Preventing and TREATING Dementia, and living past 120!

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 everyone welcome to another episode of the plant-free md series with dr chafee today we've got a really special topic which we've touched on a little bit but haven't gone to depth on it's alzheimer's and dementia so uh dr jayfee welcome hi thank you for having me thanks for being here um all right this is a really interesting topic because uh it's terrifying for me and i'm sure for everyone else the thought of losing our minds either prematurely or even just losing our minds full stop because not everyone goes um kind of gaga before they before they pass away and you and i have touched on on a few ideas about alzheimer's and nutrition before it'd be really cool to dive into that a little bit more um so i mean where do you want to start maybe we can start with kind of a low down on what alzheimer's and dementia are so yeah well i mean there'd be sort of two types of uh two two different things but you know alzheimer's can cause a type of dementia dementia would just be a neurodegenerative process where your brain is just physically uh or functionally uh devolving so it's not as efficient and effective as it as it was and it'd be for a variety of different reasons one of the reasons obviously is alzheimer's you can also get this with parkinson's and other neurodegenerative uh issues the the ones that that uh are are pertinent to this discussion would be the ones that i believe are reversible or at least preventable and partially reversible uh through diet and lifestyle uh at a certain point damage is done you you can harm yourself and that can sometimes lead to permanent damage but you can certainly reverse a lot of that and i've certainly seen that in in patients and family members and also there have been studies that looked at a high fat ketogenic diet as a treatment modality for alzheimer's and that actually showed better better results than every single alzheimer medication that's ever been trialled so that's certainly something that can be influenced by this now can you reverse all the damage you know not in all cases but it's certainly going to improve your situation dramatically and then there's just other other forms of dementia people can just slow down over the years we see on mris and ct scans when we're looking at patients for other reasons uh you know the brain of a of a young healthy person it you know it's very full the skull is full of brain and you have ventricles which are the hollow portions inside the brain that your cerebral spinal fluid is created and flows through and these are very tight and small generally in a young healthy brain because they're just full of brain then when you get older and older you see older and older brains those spaces open up wider and wider and wider and you know this is because the brain is atrophying and it's just like if you have muscles that are just just slowly withering away your brain does that as well but you know so you can have someone who doesn't have dementia per se but their brain is not the same as it was when when they were 35 or even 40. so that's that's a big issue and i think that a lot of that has to do with diet and partially to do certainly a lot to do with what we're eating but very importantly what we're not eating everyone's going you know whenever whenever you get into the in your 40s and you have a couple kids you think oh i need to protect my heart i want to you know be there for my kids and my family so they go on a low fat you know supposedly heart healthy diet and everyone starts getting problems their blood pressure starts going up their uh you know their coronary calcium starts going up and they start having more and more problems and this is and then their doctors generally say well well this is because you were eating all those steaks for the last you know 20 30 years well no because they weren't having any problems when they were eating the steaks they were actually very well and very healthy then when they stopped doing that they got a lot worse and so you have these people in these these elderly care communities and so forth i see it in the hospital all the time we have the dietary guidelines and recommendations for our patients and i've actually emailed the hospital and and the health network multiple times saying like well look you know i think there's there's some significant flaws with this all pushing high carbohydrates even high sugar and low fat low meat sort of diets and i see these people basically eating sugary cereal and candied bread and these people are in hospital and he's like and i just look at that and it's like that's why they're in hospitals because they're you know they've been eating this crap inside yeah and so you know the main thing with with eating a low fat diet and why that affects your brain is because your your brain is made out of fat and you know and you know 70 of your solid components of your brain are lipids fats 20 of those are dha and so and then you have epa and all these sorts of things that don't exist in plants that you can't get from plant oil certainly how seed oils all that rubbish and so you need to get this from animal fats they also have very long chain fatty acids 20 and 22 chain fatty acids and these don't exist in plants and we don't really make them ourselves they're very inefficient and ineffective at making them we have to get this from our food source and so if you're not getting them from me you're not getting them and your brain is deprived and so you cannot maintain your the structure the physical structure of your brain because every minute that we stay awake we get low-grade brain damage and as your neurons are firing they actually damage themselves and this is why we need to sleep this is why we need to shut off this is why our brain cycles which neurons are firing at a time people used to say like oh well you know we need to like that movie limitless you know you need to do this and it'll activate all your brain at the same time right baby yeah that's called a seizure when all your neurons are firing at the same time that's actually what that is fantastic yeah exactly yeah and i haven't heard too many people say that they were you know uh thinking too clearly when they were having a seizure yeah they weren't heading to the casino yeah exactly yeah and support card counting and things like that like so you know you want to cycle your brain cells and you want to rest your brain cells if you if you don't they die this is what is where drugs are a problem you say that drugs kill your brain this is because they give a dopamine response and dopamine is an excitatory molecule it makes your neurons stay on and that can damage them and they eventually die so certain parts certain parts of your brain are are sensitive to dopamine and those parts are the ones that die and you can see this on mri but when you're not sleeping enough and your brain's not resting enough you're if you get less than six hours of sleep at night on average you're six times more likely to develop alzheimer's so you need to sleep you need to rest your brain your brain needs a chance to heal heal and rebuild itself but it can't physically rebuild the structures if it doesn't have the physical components to rebuild those structures with and that's