problems so how can a new problem be caused by and by a traditional use it's a good point mechanism methods such as such as pesticides so he did the research he looked at this and he found that even in the context of pesticides there were 10 000 times more naturally occurring poisons in plants like spinach than the pesticides we spread on them by weight and that the naturally occurring pesticides were far more likely to cause cancer than the pesticides we spread on them several orders of magnitude wow more likely and so it was a drop in the bucket and and this this you know sort of uh this is why we still have pesticides this is why they're still legal they were trying to criminalize them and they did criminalize some of them uh but they basically had to stop at that point because uh you know the evidence was very clear that the the plant was worse than the pesticides we were spraying on them um so we were quite blown away by this uh we we thought you must be joking i was looking around for like a ta everyone was looking out wildly just for seeing this who who's in on the joke yeah i was expecting someone in the corner just to be snickering and just like oh he's just he said he does this every year no one was and it slowly dawned on all of us that they'll get this guy serious and i was like okay well but vegetables are still good for you though right and i remember thinking that in my head and and right when i thought that he just looked at us and just gave us a funny look and said i don't eat salad i don't eat vegetables i don't let my kids eat vegetables well plants are trying to kill you so i was like all right screw plants and i just stopped eating them i i went to the store and i just only you know everything had a plant and everything had wheat everything had bread you know everything from bread wheat pasta to mixed meals they all had some sort of plant-based issue with them and so i was like right plants trying to kill me i'm not gonna buy anything with a plant so i was like eggs eggs don't have don't come from plants milk milk doesn't come from a plant meat doesn't come from a plant so i just ate eggs meat and milk at first it was very restrictive i thought it was very so i was just looking at all the things that i couldn't eat after two weeks i just didn't care i didn't even look at bread or or plant-based food as food anymore i really couldn't even recognize it there was a time where my i was living with my brother and he said oh can you pass me the bread on the counter i literally couldn't see it i'm like where where is it it's like it's right there it's right in front of you it's right by the house i could i actually couldn't physically see this stupid piece of bread and he was like you know by the back right burner of the stove directly to the right of that and i looked at it and then slowly like just popped into my my vision like a like a magic magic eye painting it was like just all fuzzy and then all of a sudden like a sailboat pops out and i was like brad i was like i didn't even realize we had bread so that that was my foray into carnivorism early on i absolutely felt amazing with that and looking back i realized okay that's why i felt so good because that's what i did at the time i didn't realize it had made such an effect on me um but but that's the thing and so you know after that i was like okay right i knew it i knew plants were trying to kill me and stay away from these stupid things now it's not that plants are trying to kill us not they have any any animosity towards this is that they don't want to die you know like any living thing they every every living thing has a natural defense you know and so while we can when animals can run away or fight back plants can't and so they use poisons and different sorts of things as a defense but all of them use poison they usually poison as a main deterrent so when you eat them it causes harm to you know the host that eats this and that deters them away from eating that plant and that's their natural difference on that point so i imagine that there is a scale of how toxic um or how damaging a plant is so for example if there's a certain part of the plant that it really needs to protect i imagine that's going to be more toxic like the seeds and then if it's you know if they're trying to spread something like buy the fruit i imagine that's going to be less toxic can you kind of expand on that yeah yeah exactly so you know as i've said you know many times the way i look at it is everything everything defends its baby more than anything and a seed is a plant's baby and so that's where you'll find you'll generally find the highest concentration of toxic elements is in the seed because it does not want you to eat that uh now people say well well fruits are fine because the plant wants you to eat the fruit not necessarily it wants something to eat the fruit right but how many berries around the world do we know will just kill you out right you know that don't eat the red berries like this is something that we know traditionally uh when you're foraging and so forth you stay away from certain sorts of things like red berries you just don't eat red berries that's a that's a typical sort of thing and there are red berries that you eat like raspberries and things like that but by and large that's a rule of thumb if you're just eating random random ass berries and indirect woods you don't eat the red berries so a berries of fruit a berry has a seed the berry wants something to eat it does it but not you okay and the cassowary bird are very good example of this they live in the tropical areas of uh places like australia and they eat fruit that's what they eat but they the kind fruit that they from these tropical trees will essentially kill anything else they're highly highly toxic but the cataract has no problem with it that's because there's this symbiotic relationship between the cassowary bird and the trees because casserole bird are the main germinators of those those uh seeds and so if it doesn't pass through the digestion of a cassowary bird that seed cannot turn into a tree and so if the category bird were to leave that area or become extinct those trees would all die off as well and so there's a symbiosis between those two species so yes the tree wants something it wants the cassowary bird to eat its fruit but it doesn't want you to eat the fruit because it's seed won't germinate if you eat the fruit and so yes and and for us specifically because we would come from a herbivorous background eight million years ago we still have some defenses we have uh the agricultural revolution was about eight thousand years ago for certain areas agriculture you know came up independently and sorted in seven different areas and the earliest version of that was about 8 000 years ago and so those the descendants of that uh people have some more defenses against these sorts of things so yeah some things are worse than others as evidenced by the fact that if you get lost in the woods and you run out of food you can't just eat any random plant because most of them will make you very very sick or even kill you you know the movie into the wild was very yeah i was thinking that when you mentioned the red berries yeah exactly so so that's a very good example of that this kid was out in the woods just living off the land great but he you know picked the wrong leaf and he picked something that is not edible and edible meaning that it's not as