Why I Never Eat Carbs

So, do you need carbs to be healthy? Short answer, absolutely not. Humans have been apex predators for over 2 million years, and during much of that time we were in the Arctic Circle during the ice ages. Not much fresh quinoa and grains up there, and certainly no honey. So, for thousands of generations in human history, we have been hyper carnivores without any access to carbohydrates. So, even if people would want to use them, they wouldn't have even had access to them. Just think about what people were eating when they were walking from Asia to North America over the ice bridge during the last ice age, 1,500 mi north of what is now Seattle, when Seattle at the time was under a mile-high block of ice. If carbohydrates were essential for health and for life, we would not have survived during those conditions, and no one would have made it to North America, or survived during the ice ages, or in the Arctic Circle today. So, in spite of tens of millions of people around the world right now doing ketogenic carnivore diets, and entire civilizations of humans alive today, and historically and prehistorically, who have never eaten carbohydrates without any health issues, there are still people that try to say that without carbohydrates they're going to get into a stress state, you're going to jack up your cortisol and cause harm to your body, and you might damage your thyroid and cause other issues. This is strictly against the literature, and the long-term randomized controlled trials in humans on ketogenic diets for 2 years plus show absolutely no damage to thyroid or elevated cortisol or any other dysfunction of the hormone or physiology. And what do such bodies as the National Academy of Science and the Institute of Medicine have to say about this? Well, they say point blank that you don't need any carbohydrates in order to not only survive, but thrive. They point out that in large populations that have never eaten carbohydrates, as long as they got adequate protein and fat, that this had no negative effects on their health or longevity. So, this is a well-studied and well-known phenomenon that being in a ketogenic state is actually healthy. It's not harmful. There are thousands of randomized controlled trials in humans showing the specific health benefits of a ketogenic approach even when compared to a high-carb, low-fat diet, a well-designed Mediterranean diet, the DASH diet, and so on. Ketogenic diet beats these diets again and again for specific medical outcomes, such as treatment of diabetes, treatment of weight loss, treatment of Parkinson's, treatment of Alzheimer's, treatment of polycystic ovarian syndrome, treatment of kidney disease, and the list goes on. Again, there are literally thousands of randomized controlled trials in humans showing the benefits of ketogenic diets like a carnivore diet. The added benefit of a carnivore diet, or a plant-free ketogenic diet, is that you're also removing all the other plants with that have plant toxins that can also cause some harm as well. Especially for people with autoimmunity, this is really important because these plant toxins can actually trigger autoimmune flare-ups. And here are two things that prove that humans are not meant to eat carbohydrates. First is insulin. Do you know that we have the wrong kind of insulin for carbohydrates? Think about it. When we eat carbohydrates, our blood sugar spikes, insulin goes up, but then blood sugar drops down too low because insulin keeps going. So, we have to keep eating more carbs insulin, we keep having this balance all throughout the day, and we can't get our blood sugar right as a result. Did you know we actually had to reinvent insulin for type 1 diabetics and type 2 diabetics who require insulin. So, instead of just giving normal insulin that our body would make and replacing that, instead, they have to be given things like Actrapid, Novorapid that have a sharper spike to match that carbohydrate spike. If our normal insulin was made for carbohydrates, then why is it that we had to make a new insulin for this? In fact, when type 1 diabetics go to a ketogenic approach and they're not taking in carbohydrates, they still need some insulin, especially for protein because this will give a bit of a rise, but the insulin that most matches that protein curve is actually our normal insulin. So, they are given the old-style insulin that actually perfectly matches that protein curve. So, our insulin is designed for protein, not carbohydrates. Secondly, our teeth and dentition. Carbohydrates select for certain bacteria that actually cause cavities in our teeth. No animal in the wild eats a natural diet that rots their teeth. If an animal loses its teeth in the wild, it dies because it cannot eat, it cannot function. And so, no natural biological diet will cause any species of animal to rot their teeth. So, by definition, any food that rots the teeth of any animal is not designed for that animal and is not good for that animal. Oral health is a window to the overall health, especially cardiovascular health. And anything that causes tooth decay is likely to cause other issues in the body. And any food that brings about the wrong bacteria in the mouth that cause cavities and rot the teeth is obviously not meant for that animal, like carbohydrates are not meant for us. We see a clear break in the dentition before and after agriculture. People did not need dentists, and neither do animals. Immediately after agriculture, we see jaw formation shrink, we see fallen dental arches, and we also see rotting, broken, crooked teeth because we started eating food that was not designed for us biologically. And while we can survive on it, we are not going to attain optimal health from it. So, there are two pieces of hard evidence that show that humans are absolutely not designed to eat carbohydrates. Recently, you'll hear influencers talking about how stressful it is on the body to make its own glucose. It's not stressful at all. Again, this is our natural, normal metabolic state. This is the natural metabolic state of humans going back millions of years. It's a natural metabolic state of nearly every animal on Earth. 