Why Vegans Have Smaller Brains & And How Cows Can Help The Environment! | PART 1

welcome to the plantree MD podcast with Dr Anthony chaffy where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically hello everyone thank you for joining me for another episode of the plant-free MD podcast I'm your host Dr Anthony chaffy and today I have three very special guests who are joining me over from England who wrote a wonderful new book called why vegans have smaller brains and how cows uh are going to save the planet I probably butchered that but it's something around there vegans have smaller brains in any Cas is the take-home I got from that so thank you all very much it's a pleasure to meet you all yeah hi nice to meet you yeah you as well so uh for people who haven't um come across your works I understand this is your first podcast that you you've all done together could you please uh tell us a bit about yourself hi I'm Ana tore I'm a retired Medical doctor I qualified from the University of Cambridge in 1986 I've also done a master's in nutrition at Oxford Brooks University in 2018 that's my background Al um I'm Ali Morgan Allison Morgan um I'm an agricultural and environmental specialist I've worked for the last 40 years in um agricultural advice and research and especially associated with Environmental Management um I did a degree in agriculture at the University of reading and uh and I've also got a a a postgrad in um Global development studies and I've worked overseas in the Middle East and in um Central Asia as well and I'm David Ellis people usually call me Dave um I studied and graduated in Sciences uh mainly in geology um and then spent 31 years in the oil industry as a geophysicist and uh left that eight years ago now eight and a half years ago and since then especially in the last two or three years become really interested in the topics of both nutrition thanks to Ana and in farming thanks to Ali and it's been really interesting very good all right so what brought you all together to write this book and and what sort of brought that about and and say this is something that that we need to get out there um we met through mutual friends um when uh I first met Ali she was actually following a keto diet and she asked me for dietry advice we ended up becoming friends I discovered that she also wants to be a writer and I asked her to write write the farming and environment section of the book um Dave joined the project just because he's so good at uh bringing things together and um thinking up catchy titles thinking up catch in the book yeah yeah I'm I'm I'm I'm Mr slogan yeah um we had great fun coming up with chapter titles for the book yeah well and also just title for oh sorry go on yeah no I was just going to say I I you know I think when I first met Ana it was I was intrigued by the diet she was following and um intrigued and then I adopted it and I I found it really beneficial yes likewise yeah yeah so are you all doing a ketogenic diet at this point trying my best trying don't stick to it 100% but yeah yeah have you all years oh very good have you all seen benefits or is it just a sort of a casual thing that you you like to do well before starting um what we call the sapiens diet in the book um before starting it myself um I think that was in 2016 I actually did something called a leaky gut test on myself it's called a peg 400 test and it's a very accurate way of checking whether you have a leaky gut or not so I did it before starting the diet and four weeks later um I repeated the test after following the diet strictly that's only animal foods for four weeks and my leaky gut reversed but besides that I've noticed other improvements um I used to have um abnormal pigmentation on skin which is something called acanthosis nigricans and so dark circles around my eyes pigmentation on my elbows and knees and it it all got better plus various other minor skin ailments or all improved very good like lots of benefits um as as Anita said um I was following a ketogenic diet but more of a sort of Mediterranean style ketogenic diet and I had lost weight because I'd been um uh four years ago as technically obese and I i' G losing weight but I wasn't seeing any other benefits I I'd had chronic rosacea uh skin condition uh for 20 years and um and i' Al also had chronic acid reflux and barck esophagus um and when I met Anita and um changed to uh the sapiens diet uh and all meat all animal food diet cut out all the plant foods which didn't bother me a bit um all those conditions uh reverted the the the skin condition the acid reflux the barck esophagus all disappeared very good yeah and uh for me I mean three years ago before I started this my my typical meal plan during the day would be always cereals for breakfast uh covered in berries and stuff and and honey um usually sandwiches for lunch um and then after an evening meal probably even more bread later on bread and cheese or something I thought I was eating healthy I was counting my five a day I was eating whole meal cereal whole meal bread and so on I have suspicion now looking back on it I think I was becoming gluten intolerant um uh Ana said well you know if you eat a beef burger don't eat the bun and I was horrified um but I tried it and you don't need the bun and well what about the chips well avoid them if you can but you know try and cut out the carbs uh for breakfast instead of having cereals have you know bacon sausages eggs and so on and I thought that's easy because that's kind of and liver and liver I know it's more of a traditional you know British breakfast so that was easy what I noticed was was that changing my breakfast from cereals to meat-based um my my gut settled down and and my insid I felt much better and after doing this for about you know several months I I didn't think I was overweight but I've gone down two inches around the waist great so in a 32 33 in Waist as I said I don't think I was that overweight but I've lost that kind of slight pot belly and uh people remark now they say well when we look at photographs of you a few years ago you can see that and you look slimmer I assume that's probably mainly kind of visible fat that I've lost hopefully yeah which apparently is a good thing as we say in the book so yeah I've seen so so many improvements as well very good well so the name the name itself is obviously very