poisonous as other things and you can survive on it for a time and he ate the wrong thing and he died you know it was very sad but this is this is a very typical thing there were big books about how to forge them what to look out for most of the things out there you cannot eat most plants will kill most animals or at least be very harmful almost animal kill them at a certain certain uh to a certain degree you know if you eat enough of it um but yeah there's a ton of different ways that plants defend themselves this is very basic botany there are different ways that plants defend themselves or a lot of really interesting ways that they defend themselves but they all use uh poisons as far as i know i i ca i can't i've never been told or heard of a single plant that doesn't at least use some sort of uh chemical deterrent um to dissuade at least some species so this is this is something that's very abundant and there's so many different examples of this lectins are a very good uh example of this is something that you know people know about being what are lectures yeah lectins lectins are a carbohydrate-based protein that that exists in most plants uh there are some animal-based lectins as well but these don't seem to cause any any problem or harm when you eat them but the plant-based lectins do they cause a lot of harm these likely evolved to defend the plant against things like fungus or insects but because there's a lot of very different very similar mechanisms molecular molecular and cellular mechanisms between all life and it's certainly animal life that you know there's crossover and we get damaged by these things as well lectins are very interesting lectins come in combination with other things that are in plants such as gluten so like wheat germ and gluten and this is something that you know people talk about with celiac and so forth and then it became very invoked for everyone to have celiac even though almost no one had celiac but they weren't actually far off base because gluten actually just causes harm to anyone whether or not they have full-blown celiac so gluten uh you know buys different areas in your gut and can actually break the tight junctions between your cells and actually physical openings between your gut lining and yeah and so this is called leaky gut and so bacteria and things like lectins which your body would normally not absorb can pass into your systemic system and then cause all sorts of havoc gluten is also 80 of the protein in wheat is gluten gluten can't be used as protein bias we don't actually break it down we don't absorb it it just causes harm and so this this sort of plays into what we've talked about before with uh the bioavailability of plant source you know nutrition they say oh look look at all this protein that's in wheat yeah you can't use 80 of it okay so that's not really helpful and it's causing harm so when you're eating things like you know gluten and so forth you're getting leaky gut this allows things like lectins to get into your body these things they combine in all sorts of different things because they're or carbohydrate-based protein they can bind carbohydrates very very easily um they can also bind insulin receptors so you know even people in a ketogenic world that have eliminated carbs and sugar they can actually still put on weight and and retain fat because they're eating things that contain lectins and lectins bind to insulin receptors insulin is obviously forces energy into cells it doesn't allow to come out of the cell so it makes your body store fat and doesn't let your body use the fat and there's been studies have actually shown that uh different lectins can actually bind insulin receptors tighter than insulin itself and so it actually stays down longer and has more of an insulin-like effect than even insulin itself and so you can get quite a lot of weight gain from eating lectins especially when you have leaky gut it gets into your system and eliminating these sorts of things from your system all of a sudden people lose a lot of weight i certainly noticed that i was just eating just vegetables like you know spinach kale broccoli and just meat and just just by dropping the spinach kale and broccoli i lost 10 kilos in 10 days and so you know it was just just came right off me and i was eating more calories i was eating much more meat i started eating a lot more meat a lot more fatty meat so i probably couldn't topple my calories but i lost 10 kilos okay and so that's that's uh that's that's likely why and also you know the different sorts of you know water weight that i would that would have been storing as well from the inflammation in those plants so it can also block leptin leptin is something that we've spoken about before which is released from your fat cells and go up and tell your brain how much energy you have and so lectin can bind to the leptin with the p receptors and and make them yeah and make them uh insensitive so now you're now you're getting you know you get like peripheral insulin resistance so your insulin doesn't work well on the on your body now you get leptin resistance um and so now your body can't now your brain can't recognize the leptin so it thinks you have much less leptin than you really do it causes you to overeat and so we see this in mice models that when you block the leptin or give them lectins that that cause leptin and sensitivity they gain weight quite significantly and if you knock out leptin in in mice they just eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and they just they can't stop and they just they just balloon up just like humans um yeah exactly yeah and so you know and that's the thing because when you you know insulin blocks left in fructose also blocks leptin and so it's like you don't have any leptin this is what causes you just to eat and to eat and eat it causes you to overeat because you can't your body can't actually tell you when to stop your body can fully control your portions and caloric intake but not if it's uh eating the wrong thing that's screwing up the mechanism there have also been um studies actually showing that that keeping isocaloric intake so so same calories you have two groups and both are given the exact same calories but one knocks out leptin that group that knocks out leptin loses weight even though they're eating the same calories okay so how would you do that how would uh how can you sort of either knock it out or knock it or not knock it out knock out the leptin you mean just just remove it from the diet yeah so you should you give them the same same same calorie intake okay slightly different food one that doesn't doesn't have uh lectins in it right and then the foods that are high in lectins yeah so well there's a ton of them right so you know like beans kidney beans red beans all these sorts of things these these are very high in lectins uh like cassava melons no sorry not cassava milk but um that's that's um cyanide but um there's tons of different sorts of things beans are very very typical for these sorts of things wheat and so forth soy uh as well can have lectins all there's a lot of different most plants will have lecture erotic and this is another good reason to just not eat plants at all is because of electives and there's a ton of other things as well lectins are just one of them you know that was one of the things that you know dr gundry got very right he talked all about in the plant paradox book that he wrote we talked