what fat is that's what cholesterol is and and you need those from fatty meat and animal animal meat and that's very important and that's something that we've uh deprived ourselves of for at least the last half century and and some people even even longer than that but i asked every elderly person when i'm talking to them about this i asked them like you think back to when you were a kid did any of your grandparents ever have to go to a home did any of the older people that you knew ever have to go to a home or have dementia or anything like that and they all say no now that's not a scientific model but you can look at the you know the the rates of these things and they were very very low uh prior to 1980 even and now everyone who gets above a certain age they're all going into homes you know that's a very difficult thing right now in in the hospitals uh hospital systems since i've been a doctor for the last nine years now you know i've seen nothing but uh you know people waiting to be placed into uh nursing homes and so forth it's absolutely rampant yeah and so you have to get like a two-year waiting list for for these things they're so backed up so it's it's a big problem and it doesn't it doesn't need to exist it wasn't a problem before people think oh we're just living older now that's not true that's not true at all we have we have a higher average life expectancy from birth but we also eliminated most of the major killers in infancy yeah it's a deceptive stat isn't it very yeah you know because most of the most these things were because like in eighteen hundreds all people only live until their thirties that's not true this average from birth was thirty six in eighteen fifty but if they lived until 10 years old the average was 56 you know and then you go on from there and committed to adulthood you essentially live to be the same age as you do now actually that is according to the census data going from 1850 to 2017 which you know yeah i mean it's very it's it's so difficult to compare you think about um people in the you know 1800s they also live much more dangerous lives you know they were they were jumping on horses for transport they were you know if you wanted to cross an ocean you had to take a ship there was the chance of like catching disease and that sort of thing you know outside of the high infant mortality so it's true it's not kind of like apples with apples it's apples and oranges yeah that's it you're dead right because that's the thing is something these people were dying of old age at any at any point you know it's not like yeah whether the average or the dynamically didn't get the cats you know exactly you know and you didn't have you didn't have antibiotics you know all these sorts of things but it is it is interesting that without all these you know modern advances and safety measures that we have and medicines and so forth when you got into adulthood even back in the 1850s you on average lived roughly the same amount of time as you do now yeah without the crap that we have now so that means that you know we're probably you know doing some major things wrong which of course we are we're deteriorating but all these band-aids have been stuck on top to try and keep the sort of status quo um so that we can get like a stake in the ground in the ground dr chaffee can you kind of explain the process of what i'm going to call natural brain degradation or deterioration so like assume that somebody is getting a reasonably good diet and they are getting enough sleep etc uh you sort of alluded to it before i assume that as people get older their brains do naturally um like you were saying take up less space they they do naturally degrade can you explain that process a little bit so yeah but i think that a lot of that has to do uh with what we're doing wrong as opposed to just being actually actually normal i think that a lot of that has to do with you know depriving ourselves of these healthy fats and depriving ourselves of uh you know proper nutrition but also exposing ourselves even even to a small degree to things that are going to be harmful to us so you know i always talk about you know plants and sugar and so forth being quite harmful to us and they and they are and these can cause damage to your brain just like they can cause damage to your body and so this is gonna this is going to degrade your brain cause inflammation slow down your healing process and make it more difficult for you to um for you to rebuild your brain and so forth uh and most people don't get enough fat most of the people that um that do live a great age they generally eat are eating eggs and bacon and things like that you look at this is this is an anecdotal but you know when i i every now and then i'll look up you know diet of people who live over 100 or oldest people in the world and they're dying and there are people that look at these things and they get the handful of people you know the 10 20 people that have lived to be 110 115 117 i i think every single one that i've seen they all say bacon and eggs like that's the secret bacon and eggs they all say it and i remember there's one guy who's 110 years old he's oldest man in new york this guy was still living on his own walking around new york just doing his thing 110 years old and they asked me like oh you know this is where the mediterranean diet was really gaining any popularity he's like oh it must be your diet like you know what are you eating are you on the mediterranean diet and he just said and once what he said was that what do you eat every day well every day i eat a pound of bacon and a box of thunderbird wine a box of it and like you know some sometimes you get like box of wine actually get nice wine now yeah yeah sort of been a move that was not the case then yeah if you were buying wine in a box that was that's good exactly horrible horrible horrible wine and anything called thunderbird wine is just not very good fantastic yeah well they they always say that hong kong has the um oldest life expectancy and they've got the highest per capita consumption of meat so they do yeah it's like it's like a pound and a half per person on average and you know not everybody is an adult male 1 so yeah that's right you're talking about little girls are are in that average and that means that the people who are eating the most meat which is generally going to be your old male i think you're going to eat a lot more than that yeah yeah yeah and so um yeah and then you look at um other other sorts of things like you know every the vegans always like to try out okinawa and how they live a great long life and they don't eat a lot of red meat at all and they always say that i always listen for qualifiers and we you know weasel words that that slightly change something to make you think you're talking about something else when you're actually not they say uh they don't eat a lot of red meat that's that's true but they eat a lot of pig they have a lot of pigs there they use a lot of pork they eat a lot of meat and so that's not considered a red meat fine it's still meat and so even though they're eating plants they're eating plants that you know they grew there's nothing a lot of processed crap and so when things like the blue zone study if you look at that you know you look at the the studies and you ignore the conclusion that