The Secret Diet of AFL Star Tom McDonald!

hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is just eat meat and that's what you should do but if you're hiking or road tripping or stuck at work and you want something nutritious that is just meat and fat and possibly salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option I like this product not only because it is pure meat but also because I really want the carnivore Market to thrive as well the more we support meat only products the more people will make meat only products and this will bring this into the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to check out then take a look and use my discount code HTC to get 10 off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25 off total all right thanks guys hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the how to carnivore podcast and YouTube series we are again joined by Dr Anthony Chaffee the plan for EMD Anthony good to have you on hey man good to see you likewise and today we've got a special guest Tom McDonald who is an AFL player he's currently in his 13th season in the AFL and is also a proponent of a low carb keto carnivore-ish diet which we're going to find out more about so welcome Tom hey Simon mate good to be on good to talk to you both good to have you here um so Tom what what got you down the nutrition rabbit hole and how did you discover low carb uh look I just like rabbit holes in general so yeah I follow you on Twitter um but yeah I don't know I don't know who actually started it but I do remember we were talking before about the low carb down under um sort of presentations that were on in Melbourne seven or eight years ago and our team doctor was a speaker there at that time he was sort of talking about low carb and how he was helping it freeze like GP patients so he was part-time with a footy Club part-time GP and he was working with like severely obese patients and talking about how you're seeing really good results with low carb keto sort of diets and he himself had done that he was I think he said he got up to 140 kilos at one stage and he was back down to like 100 um and so I just sort of got interested in it and um thought I'd give it a go I think we also had in I want to tell you this story before Simon we got in the South African speaker who what's his name again he was actually in Australia at the time for some reason and came and gave a presentation to the whole team and so I just found it really interesting um and gave it a go for I reckon about six months um it was through the off season pre-season period usually guys don't want to try stuff in the middle of the season and fair enough because it can be a huge change to do big training wholesale changes or nutrition changes in the middle of the season so I think I waited the off season and had a go at it saw some and I was really really on the high fat moderate protein really low carb and had some really good results in terms of like body fat my distance running my endurance running was really really good um but as we got back to training as a team and doing contact work and more gym work and more explosive stuff I started to struggle a little bit and that's where I probably dropped off it I still probably took the principles from there but started to go back a little bit to what I was doing before with some higher carb days leading into our big training sessions or or game day so I probably had probably three or four years of being in a bit of an in-between phase until then yeah four years later I went into a bit of Carnival research I don't even know who I came across to start with but um started thinking what if I could fix some of the problems I had by going a bit more carnivore than keto and that's how I got to that phase um which was a few years ago and now I probably look I'm still probably I'd be a very high protein eater um I'm not as crazily strict on the carbs especially around our big training sessions of big games um but still we'll consider myself a yeah a well above normal protein intake for an athlete um yeah so that's sort of a quick rundown we can go into some more detail around games and how I sort of play with it but that was sort of where I got to nice and and so are you at this point are you you say you're still doing some carbs like before big training and games and things like that yeah we probably the the season split up into three phases like pre-season we will have training sessions on a Monday Wednesday Friday that are essentially what a full match is for us so it's 12 to 14 K's of running um with a fair bit of Sprint in there a lot of contact and then we would have a full one-hour lower body power lifting session in the afternoons those days so like huge calorie days and then the Tuesday Thursdays will have upper body weights with usually some swimming or bike conditioning and then Saturday mornings would be Hill Sprints in the morning with a Sunday off so preseason's just a brutal training phase um and that's where I would try to have at least some carbs either the night before those like I do it a Sunday Tuesday and a Thursday night usually some rice or something like that with steak or whatever I'd be normally having um or if I didn't have it done up before I'd have some sort of card in the morning um even I just even if I just had a couple bits of toast that would probably help me for those days um but in season we go back to playing a game on the weekend and a moderate training session three days before the game and the other days are all very recovery recovery lifts maybe one heavy lift during the week with the others being sort of more accessory and you only really need to get ready for one game of one day of the week that's a huge energy outlayer which is a game day say a Saturday um and so I tend to go lower carb through the week and then I'll I usually make my own fried rice on like a Friday afternoon and have that through to the game and then that's my sort of big carbs going into the game but it's not what we used to be where I was saying before off air that it used to be pancake soft drink pot chips anything you could possibly get your hands on was an excuse to carb load the day before I sort of go back to still have a favorite approaching it like I'd have um maybe steak or bacon in my fried rice and plenty of butter and fat in it but I would have cars before the game and that's sort of where I've landed it's um been a bit easy to maintain um but also help me keep body weight in check and um stay a bit more yeah level during the week yeah I mean I think that's just a huge benefit anyway it's just you know upping the meat upping the fat not being scared of the fat like a lot of people are worried about that for health reasons and and eating you know cleaner carbs not eating a bunch of processed garbage and things like that so I mean I think even even I mean that's such a huge step in the right direction obviously you're seeing you know good results uh or you wouldn't you wouldn't be doing it you know you guys are so you know well in tune with your bodies and and your performance and things like that that like you know obviously you get a little bit of sand in the watch gears and you know things things start to come unraveled so yeah yeah I did do so I did for probably six months to nine months in 2021 of like extremely hard carnivore barely any cheap meals maybe like once a month if we were going out for a beer I might have a drink and we'd have a Parmer and I'd be like [ __ ] I'm I'm having this night off but I was pretty strict like 95 of the time and I got super lean for what I'd ever been and did feel awesome like everything felt great the only part that I couldn't quite do was I started to cramp on game days interesting and I tried lots of different things like the salt all the different um electrolyte sort of stuff and I just couldn't quite get that last bit of the game out without having the cramping uh look I don't know if you've got suggestions and if I was to do it again what I could do but I found unless I had the carbs the night before I was getting to the third quarter and you probably run 10 to 11 K's and I just I'd be stressing if I was going to make it at the end of the game and I was like as much as I like this concept if I couldn't quite make it work for my job um yeah I was like I'm gonna go back but that was the one part I couldn't quite do it other than obviously it's a you know mentally it's a big challenge to be as strict as that is for your whole life let alone um just for a footy season but that was the one part I did find difficult was getting through to the very end of games okay but otherwise otherwise you felt really good otherwise everything else was amazing awesome so um how much water were you drinking yeah look I I don't like or you wouldn't have measured that sort of stuff I think I was still reasonable I don't know if I would add salt to everything so I think I was getting enough salt I might have been water um yeah the only reason I ask is because a lot of people when they when they start having a cramping issues the first thing they think about is electrolyte so they start adding electrolytes and electrolytes and then if they keep having cramping issues uh sometimes they'll add more electrolytes and more salt and what that does is actually increases your demand for for water and now you know you're you're trying to excrete more to get rid of the excess salt and that can actually make you cramp because dehydration can certainly make you cramp as well and so you know if you try the electrolytes and that that doesn't work then it's probably more water related and you should just ramp up the amount of water that you drink and that that often settles things down for people is is really really ramping up the water but like I said you know the more electrolytes you drink and you know putting salt in the water and things like that you know that can actually increase your demand for water as well what like are you how many liters a day are you saying like three to four liters a day or even more than that or minimum yeah especially for like a big guy like you and like playing playing uh you know High Level Sports and doing that sort of activity yeah at least I mean when I was you know I mean when I was playing I mean I I would I felt best like when I was drinking like