all about lectins and how harmful these things were but then his remedy for that was to take a pill designed by him that blocked lectins as opposed to recognizing that this is this is a natural state for plants to defend themselves and that lectins certainly cause problems and blocking those lectins is great but there are other things that cause harm as well and so gundry i think missed the bigger picture there just an understanding that just problem plants in general yeah exactly have a lot of defense mechanisms lectins being one of them but there are more and so you know he was saying he's still pushing that people should eat plants and so forth but just you know along with his his uh medication that that blocks lectins fine but there are other things that cause harm as well besides lectins it's not just that um but that that's the thing with with leptin so that's really interesting because it does all that but it's also so it you know tracks obesity and so forth but it's also been shown to be implicated in parkinson's right so this is a really weird one because it can actually track up your vagus nerve vagus nerve comes down it's one of your cranial nerve it's your 10th cranial nerve it comes down um into your gut and it regulates a lot of different sorts of autonomic functions in your body and your gut you can have problems with this and for various reasons they can get them severed around this the level of the stomach and it's called the vagotomy so this has been theorized that you know lectins can track up and get into your brain cause damage to the area of your brain that secretes dopamine thereby causing parkinson's which i think most people are aware of is a very very debilitating uh issue and very very hard for people to live with um so the idea is okay if this is tracking up the vagus nerve then cutting the vagus nerve and stopping that direct channel you know should reduce people's uh likelihood of developing parkinson's and in fact someone did that study they looked in denmark and they looked from like 1977 to like the mid-90s or something like it was like a 20-year span looked at every single patient that had a vagotomy for whatever reason and looked at their incidence of parkinson's they found that there was something like a 67 reduction in parkinson's uh for this for this cohort okay and actually since then people have found actual mechanisms actually have actually tracked lectins tracking up the vagus nerve actually getting into the brain and causing damage so we actually have you know causative studies as well so lectins do this as well also cause are implicated in autoimmune diseases so a ton of different autoimmune diseases a lot of them are when autoimmune disease is your body all of a sudden starts attacking part of your body as if it were a foreign object or a pathogen and so it's called anto auto antibodies auto meaning that they attacked yourself so a lot of thought is uh put into this and and it's thought that the mechanism of this is is likely to do with what's called molecular mimicry so if you have an infection or some sort of virus or a bacterial infection or or exposed to something your body you know mounts an immune response to this and makes antibodies to this pathogen or foreign object that are similar enough to parts of your body then those antibiotics will then now attack on to that part of your body and start binding to that and once your body gets sensitive to something it sniffs on something says okay that's not a response to this this is tracking and they make more and more sensitive antibodies to that and get more more and more specific for that and so your body can really knock out uh these parts of your body and really attack yourself and cause a lot of harm um so we've actually shown that you can have molecular mimicry when your body attacks these lectins because these lectins are essentially foreign bodies they're they're alien to your body they're not supposed to be there and your body can mount an immune response to them and so you can actually get this molecular mimicry from these lectins to then start attacking your body and there have been studies showing that people that remove lectins and remove these sorts of plants they actually reverse their autoimmunity issues and and what we call it putting being put in a mission you you have this sort of issue and it can come back but these people are put in remission um you know for months and months and months or even years there was a study um that that went on i think it was for about two years so low sample size was only like 15 people uh 10 of these guys went into complete remission and stayed in remission throughout the entire duration of the trial and reduce their different markers of auto antibodies uh significantly absolutely you know massive massive decrease now this was a there's a smaller sample there's a smaller study only 15 people so you know it's not really powered highly enough to uh be you know academically conclusive but it's very interesting and it's something that you know certainly deserves larger studies and you know this is directly what we're seeing in practice so people that go onto a carnivore diet um or even a ketogenic diet where they're very careful about what they're eating they significantly reduce their problems and then when they go from the keto into carnivore they it steps it up even more they are just eliminate their autoimmune issues and this is what you know we've seen with you know dr j salisbury we've spoken about before who was curing c-u-r-e cure a you know autoimmune diseases such as crohn's rheumatoid arthritis ulcerative colitis and so forth so that he was doing that in the 1800s and we were doing this for decades and decades and decades until we all of a sudden you know said yeah red meat is bad for you and got rid of it but you know people are rediscovering this and you know i certainly have a lot of patients that have had significant improvements with it you know like you know people um are reversing things that heretofore thought would just this is a permanent condition this will only get worse you'll be on tons of medications you'll have a lot of surgeries and you'll never get rid of this well they're getting they're getting rid of it and they're getting off all their medications and so forth so it's um it is quite significant just just removing these sorts of things and lectins play a big role in that as well it's kind of it's it's interesting to sort of focus like we are now about the things like lectin and the toxins in plants because often we we kind of talk about the benefits of cutting out carbohydrates um primarily to do with the becoming more insulin sensitive and also you know not storing that um energy as body fat on your body but to actually really focus on the chemicals that are implants that are doing the damage is is it an interesting kind of different a whole another reason not to eat them yeah well that that's my whole argument with it with the ketogenic crew is that you're eliminating sugar and carbohydrates which is great i fully support that but it's there are other things that are bad you know we focus we get quite myopic uh as people we focus on one thing and this is the thing and then we forget about everything else there are a lot of things going on in the world and so we focused on cholesterol that was the problem that was the end-all be-all so everyone just got rid of cholesterol got rid of fat so forth so you're