the author draws you draw your own conclusions and and so the authors through the conclusion that in these areas they're more plant-based they live longer and have healthier lives therefore plant-based is better but actually what they showed was that places that ate a lot less sugar and processed crap lived a lot longer and they also excluded places like hong kong and so forth you know they cherry pick these things as well but they also got the wrong conclusion from their own data i would say and you have the lancet study which was crap um you know the top uh epidemiologist and professor of medicine world he's the most cited researcher in any discipline of all time professor john i ideas from stanford um and and citations are really how you draw you you measure your clout as a researcher and he is the best researcher of all time in any field and so and he he just pointed out that you know these nutritional medicine nutritional studies and so forth are all crap basically they're really bad and and he said specifically about the lancet trial that that was more science fiction than science and it was just you know these people have an agenda and they'll they will you know mold and manipulate whatever they can to to meet that agenda and so you know it's um uh you but there's other there's other ways of looking at these things and there's a lot of other sources of information as well that totally completely different story absolutely so we've so far we've kind of gotten uh in terms of prevention we're talking about eating your saturated fat which generally will come from eating meat pork beef lamb chicken whatever it is and getting your sleep as you mentioned if you're getting less than six hours per night you're six times more likely to have i think um alzheimer's or also resume alzheimer's um all right let's talk about uh sort of not only protection but the cure uh have you have you got any anecdotes or stories about people recovering or improving their alzheimer's and dementia with proper nutrition yeah well so so like i said you know there's there's an actual there are actual studies you know using a high-fat ketogenic diet as a treatment modality for alzheimer's and that has been shown to be more effective than anything else ever tried basically and so um you know i i'm trying to sort of set up trials and things like that as well just to just to use a carnivore diet high-fat carnivore diet release the you know high fat ketogenic diet uh as a as a treatment for uh these sorts of people and just and just show just show how beneficial it is and give these people you know a new new lease on life and certainly family members certainly uh friends and colleagues and patients that i've that i've you know helped get on a carnivore diet they they've benefited tremendously you know my father i mentioned before was diagnosed with parkinson's and was slowing down and was having memory issues and and you know he's a he's a brilliant man he was a physicist mathematician computer scientist uh his whole life and you know he was on a team at the lawrence livermore radiation laboratory in berkeley with louis alvarez who won the nobel prize in physics for developing the bubble chamber and cracking atoms my father literally was one of the first people to crack the atom and study subatomic particles and so his biggest fear was was losing his faculties and as it is with a lot of people and i was seeing this happen and it was absolutely terrifying and he had had a few medical issues and so forth that it set him back and he was very slow to recover from this and he was you know he was sort of sitting on the couch he was watching tv he wasn't really talking as much normally he's very very uh conversational he loves talking to people he loves um you know being in conversations and contributing he's very interesting guy to listen to as you would expect and he wasn't really able to do this and it would be would actually be days uh would go by before i i heard him say anything you you know talk to my mom more than that that would have been devastating it was and i was i was watching this in real time and and aware of what was happening and really upset by it and and trying to think you know what what could i do what could be done you know hoping that he would just sort of come out of it and that was when around the time that i really came back to a carnivore diet and and really realizing how significant it was that i was you know what i was doing you know 20 years earlier and really digging into the into the research and seeing what we could prove and so i was i was living like that i was getting insane results from this and i was doing so much better and i was you know looking through the data and what and asking questions and trying to see you know if i could answer them in the data and challenging okay we have two opposing ideas let's look for for information and and evidence that can prove one of them right or wrong or maybe both of them wrong or right uh we're wrong anyway and i was getting really excited i was finding new things i was talking to my parents about i was like oh look at this and look at this and look at this and look at this eventually it was enough that it interested my father and he talked to my mom and said well let's let's try it let's just do it do it for a month and see how it goes one month into this my father was just a different person he was just an entirely different human being he had so much more energy he was going around he was talking we were talking having normal conversations again and and then he was telling me um you know i was like oh i'm just having really bad constipation it's just sort of having an issue and i sort of realized that he was still doing things low fat or lower fat than he should uh because he he sort of grew up like or he raised us like that on the pritikin uh modality of just not eating any any fat at all and so it was hard for him to eat fat and he just didn't he was just still naturally doing it i i wasn't even cutting fat off myself for a while and then i was like no no no i have to eat the fat i had to convince myself um to do that because i was like i trust the data i trust this eat the damn fat and so i just mentioned john was like well you know fat is actually what drives your digestion that's what actually keeps your stool soft so if you're if you're having hard constipation that means you're not getting as much fat as your body wants because it's that excess fat that your body can't absorb that goes through and keeps stool soft and also it's the fat that grows your brain regrows your brain and and keeps it healthy and so you know it's really important to do that and so he said okay and the man started eating bacon and drinking whole milk i've never seen this man awesome whole milk or eat bacon in my entire life as a child or an adult and one month after that he made insane improvements the first month the second month was even more he was just basically his old self again he was he was still uh a bit weakened because of the the hospitalizations and and you know uh deteriorating sort of um uh issues that he's had and and you know he had he still had to recover from that but all of a sudden you know he's reading again he's going through his his old you know physics textbook from his phd at berkeley and he's you know he's he's