The Advantages of Being A Ketogenic Carnivore Athlete!

[Music] so we're going to go over three key benefits to being a ketogenic or carnivore ketogenic carnivore athlete uh we're going to talk about the growing list of carnivore athletes because there are quite a number of top tier International athletes that are coming to a ketogenic corn ofor diet and showing vast improvements in their performance and then my own experience because when my professor said plants are trying to kill you and that he didn't eat plants he didn't eat salads he didn't eat vegetables he wouldn't let his kids eat vegetables uh that stuck with me and I was I was an athlete at the time I was a uh played uh at the University level and at the prorip level in uh the US and Canada and then professionally in England and I can tell you it was a massive massive difference in my performance so one one of the main benefits is you you actually tap in to a much better more useful and much more uh uh wealthy store of energy when you're in a ketogenic state to store glycogen you have your your liver and your muscles but you can only store about 10,000 K which about 20 2400 kilo calories of energy so it's a decent amount of energy but that's by no means our main energy store in fact it's our fat and our fat in a 65 kilo athlete with only 6% body fat so an elite level body fat percentage and just those 6% body fat has nearly 36,000 kilo calories of energy available to them so this is why you're seeing people run ultramarathons completely fasted uh Alex McDonald is an athlete in U actually he's just recreational athlete in in Sydney and he ran five marathons in 5 days completely fasted didn't eat the entire week just to prove the point that you didn't actually need to suck down a bunch of carbs because the energy that you use for your exercise today doesn't come from the food you ate this morning or yesterday it comes from the meal you had two weeks ago and it's stored in your fat and then you use that fat but only when you're ketogenic if you're not in a ketogenic State you cannot access your fat stores because once insulin gets up to a certain point your fat cellers are locked you cannot get energy out of uh those fat stores if your insulin is too high so you want to get that down low then you tap into this nearly bottomless amount of energy that's available so for carb athletes they're going through this period where they Bonk it used to be called hitting the wall uh when I was a kid it was called hitting the wall and and now we have all these gels and these powders and and sugary drinks and things like that so that people can keep up their energy and maintain their glucose but what I was told when I was a kid was that you have to keep pushing keep pushing and eventually if you push through you'll get break through the wall you get into your second wind and then you can just go forever and when you're in a ketogenic state that is your second wind you're always in your second win because you're tapped into your your fat stores you're not just running on glycogen you're not just running on glucose you're running on ketones and that's very important so as a ketogenic athlete you don't Bonk you don't run out of energy you don't have to keep sucking down these sugar gels and having these ups and these downs and these highs and these lows and that's also important too because we're going to talk also about long it as an athlete and as as a person if you are eating a certain way or taking in a lot of heavy carbohydrates for your athletic performance that's going to have a metabolic toll as well and a lot of the athletes that Professor noes and others have studied when they have these comparative analysis with keten athletes and carb fueled athletes they may have similar performances on on game day but the carb fueled athletes some of them were pre-diabetic they were getting metabolics and these were lead athletes and these people are exercising a lot in the pre-diabetic so obviously that's not a sustainable um not sustainable for an athlete as well so well why are we told this that carbohydrates are the best fuel for athletes well it it's predicated on a few different things but one of them is this idea that um that you can only you up to a certain point of percentage of V2 Max you're burning fat and then past that you have to have carbs so if you want to be an elite athlete where you're really pushing yourself and really extending yourself then you have to have carbohydrates because you'll only run on carbohydrates and so this was um emphasiz in this quote here uh by berken Holly it says nobody has awarded Olympic gold medal for the most interesting metabolism which is true um but I would actually refer to that metabolism carbohydrate metabolism as the interesting anomaly because the vast majority of animals on Earth including humans in the wild are in a ketogenic state that is the natural state of most animals that's the natural metabolic state of humans when we're in the wild eating our natural diet uh We've looked at Lions we've looked at wolves they're all in ketosis even if you look at uh cows and gorillas they tend to be in ketosis as well and that's because they aren't running on carbohydrates even though they eat fibrous plants which are strings of glucose they don't break those down no vertebrate animal can break down cellulose it's the bacteria in their gut that ferment and eat the fiber and