provocative and absolutely wonderful um how did you came up with that what was the what was the Genesis of that title so actually uh when I first started writing the book I came came across uh a research paper from Oxford University um and I was telling about this paper because it was so interesting to a friend on the phone and I said what this study shows is that they've followed a group of middle-aged and elderly people over five years they've um noted what they eat they've done blood test to look at various markers and they've done brain scans at the beginning and end and what they found is that the less animal food that you have in your diet the more your brain shrinks with age so the vegans in this study had the most brain atrophy the vegetarians next and the meat eaters the least and this friend on the phone said so what you're saying is that a vegetarian diet shrinks the brain I said hm I suppose so he said so why don't you call the book that and I said that's going to be offending too many people so then I changed it to why vegans have smaller brains because we decided we wanted the attention and we want the attention yeah well you'll get it I I um I actually refer to that study um I'm ass the 2008 you know it I do yeah there one think as 2008 yeah yes that's it yeah yeah because it you know relates to B12 as well and actually quite significant lower levels of B12 and so when I have patients come in that have comparable levels of B12 and they're not really feeling that well and they have a lot of brain fog and I can show them that and show them that study and say well you know you're not really in good uh company here with your B12 level that low I you know even though it's in the in the normal range still I would definitely think that that's the would be outside of that no but I yeah absolutely love that I was I was thinking that that was probably the study you were talking about um but there are also studies on babies whove been breastfed by vegan or vegetarian mothers who also suffer brain atrophy I don't know whether you've come across those um don't know if I have that one those specifically but I have I've seen um certainly developmental ill effects from vegetarian vegan diets in an early age so there are some studies which actually show brain atrophy in babies right um been breastfed by um vegan mothers and if you pick up the brain atrophy early enough usually within the first six months and you give them B12 the atrophy can be reversed completely but if you don't catch it in time they suffer permanent brain damage so it's not just middle-aged and elderly people um it's babies as well um scans that show Brain atrophy that's very sad is it is it just a matter of some of the nutrients that you may be lacking so if people were a supplement um just giving them B12 or something like that or is it more than that is are they they requiring more out of the meat and maybe less of the different things that they're eating to uh do you mean generally or in the young children you in well in generally but in in the children you are they able to reverse it with just some supplementation or do they have to overhaul from the studies that I read it was reversing it but just B12 okay the babies right yeah so significant in general there are nutrients as well why why supplement if you can just fix fix your diet absolutely the argument being of course well why why fix your diet if you can supplement that's what you know the vegans will say well I can take B12 and and so that's fine but I think there is certainly a lot of other things that we're we are missing choline DHE EP or DHA EPA um you know all you know cholesterol you know your brain's made out largely made out of cholesterol and uh there was a study that came across recently we're publishing a case series with people have recovered from multiple sclerosis with a a heavily ketogenic cornivore diet a plant-free ketogenic diet and they as we came across some of these other studies one was specifically showing that dietary cholesterol improved regrowth of the the m and sheath on Ms patients specifically so you need these building blocks and you can certainly grow a brain but are you optimally growing your brain are you optimally maintaining your brain and I would I would I would think not I mean we look at the average cranial capacity prior to to Agriculture and directly afterwards and this may be something that you guys address that um that it shrinks significantly for both men and women and it's not something that takes hundreds or thousands of years it's very sharply in delineated did you and did you all look into that as well C can I before we carry on I would really like to say that we have nothing against vegans we don't wish to vilify them yeah of course um I've been on the other side of the fence myself I was vegetarian um when I was a teenager my youngest child has been vegetarian for the last 11 years um we're just trying to help people 100% want to get back out of the way the majority of people who follow me um and even do ketogenic carnivore diets now were were once vegans and vegetarians whose Health suffered to such a degree that they they had to look elsewhere and have only made a recovery since changing their diet even though they did the the perfect vegan or vegetarian diet with copious amounts of supplements and and using nutritionists and other sorts of references and resources in order to to do something right and then of course uh had a lot of ill health effects so definitely not trying to div vilify anybody I always say that we are much aligned in our thought process and our motivations it's just we've sort of seen different information and gone down different paths but the motivation is still the same we're trying to do the right thing we're trying to be as healthy as we can we're trying to do the right thing for the planet we're trying to do the right thing for the other creatures and life on this Earth it's just that you know when we look at this this data you know we we maybe see different data we see different pieces of evidence and we think about it differently you know two people can look at the same piece of evidence and information and intelligently and honestly come to different conclusions and that's completely fine I mean that's the sort of the definition of being open-minded is understanding that so certainly