eating you're seeing entamons and candy fat free candy and it's like okay um that may not have fat in it but it's definitely not good for you even if you know fat weren't actually good for you which it is then ketogenic sort of came in and said okay carbs carbs that's it as long as it doesn't have carbs it's fine well no not really you know there are more things there are thousands and thousands and thousands of things and lexans are a major one of them there are tons of different kinds of lectins and they do different things in your body gluten itself like i said causes leaky gut leaky gut can cause a whole bunch of problems because actually let bacteria into your body those bacteria depending on what it is um you know can cause problems there's specific types of bacteria that are found in the gut that can have what's called lipopolysaccharides and these can bind to your toelite receptors getting a little technical i won't get too technical but it binds your total light receptors that's important and it increases uh you know that it's activating of that receptor and that causes a significant cascade which causes a lot of inflammation in your body so these little bacteria get in your body and then they cause huge amounts of inflammation through the total light receptor uh there are other other bacteria that actually suppress that so like bacteroides family actually uh block the toilet light receptor and reduces its uh output so that actually is uh anti-inflammatory as opposed to pro-inflammatory and you tend to get more bacteroides and so forth in your gut when on a ketogenic or carnivore diet and so you know even if you did have a bit of leaky gut you would actually be a bit more protected from that um gluten itself and we'll sort of get back to the toilet receptor later but i just want to talk about you know gluten because gluten can cause leaky gut but it can you know cause other issues as well and and you know we've actually seen a connection between gluten consumption and type 1 diabetes likely through this you know lectin pathway that we discussed earlier and there was a there was a study in denmark i believe was like a hundred thousand pregnancies and looking at what the mothers ate and they found that the mothers that ate more gluten gluten containing foods their kids were twice as likely to develop type one diabetes which is again thought to be from you know molecular mimicry uh first we thought it was like you know like virus you have sort of sort of gastrointestinal uh issue and then two weeks later also you're just dropping weight you can't put it on you're thirsty all the time you're peeing like crazy and that certainly does happen and we do see that um but you know it's we do see this connection with gluten and lectins as well so the the process there dr it's like the um the mother's got this damaged gut from consuming too much gluten um potentially like leaky gut or what have you or what's the actual process do you think that's then causing their children to be unwell oh probably lectins letting things in through the leaky gut you know because if you're eating the more gluten that you're eating you're causing more uh break break down those those tight junctions and you're allowing things like lectins to come in lectins come with gluten you know because there will be lectins in whatever food contains gluten as well and that cause harm in the body when you eat these things if you're not genetically adapted to dealing with them so night shades are a classic example potatoes tomatoes eggplants peppers these things are highly toxic they uh you know all night shades produce solanine solenoid is deadly poisonous 70 people a year still die from eating potatoes you can look it up and that's because you know as i was told when i was a kid you have to store potatoes in a very uh specific way you have to hide it under you know in a dark cupboard or a cellar because if it's exposed to light it'll it'll turn green if it turns green you can't eat it it's bad for you what does bad mean it means it's poisonous that's what it means it's making more saline and that solanine will kill you or it starts growing a root you can't eat it when it grows the root or you have to cut out the entire eye you can't just cut off the the root part of it you have to cut out the whole eye that's growing the root or you just throw the stupid thing out just to be safe because it happens a lot it grows roots quickly yeah exactly and so you know that can kill you and so people that don't know that or don't take it as seriously or maybe uh you know just cut off the root and not take out the whole eye or so forth they can get seriously harmed from this and again 70 people a year die from eating just potatoes so you know belladonna tobacco these are all night shades as well these things have have horrible poisons in them that are very very harmful there are a lot of different things that plants can do you have toxins which cause direct damage to the eater you have hormone disruptors that screw up you know it's a pretty self-explanatory screw up your hormones uh nutrient blockers these make it difficult for your body to absorb the nutrients you're eating so you maybe you're eating you're looking on the pack and saying i'm getting these nutrients no you're not because you're actually getting those blocked by the different things that are in that food there's photosensitizers to make you sensitive to light there's you know cyanogenic foods as well that when you eat these things it crushes and it releases cyanide cassava melons are a very good example of this but we also have almonds so almonds have a small amount of cyanide in them but it's not that small because one to two pounds of almonds you know 400 to 800 grams of almonds is a is a lethal dose of cyanide in an adult okay and we just give this stuff to kids we sell it at stores without age restriction which i think is wild you know um bitter almonds which are like when you crack open a peach pit there's like this shriveled looking almond that's called a bitter almond one or two of those will kill you that has that's that much cyanide in them cassava melons yucca these things are traditionally eaten in tropical areas and impoverished areas they're a main staple of the diet cassava melons are the third most important source of calories in in tropical areas they have so much toxins in them if you don't prepare these things properly you'll just die and people do die still to this day when they don't prepare them properly and even when you do prepare them properly but you're eating this as a staple of your diet long term you get serious thyroid issues neurological issues very serious neurological issues from eating these things long term because you're still getting low-grade poisoning the whole time even though you've prepared it in a certain way that you're knocking a lot of things and people talk about lectins are heat sensitive and that's true is at a certain temperature you can knock out these lectins but not all of them and how many things do we we cook uh you know to fruition you know i mean we're not we're not cooking cereal for example now you have the processing of that some time to use heat and processing but not always and they don't always use enough heat to knock out all the lectins so breakfast cereals and so forth commonly have a ton of lectins oats people eat like muesli and so forth just the cereals and so forth just eat the grains the