as a byproduct excrete that fatty acids so short chain fatty acids which are 100% saturated and then those bacteria die off and they're absorbed as protein so gorilla is eating leaves and cows eating grass but what they're absorbing is fat and protein just like a lion just like a wolf just like we're supposed to and so they're all going to be in that ketogenic so-called starvation state but they're not that's a normal metabolic state so I would actually say to to Burke and Holly that their metabolism is the is the unique strange metabolism so so this sort of details some of this so there are some of these these studies that that showed and and this was um mentioned in the previous talk by Dr Paul Mason that some of the performance of the ketogenic athletes while they were still going through fat oxidization they were running on fat they didn't actually have the same performance but that has to do with a lot largely with uh being fat adapted so this study the Supernova trial didn't actually account for that they only had these people going for uh you know you know 2 3 weeks um and so they weren't fully fat adapted they weren't being uh adequately given electrolytes we given very small amount of electrolytes and so this was uh very poor for a number of different reasons and there are other studies that did have keto ketogenic adapted athletes that had far far greater performance so it's not just about mobilizing the energy the fat the Keet tones it's about how you use them and U and that makes a big difference so we look at some other trials look at volc um and Finny did the study called faster in 2016 and so that idea of of only burning fat up to 60% V2 Max is is sort of undone here because they found that that's only applicable to carbohydrate fueled athletes and so it's it's not the case in ketogenic athletes especially when they've been fat adapted and these people were it said six months there but it's actually N9 months they were fat adapted for at least nine months average of 20 months and these were um Elite athletes ultramarathoners Iron Man competition uh athletes and they had been self you know chosen themselves to go on a ketogenic die and they'd been on that for uh a number of years on average in the low carb group that actually you can actually see that they had um fat oxidization well past that's a red line there well past the high carb diet you know over 80% V2 Max there's still uh the large majority of their energy is coming from fat oxidization so it's it's very different so if you're run if you're eating a whole bunch of carbs your insulin is high and you can't run on fat properly then sure you know you need to keep eating carbs but if you have gotten away from that then you actually a huge Advantage so the keto athletes had a carbohydrate sparing effect there vast majority of the energy was in um in in fat and uh the good thing is is as we'll as we'll see in this trial uh you make glucose you make glycogen so even the amount of carbohydrates that you do use you don't need to take those in exogenously and in fact if you do take those in exogenously then you're going to go down that blue path and you're actually going to uh really curtail your energy mobilization so this was this was the study that uh was mentioned um in the last talk which was where they took muscle biopsies so they took muscle biopsies before after and then 3 hours after uh their their their exercise tests and they found that the ketogenic athletes had essentially the same glycogen muscle glycogen levels as the carbohydrate athletes and the carbohydrate AES for the 3-hour test they were taking down sugary gels and different sorts of sugar drinks and things like that whereas the uh fat adapted athletes you had a bit of fat or something like that they did not take in carbohydrates and so it was their body replenishing the glycogen not the carbohydrates that they were eating hey everyone really happy to announce a new sponsor for the show and for everybody down in Australia Stockman steaks who are delivering highquality grass-fed and finished pasture raised beef and other meats flash frozen and vacuum sealed to your door something I've been enjoying a lot of myself recently as well they also have a great range of specialty items such as high fat keto mints and carnivore beef and organs mints with liver kidneys and beef heartart as well so use code cha today for a free order of beef mints or another specialty gift along with your order at Stockman steaks.com and I'll see you over there thanks guys this is a this is a a study from Professor Tim noes down in South Africa and this was an interesting trial because he took high carb athletes and low carb athletes he switched them around so it was a crossover studies a randomized crossover study where they looked at the performance of recreational athletes you know weekend warrior sort of things where they they tried to push them to the maximum limits where they tried to do things that was the the the trial where they had five successive uh 800 meter runs and so going really really hard and you're doing this again and again and again and they're trying to wear out and get rid of all available glycogen and see what happens well the fact is is that the keto athletes did not lose any performance and then they did adapt them for 6 weeks about 42 days and then they they competed with um you know in the different trials that they had then