very happy um with anybody who wants to do anything with their their own life but like you say trying to help people trying to get this information out there because if someone is trying again with these same motivations to do the best they can for themselves and for the planet then this is good information to know about yes one of the things we um put in the book it's in the conclusion actually is is you know in terms of you know our Evolution you know uh Homo sapiens been around for like 200 300,000 years if we were to squeeze those 300,000 years into a into a clock a single day a 24-hour day um then for 23 of those hours over 23 of those hours we've been we would say you know carnivore meat eaters uh protein and fat and offen and so on so for the majority of our Evolution you know that's what's drove us and we say in the book we we didn't uh evolve to eat meat we were put the other way around we evolved because we ate meat yeah um so in that day it's only been the last you know hour or so 10,000 years that we've started all you know large scale agriculture introducing more and more plant Foods into the diet it's been in the last minute 30 seconds that we've had our our food guidelines or even well I think actually it's the last 10 seconds of that 24-hour day that we've had the national food guidelines the the food pyramid in the United States and elsewhere the so-called eat well plate in the United Kingdom so that's been around for 10 seconds and in those 10 seconds trebling of obesity trebling of diabet type two diabetes inflammatory diseases maybe even Alzheimer um who knows where we'll be in the next 10 seconds you know if we carry on like that and then we have the example of um you know what's happened to brain size this is the question you asked um six million years ago chimpanzees brain size about the size of a bread roll um we then became we then split from the chimpanzee line started our Evolution and when by the time we arrive at Homo sapiens our brain sizes have trebled and that's more like the size of a you know a whole meal Loaf a whole meal loaf of bread uh so it's trebled in size and as I think you mentioned in the last 10,000 years it's actually shrunk a little we've lost a profiterol size of brain and why is that and I know there are you know people theorize many different reasons but surely one reason might be to do with diet and it's switching more and more to plant-based foods and lacking reduced you know B12 the essential uh you know DHA and so on that we need is that what's driving the shrinkage and again if if that's happen in 10,000 years where will we be in 10,000 years time will that brain shrinkage increase the the other thing that from my point of view that makes so much sense with this is uh uh my background in uh animal agriculture um and agriculture as a whole but animal Agriculture and a lot of animal nutrition and so on um is that in in the animal world every species of animal is adapted to a particular diet um quite specific herbivores don't all eat just grass uh giraffes brows goats brows and you know they have a specific diet and the only animals that you see getting sick are are a domesticated pets and livestock that are eating the kind of diet that we're eating with grains uh a lot of grains and vegetable matter in it when they um so for carnivorous animals like dogs and cats they're all getting obese and diabetic and having heart disease and arthritis and all the things that we're getting uh you don't see that in the wild uh and and likewise with our domesticated livestock um no animal is uh adapted to eat Just Grains and we you know throughout my working life uh that's where I've seen the major problems with livestock metabolic disease um because of grains in the diet yeah absolutely it's right Al isn't it that we we feed grains to these animals to fatten them up to fatten them up and that's happens to us as well yeah and they suffer a lot of metabolic uh diseases as a result yeah it it is interesting how the medical establishment is so bewildered by things like mil the kosis you know the fat marbling that that are that shows up in the muscles of humans we just know that this is a sign of metabolic distress and fatty liver disease non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and we're just beside ourselves well what could possibly cause it but we intentionally cause that in animals we intentionally cause myosis in cows the marbling we intentionally cause fatty liver disease in ducks and geese and that make F gr how do we do that we stuff them full of as many grains as possible with a cow we just let them eat it with with the the Ducks and the geese we want to make that quicker so they force feed them grains but it still happens from the same thing they're eating something that's not meant for their body and we're getting bad things and then all of a sudden we're eating the exact same things we're getting the exact same problems and yet people are are bewildered by um by what's happening and it must must be fat there's fat in the liver it must be because you're eating fat yeah yeah so when um when we look at this from an evolutionary perspective and I I completely agree by the way but you know I'm I'm I feel like um there are so many people that try to argue his appeal to Nature and that you know just because we've been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years and our earlier ancestors for millions of years well that doesn't that doesn't mean now we have science and we can see because of the nurses study out of Harvard that actually if you eat more plants everything gets better and uh what would you what would you all say to that well many of those studies are epidemiological observational type studies you can show associations but you can't prove a cause mostly from those studies so we have a chapter in the book that's called science fiction which takes apart nutrition studies and why they are unreliable and flawed um and why our gu guidelines shouldn't be based on these flawed studies um there's also a book by Gary tabs called the diet delution which does this extremely well takes apart um nutrition science um and and shows that we can't really rely on it um the best types of studies are controlled studies but they're difficult to do they're expensive um and usually have smaller sample sizes um we would appeal to you know we