70% of animal species are carnivores. They eat protein and fat, and so they run on that fat. That's what a ketogenic state is. Then, herbivores, who largely eat fibrous plants, and that's most herbivores, don't actually break down that cellulose into the glucose molecules it's made out of because they can't make cellulase. No vertebrate animal is able to make cellulase. It's the microorganisms in their gut that break down the cellulose, consume the glucose, and as a byproduct release saturated fat. Then, those bacteria microorganisms die off, and they're absorbed as protein and other nutrients. So, while a gorilla just eats green leaves, 70% of what they absorb is saturated fat, 30% from protein, very little from carbohydrates. Cows can get nearly 80% of their calories from fat and 20% from protein. So, again, they're running on fat, not carbohydrates. So, if we were supposed to run on carbohydrates primarily, we would be one of the few animals on Earth that does so. These people try to talk about biochemical pathways, and when you listen to them, it's very clear that they've never taken biochemistry. They talk about how gluconeogenesis converts protein into glucose, and this requires cortisol, and this could elevate cortisol. First of all, cortisol is important, it's vital for life, you die without it. Look up Addison's disease, that's an absence of cortisol. It's very dangerous, and people get very sick. But also, just because we use cortisol does not mean that we're in a stress state, or that that cortisol is super physiological, meaning above what our body naturally wants. But most importantly, the protein pathway of gluconeogenesis is really one of the last pathways that your body goes down in order to generate energy. The predominant energy when you're in ketosis is actually from fat, it's ketones. So, you take that fat in the form of a triglyceride, or has a glycerol backbone and three fatty acid chains along with it. That goes to your liver, the glycerol backbone breaks off, the three fatty acids get turned into ketones, and the glycerol gets turned into glucose. So, this is happening naturally and automatically in order to generate ketones, you're also generating generating some glucose as well because some of your cells do still use glucose. Generally, ones without mitochondria, like your red blood cells, because you need mitochondria to burn ketones. So, this is called the glycerol pathway, and this is the primary pathway of energy generation and gluconeogenesis when in a ketogenic state. Until and unless you run out of all of your fat stores, you will not start cutting into your protein in your muscles to go down gluconeogenesis to make glucose. Muscle and protein are too important of a resource to just waste turning into glucose. It also has an energy demand and can release ammonia, and if this isn't converted into urea properly, it can build up and cause protein poisoning when you're getting an overabundance of protein that can harm you. This is usually seen when people are eating very high protein diets with very little fat and very little carbohydrates. And right now, there's a rash of people going around saying you have to do a low-fat carnivore diet because deers are lean, even though they actually have a lot of fat in their abdomen and under their skin and around their organs. So, when you go very lean carnivore, you can actually get protein poisoning, get very sick, you can feel awful, you have terrible energy, your hair can fall out, and you can get other health issues as well. And some people have actually died from this historically, but that's pretty rare. So, the glycerol pathway of gluconeogenesis is actually the primary pathway of gluconeogenesis, and it also does not require cortisol. While cortisol can elevate this process, it is not required to run this process. Then, you might see some people saying that you need epinephrine or adrenaline to trigger lipolysis, and this is a stress hormone. No, it's not, it's just a hormone, and it's used for different hormonal functions. But they say this proves this is a stress state. Well, no, it doesn't. And in fact, the main driver of lipolysis is glucagon. Glucagon is the anti-insulin, it sort of does a lot of the opposite things to insulin, and this will cause you to burn fat and to elevate your blood sugar through gluconeogenesis, through the glycerol pathway. When we have patients that come into the hospital who are in a coma because of hypoglycemia, low blood sugar, we don't give them an injection of cortisol, we don't give them an injection of epinephrine or adrenaline. We give them an injection of glucagon because that is what drives lipolysis and gluconeogenesis. But you don't have to take my word for it, this is in biochemistry textbooks. This is in the current literature on long-term ketogenic diets. This does not cause harm, this is not a stress state, it is not harmful for you. In fact, when people have something called Cushing's disease, which is really elevated cortisol, so that they get all sorts of bad health issues, and they get very sick as well. This is to do with a tumor in the pituitary gland, but there are other causes