Why We Are Carnivores Slide Presentation, with Dr Anthony Chaffee

[Music] welcome to the plant-free md podcast with dr anthony chafee 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 [Music] hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar i don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so i like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because i want the carnivore market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products that will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code anthony to get 10 off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25 off total all right thanks guys hey guys dr chafee here just wanted to do a talk on what i basically did at ketocon so the why we are carnivores but i wanted to do it with the slides that were prepared for that talk but unfortunately didn't show up in the in the video recording that that we had so i'll be doing roughly the same talk covering the same material it's not going to be word-for-word it's not going to be exactly the same because it is sort of uh you know six weeks separate but i'll be covering the same sort of material and maybe you know adding in a bit uh extra as well and going through the slides so uh yeah that's it and you change it out and uh if you like this sort of thing you know please do like and subscribe it really does help uh get the message out and um you know so hit the little bell and subscribe and then you'll get all the content that i have and i put out uh videos um you know multiple times a week and um and i have more content coming out on patreon as well and things will be coming out like this earlier and other bonus content that isn't available elsewhere as well as weekly zoom meetings and ask me anything sort of sessions and live q and a's as well so if you want to be a part of that uh please do check that out and think about becoming a patron okay thanks guys here we go okay so the topic of my conversation is is why we are carnivores and just the arguments and evidence behind the fact that biologically humans are carnivores and what this means and why it matters so first we should really define our terms so you know what what is what is a carnivore what is an herbivore what is an omnivore uh herbivore is just something that just eats only plants pretty straightforward a carnivore is something that that eats almost only meat and an omnivore is something that eats both plants and meat but i don't think that's a very tight definition because you know felines are known as obligate carnivores because almost every plant will kill them or cause serious harm and yet they can eat some plants and domestic cats are fed grain and plant-based kibble which you know is um you know obviously uh showing that they can survive on some plant food as well so you know does that make them an omnivore you know i don't think so you know i think what we need to define here is what is optimal for the animal what is best for them to eat uh and and survive on in the wild um we can also think of of omnivore in another way i think the really only good working functional definitions of the word omnivore would be one of two things so either you get as much nutrition out of both plants and animals you can eat them indiscriminately or there are things that you can only get in plants that you have to have and there are things that don't that don't exist in meat and there are things in meat that you have to have that don't exist in plants and so you necessarily have to eat both so humans don't fall into either of those categories so we we have things in meat that we have to have that we cannot get from plants but there is nothing in plants or fungus that we have to have that we cannot get from meat now it is true that if you you know eat different things you will change what your body's requirements for different nutrients are and this is where the rdas come from but these are looking at the context of eating in a mixed diet so things are very different when you're exclusively eating meat so you know the evidence for this is i mean there's just a ton of evidence we can go through these in different uh in different ways looking at things biologically anatomically evolutionarily anthropo anthropologically metabolically and the fact that plants you know are are living things and they like to stay living things if you eat them they die and so all living things have a defense while animals can run away or fight back plants can't and so they use poison and other mechanisms as a way to deter animals and insects from eating them but poison being a main issue there so why is this important well it's important because when we're talking about living optimally you have to be able to eat the optimal nutrition and if meat provides optimal nutrition and plants can cause harm through their defense chemicals this is obviously not optimal to be a so-called omnivore and where this really plays in uh is in you know medicine and our concept of chronic diseases which which i argue are not diseases per se these are you know toxicities and malnutrition really so toxic buildup of species inappropriate diet and a lack of species-specific nutrition right so namely too many plants not enough animal animal protein and fat okay so you can look at this as you know as simply as looking at animals in the zoo animals in the zoo if you you have signs that say don't feed the animals if you feed these animals something they don't eat they get sick and any proper zookeeper that knows what they're doing can tell you that if you feed an animal something that it doesn't eat in the wild that they get sick but what do they get sick with they get obesity heart disease