seven to eight liters a day oh well okay yeah no I definitely wouldn't have been doing that uh well you know just play with it though you know I mean I I think definitely more than four liters a day for sure and then like Tamp back on the salt and the added salt just salt to taste that that should be more than enough and um you know or you're drinking coffee taking caffeine things like that uh yeah I drink coffee normally when I was doing that I would quite often do like a bulletproof coffee in the morning when I was doing cardboard so like if I didn't want to eat bacon and eggs on those mornings or whatever I was doing I would do yeah the uh bulletproof style coffee on those days but yeah I'd always be a one to two coffees a day sort of guy yeah so soak coffee can strip your body from magnesium and magnesium is is known when you get low magnesium it's known to give cramps and uh but also coffee caffeine is a diuretic so you end up losing water as well so it's sort of a perfect storm for cramps as they like low magnesium and dehydration so if you're gonna if you're going to take drink coffee then like certainly I would take like a magnesium supplement specifically you know something that's high bioavailability that will absorb really well and not at the same time as the coffee because it can stop absorption as well if you take it the same time and and then just really jack up the amount of water you're drinking yep or even caffeine pills on the sort of morning before the game you know if you still got the caffeine addiction you want to feel alert well that's all we would try to do going into a game I'd sort of try and have less coffee that two to three days before a game and then we would have a nodos before the match instead yeah nuts but either that or you just have the coffee on the way out of the game is it sort of depends we play a lot more night games now which sucks because you know if you're having a coffee at five o'clock at night you go on and play at 7 40. and finish up at midnight and you're already stressed and adrenaline like it's a bad combination for sleep but yeah it sort of is what it is when we were no good earlier in my career we used to play all afternoon games whereas most of our games are like prime time TV games now at yeah 7 50 at night yeah it's not good for sleep yeah I guess it's a good problem to have but yeah yeah yeah yeah it's different but I mean Tom there's obviously a little bit of fear and it's based on experience for you to sort of do those harder sessions without having any carbs on board curious to hear Dr chapey's thoughts because you know the the way that we've sort of spoken about it or is that you can only hold so much energy in your liver in the form of glycogen whereas the energy storage tank that we've all got on our bodies in terms of body fat is not endless but it can last for months even on a lean guy like you Tom it'd still be still be a month's worth of energy probably I've Chef you're doing a kind of expand on that well yeah so I mean I mean just on the sound of it you know when you were on a carnivore diet I mean just the meat and water that you were feeling great it was just the cramping that was an issue as opposed to like the energy levels in the contact is it am I right up to say that yes yeah so when it was keto-based I had more issues with actual power and force production right when I went to carnivore that sort of went away which was interesting in itself like the yeah kind of all I could go back to doing the gym and I was still lifting the same in the gym but keto I couldn't um so that was an interesting distinction to make but yeah then still was just on Carnivore still having issues on the only on the maximal days like we're running 15ks in a match sort of thing so having issues with cramps yeah so you know when you're doing keto I mean keto can mean a lot of different things because it's just the absence of carbohydrates right and you have to replace that with something generally it's meat and fat as well and but a lot of people say like oh well I have to eat a lot of veggies and greens and and non-carbohydrate ridden plants to get all the nutrients and things like that so you start eating a lot more of those things so you can actually say to distinguish in my example I was I'd probably just go between either high protein versus high fat when I say keto I was just a higher fat version of Keto I wasn't really having many veggies anyway uh I would have had some but I have never been a big plant eater anyway yeah that's sort of my distinguish how I distinguish it sorry were you having any carbohydrates or just low carbohydrates like below 20 or 50 or something like that because I mean people people do that as well it's like maybe it'll just like below 50 or below 20 grams of protein or carbs a day I should say I'd say like below 50 below 20 on a lot of days below 50 almost and then like I was saying like once a month we're going for a drink or whatever and those nights you probably just wouldn't care but 95 of the time under 50 grams yeah okay and then on Carnivore was it just meat at that point um no I probably assumed like 120 grams here and there and yeah a cheat day once a month yeah so with with different different things and well there's different things in plants that can trip you up one of those things are different lectins that can actually bind to insulin receptors even more tightly than insulin cancer some essential plant and five times more tightly than insulin when insulin's up or or it's you know active or hitting those insulin receptors it can actually block the energy mobilization from your fat and so you end up actually being in a worse off position because you're not eating carbohydrates so you should be able to mobilize fat because the lectins is actually not letting you so it's like you have a lot of insulin but you don't have carbs coming in so you you sort of gas out and um and that can be that can be a problem for people uh you know if they're if they're eating these different sorts of lectins because I can that can screw with that as well which is why a lot of people when they go from keto to carnivore they actually have a lot better results they lose even more weight and they're exercise potential and endurance goes goes up as well you know that's some of the work from Professor Knox was that he they actually did like randomized controlled trials with different athletes and you know put them on the treadmill and some were like keto adapted and that can take some time too it can take you know two three weeks sometimes before people get fully keto adapted um fat adapted like I for me I didn't notice a lag at all as soon as I stopped eating all that stuff like I just felt amazing like just right there I just got better and better and better but some people can take up to three weeks and you know so they they gave it like 42 days so they got you know you know six weeks for these people just to make sure that they were fat adapted and they found that they had the same exercise ability and potential they could really push themselves really hard and uh and then they switched them so the guys that were doing keto started eating carbs and guys that were eating carbs did keto and again did give them 42 days and found that they were still able to exert themselves be exactly the same except with the added bonus that the guys were in keto uh fat adapted could just keep going they wouldn't they wouldn't run out of their glycogen you know so but that that is one thing that you can you can have other things trip you up besides just the insulin so that's uh that is something that that I certainly do see sometimes when people go from keto to carnivore they get especially in their uh especially in their you know if they're high level athlete they get they get even more results I think it's probably a lot to well there are a lot of things going on I think but I think one of the major ones is probably the to do with the insulinogenic uh response to the the lectins did you start uh any of this process while you were playing rugby or has it all been post-career or yeah no I did this for like when I started this 23 years ago it was just I was just in college uh University and I took cancer biology and just learned how toxic plants were and that there were like just dozens if not over 100 carcinogens and just all the different plants and fruits that we ate and uh There Were Ten Thousand Times more abundant than the pesticides we sprayed on them and 500 times more likely to cause cancer than the pesticides we sprayed on them you know so we were just blown away by that my professor just told us that he didn't eat any plants he didn't eat any vegetables any salads wouldn't let his kids eat salads and he just and he said to us he's like plants are trying to kill you and so I was just like yup never eating plants again so I was 20 at the time and I was playing um I was playing for a University team I was playing at senior level and I was uh you know in the mix for the U.S national team and I just stopped I just stopped eating all plants and and so I defaulted into just eating meat because what what else is there and um yeah so I was going around the grocery store going like well what the hell can I eat and I just came across some eggs and meat so I just picked those up and just started eating that and I just my my athletic performance just just absolutely took off absolutely it was just night and day I mean I I was putting in a lot of work and I was very serious about it at the time but at the same time my my fitness was just increasing at levels that it had just never ever you know done before and I got to the point where I was so fit that I could just I could just Sprint all day and not get tires I was at a dead Sprint all day every day throughout every practice every drill uh every game and I couldn't I couldn't get tired I couldn't wear myself out I got in such good shape that like after a game I'll play like a high level game in like the Canadian Premiere ship and I'd just be buzzing I played openside flanker which you know a lot of running a lot of contact and um and I remember like walking off the game off the pitch one day and I was just like buzzing I'm like what am I doing like I'm like like that wasn't even a workout like I've got to go run I've got to do something I was