of hypercortisolemia, meaning very high levels of cortisol to the point that it causes harm from super physiological levels of cortisol. So, fun fact, in the hospitals, we actually use now, in modern medicine. Ketogenic diets to ameliorate the negative effects of cortisol. Basically make those bad effects not as bad. So if a ketogenic diet made high cortisol worse, that would be a really really bad idea to do when someone has Cushing's. And yet that is a part of the treatment profile for Cushing's disease. So can you eat carbohydrates? Sure, if you want to, but you certainly don't have to. And I would argue that it's not a great idea. High blood sugar causes glycation. Glycation is when carbo- hydrates, any carbohydrate molecule, fuses to other molecules and permanently damages them. We measure this with HbA1c, which is an advanced glycation end product of glucose with hemoglobin. AGE literally ages you. So those glucose molecules can glycate the insides of your arteries. They can cause damage to the arteries. They can cause atherosclerosis and heart disease. The number one risk factor for heart disease is diabetes. That damage to the blood vessel can damage blood supply to multiple organs. And as such you can get multi-organ failure. The number one cause of kidney failure is diabetes, high blood sugar. The number one cause of adult onset blindness is high blood sugar, diabetes. The number one cause of getting your leg amputated is high blood sugar, diabetes, because it damages the blood supply to your organs and tissues. Fructose is even worse. It has six or seven times the glycation effects as glucose. So this is even worse. So people saying that eating sugar and honey is a great idea really hasn't thought that through. That glycation can affect other tissue in the body as well. We even see in damaged arthritic joints. When we remove that damaged cartilage, that it's actually full of these AGEs, advanced glycation end products from high blood sugar. And it doesn't matter if your blood sugar is down an hour and a half after your meal because it was up before. And that area under the curve is causing damage. We even see this removing damaged discs from degenerative spines. And we see a lot of this glycation damage there as well. So in order to protect the body from glycation, the body elevates insulin. Insulin is a very important hormone. It doesn't just drive energy into cells. It's also an anabolic steroid. It tells tissues to grow. Mostly your fat, muscle as well, but also your prostate, your skin tags, rectal polyps, uterine fibroids, and even the smooth muscle layer in your arteries that will grow and contract so that your arteries can't relax. And this causes high blood pressure. That insulin also pulls in too much sodium from your urine. And that can actually raise your blood pressure again. Insulin blocks estrogen production in women, lowers the LH receptors in men's testes, lowering testosterone production, and blocks the production and action of growth hormone in both men and women, causing premature aging because growth hormone is very important for tissue healing, building, and repairing, and also for fat loss. So anyway you look at it, eating a ketogenic diet like a carnivore diet without carbohydrates is not a health concern at all. And in fact, in many cases is a huge health benefit and boost. Again, thousands of randomized controlled trials in humans showing that ketogenic diets improve specific medical outcomes. Carnivore diet is a ketogenic diet. And this makes sense because humans have been carnivores for 2 million years. And again, in certain areas like in the Arctic Circle, especially during the ice ages, there were no plants available whatsoever. And we were eating very high fat animals like mammoths, whales, seals, bears, and so on. Some people when they're doing carnivore, maybe they're not doing 100% meat and water. Maybe they're using a lot of dairy, which is very trendy right now with all these recipes that use dairy. Well, dairy has casomorphins. It can even have carbohydrates. But those casomorphins will trigger fat deposition and increase hunger signals. So you can gain weight, and many people do. They can also add in artificial sweeteners because, well, it's still ketogenic, isn't it? And we have these keto treats and keto snacks. And people will again gain weight and their health can suffer. Then you have this strange trend, which I've done videos about, where people are recommending you do a low fat carnivore diet for fat loss. And what happens? Yes, they'll lose that at first because they're getting protein poisoning. And one of the symptoms of protein poisoning is rapid weight loss because you are literally dying. People's health can suffer. Their energy goes down and their hair falls out. And they can have a lot of other health issues as well. So then people say, "Well, this must be because you're in ketosis for too long and your body is shutting down because of this stress state." Then you add in back carbohydrates, and sure enough you feel better because you're not in protein poisoning anymore. So you think that must have been ketosis. The same thing would have happened if you just added in fat. And as I've been advocating for many years, it's a high fat carnivore diet is very important. 78 to 80% calories from fat is typically what people need. And then people will point to these examples saying that, "Look, this can happen as a consequence of being in ketosis." Ignoring the tens of millions of people who are thriving on ketogenic diets like a carnivore diet. So the next time someone says to you that you need carbohydrates you'll get sick, you know what to tell them.