diabetes cancer autoimmune diseases all arthritis and all the rest of them these things don't exist in the wild and they don't exist in in animals that eat their optimal appropriately specific biologically adapted diet dogs and cats are known carnivores and yet we give them grain and plant-based kibble because it's cheap and it's a filler and they get sick too and they get all these same diseases we get all these same diseases and in fact that's what veterinarians are now are saying they're showing that animals and domestic animals are having a much higher rate of so-called human diseases they're getting all the diseases that we are getting like diabetes like cancer and that this is something that has been increasing dramatically and you know you can you can make different arguments but you know the it it correlates perfectly with the advent of packaged dog food becoming the main way of feeding animals and these diseases started started rising precipitously and the average life expectancy dropped precipitously the average life expectancy of a golden retriever in america in the 1970s was 17 years now it's nine years some people might say this is because of aggressive uh you know breeding programs but you know golden retriever was already a pure breed i don't see how just making more of them is going to cut their life expectancy in half without causing any major major problems in other directions so so biologically we can look at this uh in a number of different ways but you know we can start from our teeth our teeth have uh you know changed uh dramatically in the last sort of eight million years becoming smaller and smaller because we're chewing softer and softer foods we're not you know chewing on sticks all day like a like a gorilla does and so we're getting carnivorous adaptations to our teeth and our brains our brains are growing bigger because we can support a bigger brain and we also need a bigger brain to figure out how to get animal source protein and nutrition and that's very simple because we cannot take down a mastodon with our bare hands we're not going to take down an elk with our bare hands and we're not going to be able to rip it up and eat it as well and that's why we had to develop tools and tactics and that's why our brains grew instead of our claws and our teeth and so that's why we live in houses and lions don't that's why we developed our intelligence and chimpanzees and gorillas didn't so to the extent that we have anyway because they actually are pretty smart animals um but then just looking at the gi tract you go down to our stomach our stomach ph is very very low it's around 1.4 1.5 and other carnivores are around like two like lines are usually around two you look at buzzards and vultures and caring animals they're around the 1.4 1.5 range and that's because they have a you know the food that they're eating has a high bacterial load and so they need to be able to kill off that bacteria so they don't get sick we in our evolutionary past seem to have come from a scavenger background where we were just eating off the remains of the the kills that you know another more physically adapted animal uh you know would have made a kill and then left some leavings and this is actually where the original stone tools came from using big large pound stones to crack open the skulls of these animals and get at the brains because it was very nutritious very high calorie and fat content that was very very good for our early ancestors in any any animal for that matter but that's what we had to adapt we had to adapt that high stomach ph simply because we had to uh eat meat that had a lot of bacteria though this even even more recently without refrigeration people would be eating meat they'd try to store and dry meat but things would go off things would go bad and you'd have to be able to contend with that high bacterial load then you look at the fact that we have five organs working in concert just to absorb fat so our stomach starts breaking down food and process of digestion then our liver makes bile our gallbladder stores that bile our pancreas makes things like lipase and other enzymes that break down the food and break down the fat into digestible absorbable products and then that bile emulsifies the fatty acids and your small intestine absorbs it okay so you have five organs working in concert just to absorb fat if fat weren't really really important it would not do this it wouldn't have wasted its time and energy this is a very high energy demand to keep these organs functioning in that process of absorbing fat so if that wasn't extremely important it would not be we would not be spending all this energy and coordination in order to absorb it the other fact is that you know we cannot break down fiber or all herbivores that eat high fiber diets they get actually most of their nutrition from the breakdown of that fiber the bacteria and their guts actually feed on the fiber there are no vertebrate animals that can break down fiber so they have to cultivate these bacteria which break down the fiber and actually eat the fiber and that's what they get their nutrition from and then they expel and excrete short chain fatty acids that's a waste product of these bacteria and that's what the animal absorbs either and these are 100 saturated fats so even gorillas that just get did just eat green leaves they get about 70 of their calories from saturated fat cows get as much as 80 percent of their calories from saturated fat because they're much more efficient at breaking these things down and then those bacteria break down and die off and the animal absorbs those and gets the protein from those bacteria and so that's actually what they