like this one you were just sprinting for just eight hours a day and like it's only 90 minutes I started off I got I was like trying to see like where in the day I could just go and just Sprint 10 miles real quick just to run this out of my system before like we had the you know the post match function and everything and uh at that exact moment like one of the guys on the team who's one of the fitter guys on the team just said oh my God like you know if that reflew the whistle you know like five minutes later I probably would have died of a heart attack and I was just so drained it was like I literally wasn't I wasn't that wasn't even a workout to me and you know some of the other fit guys on the team were just there were gas they were dead so you know that's when I really started noticing like how much of a difference this was making and um uh but yeah it was night and day and then when I was in my when I was in England as you know I mentioned before we started uh playing over there that's when I actually slipped off I was about 25 and some of the meat was breaded had some sort of crumbing on it and I was just like well you know with the plant but you know dose makes the poison maybe it's not all that bad and I sort of convinced myself that maybe it wasn't wasn't all that bad and you know within a few months I remember thinking a few weeks and months I remember thinking I was like I was just getting these aches and pains and you know my back hurt and it was all these weird little things going on that just had never happened in the last five years and I just didn't feel as just super human amazing as I normally did I was still playing well I still felt good but I was like why don't I feel it's just unbelievable as I normally do I mean I'm not working as hard am I not pushing myself like my 25 now I'm just over the hump and just dying now my body's just breaking down and um you know but that was that was when it started just a little bit just just crumbed chicken like that was enough you know everything else was me and but the biggest thing that that did was that was that was the the crack in the dam because now I was out of the mindset of just I'm not eating any plants at all ever to oh well why don't eat that or why not put some ketchup on something why don't I do this I remember thinking myself I haven't used ketchup in years like what why why haven't I on I guess I'll use some it was weird it was just this surreal sort of moment and then it just sort of slipped off and then I started just eating more of a whole food approach still very heavily meat based but other things would be in the mix as well and then like salads or something like that but there's always Whole Foods you know um it's exactly the sort of cycle I go through quite frequently to be honest like and it's usually not even yeah same as what you're saying it's not deliberate but quite often it comes I've got two little kids it comes just from practicality of time you go I'll just have other kids are having tonight and yeah and you yeah and it's exactly like you said you do it once you're like oh I'll do it tomorrow and and then all of a sudden I have a rush of motivation and I go a few weeks going really well again and then slip back so I yeah I know the yeah that's exactly what I go through yeah well I do know you know now that like in my in my late 20s when I was still playing you know at a high level in the U.S super league and and um and then in you know in Ireland in the AIL uh one uh you know and not not sort of doing this um I still felt good and I was still able to compete but you know as I had other you know when I was in Ireland I obviously had had other commitments and things like that time commitments with medical school but I felt better at 38 when I rediscovered carnivore than I did at 27 playing you know top level rugby in the US and training a lot and you know that was within a couple weeks and I was I was out of shape you know I was I just been doing humanitarian work I've been in Bangladesh in the refugee camps there and so I've been there for a while and I've not been working out just been eating whatever the hell was available in a refugee camp just not always uh not always anything that you even recognize but you just see what's there and and then you know I was out of shape I was way overweight and two weeks into it I lost 10 kilos in like 10 days really and then I just started feeling amazing I'm like right I'm going back and playing some rugby and so 38 went back out and my team in Seattle had just turned professional the the major league rugby Championship just just started that year and so I was out there playing with those guys who you know swings guys were professionals from overseas and others were you know high-level us players and but they've been training for months and I hadn't been but I was I was able to keep up and I was able to just meet at a dead Sprint the whole time even though I was very out of shape and like a few weeks into that um we had a fitness test and like a modified bleep test so people know what that is it's miserable and uh I finished like top five you know out of like you know 90 players you know and that's like three three squads but uh but that's that's being you know that was really just like two weeks of running and I was able to just just be that competitive purely off of my diet and I was 38 you know so it makes a massive difference at least at least for me and from what I've seen and conceptually from the biochemistry of it it makes it does make sense to me that why that would so it sounds like you noticed the biggest difference performance wise in your running did you notice any difference like gym work power work when you initially started was it Improvement was there like a backwards bit for the start and then it picked up like yeah for me no I didn't get any backwards bit I just started improving right away uh some people do notice a dip but that usually comes back in like a you know a couple weeks you know as I was saying with with Prof notes he was saying like at most three weeks you'll get fully keto adapted uh but I felt better right away and that was one of the first things I noticed uh that there was something different there was something sort of amazing going on was because I couldn't get sore I wasn't sore after like these big gym sessions and I just like bought a bunch of like home equipment because I was I was helping my folks with some some health issues so I was taking some time off from work and so I had two three hours a day four hours a day to just work out and so I was just doing a bunch of lifts and I did like a heavy leg session with like 12 big heavy leg uh actually sizes to failure and normally that would leave me very sore for quite some time especially because I I'd really just gotten back from Bangladesh and so I was like the first leg leg day that I'd had in months and months and months and I was expecting to be just miserable and sore and broken for a week or so I wasn't even sure the next day I mean at all and I thought okay that's weird like well you know I wasn't like jelly-led just just walking out like a you know newborn deer or something like that you know out of out of the gym so like well maybe maybe I just didn't push myself hard enough maybe but I went to failure every single every single set and so I was like well I'll just keep going until I just really wear myself out and end up doing um that those 12 sets again the same workout set and then I just started doing squats on top of that and I ended up I said to myself okay I'll just use I'll just do sets until I just wear myself out and I just can't do anymore and then I'll and then I'll know I'll know you know what's going on and I ended up doing another 20 sets of squats to failure every single one and like the first set on of that my 13th set I should say I did 15 reps of failure on my last set I did I saw my you know 30 second set I did uh 12 or 13 was my failure so it wasn't much of a dip so but I was giving myself a proper rest I was giving myself like three four minutes rest in between sets um but um you know so now what I do I do like the old search new Bray and you know uh garanda um I mean Jack LaLanne sort of thing right I only give myself like 60 seconds between uh leg sets and 30 seconds between upper body set a it goes a lot quicker and B I can actually wear myself out but with that I yeah I couldn't wear myself out and the next day I I still wasn't sore and I was like walking up the stairs I'm like why how am I not feeling this I was taking two at a time and I was like okay yeah you know there's something going on in my in my hamstrings and so I went I went hiking I went up this horrible mountains called Mount Si it's miserable hike it's just straight up and um and uh but it was fine you know I did just fine and uh well it was like three hours and then I just felt so good after that I was like right it's time to go play some rugby and so I went to practice that night and it was just at a dead Sprint it just felt great and the next day you know I could I could feel that you know my that I put in a lot of work on my legs but they were not sore they didn't hurt I could I could you know go up and down the stairs there's no problems and um you know so I felt fine then the second day you know normally you're worse on the second day it's fine then too I went I met a friend for coffee that day and I was thinking to myself okay well what about coffee can I can I have coffee is that safe and one cup of black coffee and within 20 minutes I thought my hamstrings tighten up my back started getting stiff I could start feeling this pain like forming as I was sitting there going okay what's happening what's happening you feel it in real time I was sore for two days after that just from one cup of coffee and it sounds like like you're you're so sensitive did you do you think you're overly sensitive to the plants compared to the average person like because even when I did six to nine months of carnivore if I slipped back while I might not maybe maybe feel a little bit off I would never have a reaction like that to the coffee say like is do you reckon there's part of your makeup that has made you so sensitive to the downside but also so sensitive to the positive side of it as well um I mean maybe you know I mean everyone is