go back again to Evolution we would say well there's a great study exactly conducted on everyone over hundreds of thousands of years um surely that should be the null hypothesis for these studies and if you come up with the result that is different from the way we're designed to eat from our physiology that everything that says we should be carnivores and eating mainly meat and an Source Products if you come up with something that's different you better have a pretty good and robust explanation and generally they don't yeah they ignore that completely yeah I I think one of the other things is that uh a lot of people say well we're primates and Prime other primates uh mainly eat um are mainly herbivorous um and uh but we've evolved as as we've been discussing because we started eating meat and particularly high fat meat and aful and so on six million years ago and people think that we're just like other primates but as we've already noted uh our brain has grown has tripled in size over this period whereas the chimpanzee brain hasn't grown um and the other difference is the difference in our guts our gastrointestinal uh tract um that the the our our gut has changed dramatically and is really no longer adapted to eting plant Foods um and because it's it's a compromise between growing a large Brain and uh reducing the gust which is also very energy demanding um uh in order to enable that brain growth and because we've been eating these nutrient Rich uh Foods meat and fat and awful um for for so long that has enabled us to fuel that brain growth and with haven't needed the kind of gut with the large intestine um that the that the Apes have got yeah and then just from a functional perspective we we don't break down fiber and you know well the great apes they do hind gut digestors they have a elongated seeum we have an appendix much much smaller and and they have fiber can pack in there and ferment and and release or produce as a result of the bacteria short chain fatty acids and then bacteria die off and get absorbed as Protein that's it's a very involved process and they get a lot of nutrition from that and we we simply don't have that capability I see a lot of people say well our guts are so long and that's like a herbivore well they're actually not all that long they've actually shortened significantly and and our short small intestine is longer comparatively than our large intestin typically the other way around with her bivor doesn't matter what it looks like doesn't matter if it was you know just a hockey stick with a bunch of bags hanging off of it it does not process fiber in plant tissue like we just don't we don't even have the enzymes to release a lot of the um nutrients you know the different vitamins and minerals and there low bioavailability I mean think I think that is you know to your point you know proof positive that we are not designed to eat these plants because we do not have the enzymes and biological capacity to process these plants through engineering and techn Tech ology and fermentation and cooking and other sorts of techniques that we've developed we can do that but the fact that we have to do that shows very clearly that we're not designed to do that we're not evolved to do that I would think yeah so we have a chapter in the book called fiber a natural junk food nice yeah well well tell us about that tell us about your views on fiber well uh it's not a nutrient for humans we don't need it um uh studies show well the the thing with fiber is that many people think that it reduces your risk of bowel cancer but if you look at all the studies overall the evidence doesn't really support that clearly um there are some studies that show usually observational type studies which show that fiber might reduce R the risk and others show that it actually increases the risk but if you look at control trials um there's no benefit for fiber um and bowel cancer and the other common myth with fiber is that it reduces constipation but there's also a very good control study done in Singapore which shows that cutting out fiber completely from your diet actually alleviates constipation and the author of that study likened it to a traffic jam if you have a traffic jam with lots of cars and you're adding more cars to it that's going to make the situation worse it's the same with constipation and fiber adding more fiber just makes it worse yeah um and the other supposed benefit of fiber is supposed to be short chain fatty acids but the short con fatty acids get converted to ketones most of them get converted to ketones anyway and if you're following a ketogenic diet you'll have ketones produced naturally so you don't need them hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just your meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products there will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10% off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25% off total all right thanks guys yeah it it's also um all very very good points and um something that that I think people Miss is that you can find a study that's says anything but it's the quality of the study and is it actually capable of showing what it's claiming uh that it showed or or the the conclusions that the authors have drawn the the other thing is that there are a lot of people that don't eat a ketogenic diet don't produce a lot of ketones and don't eat fiber they eat a very processed food diet and so they don't have fiber they don't have ketones and so their gut isn't getting the short chain fatty acids to any degree so if this this was required um and and your your guts would just die without it well then obviously those people would be in Dire Straits but you know your T tissue can run on glucose and just like other tissues it may prefer ketones but if you don't have ketones available you know it can it can run secondarily on glucose and I think that's a that's a major you know uh flaw in their argument that no you need fiber for sure chain fatty acids well obviously you don't though because even if you were to just run on glucose which I don't think is the best thing for us you could you would still survive it's not like this going to kill your organ and so yeah I think that that's those are all great points speaking of which we have lot all sorts of myths about different sorts of food stuffs or other sorts