you know going along he's like taking a chainsaw and cutting down trees he was 80 right you know so like i mean i remember calling my brother and he would say asking what he was doing he's like oh i'm just going over to mom and dad's house it's like okay just hanging out well you know you know dad decided to cut down a tree with a chainsaw yeah worried so she you know she wanted me to go over there and make sure he doesn't die and i'm like okay all right you know and that's a check question for you when this change was happening could your could your father actually recognize it and be like oh i'm better this month than i was last month or did he just kind of naturally start doing the stuff he used to do he um i i didn't speak to him specifically about that um so i don't know i'm sure he did because like i mean he was just he was just a different person yeah entirely different person and you know he definitely was saying that he felt better and was doing better and so forth and he wouldn't he wouldn't have stuck with it if he if he didn't think that my mom was very much against it but she she did it to support him and you know she's a big foodie she loves cooking and she was a bit grumpy that she couldn't cook all the different things that she she used to cook and a couple weeks into it i was just asking how she was doing so while i'm just you know i don't feel good i'm all tired i'm this and that was like well you know you're diabetic and you're on a heap of medications to keep your blood sugar down but you're not eating any exogenous carbohydrates so what's your blood sugar doing and she sort of thought about it and checked it was actually quite low so like well there you go you know i mean you can expect to pull back on your medications if you're not if you're not uh you know taking any offending asians that that require it and this is when she started titrating her her diabetes diabetes medications down now she's off of them you know she's on the lowest dose of of uh long acting insulin because um you know she doesn't doesn't quite uh make enough insulin at this point she was insulin dependent diabetic as well and so um you know they they both noticed you know extreme benefits of this and and my mom certainly wouldn't have stayed with this if uh if it wasn't such a big benefit to her life um yeah my father ended up losing i think 60 pounds in eight months and and was you know just running around doing all sorts of things you started going to the gym again at 80 and um you know doing spin classes and things like that there's actually a thing called pedaling for parkinson's where you if you move your your legs very very very fast it's just the motion you're just moving them even if something's moving for you if you have an automated uh you know bike or something like that that moves your legs as long as your your legs are moving at like you know 80 to 90 rpm um for about 40 45 minutes three days a week this is actually showing a significant improvement on parkinson's symptoms and it can actually reverse parkinson's symptoms if done for eight weeks and actually maintain for another eight weeks and so yeah it's very interesting so so he started doing that as well uh once he he felt up to it that was about eight months into it and he was just using a completely different person um you know one reason why you know the ketogenic diet and then in a carnivore diet obviously because you know ketogenics getting closer to a carnivore diet which is our evolved natural diet that's going to be the most beneficial the ketogenic diet in and of itself made a significant improvement in uh you know people with alzheimer's and so forth for very very simple reason you know we have mentioned this before but um alzheimer's is sometimes referred to as type three diabetes because it's um seems to be more of a metabolic process and when you address that metabolic process and the problems they're in you know you you can actually uh have find workarounds or even reversals so the issue with type 2 diabetes is that you have peripheral insulin resistance you you have you're running your blood sugar so high for so long that your body's just like okay enough of this crap because because glucose at high levels causes harm and so your body is going to set up defenses against it one of those defenses is to slam up your insulin high insulin for too long causes a myriad of diseases and so this is one of them so when you get peripheral insulin resistance well your brain is part of that and so now you're getting insulin resistance to the brain now the brain can't take in as much glucose but because you're in this this this uh high insulin state you can't make all your other uh your energy sources you can't you don't make blood sugar you don't make glycogen you don't make ketones and so you're dependent on this glucose which now you're resistant to because you're insulin resistant and so you start feeling like crap your body starts getting tired you can't exercise as well as you could have and your brains start slowing down and you're not getting energy to your brain so it actually starts to decay and decay and decay and this is what we see these things shriveling up and when you switch to a ketogenic diet or preferably a carnivore diet but really just getting rid of carbohydrates and getting your insulin down and your body can now mobilize your fat stores and mobilize ketones ketones are your brain's primary food stores i don't know where the hell this rumor went around saying that your brain runs on glucose that's what it's supposed to go on that is crap you know i learned this in biochemistry 24 years ago that your brain's primary primary energy source are ketones you run they run on ketones no matter what metabolic state you're in you're always running on ketones and you and they run better when you're in a non-insulin driven state termed the fasting state which is that's that's our primary metabolic state that's where everything works better and so i don't know who came up with that i don't know who said that you know but they're wrong and they clearly never took biochemistry they just they just heard something and it sounded good and they ran with it and that's a lot of these it does sound simple it's like you know carbohydrates in use glucose for energy that'll fuel your brain well but also when you're you you're in a fed they call a fed state you know your brain does predominantly run on on glucose but that's because your body is desperately trying to get this blood sugar the hell out of your system as quickly as possible because it's damaging you okay so it's shoving it in everywhere it's not just your brain it shoves into your fat and your muscles and your liver it shoves it in everywhere it's just getting it the hell out of your bloodstream because you don't want these loose particles running around causing damage and so [Music] it people look at that and they hear that and they go oh that's the end of the story your brain wants to run on on glucose like okay well first of all you're you know you're assuming a fact that's not an evidence okay because you're assuming that that actually is our primary metabolic state okay and you're assuming that we got it right that that's a fed state and so forth so you know that that that was a guess and i i would say it's very very wrong and so you