going to be a bit more sensitive or less sensitive I don't have too many like sensitivity sensitivities like a like someone with autoimmune issues do I think with that one really what it was was I just I just ended up obscene workout I'm like I should have been just crippled for months whereas like now like the on the rare occasions that I have like a cup of coffee or something like that which is really I mean I don't think I've had coffee in years but you know I've had a cup of coffee here and there since then and um you know maybe we're working out or whatever and maybe it's just like you just feel a bit oh it's a bit but it's nothing it's nothing to speak of really and you know and even even like the soreness in my legs my back at the time was not that bad it was nothing it was nothing close to what it should have been or what it would have been yeah in years past it was just I noticed it now whereas before it did not exist and so you know I could see that contrast I'm like that's you know that that's doing something but it wasn't it you know it didn't like debilitate me yeah you know what I mean but it's just interesting though that you can pick up on that whereas I don't recommend people would pick up on those differences but you're obviously yeah I don't know you've studied a lot of this stuff but you can you can detail what one thing does to your body versus another very clearly obviously well I was definitely looking for it too yeah for the last few days I was really focused on like okay am I sore can I get sore why am I not sore and uh and so you know then I started noticing that and I didn't know what was going on at first I was like oh why is my back a little stiff like that's weird all my hammies are a bit a bit tight and then all of a sudden I'm like oh that's what happened and so then it was very very noticeable and then you know and most people aren't going to maybe even notice it that much I mean I talked to some people you know they say like well I'm doing carnivore and I feel great my lips are better my my uh exercises my everything's getting better but I'm still a bit sore on the gym and you know talk to him and you know sometimes they're still drinking coffee and that that does seem to uh be a theme but I don't but they're going to be way less sore than they normally would be you know someone like yourself who's doing really high level stuff you know I think you probably would notice a bit of soreness you know but probably not even all that much either compared to you know when you're eating like a more standard diet you're going to have and certainly not being in ketosis because just being in ketosis the higher Ketone levels actually suppress inflammation as well and so you're going to be removing things that cause inflammation you're also going to be gaining something that reduces what's left you know um so you know it's but it's not all that that much um you know but it's something I did notice it anyway and that's another sort of reinforcement for me and like okay I just you know coffee's not worth I was never a big coffee drinker anyway but that was enough for me to just be like yeah don't don't bother with it yeah Tom have you with sort of your recovery have you noticed a difference when you're being strict carnivore or very low carb when you're slipping off um look I'd say when I was very strict carnivore especially in those off season sessions a bit like what you're saying Anthony about being on a backup session to session I'd run every second day like we'd normally run every second day in the off season but I was finding that easier than normal um in terms of recovery after games because the recovery after a game is usually not necessarily about the running or the speed It's usually the contact like I've been Sorrel this week because I had a 120 kilo guy drive his knee into my spine and that really hurts and so that's still sore now but the rest of my body's recovered pretty well but you generally guaranteed to have a couple of hits like that from the game that's you saw for three to four days post tomorrow we train I should feel pretty good tomorrow and then we play three days later so you're always feeling good to the game unless you have a you know a particular injury but I probably I'd say I did notice a bit of a recovery difference when I was really really strong carnivore but kind of like what Anthony was saying I I haven't noticed a huge negative out income sorry impact when I've added little bits of carbohydrates in and I'm not a big plant eater either so I don't know if plants have as much of an impact on me but just by having rice back in I haven't noticed the downsides that a lot of people might if they're super sensitivity insulin or whatever it may be um it might be a small percentage difference but for me as I was saying before by reducing the cramping impact it was kind of a bit of a deal I've been willing to make now I probably could be a bit more disciplined especially in the off season and preseason we're not worried about games and cramping and that's where I think I should be back to being more strictly carnivore I think that's the process I'll go um this off season again but um yeah to sort of I'm not as I do notice a difference but not as Stark as what you've described Anthony yeah well you know the thing is too is that um you know you can you can still run on carbs you know you just have to keep feeding carbs yes you know and so and because you run out of glycogen but if you keep eating more you know this is why like you know like cyclists they use that sort of you know sugar gel sort of stuff yeah we feed and and you can do that you know but if you if you don't eat the carbs at all then you just you never have to you know and so the advantages to that um but you know you can certainly do it I mean most high-level athletes in the world right now in recent decades have all been doing it that way you know so I'm not saying you can't you can't do it like that you know and so I clearly are you know it's just uh I think there's I think there is a bit more of an advantage uh but I think that the a big big part of it is just eating a lot more meat which is what your body wants and the fat as well and um you know and if if you you know because it's not like you say like it's not something that you really want to mess with in the middle of the Season especially like if you're you're prone to getting those cramps and things like that like you know is that something is that worth when you're going into like later on in the season like you know just throwing that out there and then potentially getting cramps is that's probably not a great idea but um you know you can definitely keep doing it uh you know by eating eating carbs and you just might have to eat more carbs on the day of the game yeah but there are other advantages as well but uh you know it's good that you know you're not you're not seeing too much of a hit but I think there's a huge benefit in cutting out a lot of the other sort of plants and just keeping it short clean carbs and uh and just eating a lot more meat I think that's that's huge have you noticed well I should say is you know when you were doing just just carnivore did you notice a difference in your weight as well or your weight lifting as well because like for me like I was saying like I can just face my recovery so quick that I can just do 20 sets of something you know without real much much problem that I'm feeling pretty good the next day did you notice a similar similar experience I well not in terms of that because we just our gym program sort of set like I'm not I don't go into the gym and go I'm just gonna do 20 sets of bench today or 20 sets of squats like we'd have our four sets of trap bar deadlift and our naughty curls or whatever it may be so I wasn't there experimenting I'm sort of you know it's a different scenario like you've probably got a bit more freedom to play around with it so I didn't notice much there but I lost a lot of weight like I we did the dexa body scans we've ever had them like the um the proper um bone density ones and I so I lost six kilos I think but I gained two kilos of muscle so I actually lost eight kilos of fat really to be able to lose that amount over that sort of six to nine months which the dietitians had always told us like it's impossible to lose significant weight without losing muscle but I did that but my weight like the gym numbers that I was lifting and stuff probably similar but I was doing them while weighing six kilos less so my power to weight ratio was way up from where it was before which is really all we care about like footies not quite as physically like it's not as much about strength as rugby is it's more closer it's in between there and soccer like our running demands are very similar to soccer if soccer went for another 30 minutes like wear an extra quarter on soccer's timeline um so we're more worried about you know repeatability of Sprints and short sharp movements than we are about huge rugby tackles and scrums like that's a rarity so yeah I wasn't as concerned about the gym stuff but I was obviously wrapped to lose six kilos and be running better and feeling better on the field especially yeah yeah I was going to say too when you mentioned the like the hex bar deadlift that's something I think it was a Flaherty this guy he's a he's a professional trainer in in the US but he like swears by the hex bar deadlift you know that's one of the best to get that uh strength weight ratio up especially like concentric so the concentric uh hex bar so you just lift it up and then just drop it and just do that and then you don't have like The Eccentric where you're sort of tearing apart the muscles and you're growing your hypertrophy so you're just getting the strength but you're not getting the bulk and so he was you know he's saying that he can drop people that he was actually saying that he could he could predict people's 40 meter dash time um down to like like the tenth of it like a hundredth of a second uh based on what they can do with the hex bar deadlift and he did that with like 10 people sorry 100 people 100 100 different uh like NFL athletes or prospects or whatever and they all did their hex bar thing and he just set out you know where they were going to place out of 100 and he got he got all of them except two in