they had a twoe wash out period where they ate whatever they wanted to and then they switched and so the carb athletes became the keto athletes and vice versa and then they keto adapted them for another 42 days and they found that there was no drop in their performance so the idea that you have to have carbohydrates or you will hurt your performance is simply not the case and once you get away from carbohydrates even before we look at any sort of AD advantages you have once you're once you're very keto adapted in months and years after your keto adapted which I I would argue is the case you are already at a mass massive massive massive benefit as an athlete just because you're tapped into your fat stores you're tapped into 15 times the amount of energy from your fat stores than you have available in your glycogen for for a 65 Kil person at only 6% body fat and if you have more than that then you have even more energy available to you so the low carb group was still burning fat up to 90% uh V2 Max and the high carb group was you know no surprise running primarily on carbohydrates the low carb group had better metabolic flexibility again this is this is uh looking at the carbohydrate a these are taking a lot of carbohydrates is actually causing metabolic issues and and forcing people into pre-diabetes so obviously that is not a sustainable uh model as an athlete if you want to be if you want to continue to be an athlete um Professor no also has a theory that the reason that athletes Bonk and they run out of energy is not because they're running out of glycogen but actually their blood sugar dips a bit and so this is not getting enough blood sugar to the brain the brain feels the effects of that um that's also very much benefited by being in a state of ketosis because you can much better you're much better able to maintain your blood sugar level but also your brain runs on ketones and primarily runs on ketones for about two-thirds of your brain it preferentially runs on ketones so when you have ketones available and even if you have an abundance of glucose those parts of your brain will only run on the ketones it's only when those keton level start dropping that you start filling in the gaps with blood sugar I learned that in Biochemistry 23 years ago and yet we forget this somehow so let's look at actual performance when you have somebody keto adapted longterm with high level athletes so mcweeny 2018 actually showed um in high high performance Elite level athletes that were self- selected into high carb group and low carb group for 12 weeks so it's a that's a good amount of fat at adaptation you could go longer but some Studies have shown that after about 12 weeks on a ketogenic diet you have roughly four times the number of mitochondria and they're four times as effective so right there is a massive benefit in energy production so the athletes in the keto group outperformed the high carb group uh they had three different tests and uh two of them came to statistical significance one did not however in the short 6-second Sprints that did come to statistical significance so they they were able to outperform their High carbohydrate uh compatriots and they also improved their body composition they on average uh lost about 6 kilos and the high carb group lost less than a kilo and so this shows the benefits of that upregulation of these of uh of being keto adapted so you can make all the keton I me this is something we notice when people first go on a ketogenic diet carnivore or otherwise is that their ketones can go up very very high they may even notice their ketones in their urine um that means your body's not using it if it's just being peed out right it's wasted but after over time then the urine levels of ketones tend to go away and you can measure this and your blood levels of ketones tend to go down is that because you're making less ketones no it's because your body is utilizing them and using them properly you can measure this with uric acid levels uric acid competes for elimination in the kidneys with ketones and so if you're spilling out more ketones in your urine that's going to offset the uric acid so your serum levels of uric acid can go up slightly and Studies have track this it can actually go as long as four months and still be elevated so well while it's coming down you still have slightly elevated levels of uric acid for some people they don't get gout by the way um and that's another thing people realize there are five different causes of gout up until the early 2000s they were all ca g called gout now it's called pseudo gout and then gout is called your is is the uric acid crystals you have no idea they all present exactly the same they have exact same symptoms the only way to tell is about sticking a big needle into this inflamed nasty painful joint which no doctor is going to do unless they want to get sued and then you send that off for to a lab to see what kind of crystals are in there sometimes it's uric acid crystals other times it's oxalate crystals that's another cause of pseudo gal which is a plant toxin which we'll get to hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only product prods that will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10% off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25% off total all right thanks guys so another reason why this is good is because it can promote muscle growth and fat loss