whole grains and these things are just having you know raw unheat-treated um lectins and and many other things as well and so it's very dismissive and i think ignorant to say that oh you can just you just cook it it'll be fine you'll cook everything and you know and not everybody knows that there was you know you have like like red beans kidney beans things like that you have to soak them for like four or five hours and then you have to boil them for at least 10 minutes um if you don't do that these things can cause serious serious harm to you you can you can be extremely sick when you eat these they're very very toxic um and that's from the lectins the lectins are just so so prevalent so you know there's toxins that can cause damage to your metabolism or structurally you know it can damage your you know gut lining can cause uh you know actually leave your gut in tatters as has been described as this tears apart the gut lining supposed to be in insects to try to eat these these leaves and just tears into shreds and you know we think about leaky gut that's sort of a toned down version of this but when your guts just raw in pieces obviously it's not going to be barrier protection it's not going to be able to stop the the invasion of these these different sorts of elements into your body that your body doesn't want um you know we think about things like you know hemlock right waterhemlock is one of the most poisonous plants in north america what how this kills you is it is it's a neurotoxin so it it's a is a gaba receptor antagonist so an um you know antagonism blocks it stops it from working right gaba is one of the molecules in your brain that sort of slows things down okay and you have to have this balance you have excitatory molecules and and things that sort of reduce that excitation gaba is one of those things and this can make you calm this can make you peaceful and so forth but if you don't have it you you get too excited when you get too excited this is called a seizure and all of the cells in your brain just fire off at once and you get into a massive seizure and hemlock water hemlock can block that gaba receptor to the point that your body cannot inhibit these excitatory signals and you'll die from seizures within minutes your brain your body cannot stop them so this is quite serious you know it can also like you know things like um cyanide can can block your respiration you get too much of this stuff you can't you know you know move uh uh oxygen into your hemoglobin properly because it's it's bound up and this kills you you can't actually move gases throughout your body so this this screws your respiration and it kills you um hormone reset hormone disruptors there's a ton of different things like that i've spoken about before like phytoestrogens and soy people don't realize this they talk about all the hormones and meat i still get this to this day i need to do sort of a video or post on this but people talking about um you know what i don't want to eat all these meats because they have all these hormones in it and yeah maybe but yeah but they give them all these growth hormones and so forth and and it changes their hormone panel and i don't want that in my body well first of all you have to realize that they give these hormones early on in the cow's life so that they can grow right there's no point in giving them a medication that costs money the day before they're processed and then have that in their body so this is this is out of their system you know long before you ever come across it but people have looked at this and found that if three ounces of lean untreated beef has about two nanograms of estrogen in it and then a hormone treated uh cow three grams of lean meat will have about i think 3.9 nanograms so that's and so people say there's twice as much estrogen in that and that's technically correct relative to not much yeah exactly because you know it's technically correct it is double but put it in context because you know a fertile woman makes about 150 to 180 000 nanograms of estrogen a day so increasing that by two really not changing too much cabbage three ounces of cabbage has 400 nanograms the birth control pill has 35 000 nanograms right there's different kinds of birth control pills some have more or less but that's that's an average um and then people who don't realize that things like soy three ounces of soy have uh over one million nanograms of estrogen okay so you're talking about 20 times the amount of estrogen in three ounces of soy than the birth control pill and and this can be this can be uh easily demonstrated by the fact that there are doctors and different supplement companies that recommend soy supplements and eating soy for post-menopausal women because it sort of replaces their estrogen it's almost like you know hrt hormone replacement therapy um but again you don't know exactly the dose you're getting you're getting all the other crap that's with soy so is this really a good idea but in the same breath people are then saying oh you know kids should eat soy too soy's really good um i'm sorry you're using this medicinally for a postmenopausal woman who doesn't make estrogen now you're giving this to kids and you're giving them their like soy protein soy based formulas and so forth for babies that's that's honestly i think that is um i think that's child abuse honestly yeah the most important formula yeah and and so you know giving this stuff to kids or even recommending the stuff to kids any doctor who does that i think needs to have you know take a class in botany and uh and then if they don't really get the lesson they should they should probably lose their license because that's uh that's causing serious harm you know hormones are most have the most dramatic effect in development and so when you screw up a kids hormonal signals when they're that young you have you have changed them for life and you have really caused serious problems for the rest of their life that they will never recover from fully because you develop to a point and then that's it your static and you can be you can optimize your health from there but you have developed into x and you will stay x whereas if you didn't have those influences you would have developed into y and so that is a permanent that is something permanent that that you do to children i don't think that's that's right it's quite bad um but yeah i mean dr can we talk a bit about the nutrient blockers because i know people will look on the back of a packet or they'll google you know how many nutrients are in a certain fruit or vegetable uh but the the reality is that these nutrients aren't as bio-available as they are when you're eating animal-based foods um so like you know the classic example i think is when people buy vegan protein so they look in the back and they think if i have two scoops of this i'll get 30 grams of protein but how much of that protein are you actually absorbing um and how much of it is just coming out the other end yeah the answer is not much you're not not absorbing much of that and we see this in various studies looking at you know the fecal content of people that you you see the plant-based proteins come out the other end just like you're saying or people with stomas where they have a disruption of their bowel for some reason and they have a bag that comes out and they just measure the contents of that they find that people that eat animal-based proteins they absorb almost all