the exact order and it was really interesting well that's sort of become that's the main part of our work workouts for turn away so we'll do a Power day where we'll do jumps with the trap bar so it'll be literally three count of movement jumps four sets of three but it's attached to a gym aware program which has a little tiny chord which measures measures your velocity and funny you say that about the NFL because our weight Sky brought that from the NFL and he said the scores on that uh Rel like our measure of power so he's like the quicker you can move a 50 kilo trap bar on a on a jump correlates to how good your power is on the field um and where all like a lot of our guys bar one or two are a fair way off NFL athletes like the receivers and running backs much more endurance space over here but he's like our biggest thing is we want you shifting that bar as quick as possible and then on the Wednesday will be a heavy Trap by day where it'll be you know four sets of three four sets of four uh max weight usually we will do the um e-century by lowering as well but um the the Monday power day is all about how quickly can you jump off the floor and not even land and reset but down up down up down up so yeah they've become the biggest part of our weights training is the Trapper and you do and you remove a lot of the risk with a normal traditional deadlift of any back injuries you've got a lot of guys like we have 45 guys in the gym and maybe only three to five different coaches it's hard to watch everyone's technique perfectly so to remove a lot of the injury risk trap bar is a lot safer yeah definitely yeah when and that was the thing too uh with the concentric um because you're not sort of breaking down the muscle more you can do it more often too so you know that's I don't know if you want to sort of go off off program and add more things in but you know if you were going to that might be one to think about um I know a lot of rugby guys that that like Carl and Iles he's like the Speedster for uh the US seven seam he was he was like a you know prospective Olympic sprinter and then he switched over to rugby because I recognize seeing YouTube videos of him yeah he just runs around people yeah yeah so he does that he does that that training program so he does the concentric and um and that was something you're saying too so if you do you know sort of a few sets or like four or five sets uh or maybe was it three sets of like five to eight reps of just the concentric lift right before you go and perform like do a 40 or play a game that you'll actually be faster because you'll load up um your your muscles and get them uh ready to fire much yeah much more so we'll do that tomorrow morning we'll have a primer session before our main training session which is tomorrow and then we they have the option of guys to do it in the rooms before a game so I have made like we can't get the gym stuff in there but we can get mad balls and do mid-ball throws and uh Med ball Accel throws and stuff like that so that sort of stuff's really made its way into AFL it'll last probably two to three years a lot of the NFL stuff it's I think most of it's coming from the NFL where all the money is and all the research that sort of stuff is coming into our sport as well so yeah we would never have done that previously doing primer weights before training nice oh very good yeah that's awesome nice and last time we spoke Tom you guys were getting into a bit of the knees over toe stuff like particularly Nordic curls is that still on the on the uh recipe or yeah nordics nordic's a massive like that's our biggest predictor of hamstring injuries so you have to have a score of over 400 as a minimum to sort of be considered semi-safe from a hamster injury um 400 what does that mean oh so there's a it's a computer score off the noise so there's a machine called the nordboard so it's a it essentially holds your ankles in like you would do a naughty curl but it tells how much force you're putting through the the handles with your hamstrings so um and then we also do fast fuel length testing of our hamstrings so there's a quadrant and if your score is over 400 and your fascal length is a certain length you're in the top quadrant you're considered safest from hamstring injuries if you've got short fascicles with low strength you're in the most risk interest category so guys who's whatever you're in you'll be given a program based on we need you to work on stretching your fascal length out or we need you to just work on the strength and you'll be doing weighted nordics more reps whatever it may be and we do a lot of copenhagen's which are like the groin um it's sort of like a Nordic for your groin so you have one leg up laying on your side off a bench or something and you have to lift the rest of your body weight up using your groins um a lot of our stuff other than the power power exercise we do on the gym are based on groin hamstring back sort of injury prevention like core stability we have a lot of guys who get like the old school not the old school op but groin issues from just because there's a lot of running a lot of change of Direction in a week so a lot of our program is around preventing those sort of injuries yeah nice do they have they have you guys on a a diet program as well as everyone just sort of left their own devices there yeah we have a nutritionist um she's actually really good like I've talked to her about my like you know having been on a high protein when I've done Carnival before and you know being in a much higher protein than what she would probably normally recommend but I've had some terrible nutritionists in the past which is like you're talking to a year 9 textbook and you have some that are really flexible and go no I'm more than happy for you to do this if you're seeing benefit I'm happy to support you on it it's still in the general sense of Education it's a lot more just like you were talking about like a Whole Foods diet which look still a million times better than what kids would eat in year 10 11 when they're playing footy where they're you know it's macca's on the way home and it's you know whatever you can get your hands on in the cupboard it's still a big Improvement on that but it's not anywhere near a low carb sort of diet or anything like that yeah I think yeah a lot of those are still in that yeah I I guess better in the sense of Whole Foods and everything like that but still very carb Centric they're still doing that with rugby as well I've been trying to uh talk to some of my my friends who that the guys I played with are now sort of running the the Seattle Team now and um and uh I'm trying to sort of like just quietly just be like oh you know there's this thing if I can help you with it you know like they're still they've got their guy and they they've just it's the same traditional sort of thing you know just like get your Macros here you know sort of lean lean sort of meets and lean proteins and then you know get all your energy from carbs and things like that so it's not they're not quite there yet unfortunately it's the problem is you've got to be a very brave or very senior sort of nutritionist to go and be the first to do something in a in a professional sport and like footy here is the biggest sport by far you know if it doesn't work or just say you had a big injury list that year by chance or you didn't perform well the thing is going to be pointed to the person who did something different for the first time so no one really wants to take the risk so I I get that and we we actually the when I did start doing more of the low carb keto eight years ago a lot of guys had a really good goal at it like we would have had 10 to 15 and a lot of guys still keep those principles they're not they're not um maybe as invested anymore but it was as close as we got to getting a whole team buy into it um and we did see some good results at least physically performance wise we didn't really translate on the field not really for that reason we probably just weren't there as a team yet but um that was as close we got to getting a whole team on board and it was because we had uh Tim Knox come represent and we had a doctor who was pushing it yeah very good well it's really cool that you guys had him come out and talk to the team like that yeah yeah he's huge I mean he's been he's been one of the top uh you know Top Doctors and and internationally for exercise physiology uh for decades yeah and um you know he was one of those guys that was a proponent of carbohydrates and you know you need carbohydrates for this sort of thing and I think whatever 10 years ago or so he just sort of went like damn it I was wrong I'm so sorry I've been lying to you people like this is this is totally different now he's and he's doing all his research down the other other tracks so yeah that's that's lucky to get him uh because a lot of people outside of like these circles that sort of we're in like wouldn't wouldn't have ever really come across them and come across as wearing especially the transition uh because he you know he got vilified because he just had a change of heart and just said hey look this is what this is where the evidence is taking me which I think is a very responsible thing to do you know especially as a professor who's who's made his career off of saying one thing and now he's saying I got it wrong guys this this is this is this is something different now they took him to court to take his license away you know I mean it's just it's just ridiculous what people will go through to protect their their ideologies yeah what did you think like uh obviously you've got the your thoughts on all the planned stuff and then carbs as well but would you say plants versus say seed oils where are you sitting on like the seed oil sort of debate I've seen a lot more of that on social media that people are pointing their finger at even that more Southern carbs now that yeah refined vegetable oils are pro like maybe your carbs are fine but all the oils and stuff they're coming with are actually the thing to blame like where do you sit on that yeah I think it was terrible yeah I mean just the industrial process that they go through is pretty wretched it makes them turn rancid anytime the oils outside of the seed or the other plant in general any any liquid oil if it's liquid at