know a little bit of information is a dangerous thing so they heard like one little thing oh that's it that's it and they just ran with this and they're like no no can't be anything else like look you don't know enough to realize how wrong you are and so when you do actually take biochemistry you take the rest of it you find out that ketones are actually what run your brain your brain is always running on ketones that's it that's its optimal preferred and most deficatious uh energy source especially when you're talking about someone who's been eating carbohydrates for a long time even if they're not diabetic even if they're not um you know having any sort of you know disease process that we can see very clearly this process is still happening you're still getting uh some insulin resistance which is going to slow down the the uptake of energy into your brain it's going to slow your brain down over time your brain is going to atrophy i think this is this is a major part of why our brains you know so-called normally atrophy over time i think because we're not maintaining it properly so we're not maintaining properly because we're not getting the requisite fats that they're made out of probably not getting enough sleep no one does and then we're we're eating a lot of carbohydrates even if we're not eating sugar you know fructose is is worse than all of that it causes more protein insulin resistance um you know in and of itself regardless of of your blood sugar and so forth so this causes much much more problems so if you're eating a lot of sugar this is gonna is gonna hit you more and obviously there are gonna be people that are genetically susceptible uh to these processes and they're gonna be hit harder so when you go to a carnivore diet which is how we're supposed to be anyway and at least a ketogenic diet you now circumvent that blockage okay now you don't need insulin you don't want insulin and so it doesn't matter if you're insulin resistant because your ketones are just going to go in and run your brain in your brain you're just going to light up like i saw with my dad that he just you just literally just woke up and this is what a lot of people talk about you have this this mental clarity and they don't have the brain fog they have a lot of different descriptors on what they feel like cognitively when they go on a ketogenic or carnivore diet i wonder i'll jump in there is that i wonder if that's a similar feeling to what people experience on intermittent fasting towards the lattice that latter stage of their fast where they've cleared out all the glucose and insulin from their body yeah that's exactly exactly what's happening yeah because they're you know their insulin has dropped down to a normal level and that's where you get all the benefits that those are the benefits of fasting in general but intermittent fasting um as well because you're just waiting out the clock on your insulin so intermittent fasting they do this essentially every day and so they eat like a big meal or within a window and and then their insulin is up generally because people who do that can often uh be just still eating a normal diet and also get a lot of very good results from that because they're waiting on the clock on that and then they get into their normal state so they are in their normal metabolic state for some periods and they feel a lot better and that's when they work out and they have boundless energy and they're running marathons and so forth and they have one full fast day a week generally this is in the traditional intermittent fasting modality and that's when they feel the best and that's when they're doing all their that's when they plan their marathons on their fast day and so forth and that's exactly what's happening you're you're letting your metabolism get back to normal you're letting your body actually run efficiently and effectively and just generate energy and you know run properly and that's the amazing thing about your body is if you just leave it alone it generally does a good job you know i don't understand why people think that we need to micromanage our biochemistry what animal can possibly do that in the wild you know you just you just eat naturally and your body takes care of the rest if it didn't we wouldn't be here you know we didn't have the technology and the ability and the understanding that we do now to to try and micromanage our biochemistry and our bodies in our blood sugar and so forth so you know that that wouldn't have wouldn't have been that wouldn't have been a survival uh trait and you know and people saying that you know and also you know we we all we do have more technology now we do have more knowledge but you know you get to the point where you know you're so sharp you'll cut yourself because we've looked at all these sorts of things we said i know exactly what's going on here and you're dead wrong and you end up going down a very very different track and you start you start ignoring the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge that told us to do the exact topics of what we were doing and you know and sometimes those accumulated not you know pieces of knowledge or are based in something that's not right but a lot of it it has to do with with with trial and error and seeing what actually works in a practical practical setting yeah i think i think what you're describing there is that sort of a very simple and intuitive way of eating um but you know it's hard to create 10 different products around that and you know a lot of the sort of like you know overthinking and like you know eyes if that's a word of you know the human body and like you know all the the crashes and then you need this sugary product to pick you back up and then you need this caffeine gel before you exercise and then you need to carbo-load the night before and all this stuff i mean really it's i think it's just productizing your health and you know you might do all these hundreds of things and get close to what you would do but you know experience if you just sort of ate intuitively you ate a more more you know natural or ancestral diet um and you know actually experience a little bit of hunger a little bit of intermittent fasting yeah i mean yeah you can i mean you know there's there's um i don't think there's anything i don't think there's anything necessarily that provides more benefit once you're already in your proper metabolism um i it's hard to say because i haven't really seen any study and maybe maybe they exist and i just haven't seen them and um and maybe this this happens even though i don't i don't know i mean you can't you can't prove a negative just because i haven't seen information doesn't mean that information doesn't exist but i haven't seen personally anything that convinced me that that you get much more from just not eating at all versus not eating carbohydrates and being in a so-called fasting state um the the studies that have shown a lot of benefit have been in the context of a sad diet of the standard american diet standard australian diet where your western diet which is crap and so you're not eating crap and all of a sudden you're better and you're in a you're in the so-called fasting state and you get these benefits i don't and we think of that because oh when you're fasting you're not eating and now you're in this fasting