of that especially if they're not eating fiber though they will absorb basically all of that because the fiber disrupts how your body absorbs food that's another you know way that plants are not your friends is because the fiber actually disrupts and blocks your body from from absorb from digesting breaking down and absorbing things so that's a physical barrier uh to your your absorption of these nutrients and and the plant-based proteins a lot of this stuff comes out so you know you think about you know gluten you know as you say you know gluten you know coming from wheat gluten has is 80 of the protein in wheat but gluten can't be used as a protein so 80 percent of the protein in wheat is unusable so it'll say 30 grams of protein and how much of that are you getting you know a few grams maybe so it's very different and so uh the bioavailability of these things because we're just told it contains you know this this mineral this element this nutrient and so forth this amount of proteins it's not true that doesn't mean that that's uh first of all there's a difference between crude protein and an actual you know functional protein crude protein is just the amount of nitrogen that exists that's not necessarily nitrogen in the form of protein because protein has an amino group that has the nitrogen in it that's what makes it a protein but they just measure the amount of nitrogen not necessarily the amount of nitrogen in proteins so crude protein is just all the nitrogen that's in there and there's quite a lot of nitrogen in sort of plant foods that that have nothing to do with with protein so that's another thing as well um the different sorts of nutrient blockers um that specifically block nutrients um there are things that that are like enzyme inhibitors so they they don't allow your body to uh break down certain sorts of things so so this would block different different uh proteases and lipases uh from breaking down protein from breaking down fat so that you can break it down into a smaller form so that you can then absorb it so it blocks that stops that so these things stay as big protein molecules and now they're they're passing through they can get to your gut and your and your gut biome can eat them and you know all the arguments on you know animal protein causing a problem because it gets your gut bomb well the only reason they're getting to your gut biome is is if you're blocking it from being broken down and absorbed in the first place so if you don't eat plants you're not going to have those types of bacteria anyway because we talked about you know the bacteroidetes and different sorts of of bacteria found in the gut you have you have an optimal gut biome when eating keto and especially carnivore and if you're not eating all these plant-based sorts of things in the first place you're going to absorb all of this so these are going to block proteases and so forth which would make so they're indigestible and you can't break them down you can't absorb them soy has a lot of these um which is uh kind of interesting when you're talking about you know soy protein as a major supplement and so you have you know soy can actually block proteases so you eat a bunch of soy protein and and just the inherent nature of the soy you know unless they unless they're very careful about eliminating the stuff out of them which i doubt they are that's going to stop your body from even utilizing and breaking down the soy protein so even if you were going to doing the opposite of what you want so yeah exactly yeah and so you're going to get basically none of the soy uh this is soy yeah you're just going to all the crap that you don't want and it's perfect exactly yeah well that's the thing you know eight glasses of uh soy milk a day is enough estrogen to grow breasts in a man um and so if that's not what you're going for you might want to avoid soy and especially from the soy lattes yeah exactly and yeah if you're you know you're lactose intolerant and you want to put milk just don't just don't just forego you know you don't have to put milk yeah exactly just don't you don't don't drink it at all you don't have to drink any of that crap you know and you know just because you call something milk doesn't make it milk you know if it didn't come from a mammal it's not milk you know i was like you know the famous say from abraham lincoln he was dressing congregation people and he said if you call a dog's tail a leg how many legs does a dog have and everyone said uh five they said no four just because you call a tail a leg does not make it a leg we have to live in reality just because you call something you know something else doesn't actually change here in nature and so same thing we pro wheat proteases um protease inhibitors these again do the same thing where they're blocking protease and that protease cannot break down your proteins that you're trying to eat so you can't absorb them but these also going back to the total light receptor wheat protease inhibitors actually can uh stimulate uh the total light receptors as well and so this actually develops another inflammatory cascade so this is it's not just blocking protein absorption that this is causing a problem too this is also causing huge amounts of inflammation and problems in your body which again can dysregulate you know dysregulate your immune system and and um uh has been implicated in autoimmune dysregulation as well so again playing into the autoimmune issues also um one of the ones that i find very very interesting are the photosensitizers when you're eating you know different plants generally you don't see this in plant animals in the wild generally you see this in in pastures animals that run out of food because of neglect or some other reason and they start eating plants that they normally wouldn't and they get problems and so there are different plants and different leaves that they can eat you know you see picture this on the internet um you can probably put a good lecture from a botanist professor of botany and texas i think was very interesting and shows a lot of pictures of these talks about the gets into the more of the details on everything i'm talking about not everything i'm talking about some of the things i'm talking about um and one of them is these photo photo sensitizers and so these pictures of like you know sheep that got into that got into this thing their whole face is swollen up and burned and cracked it's very nasty to see um but there are just simple things in our in our food supply like limes and celery there's a thing called celery dermatitis that's an actual medical condition people that eat a lot of celery or handle salary pick celery work with cellular and don't wear gloves and so forth this stuff can soak in their skins or obviously if they eat it and this causes them to be very very sensitive to uv light and so their body is not protected anymore and you get horrible horrible burns so they have to wear hats gloves sun cream all over their body long sleeve shirts they get a little bit of exposure they get horribly horribly burnt and you know i haven't seen too many very tan vegans you know and this is again i think probably part to do with that that they burn very easily in the sun first and foremost to do with the the photosensitizers but also to do with the increased amount of inflammation they have in their body causing uh more harm when they get skin damage as opposed to being able to heal that limes