room temperature is much more unstable and and it breaks down into these you know very inflammatory byproducts also have a massive uh omega-6 ratio to make it something you don't even have really any Omega-3s to speak up and so the omega-6 is you need omega-6 you know it is it is necessary there it's an essential fatty acid but you need it in specific proportion to your Omega-3s and it's the same enzymes that metabolize omega-6s as Omega-3s and so you can drown out uh the the enzymes with your omega-6s so even if you do get some Omega-3s it doesn't they don't even get used they don't even get picked up because there's so many just they get overwhelmed and also when you're when you're heating you see they have to heat these things at high temperature to to just make them and when you heat anything every 10 degrees Celsius that you raise up the temperature it doubles the reaction rate so it speeds up the degradation into these rancid oils that are quite harmful and so just by the process of of making this stuff they've completely turned all of these things rancid because they heat it up to such high heat that it just massively increases the reaction rate by millions of times so it's always already rancid then they have to dump in all these crazy industrial chemicals that are known carcinogens to humans uh to try and wash out some of this junk and I mean when they were first doing this stuff it was with uh you know canola oil was person was made from like rapeseed oil which was an industrial you know lubricant that's where I first used it as and they're like oh well this is a fat maybe we can just we have tons of this stuff maybe we can just sell this to people and um and so they started marketing it but like it was so toxic that like it was actually just not it was not edible it was not palatable it was it was it was just poison and so it was illegal for them to use that and so they had to sort of breathe I think they bred sort of other season were just slightly less toxic but like they still had this toxin they just had a lower level that like passed under the bar they're like all right yeah there we go so it's still it's already a toxic seed is already a toxic oil you know plants have defense chemicals that's a fact seeds have seeds or plants baby that's usually where you know they have the highest concentration of toxins because they're trying to protect it more than anything and so that's uh you know that's normally what you see as you see it's high concentration of toxins in there and so you know now you're getting oil just straight from that you know you're not gonna just get rid of all these things or some of that stuff's going to come with it you know and so yeah I think that stuff is is not good I think a lot of the uh in research that shows that there's not really much of a problem with it or maybe even like a benefit from canola oil to something else you know um some of these things are really poorly designed studies a lot of them are industry uh funded research and one thing you can count on with industry-funded research is it will support the industry yeah because if it doesn't they just don't publish it simple as that and a lot of these things are designed in such a way that the outcomes the endpoints are going to be something favorable and sometimes they'll have they'll have they'll run an experiment to a certain endpoint and that endpoints unfavorable but they look back here and they say well we can actually say that this is a favorable output endpoint so we'll say that's the end point and so you know there's a lot of these little tricks that you do to make something look better than it is or worse than it is and there's a lot of that with with seed oils but I mean either way whether or not this is good for you or bad for you or neutral it certainly wasn't something that we ever existed on before the 1950s because it didn't exist before then and um you know you can't say that something's essential and that you need it if we didn't even have it a thousand years ago 10 000 years ago 500 000 years ago when we were evolving if it's not something that we were eating 50 000 years ago it's not something that we have to have right by definition if it's something that existed 50 000 years ago why why do we need it of course we don't need it um and if you look at uh just you know this is epidemiology but if you look at the rates of heart disease and you look at the uh levels of acetyl consumption they perfectly track each other and acetyl you know precedes the heart disease Rise by you know like you know 15 years or something like that so it's like you have these two lines just going up and uh same with like sugar and high fructose corn syrup they both they just track like that whereas the animal fat saturated fat it's actually opposite so it's going down as heart disease is going up and uh as it was an inverse relationship between heart disease that's the thought that's like it seems it almost like I feel like another 10 years time it'll be what we all point to in even more so than even more so than maybe processed carbs that will go that was the worst part rather than even sugar like obviously Sugar's been around for a long time you know honey and natural sort of sugars but yeah I feel like the Tide's sort of turning a little bit even on that now that people are realizing that your vegetable oils are not very good and I think it'll still take a long time but yeah that's the one thing I've seen the most of recently is a lot of the data coming out on how bad the cdlers are and I always I've always tried to cook in butter or just you can buy beef fat here in the supermarket I just try to try to buy Tallow anyway but um yeah well that's good too and that's the best one as well and and you know even I don't think most people are going to understand that trans fats are bad and trans fats come from these vegetable oils that are partially hydrogenated seed oils that trans so when you have a double bond right it just changes the shape of the molecule and the molecules chain can come down here and then Branch off and come off here or it can go down there and so this is CIS it comes off the same side this is trans comes off the opposite side after that double bond and that trans connection doesn't exist anywhere in nature so our bodies have no idea what the hell to do with that and so that's where you see like these massive massive just you know uh buildup of of plaques and and disease and things like that is when there's just all this trans fat crap so that's actually been maybe illegal in the US now you can't you can't cook with that stuff you can't use it in anything and I think other places have made it illegal as well and that comes from all those those seed oils as well and that's certainly I mean there's no question about that that stuff is toxic um and you mentioned sugar as well yeah we you know we have had sugar for a long time but it was it was we haven't had the exposure to it now of the quantity yeah exactly so like in the late 1800s I think like 1890s the average American ate about four pounds of sugar a year whereas now it's 150 pounds a year it's just like it's just insane difference and um you know that's that's gonna make that's going to make a difference of course and you know maybe people yeah people were certainly eating honey and fruit before but it was seasonal uh we didn't have refrigeration we didn't have you know jetliners to bring things over uh in Cold Storage over from other continents uh you know from the tropics and things like that and greenhouses and all these sorts of technology related you know food development and transport and things like that so it was you know it was much it was much more difficult to actually it was a treat you know maybe you had some even like in there you see it's like some cowboy movies and it's just like oh there's hard candy down the General Store you know it was like they'd have that like you know every now and then it'd be like a little treat but you know you really wouldn't even have access to that so yeah I think it's definitely the you know the amount that we're being exposed to now is make that made a huge huge difference oh absolutely look you you've just explained today that probably all of this can be explained by evolution in some way and that the way we're doing it now isn't really the way it was meant to be done so yeah it's funny that even like you're just talking about the the inverse relationships between saturated fat versus fructose corn syrup and stuff like that going upwards and downwards in the why are we so backwards with our nutritionists that they think it's the other way around is just baffling like you think you would look you could just look at those two graphs and that would be enough to explain to you what's gone wrong in the last 70 years but yeah like those two graphs alone should be all you need to see to make like a general decision on what you eat yeah it doesn't seem to click I might get those things like frame them and just put them up behind me for like every every Target you will still get people say to you oh we just weren't detecting them I had I had a conversation with a friend on Monday night and he was like oh yeah but we didn't used to measure how many people were getting cancer or heart disease I was like you look at how many people were fat versus not fat in the 50s and out and then go back to the 1900s and we actually did have records of that you know people saying that we just didn't count I mean just don't under I've never actually looked at the Bureau of Statistics within the US government like it is insane how much stuff they kept they kept records on they kept I looked at these things um you know specifically for for heart disease and different and just diseases in general I mean I had bad things going back to 1900 and they had things categorized by how many people had you know had something how many people died of it um in the country in each state in major cities in each each state by ethnicity by gender and I mean I mean I don't mean just like you know just like Baseline I mean like uh like every damn ethnicism Italian Greek French you know black white it wasn't just black and white you know I mean it had so much detail like people kept a lot a lot of very very careful records and um you know you look back at these things I mean