which is obviously IDE beneficial to an athlete I was speaking to someone in the break as very very um uh very timely so I added it in and she said that her uh nutritionist relative or dietitian relative said that well carnivore only helps because it eliminates the junk and I was I was thinking about that I was like well yeah but that's like saying that the only reason you're not poison is because you stopped eating poison it's like well yeah that's that's that's entirely the point um and plants are also junk that's the problem too um so um but but that is a major Pro that is a major thing the things we're putting in our body directly cause harm and we know this from a junk food perspective from a high carbohydrate perspective you know if you're if if you're eating sugar in the form of fruit you get a very different um GL glucose and Insulin Spike as you do if you're eating refined sugar of the same gramage um so it affects your body differently but there are other things in this world that cause harm it's not just uh carbohydrates or processed carbohydrates or even seed oils even though those are very very harm ful things things there are natural ways that plants defend themselves and some of these uh can be thought of as anti-nutrients so they'll block out the absorption of certain nutrients we saw that example with different foods uh such as black beans and corn blocked out the zinc absorption in um oysters uh but there's so many more there things like fiic acid there's oxalates there tannins um and lectin these things can bind and denature the different nutrients that vitamins and minerals that we're trying to bring in and and and stop us from being able to absorb them properly so that's very important thing called proteas Inhibitors that are very common in things such as wheat and soy which will block proteases which is our enzyme from our pancreas that breaks down proteins and amino acids and allows us to to absorb them properly and so when you block proteases then we can't break down these proteins we can't absorb them and they go out they're not bioavailable a we won't absorb them so it doesn't matter about how many grams of protein go in your mouth matters how many get in your body that's very important it doesn't matter how many you know how many milligrams of zinc go in your mouth it matters about what gets in your body it's very important that's one of the ways that plants defend themselves is by making themselves less nutritious by not being bioavailable like strings of glucose in the form of cellulose we cannot break those bonds we cannot access that glucose and so all those calories that you would see in a fireplace when you burn wood there's heat escaping that that does not translate into energy in your body and the same thing goes for many other nutrients not just not just glucose but also they make other things less bioavailable and less nutritious as well and so this is something that that can cause quite a lot of malnutrition and this is this is the argument is that it's not just well you're eliminating junk food and that's what makes a carnivore diet better you're also adding in very nutritious things and you're and you're not nutritionally deficient anymore because most people are nutritionally deficient there's a couple good examples of this in uh veterinary medicine livestock medicine where they have things called uh different diseases like big head big tongue limp neck Crazy Cow syndrome these are all diseases but they've actually figured out that they come from the animal eating a plant that they're not designed to eat and they're actually getting poisoned by the toxins in those plants and so and that's and that's um very important because they can say okay well that's what this cow has we need to get them out of this pasture we need to get them different forage all these sorts of things and maybe give them some medicine to get them through it the reason that they figured that out for cows we haven't figured that out for humans yet cows are actually worth something humans are inherently worthless right so because you know we're selling cows we're using them and they're a commodity and so when your cow gets sick or it dies and its babies are dying people are losing money and so they need to figure out what the hell is going on when people get sick they go to the hospital they spend money so that's the incentive they're actually not looking to keep us well I'm not saying they're trying to make us sick but I'm saying they're not incentivized to keep us well anyway but they are incentivized to keep livestock well when you're on a ketogenic diet for 3 months or so you end up having four times of no mitochondria and they're four times as effective because you go through something called mitophagy as well and mitogenesis so you're turning over the old damaged mitochondria and you're actually regenerating more of them as a result of that so this this is this is the key different this is the key point because people say well just not eating is what you have to do you're starving yourself and your body's looking around for resources to try to get some of these resources and and uh and use them for energy around your body well the problem with that is that when you start breaking down your mitochondria they don't just get used by some you know in somewhere else they get turned into more mitochondria It's actually an energy dependent uh mechanism