are eating we don't have that ability anymore we've lost that millions of years ago and this is evidenced by the fact that we have what's called an appendix which in other primates and other animals are who are hind gut digesters is actually a very very long cecum and that's where fiber will actually pack down into and break down into short chain fatty acids so that's where they get the majority of their of their nutrition and their calories we don't have that ability anymore you know the appendix is a vestigial cecum vestigial meaning that millions of years ago it used to be this large organ that could do this but since we haven't used it in millions upon millions upon millions of years it has shriveled up and gone away because your gut is a very high has a very high energy demand and so if you're not using part of your intestine it is really holding you back and wasting energy which is death in the wild so you can also look at this in as far as colon disease and diverticulosis diverticulosis has been shown to have only a few correlating events so constipation high fat diet and you know meat diets and all these sorts of things have no association with diverticulosis in fact there's a study showing with thousands of patients and thousands of colonoscopies looking at what factors were associated with this they found the only things that had even an association with diverticulosis which is sort of the out pouching and breakdown of your of your distal colon and this can get infected and have problems you can die from this you have to get part of your colon removed you have to have a colostomy bag and the only things that were associated with diverticulosis which could then turn to diverticulitis was increased fiber and increased number of bowel motions a day all right so the more fiber people ate the more people defecated the more likely they were to have colon disease and the breakdown and failure of their colon because that's how i think about it i think of this as as as organ failures such as heart failure your heart is beating against a very high pressure gradient for years and decades on end and eventually just goes that's it i give up and it starts to to break apart and break down and that's heart failure well i look at diverticulosis as colon failure you have overworked this organ and it's just it's just run out of life it's just run out of miles and it's just going to start falling apart now and not work as well as it would have otherwise even when people do get diverticulitis or appendicitis or cancer and anastomoses and and other sorts of of bowel issues you will see general surgeons and colorectal surgeons putting people on what is called a low residue diet really that that's just a low fiber diet and that's because they want to rest the bowel and so they don't want the bowel working and expending all this effort and energy and pushing and squeezing and peristalsing to get rid of this stuff right because they want the bowel to just heal and rest so you don't want to overwork it okay but everyone's saying that fiber is good for you that that peristalsis and moving and motion all that stuff is really good for the bowel and this is beneficial for you so why if that's true then why do we whenever there's a problem rest the bowel and avoid fiber and that helps the bowel you know if fiber is going to help the bowel and it's good for the bowel then it should be good in those circumstances as well okay so that never really made sense to me because you're you're you're causing harm in a harmed state why is that not causing a harm or overworking and overusing that organ in a in a non-pathological state and that never really sends to me so these people will say don't eat fiber but then when this is done oh you better eat fiber because that's what's going to protect you that makes absolutely no sense and and the only reason people are saying this is just because they've been trained to say this their entire life and they haven't actually thought about it okay and also think about this this is waste material this is going out it's being excreted that means your body can't use it that means your body didn't want it and it wants to get it out okay if fiber was so good for us why is our body just pushing it out at all costs it actually isn't good for us it actually causes harm to us it causes microabrasions in the gut lining causing increased mucus secretion and inflammatory responses as well it also blocks the absorption of nutrients in our in our small intestine and makes it impossible for our body to absorb everything that we're eating how is that beneficial how is that evolutionarily selected why is it that if you're eating something and you're blocking your body from absorbing the nutrients that this provides an advantage somehow that doesn't make any sense either so you have to think about these things on first principles and when that when you start looking that like that in this direction these things start coming becoming a little more obvious then you have uh ibd and um sorry ibd and uh diverticula uh um irritable bowel disease such as crohn's and ulcerative colitis there are studies actually going back to the 1800s showing that if you put people on a pure red meat and water diet that you actually reverse these and stop these processes from happening uh dr j h salisbury of the salisbury steak has actually shown this wrote a whole book about it and even as as recently as 1975 dr volklin who's a gastroenterologist also reiterated this and wrote a book called the stone age diet arguing that humans yes are carnivores and if you eat as a carnivore you will stop having gastrointestinal diseases such as crohn's and ulcerative colitis