we just we literally threw away an entire century plus of very very clear Statistics and Records and medical literature when we said that causes heart disease stop eating it and they just threw it out they just they just started looking at things completely uh fresh and it just said right everything just start over from scratch this is the only thing we know and now we're going to go from here um you're talking about like you know Sally Norton's book on oxalates you're talking about plant poisons in general she made this whole book called toxic superfoods where she just talks about oxalate and she goes back into the literature and is I mean there are people from you know the late 1800s early 1900s mid 1900s 60s 70s even the 90s talking about how like you know these oxalates or defense chemical that are toxic and all the different things that they do all the different ways that they can damage you the different levels that they start you know becoming exerting toxicity and even in the 1990s people talking about like hey you know people thinking that you know plants are good for you and they're just safe and we're just living in the Garden of Eden something I've said before is like these people are fooling themselves like these things are toxic and like you can't eat too many of these things you know people have died from eating too many uh oxalates um oh gosh why am I blanking on isn't it four what's his name Australian he um yeah so he went he went like vegan for a while I was having these like big you know um uh spinach smoothies and things like that and just having all this veggie stuff after about three weeks of this stuff he got checked into the hospital he's sick as a dog had like a bunch of uh kidney stones had to get surgery and it was it was just he had these calcium oxalate Stones it is it is from three weeks of this stuff he's like right is he going back I think I think he's eating meat now yeah and certainly not eating all the crazy oxalates because the spinach has just a ton of box like sort of like sweet potatoes and things like that and so you can have you have serious problem it can cause you know neurotoxicity and cars actually get serious neurological problems it's it is a poison and it's and it's used explicitly as a poisoned by the plants to stop you you know you hear this art there's so many weird arguments in the vegan community and and they they sort of Bounce from one's position to another because no position is tenable and so the current one they're talking about now you talk about this you know eating ancestrally eating to our biological nature you know if we didn't evolve on it then obviously you know we don't need it they're saying well actually we probably like yes you know the evidence shows that we were eating a lot of meat and maybe exclusively in some areas just eating meat but that might not be an optimal you know you're just trying to get to reproductive age it's not necessarily what's good for longevity like says who according to what exactly it's made up very wise yeah so you know what about the I'm playing Devil's devil's advocate here about the argument on the other side can be small doses of plants that almost can have the uh you know a little bit of poison makes you stronger on the other side what do you call that um hormones yeah what's your thoughts on that yeah so you know I mean sure I mean some things can have a hormetic benefit I mean even arsenic in microdoses has been shown to to have little benefits here and there but very small doses right and these sort of doses in a real in a real life situation like but that stalks of broccoli or but that's what I mean that that's that's a very good point because they don't ever say that they said it's probably hermetic well what's hermetic there's there's 500 different toxic elements in broccoli or you know I'm just throwing that out there but you know there's there's dozens if not hundreds of things that can be potentially toxic in celery or spinach or cabbage or whatever um but they're probably hormetic okay but you're not saying which one okay what about the oxalate so what level are oxalates or medic you know they don't say that um you know they don't say What's the cap on that you know we know what the cap is cap is about 150 to 200 milligrams of oxalates it starts becoming toxic before that is it hormetic probably not it's probably just not your body's just probably able to clear it in time it's not necessarily doing you any good it's just that it's not building up to to the extent of causing problem but after 200 a day that can actually start to build up thoughts problems Hemsworth was probably having like a couple thousand a day you know and and he got in trouble really quick so they don't say that they just say that that was one of the positions that they jumped to you know was uh was just they tried to deny for a long time that plants had any sort of Defense chemicals even though it's just a hard fact just go to a library and check out a book on botany you'll figure it out pretty quick or all these guys that have been documenting all the different plant toxins and nightshades and um and oxalation all these things going back hundreds of years um this is all in the literature which they obviously you know don't pay attention to and they just say okay well yes all right we did a Google search there's there's toxins there but um I bet you it's hormatic and it's like okay but you did you had absolutely zero research and you've looked into that not at all and so but but to make that claim you have to say which toxins are we talking about at what level are they hormetic what's a hormetic benefit where is the cap when does it stop being hormonal because the idea of hormesis is is that it at this range it's good for you at this range maybe it's just whatever and at this range is toxic right if it's hormetic so what what toxin are we talking about what is its formatic benefit what is the level that you get that hormonic benefit where should people stop yeah because that's important if you're telling people to eat a bunch of plants maybe exclusively plants and you're admitting that there's some things that are toxic at a certain level but maybe hormetic at a certain level you need to identify you know which toxins we're talking about and uh and and how uh how to how to know what the limit is and where to stop at that they don't do any of that they don't provide any of those sorts of things um so yeah maybe some of these things are hormetic but like you know we also know that a lot of these things cause damage and cause harm and so you know if you want to see I mean I think that's that's fully worthwhile doing is identifying all these different toxins and finding what level sort of brings about sort of making a toxic level like oxalates we have a lot of information on oxalates and uh and salinity and things like that we do know there's certain doses that that are going to start harming you and other ones we don't have as much you know um you know Verizon one Miller microgram per kilogram will kill you you know so we know that one pretty well I've just finished Breaking Bad so rice is a topical one have you seen it I have yeah it was it was years ago though but yeah yeah when he makes the rice into no I won't spoil it if anyone hadn't watched it but very deadly very deadly in one of the last episodes yeah um but no like even what you're saying it probably all makes sense again on what you were talking about before that plants maybe were needed when there was a period in time when you couldn't have enough meat maybe yeah as you're saying you could have a little bit here a little bit there when needed to get through when there wasn't enough of another food but they weren't available every day of the year 365 days a year so that theory probably makes sense um what's your thoughts on saladino's sort of views on more of the animal based versus more strictly carnivore and his choice of what he chooses to weed and how he breaks it down yeah I mean I I still think that eating more meat is is really good and I like how he supports that and he talks about how you know like meets what we're supposed to eat and the Fat's really good for you and we should do we should focus on that um I think that uh me personally I don't I don't think that we should be eating carbs really at all especially fructose you know I think that that's that's more harmful you know when you're eating it with fiber you absorb less of it which is a good reason you know why not to eat things with fiber because fiber like delays absorption stops you from actually absorbing breaking down your food properly but it also does that with fructose and does that with with some of the things you don't want as well so you get you get less of the fructose from fruit if you're if you're eating it with uh with fiber but you are going to absorb some of that and you know that is going to work in your body the way that fructose otherwise works in your body so fructose has been shown to be metabolized into the same byproducts as alcohol right so you get the same damage to your body from eating fructose and the breakdown products thereof as you do from alcohol and their and that breakdown Pro those breakdown products is that going to live exclusively or it gets through the whole body yeah so you're not going to have uh you know you're not going to get drunk right but it is going to have an effect on your brain because fructose gives a dopamine response to the Addiction Center of your brain so you can get like that Sugar High that's what that is you're getting this dopamine hit and so it could be very addictive but it's also causing fatty liver disease cirrhosis type 2 diabetes even heart disease and implicated in what can feed Cancers and also um it's been implicated in in like neurodegenerative diseases like like Alzheimer's which is now being termed type 3 diabetes so you know I don't think it's a good thing to have like if you're if you're out in the woods and you're hungry and you need a quick hit of energy you know Apple's your best friend you know until you can you know take down a you know kangaroo or something like that or a mastodon I think that that's probably you know a big survival Advantage for us that we we had that available to us and or and we could eat other plants as well to a certain extent to