are also a culprit but specifically the oils on the outside of a lime a lime is an unripe fruit really we pick these things green and we like the taste of that when they're green but a green fruit unripe fruit means that the seeds aren't ready yet either so the the plant really doesn't want you to mess with it and that's generally when you find a lot more chemicals and a lot more toxins is in an unripe fruit uh like tomatoes green tomatoes these things these things can cause serious harm um especially when you're just eating these regularly you know that's why you know folk wisdom would tell us that you don't eat green tomatoes green tomatoes or poisonous and the right you know uh they have to vine ripen to get those out of there so uh limes same category so the seeds aren't ready to go yet and so they don't want you to eat it so one of the barrier protections are these oils on the line so if you're handling lives picking limes without gloves and you're out in the sun you can get horribly burned there are there are many um uh medical cases of people getting second degree burns from sunlight after handling lines actually happened to my younger brother when we were kids and we had a lime tree in our backyard in southern california and he was out there sort of picking limes and just being a little kid and all of a sudden came back and he was just covered in horrible welts and and red wheels and things like that we thought this was an allergic reaction we thought that he was having an anaphylactic uh sensitizing reaction and that the next one was basically just gonna kill him he'd just explode with histamines um so we kept him away from from the laundry later on he was able to eat limes and use limes and you know drink coronas with limes and so forth and we just figured well maybe just got over that that allergy but looking back on it that's that's almost certainly what happened to him he had this this um reaction to the oils in the lime that he and he got a bad sunburn from it specifically from the skin rot of the lime yeah from the oils that are secreted from the skin yeah so you touch on that and you can kind of feel there's the on lines and so there's a bit of oils on there that gets in that soaks into your skin and then you get very very sensitive to light not just in the area that it's soaked into but systemically it gets into your whole system and so any part of your body that's exposed to sun will get will get much more sensitive to light and in enough high enough doses and exposure to sun you get you know second degree bursts second degree burns are very very serious burns um so it's not just a bad sunburn it's a it's a it's a medical it's a serious medical condition when you get to that to that point of second-degree burns and then of course you know all the different plants that use cyanide so there's like there's over 2500 different plants that use cyanide and this is you know quite evidently a [Music] protection against predation because they're bound up but when they're crushed then they release cyanide so basically something starts eating it and crushes it and it destroys it and all of a sudden it releases all of this all of this um cyanide into the into the you know whatever's eating it uh that can stop your respiration and and kill you in high enough doses and then like i said you know there's almonds bitter almonds um but cherry leaves like cherries in the cherry pits there's a bunch of bunch of them but in the leaves there's a ton of these things so you know like a if a branch falls off into a pasture farmers and ranchers are very very careful to get those away from the cows right away because they can you know kill your cattle um you know sorghum grass so there's actually different kinds of grass and cows eat grass but they eat specific kinds of grass and so some grasses are actually harmful and there's some of these um that you have to sort of keep your cows away from or try to get get it out of your pasture if that sort of grass gets into into it um and then cassava and yucca and so forth uh can can do all that and now sort of jumping back a bit you know people say like well you know asia people in asia eat soil all the time and they all really like it well you know first of all how healthy are you know is the average person in in asia first of all because you know the average height of a population denotes the average health of the population you have the mongols you know with genghis khan mongol horde we were saying last time on average six foot four on average okay so now the average height in in mongolia is five foot six and china is five foot eight okay but we know that humans are supposed to be on average six foot four okay so they're not exactly all that healthy necessarily anyway so that's not a very good argument because you're not saying as much as six foot four you know bad ass is eating a bunch of soy or at least you know developing on soy and then becoming a big you know six foot eight monster but the thing is is that they actually don't eat all that much soy they're only as much soy as people uh like to think they do um and they usually generally use it in you know things like soy sauce and different sorts of seasonings and condiments and so forth that use soy it's not necessarily just eating a bunch of just pounds and pounds and pounds of soy and when they do they ferment it okay so they've been fermenting soy which can break down [Music] some of these harmful uh components in soy to make it make it safer to eat and so forth so it's not as cut and dry as well asians eat soy so therefore it's good for you you know there's there's more to it than that a they're not all that healthy anyway b they're not eating as much as you think see they're fermenting it which changes things so eating just a block of raw tofu not a good idea edamame not a good idea not in any real volume anyway interesting yeah edamame is a very popular little entree and cafe in restaurants at the moment yeah yeah very good yeah um all right well you've put forward a very strong argument for why it's not worth eating plants and all the different damages that we can do or that can be done to humans when we do eat them is there anything that you want to end on or anything you want to kind of ram home dr chafee yeah i think i think the main take-home is is that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of different ways that plants you know do protect themselves and you know i like to say that you know plants are trying to kill you and and they are insofar as you're trying to kill them by trying to eat them um so if you don't try to eat them you know they're they're not going to cause harm to you they're very beneficial obviously we have we exist in an ecosystem with plants are very beneficial in a lot of respects but they are living organisms they want to stay living organisms and if you eat them they die and so they will defend themselves just like anything else and you know more power to them they should so that's the main take home is that you you live and let live with plants and and you'll be fine and that there are much more than just one thing we can't be myopic and just say oh lectins oh cholesterol o carbohydrate or even you know i i rail against you know sugar and fructose and so forth which are very very bad but they're not the only bad thing they are one of many many things that don't help us live optimal healthy lives and but you know you don't have to know