more recently because this has all been papered over because everyone said that fat and cholesterol were bad and so 100 years of medical literature and knowledge just gets thrown out the window and just completely ignored after that but even more recently there have been studies looking at elemental diets with with ibd crohn's and ulcerative colitis and an elemental diet meaning that they just take the specific macro micro nutrients that you need without any of the extra stuff that that sometimes comes along with this and they found that this was better for getting uh people out of um an acute exasperation a flare-up of crohn's and ulcerative colitis then steroids were like prednisolow in a prednisone and they also looked at fasting mimicking diet fasting mimicking diet is just a ketogenic diet so you're just you're just eliminating carbohydrates and getting your metabolism into the so-called fasting state which you know as anyone who's listened to me before knows that i completely disagree with i think that is our primary metabolic state and this would be another piece of evidence to suggest that because on a fasting mimicking diet versus a carbohydrate with fiber diet they found that people with crohn's and ulcer colitis stayed in remission on average 51 weeks whereas on the carbohydrate and fiber diet they stayed in remission on average zero weeks all right that's not a lot of weeks so this is this is already in the literature now so you don't even need all the stuff going back 100 years 120 years 150 years but it is there all right so anatomically again we spoke about teeth and how this is changing um over the over millions and millions of years people say that we have flat teeth because they just look flat in the front they're not actually they're bicuspid teeth flat teeth are like a millstone they can slide against each other and they can uh grind down fibrous plants into more easily digestible mush and then you can swallow that and your body can break it down a little better but we actually have bicuspid teeth so if you bite down and clench your teeth and try to move your jaw side to side it doesn't move at all that's because we don't have flat teeth if we had flat teeth we would be able to make that sliding mechanism and that's what other animals with flat teeth are able to do like horses and cows and again you know we have uh smaller teeth smaller jaws smaller muscles of mastication if you look at the picture of the gorilla here most of that head is actually big temporalis muscles big muscles of mastication the skull of a of a gorilla she has a huge crest going back and that's where all the muscles attach so that's a that's just a ball of muscle on its head right there you look at our shoulders our shoulders have a rotational capacity that allow us to throw things very hard and very fast like rocks like spears like other weapons or boomerangs to break to to hunt animals and take them out and take them as food chimpanzees can't do that chimpanzee or bonobo is our closest relative really in the animal kingdom and they don't have that capacity in their shoulders and so while the average adult male can throw a baseball about 60 miles an hour and obviously people that are trained up can do much faster than that even you know the the the strongest uh most adept chimpanzees only gonna be able to throw uh a baseball about 20 miles an hour that's because they don't have that rotational capacity in their shoulders we also have uh very different eyes to uh prey animals you know this is this is something that we see very uh very often in uh predator animals they have these forward-facing eyes they give 3-d vision and you can focus in on on your prey and you can hunt them down and then generally prey animals they have wider set eyes so that they can see in a much wider range so they can see animals creeping up on them um you know people do talk about color vision they say well color vision is uh you know this is to look at different colored fruits and see the differences in plants and that that's possible but it doesn't really matter because we do have come from a river's past we do know that and you know we don't lose a genetic trait unless there's an evolutionary advantage to do so so unless there is an advantage to lose that color vision then there's no point in getting rid of it you know that's why we can still move our jaws from side to side that comes from that herbivorous past but again you know there wasn't any real advantage from from not being able to move your your jaw from side to side so you know it ended up sticking around but there actually are some people that have developed color blindness and even just red green color blackness why is that an advantage well it's an advantage because you can see better in low light and you can actually see animals uh the contrast between animals and plants a lot better so it's actually really good for hunting so this has provided a a a a an adaptive advantage for hunting but at the same time their you know color vision is is good for other things and so it could be that it just didn't completely overshadow the ongoing benefits of uh color vision as well so evolutionarily as i mentioned about eight million years ago we broke off from other primates because we started eating meat started eating more meat and more meat started having these genetic and physical adaptations these phenotypical adaptations uh that that we we see in the fossil record we started becoming more upright we started becoming taller we started having smaller and smaller teeth smaller jaws bigger brains and we started using tools because we had to figure out how to take down animals that outclassed us by every