of um myths that you came across that people commonly believe that are not really very accurate yeah um one of my favorites is we've briefly mentioned it a day food and vegetables so um so in the UK I mean in the UK we have this thing called yeat well plate so the the national food guidelines from the government and from the National Health Service is branded as the yeat well plate actually when we were writing the book and talking to people about it many people actually haven't heard of ye well plate uh that hasn't landed but they've probably heard of bits of it one of them we just talked but they probably think we need lots of fiber that's one thing that's in eat well uh the other thing they probably know about is well we need five a day of fruit and veg um so if you go to the guidelines online you go to the NHS website and there's a page on fruit and vegetables and it says fruit and vegetables are a great source or a good source of vitamins and nutrients and we advise that you eat five a day five a you know five portions a day of different colored fruit and vegetables well number one the advice isn't by the day the advice is at least five day and I remember when I first heard this I don't know 20 30 years ago I thought wow five a day that's impossible surely I can't eat five a day of that but but it grows on you and as I said earlier you know I I did try to keep to that idea a few years ago but you know if it's at least five days it could be seven a day could be 10 a day I don't know uh if you say for an adult seven portions a day of fruit and veg that's 50 portions a week for a family of four that's you know two adults two mediumsized children that's 150 portions of fruit and veg a week and I think to myself something that a family has to eat a 150 times a week can't be a good source of nutrition it's a case of quantity rather than quality um but you stay on the stay on the eatwell guidelines go to the advice page for vegans and in the vice page of vegans there a list of bullet points and one of them says for a healthy vegan diet have fortified foods and supplements to provide the vitamins and nutrients that are hard to obtain on a vegan diet and then list some of them vitamin D vitamin B12 selenium iodine calcium iron he's like hang on a minute one page you're saying fruit and veg are a good source on this page you're saying uh maybe not you know so they contradict themselves are is fruit and veg as good as we all think it is or or used to think it is the other thing is that it's actually very expensive to buy that much fruit and vegetables so what we've done in the book is compare um the nutrition that you get from what a typical family of four would need in a week um and cost it with getting the equivalent nutrition from just a few hundred grams of liver and the price difference is enormous it was £30 for a basket full of fruit and veg that's a mixture of fresh fruit and pined fruit fresh vegetables and frozen vegetables we weren't picking the expensive stuff it was £30 if you did pick the expensive stuff organic it was £77 um but if you rep you threw those baskets away replaced it with a few trays of liver1 pounds so more nutrition for a third of the price never gets mentioned guel yeah I mean come on yeah if we're being serious here you know we should be be including was um Public Health England came out with something six or seven years ago saying we're very worried says Public Health England that people are not getting their five a day and what do they do uh uh we redesigned the logo so that people can make better informed choices they don't need a logo can't ether logo no why aren't you recommending they try adding liver to their diet if you're so worried they're not getting their nutrients why not try some liver it doesn't occur to them yeah or they're just actively trying to avoid it and I'm sure that that that may not even take into account bioavailability I'm sure in it's raw form you put it through a mass spectrometer it's got all of those minerals and so on but you know is that actually available to us through for example on the back of a packet of carrots it's says it's a good source of vitamin A but actually carrots don't have any vitamin A and you have to convert the beta carotenes in in the carrot to vitamin A and that's not done efficiently in half the population because their genetic makeup it's just and it's not done efficiently it's not digested in the absence of fat and of course all these diets that we're told to eat are meant to be lowfat diets well you ain't going to get your beta carotin absorbed which means you're not going to get the I mean there was one study that estimated 11% on a lowfat diet you might only absorb 11% of the P carotin so you go to the salad bar and you start packing in the Raw carrot into your plastic bowl or plastic tray thinking you're eating healthily you're probably not you're not going getting a fraction of the benefit you're much better off getting it bioavailable from St like liver and so on I I actually came well my my father told me about this um that well my parents in general that that whole idea that you should eat carrots because it's so good for your eyesight because of the vitamin A and the Very beta carotene that that that the origin of that was was uh what they was World War II and they say well Pilots are eating a lot of carrots and that gets their Vision better so they sort of put this out there to the public knowing that the German spies would pick that up because they come up with you know new radar technology and they could actually see the German planes you know the the LOF wasasa coming um coming from hundreds of miles away and they're like oh yes our Pilot's vision is just so amazing we can just see them in the dark and all this sort of stuff and and it stuck I mean I I was told that as a child you should eat carrots because it makes your eyesight better and and it makes your night vision better you know and that that was that was it and so it's so funny that we have these these things and these sayings that that they came from nowhere and the food pyramid I mean that was just completely fabricated or or like you said before you you want you know at least five a day of of multiple multicolored fruits and vegetables and it's like I'm sorry what what were the nutritional benefits of yellow again was that you know so it's