state and you get these benefits okay but you know you're supposed to be in that metabolic state you get a lot of benefits for being in that metabolic state and you're always going to be in that metabolic state if you're eating as a carnivore or even ketogenic and so they even have a lot of studies because they've seen that a you know in a fasted state you get all these benefits you in animal models they can regrow beta eyelid cells in the pancreas and reverse type one diabetes and start making insulin again reverse type 2 diabetes and a ton of other things you know reverse crohn's and ulcerative colitis tons and tons of these studies and and yet they said well you know you don't really want to just not eat anything that's really hard especially for these long periods of time because you take four days five days in a row every month in order to do that and so that well that's really hard for people so we'll come up with a fasting mimicking diet and there's a ton of studies looking at a fasting mimicking diet which is ketogenic diet right and it may not even be full carnivore but it's at least ketogenic because it's putting you in that fasting state and they find the same benefits so they find that you know that that you know fasting these mice you get you you can regrow beta islet cells and reverse type 2 diabetes they find the exact same results if you just don't give them carbs and so that's what i've been seeing maybe i'm you know i'm sure there's there's more to learn out there about you know what happens when you're just actually not eating food and what that does for you but i haven't seen uh anything that's made me think that there's more benefit to not eating at all versus just eating a carnivore diet anyway i mean and again i'm just i'm saying that out of my own ignorance like it there may be a benefit but i haven't i haven't seen much of it myself so i don't i don't um recommend people if they're on a full carnivore diet you know too fast they just just eat what your body tells you your body knows what it's doing and if you eat again like you stay intuitively you eat the meat and well it tastes good and it stops tasting good as i've said before because when your body wants these nutrients they taste better and then when it's then when it's hot enough they don't taste as good and so your body just naturally just goes look i don't want to eat this anymore and you you naturally want to stop you can keep force feeding yourself but you really do have to force yourself it really becomes i mean dr chaffee based on the the carnivores that i've spoken to like new people trialling it and seasoned carnivores pretty much everyone if not everyone sort of intuitively does some form of 16 8 intermittent fasting do you know what i mean like that's that's what i do like i have my first meal around 12 or 1 o'clock and that's just what feels good um i know you've mentioned before often you'll only eat once a day while you know somebody will turn around and say hey that's intermittent fasting so i suppose that can't on carnivore generally people just eat that way because that's what feels right yeah oh absolutely and you know i i i put the distinction on it because you know what i consider fasting is it is is knowingly depriving yourself of food when you're actually hungry yeah exactly and so i don't i don't unless i'm i'm stuck at the hospital and i i just literally can't get away and get food i eat when i'm hungry yeah you know yeah exactly and so you know when you're eating high density nutrition especially with the high fat content you're just going to be satiated longer and you're not going to eat as much and so you know you'll get into that that pattern anyway when i'm working out a lot and lifting weights a lot i will naturally want to eat more and so you know i'll eat a lot like you know big steak until i'm full and then the next day so i wake up like damn it i want another one you know and then i'll go and i'll eat again so i'll eat sometimes you know twice a day um without without a problem i don't have any problem with that um but i don't i don't specifically say i'm only going to eat during this window but yeah yeah and a lot and a lot of people do and so you know and some a lot of people ask me that as well you know should you be fasting should you do intermittent fasting i'm like well you don't need to but you probably will naturally end up doing that anyway and if you're unless you are especially when you're losing weight and you have a lot of excess body fat um and that you're trying to lose you're probably not going to be hungry more than once a day anyway if you eat until you're full and that's certainly uh what i've noticed in myself and with patients and so forth that are losing weight is that the other body has a surplus an abundant surplus of energy you really don't need much at all to maintain yourself you know there was a guy uh in england it was very it was very interesting uh individual he was very overweight i think he was i used something something around 300 kg very very large guy i mean he was you know he was a ham sandwich away from being bedridden you know and um he just decided he just sort of looked around and actually made a pretty pretty clever intuitive uh connection which is he's a mammal and there are a lot of mammals out there that hibernate for the winter and they don't they don't have problems you know they don't die of malnutrition they don't you know have you know [Music] lose out on vitamins and so forth they actually do very very well and they build up all this fat and then they use that as they hibernate through the winter and so he said fine i'm just going to do that and he just stopped eating and he was drinking water and he would take a multivitamin every day just for good measure i don't even know if he necessarily needed that but he took it and um he uh checked his dog he went to his doctor every month and got a blood you know a set of blood tests and so forth and his doctor kept going like yeah you know everything's looking good on this end and so he kept doing this he did this for nine months what yeah sued yeah so he stopped eating he did not eat food for nine months and he walked and he started getting increasing his activity as well he would walk to work and so forth which was you know a couple miles and so he walked to work every day he only drank water he took a vitamin and he didn't eat for nine months he said yeah yeah and and the thing is is that you know he said after a few days he wasn't even hungry he didn't even feel hungry now that's you know i talk about a lot you know your signals are very very different and they change so yeah he didn't feel hungry like he normally would because he was eating carbohydrates and sugar which made his brain think that he was starving to death lipton yeah exactly and so now his brain could see that he had a ton of leptin exactly an extra 200 kilos of left and so he was fine and so his brain wasn't sending out panic signals and so he was drinking water he was doing great he lost he got down to a relatively normal weight after about nine nine and a half months the craziest part about that is that his skin shrunk with him so he didn't have all these bags of extra skin which is what you normally see when people have rapid weight loss that's probably unhealthy or surgically uh