physical metric like a mastodon or even a deer you know there aren't many people that can you know wrestle down a deer and beat it to death with their hands you know maybe they exist but these things are very big strong powerful animals with antlers and so we had to figure something out we had to figure out how to take them down and that's where tools and tactics come in you know the pound stones go back millions and millions of years the first worked stone tool came in at around 3.3 million years ago and those developed and became more sophisticated as the you know eons go on and go by and these were used to kill and dismember animals and they got more and more sophisticated and that's something that um you know dr bill schindler spoke about uh you know in his talks and in his book uh you know eat like human and uh and he had a great talk at ketocon as well it's a shame that um that wasn't uh uh recorded but you can you can find his material on um on youtube as well and i'll be having him on the show soon also so you know what what um what happened i think that really drove us into that final stage of pure carnivorism was the ice age or the the initiation of the ice ages around two two and a half million years ago or so before that there really wasn't uh these ice caps these polar ice caps those didn't exist further back then about two two and a half million years ago then we came into an ice age which we're still actually a part of and these ice sheets came down they killed off the plants they killed off the animals that ate the plants and weren't able to survive during the ice times and really only these big megafauna and big fuzzy full furry mammals like mastodons giant sloths and things like that were able to survive during this this period and then the carnivores and predators that were preying on them our ancestors being among them or at least adapted enough to survive during that time because we were eating meat and because we were eating these animals and became uh basically reliant on pure animal nutrition because there weren't the plants available so our ancestors that went down that line and and just went you know whole hog on the whole uh meat trade those are the ones that survived and those are the ones that turned into modern day humans because of that evolutionary drive and necessity for animal source nutrition we can also look at this from the fossil record and something called the stable isotope study so it's stable nitrogen studies they can find this in the bones of any animal and you can see what that animal ate and if the just basically it builds up uh throughout the food chain so animals that just eat plants they will get a certain amount of this stable nitrogen and then animals that eat that animal they'll have a concentration of that nitrogen and so on so as you go up the food chain you get up to the top you know like a you know a fish that eats algae there's a fish that eats that fish feeds the fish that eats that fish and so on up the chain until you get to sharks and orca whales and things like that and so you can see that these are top of the food chain apex predators and we actually see that our ancestors in early humans and even early homo sapiens and neanderthal were apex predators they had a higher carnivore rating than even lions foxes hyenas around at the same time in the same location okay so this is because our ancestors were eating the lions and hyenas and foxes and wolves as well we have done state looked at the uh done stable isotope analysis of the ancient egyptians so not everyone knows this but they're actually more it's thought to be that there are more mummies in egypt than there are people currently alive in egypt this is because these were just the burial practices of ancient egypt it wasn't just the pharaohs and the and the wealthy that were uh mummified certainly the only ones you know buried with a fortune in gold and and uh trinkets but everyone was buried this way and so they looked at the stable isotope study and they found that you know that during the agricultural revolution post agricultural revolution that they were actually heavily eating grains and this actually affected their health we can look at these and we actually see atherosclerotic plaques in their hearts and and this was first thought to be that the pharaohs and wealthy were the ones eating all of this um you know eating all the rich food and they could afford meat and fat and so obviously they were getting uh fatty arteries because they were eating fatty meat but that actually isn't the case when you look at the stable isotope studies we find that the the normal peasant class were eating the same amount or the same uh kind of food as the upper class just probably maybe not as much access you know so if there was a famine or something like that you know they they're the ones that are going to starve first however they were they're still eating the same thing and you can even see from their statuary that this is uh not not actually the peak of uh of human health here this is the statue of a man who has clear gynecomastia and a pot belly okay so that already is showing this this dysregulation of health and hormonal health in the population just eating grains so they they had the original grains that they you may have had had treated and fermented or sprouted or done uh different things than they do now to get a more less or less harmful product and it was still causing all of these problems so even then without processed sugar and refined sweets and junk food they were still getting sick and they were still getting uh uh unwell and gynecomastia and obesity as well so evolutionarily again we look at different studies