still funny we've got the the RAF story about carrots in the book The other one that we find amusing is is um popy spinach of course spinach from popey yeah so 1930s you know dietry advice from from you know American cartoons yeah may not always be a good idea I like decimal point is in the wrong place yeah how much how much uh iron is in in spinach was overestimated 10 times because someone put decimal point in the wrong face and it's not even the best kind of iron it's not it's not e absorbed I remember watching popey as a kid and always you know e the spinach you know I'm strong to the Finish because I eat some spinach and I remember thinking I was like yeah it's not I'm not quite there yet I don't think I'm gonna I don't think I'm gonna do it and I wanted to be you know strong like Popeye but I'm like yeah I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna try this another way just can't can't can't do that H but it is it is very funny that that we see that I I suppose I suppose the the you know vegans and plant-based people would say that we're appealing to Nature and I would say we're really just appealing to common sense I mean we're seeing these things it's very straight forward it's not that you you don't I mean where are the randomized control trials to show that parachutes work right but you can you can see with your eyes that there's something very glaring in front of you and I you know if I if I look at two populations and you know I mean this is in every anthropology textbook that pre-agricultural societies alive right now they they don't have chronic diseases and heart disease and Cancers and diabetes and yet we're blaming this on a heavily heavy meat-based diet which they are on they get accidents inj injuries those sorts of things and infectious disease those are the main main things that they Afflicted with healthwise but when they transition to a post-agricultural way of eating Society back in the 1800s and before they called these Western diseases now we're calling them diseases of civilization as it's you know it's very modern and it's the diabetes and the cancer and the heart disease that they were not getting before and then you go back to their previous diet and it goes away again so again I don't need a randomized control trial to understand and recognize what's going on right in front of my face but you know if you I'm happy to do them uh we can we can do that too I've seen people like Dr Gardner from Stanford who's a vegan activist and works with Walter Willet and the seventh day Adventists and and all the big food companies and processed food companies they fund all their research and then come to conclusions that benefit those Industries funny enough and he was asked once on the I think the Rich rooll Podcast that well why don't what we'd love to see is a vegan versus carnivore diet well why don't we why don't we just do that you know and coming from a more honest Place uh I believe Mr R was and Gardner you know brush it off well it wouldn't be ethical to do it because a carnivore diet is just too dangerous I mean first it's so deficient in nutrients I mean for for instance you can't get fiber for God's sakes so you saying a vegan diet a carnivore diet is deficient in nutrients as compared to a vegan diet it's perfectly legitimate to study vegan diets with known deficiencies and yet not ethical to test a carnivore diet I mean this is just showing the evasion of um of science because they know the answer because it's it's right in front of everybody it's very clear to see hey everyone really happy to announce a new sponsor for the show and for everybody down in Australia Stockman staks who are delivering highquality grass-fed and finished pasture raised beef and other meats flash frozen and vacuum sealed to your door something I've been enjoying a lot of myself recently as well they also have a great range of specialty items such as high fat keto mints and carnivore beef and organs mints with liver kidneys and beef heartart as well so use code chaffy today for free order of beef mints or another specialty gift along with your order at Stockman steaks.com and I'll see you over there thanks guys it's astonishing because you know the way we've put together the diet part of the book is we we've taken the food pyramid M as a symbol for today's supposedly healthy guidelines that we're told to eat and we dismantle it layer by layer as we go through the book we got the idea from a South Park video yeah yeah where they turn the where Cartman says that the pyramid is the wrong way up it needs to be upside down yeah so we turn it upside down very good in doing so it's astonishing that 90% of that pyramid is completely wrong and should be the and Cartman's right who I thought should be the opposite how do they get it how do they get the story wrong about fruit and veg how do get the the the fiber story wrong how do they get the carbs are good for us and we shouldn't be eating fats we should be eating carbs instead how do they get that so wrong it's almost as if it's you can't say it's deliberate but it's astonishing that this level of denial in our food guidelines is out there and and why why isn't it a bigger story yeah exactly there are so many books out there that are saying what we're saying why why doesn't the whole world know it yeah yeah exactly so can I say one thing we need to bit about the farming side absolutely so you know when we one of the motivations to write in the book is we didn't want it to be just a diet book uh and neither did we want it to be just a farming book um you know we we've got this circle that we have uh somewhere that where we say health and diet and farming and the environment all linked are all linked they're all interconnected you can't change one thing without changing another if if we all changed our diet for health reasons that has to be supplied by farming somehow which may then have an environmental impact um so you know you read diet books you see dietry articles in the press in the media online you know say eat this you know change your diet there's one thing you can do this year you know change this eat this new superfood and they dress it up as usually as health reasons uh with no uh appreciation or thought as to well well if if we all did that who's going to farm it or is it going to be S you know flown in halfway around the