survive and then get our kill or even the native Australians like they're known to eat different plants but historically if you look at if you look at the historical record of people living with them talking to them and and studying them they like exclusively ate meat unless they couldn't get meat and then they knew which plants to eat or they were using them medically for some reason or another and so they they just ate meat and Native Americans as well and then when you look at you know when you think about the ice ages there's no plants to speak of during that time anyway certainly no fruit and honey um so I think that that you know the fruit and honey side of things I don't think hey I don't think you need it because you know where was the fruit and honey when people were crossing over the land bridge from Asia to North America you know during the last ice age I mean it's nothing right so if you if you had to have it you know our ancestors wouldn't have made it and all these different populations like the Inuit today they wouldn't be there right because there's none available to them you know when they're living traditionally and so I don't think you need it I think that fructose in and of itself is is harmful you know in a small amounts or whatever um your body can deal with it pretty well it's uh it can replenish your liver glycogen pretty quickly actually it's one of the fastest carbohydrates to replenish your liver's glycogen so if you're in a fix you know when you're getting a hit of fructose bam you've just got a full liver full of glycogen yeah that's a that's an advantage but if you have access to me and you're eating that then you're going to replace and replenish your liver galactone all the time you don't need to do that and you're not and you're going to sort of derail yourself uh by by adding in that fructose so I think it can actually be a disadvantage certainly outside of that survival mechanism and it's addictive you know so it gives that addictive signal to the you know to your brain and people want to do it at any sort of time you start with a small amount of something addictive you tend to eat a little more of it and a little more of it a little more of it and a lot of people that come to a carnivore diet or any sort of change in their diet they're often doing it because they're trying to lose weight they're trying to gain health and a lot of these people have been struggling with food addiction is specifically carb and sugar addiction and then you start sprinkling back in some of that that addictive substance and they can easily go off the rails and I've spoken to a lot of people since you know uh solatino started you know changing the way he he ate and what he recommended and they were like oh okay well I'll do that I'll follow him you know because they he was the one who got them on in the first place and and um and so they started incorporating a little bit of fruit putting a little honey on things and there was just a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more and then after six months they're back eating you know pizza and and drinking sodas on the couch and you know just like I did you know just with the breading on on chicken when I was in England that's how it started then I was putting ketchup on things and I was like and then one morning I woke up I'm like oh you know I haven't had french toast in years why have I not had french toast and you know well let's make some french toast like just forgetting the last five years of my life when I'm just like don't eat any plants you know and I it for some reason I just didn't know why I hadn't eaten French toast and so I made some french toast but syrup on it you know and so you know you can you can sort of get out of uh of healthy habits pretty quickly on that now he you know he's able to just stay with you know fruit and honey and meat and that's great but I've spoke to a lot of people that degenerate very quickly uh because they have had these food addiction uh problems before and and you know and the thing is too is that you know Dr saladino for whatever reason he's increasing the amount of sugar he's having as well he's having you know more and more and more of this stuff and how he's putting like maple syrup in his milk and things like that and that's what he feels gives him the best energy but I think that's probably that you know he's becoming dependent more on the carbs as opposed to being able to run on his own on his own fat tissue and probably not ideal for someone who's trying to lose 40 kilos whereas he's probably someone who can get away with those few extra calories and he's very nice and yeah yeah he serves for two hours every morning you know and so he's got he's got a good good life you know yeah and um whereas most people who are coming to watch you or watch him they're probably people looking for help they're looking for a different way to try and lose weight so it's probably not in the same situation yeah or or overcome diabetes or IBS yeah all your issues yeah you're in just as bad a situation is you're probably all in one if you're 40 kilos overweight you've probably got those other two as well yeah yeah usually and you know and and that's the thing you always say like well if you're if you're metabolically healthy and your medical fit and you don't have all these problems that you know it's okay to eat carbs and sugar you know that's like saying if you don't have lead poisoning it's okay to drink water with lead in it you know it's like okay but this is what gives you metabolic issues you know and so if you want to avoid that all together then maybe maybe just steer clear of it like yeah you have like a bit of it every now and then you work out a lot are you going to develop diabetes probably not you know but is it ideal is it the best thing you can do for your body I don't think so you know I would I would argue against that and again just going back to that you know what we evolved on you know you know we we did best just eating meat and and the fossil record is very clear you know our ancestors were big tall strong bastards with big healthy bones they didn't have joint degeneration they didn't have cavities they had full developed jaws and teeth um and uh bigger brains they have bigger brains than we have now and um you know they were much taller like a lot of these guys that were hunting mastodons and and uh other Mega fauna they were on average six foot two six foot four on average right so a lot of these guys were like pushing seven feet a bunch of you know AFL players you know just running around but you know just just taking down big game and you know the average height of a population you know is indicative of the average health of health of the population so like in the U.S now the average adult male is like five foot eight it's pitiful you know and uh so we should be much higher than that you know we should be much taller than that and uh and we were and so this idea that you know we we aren't optimized by eating what our ancestors do what we're biologically designed for I mean that's an oxymoron saying that that what we're biologically designed for is not our optimal food source that makes no sense but you know to say that well we we may not have been as healthy then now just going vegan just doing the exact opposite of what we've been doing for three million years that that's actually optimal you know even though we haven't been doing this for three million years like based on what because based on the fossil record we were much healthier then we're much bigger than we're much smarter than we're much much better developed then and um you know this you know so if they're not really offering any any evidence the contrary they're just saying you know what I bet you you know I bet you that you don't you don't have to be you know you don't have to eat the thing that you biologically designed to be biologically you know optimized unlike any other animal on Earth you know because any zookeeper will tell you you feed an animal something it doesn't eat in the wild it gets very sick you know and it gets the same things we do that they say they get human diseases you know they get obesity and heart disease diabetes and cancer and you know we're getting human diseases they're not catching it from us but that's why you have that sign says do not feed the animals at the zoo that's why you know and then we think that oh actually that doesn't apply to us though because you know I bet you that you know it's it's exactly the opposite for us and absolutely no other animal on Earth but you know I bet you it is for us that that that's about as as logically sound of an argument that they that they have yeah well said uh all right let's um let's wrap there lads it's all you've kind of or another crack these preseason and let Dr chafee and I know how you go though you've inspired me even like look I'm not gonna go um back to 100 right now as I was talking about middle of the season but I can't do that yeah even just what you're even just what you're saying about you know the little things that make a day turn into a week which tends on a month like yeah this has inspired me to go back to be a little bit better now and then definitely in the off season and um yeah okay well that'd be good man yeah yeah I mean I wouldn't want you to sort of rock the boat too much when you're in season but yeah certainly like you know if you uh if you you felt uh you know that you wanted to on the off season that'd be that'd be great to see and and hopefully figure out you know and if you want you know if you're having issues with like the cramping or anything else I mean just feel free to reach out and happy to try to troubleshoot things with you because most of these things can be resolved and then you can just really start running optimally and just like I think I think you would find that your athleticism and your performance will just really just go to another level uh yeah you know by doing that yeah and the good thing is I'm not coming like I'm only I'm 90 there it's just sort of a little bit of a top to finish it off so um no I appreciate it guys thanks for having me on it's good to have a chat and uh you know learn a few different things so now I really appreciate it no not a problem man thank you very much for coming on it was a pleasure thanks Tom