driven what what's your take on that uh just that he was onto something that you know this is a natural process and your body can survive in in sort of a hibernation mode and it will just it will come down with it yeah yeah i mean you know he's not going to reverse his stretch marks and things like that but like but the skin came down it wasn't all baggy uh and hanging off with him um you know if you're if you're starving yourself um you know in certain ways and you're really malnourished you know uh you know you would expect you'd have these sorts of things but you know we didn't really see that you know people in concentration camps you know they had skin stretched tight against their bones you know and then so it wasn't like they they had just skin hanging off of them normally you see that when people are taking you know amphetamine or something well yeah yeah yeah again gastric surgery and so forth or a ton of liposuction and that's um interesting and uh you know and taking just a bunch of stimulants and amphetamines which was a mainstay of of uh diet and weight loss medicine which was complete crap i mean the real the the real doctors who actually have really helped people have always stayed well away from from that um you know i tell you what eric i think his ketosis experience would have been unreal because you're literally burning the fat straight off your body and then your brain's being fueled by that i reckon he would have been in a deep state of like mental clarity i wonder what yeah it would be so good to speak to him we should track him down like imagine yeah like he's really yeah yeah we should we'll find him his sleep like i'm curious about that i'm like well he's hibernating just like a polar bear yes dude i reckon either he slept all the time or he just didn't need to sleep uh i can't imagine it was just like normal i think he i think he probably you know probably ended up needing less sleep requiring less sleep and getting better quality sleep which is what you tend to see and and yeah i think he did he did just fine you know he obviously did just fine he's like he didn't die after nine months of not eating no you know and he didn't have really any problems from the sounds of it you know i obviously haven't looked into all the nitty-gritty of of the story and i haven't seen his bloods but from from the account that i read he was seeing a doctor every month he was getting his blood taken every month and every month his doctor was happy that he felt great and then he dropped i think he yeah dropped something like yeah 200 kilos in nine months and uh yeah and uh it's doing was was much better for it from the sound of it yeah okay we're gonna end with something that's um a bit out there and a bit taking a punt but late on us dr chaffee you're eating strict carnival you've been doing street carnival for four years you know lots of people who are also doing strict carnivore let's talk longevity how long how long do you think you can you can be on planet earth alive oh i'm on a i'm on a 120 130 year uh you know time frame at the moment that's how i think about it you know so people yeah so you know um you look at you know genetically known as geneticists for the last 20 years or so that we are designed chromosomally to live 120 years on average right so that means if you just stay out of your own way and just don't mess up you should make it to 120 without doing anything special and this is something that we see in native populations and so forth the native americans the native australians uh you know different peoples all around the world still living as carnivores this is this is what they still say and they still see they're not put into the you know the eat lance and the blue zone studies though of course because uh you know they'll all they'll always say oh we don't have like the official government record we can't you know trust their records and so forth like that's fine you don't need to um but uh you know and as i as i mentioned uh in previous things that you know there's a just you know herodotus who's the father of history in ancient greece you know he uh interaction between an emissary from persia who just like taking over egypt at that time with their now neighbor uh ethiopia and the king of ethiopia and the king of ethiopia asked the persian emissary um how you know what what do you people eat and how long do they normally live and and the person you know explained growing wheat and making bread uh because this was not something that the ethiopians did not many people around the world did at that time and then they said they they generally live around 70 years and again you know this is again looking at the of of all people died in their 30s and so forth socrates was in the 70s causing trouble around athens and so you know they had to kill him you know and so um you know people did actually live live to these these ages and so forth and so and again we have this this documentation however you know if you want to trust her or not that's what they said uh living to to be 70. and then the king of ethiopia just sort of laughed at him and just said you know uh you know no wonder you guys live such short lives if you all eat dirt you know our people eat you know just boiled meat and drink and only drink the milk of our cattle and you know we would live 120 years sometimes some people would live even longer than that so it sounds far-fetched it sounds braggadocious and an exaggeration but it is exactly what geneticists have shown us to be our you know perceived genetic life expectancy on the nose you know we're saying like scientists right now are saying we should live 120 years and he was saying we live 120 years you know on the damn nose and so you know he was saying that oh yeah you know we live 280 500 years something like that yeah you'd be like exaggerating yeah you know but he got he nailed it on the head you know and so i mean you there are a ton of other other people's like this you know there's um you know i did a post about this as well um you're talking about native americans and we had we had uh you know census data on this in the 1800s talking about how they live to be 110 115 years old knew living out in the wild on the prairies you know following the buffalo herd yeah and and you know and they were fine hail and hardy you know not just like you know sitting in the back of a nursing home turning into dust for 40 years you know just hating their life maybe not even realizing they're still alive you know some of these people don't have the quality of life that you would you would hope that they would these guys did you know they were still out there they're still you know married they still had their wife you know had their children their grandchildren their great-grandchildren their great-great-grandchildren and so forth and that that's that is that is a life well-lived right there and you know we saw this and and we saw people living to that age and these these accounts of them living to exactly what we would expect them to live at genetically if they were living a normal biologically appropriate life which they were they were living as carnivores and so we we've lost that you know that inside but that's what they were doing and that's exactly why they lived that long the longest lived uh native american on record um lived