all the different ones you don't have to know why they cause harm and all the different sorts of details on it all you have to know is donating plants we're not designed to eat plants we're designed to eat meat and these things have harmful components and if you just stop eating plants you'll you'll do much much much better and and even even some things you'll say oh well coffee is not all that bad well this isn't that bad and i'm just doing a little bit yeah you're right you know you cut out 99 of the plants that you're eating you're going to be way better off than almost everybody else on earth but you know they are still going to be causing harm they aren't they are going to prevent you from living optimally and i think that that's something that everyone should experience at least once in their life do it for a few months and just see what you think i personally am never going to go back i love how i feel i love feeling the way i do all the time and so i really don't have any inclination to not feel like that especially for you know vegetables like my god i never want to eat those things anyway you know so you know it's just something i think everyone should try and just go pure pure pure at least for a month or three months you know ideally and then see how you feel you know me personally i took that and i just ran with it my parents the same way my mom's a big foodie she loves cooking these different things she literally has over 500 cookbooks she's read every single damn one of them she loves cooking she loves different kinds of food and she was doing this for a month with my father to support him because he wanted to try and it significantly helped him help his parkinson's as well dramatically and she at first was was really not liking it and she wanted to cook different things she wanted to eat different things she was getting very frustrated with it but after a month she saw how her her blood sugars were doing and how much better she was feeling and she was losing weight and feeling better and better and better and she said well you know i kind of have to keep going with this my blood sugars are so well controlled and in fact i'm actually coming off my my medications to control my blood my blood sugar and after two months she was off pretty much all of her medications and her hba1c went from 8.9 which is very high down to 6.9 which is the upper limit of normal for non-diabetic so she just said okay i just i just have to keep doing this so even my mom who really didn't want to do this she's really against this you know she's now been a full carnivore for four years because she just feels so much better and she's just so much more healthy and i think that that's something that that everyone should at least experience once and see for themselves and then just decide for themselves if that's that's the way they want to live certainly is the way i want to live yeah amazing that's really well said um just to reiterate what dr chafee said if you get 90 of the way there and you do something like keto you eat minimum plants mainly meat you'll feel amazing and as shape you said you'll feel 99 better than everyone else but if you want to experiment with strict carnivore doing a full month or more where you can really find out how you feel when you're operating at 100 and you don't have any of these things holding you back it's certainly worth experimenting and you can always introduce things in after or you can continue to go hardcore street carnivore like dr chaffee so yeah that's that's really i think that's really insightful yeah well and that's something that i've um i've said before is i think the you know the last five percent of going pure carnivore you know gives you about 99 95 of the benefits i i really have i've found that in myself and in my patients they get so much improvement but then when they just really drop that those last couple things the artificial sweeteners the coffee you know the little treats here and there um that all of a sudden they just go i had no idea i i just i just feel so much better i just feel amazing and it's just such a little a little thing we don't think that it's gonna cause that much problem but it really does disrupt a lot especially artificial sweeteners it's like jesus just get rid of all of those things um and and you get you get so much more benefit out of that just by eliminating that last little bit and i've certainly noticed that you know myself and with my patients i haven't quite cut out the coffee yet i still have black yeah yeah that's a tough one for a lot of people but you know literally every single person that i talk to um and you know i've sort of railed against coffee a few times um and a few people say like you know i'm gonna give it a try i'm just gonna you know cut out coffee as well in a couple weeks like oh i i had no idea i i just had no idea it was screwing me over that that i feel so much better my energy levels are so much better i just feel fantastic all the time so glad i got rid of coffee and we think it's a little counter-intuitive because you know coffee gives you energy right not really for a little bit yeah and then you feel like crap and then you eat more yeah exactly but it has other things in it too you know so if you're going to do it i would you know i'd really just get a caffeine tablet you know but you're going to get caffeine which is what you want and you're not going to get 150 000 other chemicals that exist in coffee as well and again coffee's a bean bean is a seed seed is plants baby so there are a lot of things in coffee that you really don't want besides the caffeine you know caffeine is a neurotoxin that was actually i was actually talking to someone the other day who um had uh you know serious epilepsy and was having had had serious seizures and so forth uh all their life and they went ketogenic to sort of combat this and they were actually able to come off a lot of their medications and they they decided to go sort of full carnivore they're still drinking and you know i feel yeah then they they cut out coffee all sorts of things and then they tried coffee as well and had some caffeine it kicked off their seizures again so they're like okay stay away from that thing and you know not everyone's going to have epilepsy not everyone was going to be um subject to that however it's not going to be good as this person pointed out so it's causing seizures in people like me you know it may not cause seizures in you but it's certainly not going to be good for you it's doing something serious to your body yeah if it's and if it's showing up severely in that other person susceptible it's still affecting us somehow yeah exactly we just we just don't see it as as readily as they do but it is it is causing issues and this person was saying in their view um you know that that that caffeine was a neurotoxin because it screws up your brain to such a degree that people that are prone to epilepsy have seizures which is trust me you don't want yeah that makes sense well if if you want help going street carnival send him dm to uh to myself or dr chafee and we'll help because as we said it's worth doing it's worth experimenting with you never know how good you're gonna feel absolutely awesome all right dr chaffee thank you so much um plants are trying to kill you you nailed it that's absolutely in your ballpark and you and you hit it for a second home run either or um great thanks a lot man good talking to you