world so that we can eat this super Berry H and likewise um farming studies that worry about the environmental impact of say methane for example um you know they say you know we should rearrange farming to do less livestock uh and reduce meat well we we would disagree and we'll come on to that I'm sure we profoundly disagree that but if you're not going to be eating meat what people are going to be eating instead uh more plant-based foods which means more carbs which means more obesity more type 2 diabetes and so on so the farming sides ignored what what's going to happen on the diet and health side so as well as there being a carbon footprint to worry about with what we eat there's a health foot uh footprint and that tends to get ignored so the whole you know section of the book that Al is been the main contributor to is all about how how do we Farm a healthy diet and is it good for the planet yeah and it turns out fortunately that the sapiens diet that we're umos proposing pasture livestock pasture meat and uh animal products is not just a healthy diet it's also good for the planet good for people good for Planet yeah lovely which which you need I I totally agree it's it's all connected and the same motivations that that drive people in One Direction or another it's exactly the same we all have very good intentions it's just a matter of what we think is the best way to get to the same ends that that we agree upon um I I do want to definitely talk about the farming and the environmental side of things it's such an important topic um I just wanted to just ask briefly uh your thoughts on things like vegetable oils seed oils those sorts of things and Grains these are these are supposed to be the staple of our diet and of course you can get a study that says anything but what are your opinions on things like seols that are supposed to be so-called heart healthy and uh and and so good for us um so the chapter on on vegetable oils is called just stop vegetable oil um it basically is saying that there is no such thing as vegetable oil all vegetable oils are either seed oils or fruit oils um they're an ultra-processed food it's it requires a huge industrial process to produce them uh we say that animal fats are are better for us they're fats that we evolved with um they have the right ratios and amounts of saturated fat monounsaturated fat omega-3 and omega-6 fats um and we advise to stop eating vegetable oils completely including olive oil because even olive oil has um a much higher amount of omega-6 compared to animal fats um so do you want to talk about the DHA conversion all that kind of stuff and then and then there's essential fats um and non-essential fats there are two essential fats um which our bodies can make from plant fats but the conversion is very inefficient and if you have a high amount of omega-6 fat in your diet which is what all vegetable oils can contain that conversion is rendered even more um inefficient and can even be shut down completely um so yeah we have a whole chapter on why we should be eating vegetable oils and how bad they are um and because they're unsaturated they're unstable is that right yes so the other downside of um uh omega-6 and omega-3 fats is that they less stable uh compared to saturated fat um they go they become rancid more easily they cause more um inflammation in the body and in the 60s um corn oil um which is very what the highest in omega-6 fats used to be used to induce cancer in animals so it may be that um seed oils are also behind an increased risk of cancer nowadays and they were actually used to um induce cancer in uh in laboratory in laboratory animals in order to study thees yeah still or was that historically no that was I don't know about whether it's done now but I I have read papers where they were used in the 60s MH yeah and we also know that all these um vegetable oils we've only been eating them within the last century and mainly because uh they needed an outlet for a market for uh the byproducts of industrial oil production you know they're really meant for um oiling machines and things at best not not the human body yeah this F and gamble so or should should we not say F and gamb oh go for it yeah I've I've set it up in very very unsavory ways so yes please earning cotton waste into something that we can eat or supposedly eat or cook with yeah that that's that's AIT yeah it's campaign yeah sell their um Crisco um and they promoted it as being plant-based and healthy yeah didn't they didn't they pay the American Heart Association ameran Health Association yeah Heart Association sorry yeah a huge amount of money the equivalent of $2 million in today's money yeah um to 20 like $20 million I think it was like 1.7 million 1.3 or 1.7 million like in the 50s and that sort of an equivalent of like 20 million so yeah massive sum of money yeah say this yeah that's no conflict of interest there ABA absolutely and it's funny you know we we we said well we we trust institutions like the American Heart Association which just a private institution there's nothing special about it um but their origin really came about because of that that infusion of money and that launch them to National prominence and they be were able to become the the AHA that we know today but they were compromised from day one so how are we supposing that they weren't compromised later or immediately later or or distantly later still who knows I mean they they were willing to do it then presumably different people are running it now however you know people that think a certain way hire people who think a certain way and perpetuate an organization in a certain way potentially um but either way exactly we have to look back historically and say well that's based on you know a bribe and and some and fraud and so we have to we have to throw that out and start over again I I did wonder about um or I want to ask you about you know the different sorts of Omega-3s and Omega sixes you know the Omega-3s in plants would be different to the Omega-3s we find from meat which are typically the ones that we need so needing things like DHA EPA for the Omega-3s animal based ones and then the arachadonic acid from which which is our omega-6 in in meat or animal products um but then it's linolic acid is the omega-6 in plants and ala that's the omega-3 in in Plants as well and things like flaxes say