something like there's 137 years wow you know and so he was born in the you know the 17 late 1700s and he died in the early 1900s i mean this guy saw a lot yeah absolutely and probably stuck to his natural diet too that yeah well yeah well you know you would you expected you you would have had to really i mean if you're going to make it that long this guy wasn't it wasn't uh uh you know dipping into the the western food as much as other people and you know and that's the thing too you know i've said before what you know what i learned as a kid that native americans went on a western diet are four times as likely to get obesity heart disease diabetes cancer and so forth and i remember thinking at the time like well doesn't that mean the food is causing the disease you know because if they don't eat the food they don't get the disease and we eat the food and we get the disease we just get at a lower rate you know what what what's a what's a western what's a non-western diet what are they eating that we're not and vice versa and they didn't say that at the time but they were full on a carnivores high fat carnivores and that's and that's very important you know being on a high fat carnivore diet obviously the meat and fat or your basic nutrients especially the fat that's very important for you and and explicitly excluding all these harmful elements that are going to cause all sorts of harm you know the the the you know the alpha and omega being sugar and carbohydrates these these cause just insurmountable damage in our bodies and our brains and the rest of them screw us too but i think that the massive prevalence of these so-called chronic diseases today are mostly driven by sugar and carbohydrates driving up our insulin and having that just completely derail our metabolic system and if this was our primary metabolic state this was our primary biochemical uh state why would it you know it just causes us to break down and die in such fabulous ways you know that so that again is more evidence why that's not our our primary metabolic state yeah absolutely all right well dr chafee 120 years heard it here first or at least i think probably yeah well i mean because like you get to 120 if you don't mess up yeah right yeah if you do extra exercises yeah exactly yeah so yeah i plan on being you know on the other side of that and there's other those very interesting things scientifically coming up you know people have uh that's true uh you know like uh different sort of uh you know nad infusions and so forth they find that this this can potentially add on telomeres onto your chromosomes telomeres are the caps on your chromosome and that is every time you split and you change and go they cleave these off and cleave these off to cleave these off that's just just a stopwatch on your life you know that's your hourglass in depth hands and when that that runs out you know that's it for those cell lines and you just start you just start popping off um there is a there's at least suggestions i've heard people saying that they're they're doing experiments and so forth and there's early early evidence to suggest that uh giving these nad infusions like iv can actually add helium mirrors or sorry telomeres uh exercise does this does this as well you know when you're when you're pushing yourself out of the gym and you're doing hard sprints and you're doing heel sprints and you're lifting heavy weights and doing squats you increase your uh growth hormone production you and then you can actually start adding on telomeres as well so this is uh you know there's a lot of things that you can do to benefit your life and add to the the quality and quantity of your life as well and that's that's one of them and i think we're just going to keep getting more and more advanced is really figuring out how to manipulate our bodies in certain ways and and to help longevity and if you're if you have the building blocks of living biologically appropriately those things are all just going to be absolute gravy and and and really help you out so i think that um i think 130 is is a fair there's a fair estimation maybe maybe more who knows we can keep doing this for a lot longer yeah exactly just just to add to what talks to chaffey's saying from my from my experience like reading and talking to people often the people who are kind of like thought leaders or ambitious or really achieving things they can have a real perspective on time and they don't get caught in the okay i can only see one year into the future or one year into the past and like for example uh in like old interviews with arnold schwarzenegger which you might have seen too dr chaffee he talks about like when he was young and getting going he would like plan his life out like 5 10 20 30 years in advance and when i speak to like you or dr pran you guys are able to look back like 200 years 400 years 500 years but then also projecting to the future because where we are right now is just a moment in time yeah and you know if we if all goes according to plan we're going to be here for another 80 90 years yeah yeah and so yeah and that's what i think of you know that's what you know most people you know they get to you know middle age um or what they think of as middle age was traditionally thought to be middle-aged and they go like oh my god half my life is gone and that was the good half you know i was just going to be and you know it went way too quick and it's all and it's again it's going to suck from here as well you know i'm not on that that that timeline you know i'm on a very different timeline you know if i'm going to 120 years conservatively they're just getting started yeah exactly i'm in my first third i mean i'm in the prime of my i'm in my adult prime right now and i feel and i feel it you know and so you know i you know middle age is is the you know is the is your the actual midpoint of your expected you know uh life expectancy and so you know if you're going on 120 your scale then you know until ages and until you're 60. if you're going 130 140 you know might be a little more than that so i've got you know plenty of prime left and so i i just yeah i look you know i look forward to having a very long career as a doctor and as a surgeon and and doing this for many many many many decades and really enjoying myself and uh you know and and raising family and and you know passing it on to my kids and helping them do the same you know so i have a long outlook ahead and this is something that you know i'm really happy about with my own parents that are getting older is that you know i think that this is easily going to add decades to their life and that that makes me really happy because they're very very important to me you know thanks so much for today that was an epic chat um i'm sure everyone's going to get a lot of takeaways from that yeah i hope so yeah that's great thanks hey guys thank you very much for taking the time out to listen to what i had to say if you like it then please like and subscribe to my youtube channel and podcast and if you're on youtube then please hit that little bell and subscribe and that'll let you know anytime i have a new video out which should be every week if not more and if you could share this with your friends that would help me get the word out and let me know that you like what i'm doing thanks again guys