well this is how you get your Omega-3s is ala and like you said there's a very low conversion and so I wanted to ask you is there any role for ala and linolic acid in the body apart from converting over to arachadonic acid DHA and EPA so if you had a sufficient supply of DHA and EPA and ponic acid do you even need ala or there are some who have suggested that actually the essential fatty acids might not be essential if we have the other fats that are produced from them EPA um DHA um so yeah it could be that they may not be essential if you have enough of the um other fats which actually I call the VIP fats in the book um which is what our bodies are actually looking for and using all the time um if you get those from your diet yeah perfect yeah and then uh grains why why are grains bad aren't they like the best thing in the world yeah I think where do we start I think I was reading one of Gary Tal's latest substacks one of his very long substacks M um and he he says what I think we've been thinking for a long time this all goes back to the vilification of saturated fat by anel keys and others we don't say anel keys we say cancel Keys uh the damage that that's done because if you eliminate for the wrong reasons uh saturated fat and animal fats from the diet what do you replace them with and of course the food pyramid and eat well replace them with carbs yeah and and as a result of that everything else has happened and because you've got rid of all that goodness in animal Foods you then have to add in the F day and you have to add in the vegetable oils to cook with and so on it all goes wrong when when we threw away vilified saturated fats so a big part of what you know is in the book first part of the book is about the carb the carb story so the problem with cereals basically is the antinutrients that they contain the gluten which um can cause leaky gut plus the carbohydrate content of them so on all front cereals are bad for you the carbohydrates will spike your insulin um as we all know uh High abnormal insulin levels are bad so yes we we explain why we shouldn't be eating cereals very good and then and then leaky gut what are some of the problems that you can get when you get leaky gut from eating these crayons um so from what I know of the um research has done by the Hungarian clinic on leaky gut what they have found is that um their patients with autoimmune diseases when they take up the diet um they always have leaky gut to start with and uh the autoimmune disease these gets better and eventually reverses um so leaky gut they're saying leaky gut is behind autoimmune diseases their symptoms reverse when they stop the diet and their leaky gut returns right we know you have views on this because we watch one YouTube videos so um we might we might disagree on the exact mechanism by which body ends up attacking itself but the totally my theory but you know it's just just trying to see see that's interesting we found it really interesting that the idea is the autoimmune response is attacking the gluten which is and the cells get in the way so that that you know the the interesting thing there is that for celiac in particular the the antibodies can stay in circulation up to 3 years after you've completely healed the G and so they're not Auto antibodies because they're not attacking oneself it's something else is going on and so you know because if they were purely designed to attack your own body they would keep attacking your body but they don't and they they eventually go away so I think there's something else going on you know and when I took um postgraduate Immunology we were we were told it's in it's in my textbook I'm probably going to put this together in in in a lecture but but when your immune cells are you know being matured in your thymus they're test against every single antigen that your body is capable of producing and if they react even weakly they're destroyed and they aren allowed into circulation so something would have to go wrong in that maturation process but then why would it be that you have to wait 40 years and get a viral insult and have molecular mimicry uh and expose yourself to this to then have a antibody that attacks that then cross reacts with your body if you have if you can make an antibody that that re reacts in the first place or or can crossreact then it could react in the first place and so you wouldn't need that that stimulating event and also it doesn't really behave like your body is attacking uh an infection if your body considers your your thyroid and abscess and tries to wipe it out it's not going to just attack it attack it attack it and then sort of calm down and EB and go away or having relapsing remitting Ms or these sorts of flares and Es um as well it should be a full court press trying to destroy this because if it is an infection and you don't St and you don't snuff it out you're dead and so a lot of these things just sort of say to me something else is probably going on yeah it makes sense what you're saying but it may be just an association um but the leaky gut does get worse when when the patients symptoms um return When stop theyed stop the diet yeah oh absolutely I I I see that all the time in practice and but that that was sort of one of the things that made me think about that because you know due to the leaky gut now things can get into your systemic circulation that normally would be blocked out by the normal functioning of your gut and now all a sudden you're getting gluten and lectins and glyphosat-prozess uh interesting to me I I think it's um amazing either way either way whatever happens the the results you know are are quite exceptional when you change the way you eat these autoimmune issues go away and it's I think it's going to be very interesting to try to figure out why that is and what the exact mechanism is going on but the great thing is we don't we don't need to wait for that to fix your autoimmune disease you can actually just change your diet and we get these results which is which is fantastic on the farming and Planet Side of things which is I think is a very very interesting topic we have quite a lot of anti- meat and cow rhetoric going on right now that this is is absolutely going to destroy the planet I think that Ireland was talking about destroying over half the herd in Ireland um I don't know if they've actually