that are just all over the map there was a major study that was done out of the university of tel aviv in israel from professor mickey bandur who i will be interviewing uh next week actually um this showed that humans have been hyper carnivorous apex predators for at least two million years so again apex predators top of the food chain this is what that stable isotope study shows that we actually were top of the food chain apex predators don't graze i've never seen a great white shark the sharky kelp for roughage i've never seen a lion eat grass for the same reasons this is not what apex predators do this is not what top of the food chain animals do they eat animals they eat the animals below them on the food chain and this is what the israeli study showed as well from mickey bandur that not only with the stable isotope study but by many many many different metrics you know we show that humans have been carnivores apex predators hunters non-hunter-gatherers hunters for at least two million years and that coincides with the advent of these ice ages and people say that well you know when when the ice ages came down you know well people were still eating plants they still had to do this and you point out that like well during the ice ages there really weren't any fruits or vegetables available to people and uh you know because it's it's ice and they argue well no no people just moved towards the equator when that happened that's actually completely false that is uh that is that is nowhere argued in any of the scientific literature and in fact it's very clear from a fossil record that as the ice shelves were moving down people were moving up okay probably because this is where their preferred prey was which is like the mastodons in megafauna so we can also look at the fossil record and look at what happened after the agricultural revolution you know a paleo anthropologist can actually look at a fossil and a skull and teeth and actually tell you if uh if a human skull was before or after the agricultural revolution teeth and jaws will only develop properly with proper nutrition and so crooked teeth small jaws micronathia those are all a product of malnutrition so not getting enough of the appropriate nutrients that we need will make it impossible for our bodies to develop properly there are other things as well you know mouth breathing sucking your thumb and using bottles and all that sort of stuff they can actually change how you how your how your mouth develops chewing on actual food this stimulates the development of your jaw as well so but looking at this just from a nutritional standpoint you do need specific nutrients like vitamin k2 k1 calcium vitamin d and so on in order to make straight teeth and this is this is published widely in dentistry journals today that that this is a phenomenon that this is not a genetic issue crooked teeth are not a genetic problem they are a nutritional problem this is from not getting the proper nutrients so when we look at the fossil record before the agricultural revolution we actually see very wide jaws with straight teeth all of their wisdom teeth are in and comfortably so their jaws are big and straight and wide and and pronounced uh they're not these short truncated crowded jaws with crowded teeth you know why is it that now we like almost no one gets their wisdom teeth in whereas a couple hundred years ago all you know most people did if they were getting proper nutrition uh people say oh well we're revolving away from that i am sorry but it takes way longer to evolve than just a couple hundred years or even a couple generations because just a generation or two ago not getting your wisdom teeth in was actually less common than it is now far less common than it is now now we look at uh height and the fossil record actually people in in prehistoric era were actually taller and they had larger brain sizes so the average uh brain size of homo sapiens was 11 larger before the agricultural revolution than it is now neanderthal brands are actually larger than that going back like 50 000 years this is likely because you know even before the agricultural revolution maybe people did start having to be you know add into the gathering part of the hunter gatherers because they weren't able to get sufficient nutrition sufficient fat and calories from the animals that they were eating because the megafauna was going extinct and we had looked at other sources of nutrition potentially to to help mitigate this so before that our brains were actually bigger and people were actually taller and there are areas where uh people were known to have been hunting mammoths and we can date these and say like okay well these guys were mammoth hunters and we can see this by other other uh metrics as well to show that that's what they were eating and they found that that some of these populations were on average six foot two or even six with four and that's on average you know the average height of uh an adult male in america is five foot eight you know and in china mongolia and elsewhere it's like five foot six somewhere is five foot four that's that's very very short and that's the average so you know half the population would be below that as well not so in the areas that uh that had an abundance of meat to eat like these big mastodon hunters and on average about six foot two or more and so a lot of these people are much taller than that as well um you know the different tribes in africa where they just eat meat on average these guys are six foot two six foot three six foot four the average height of a population denotes the average health of a population and while you may have uh you know geographical uh you know you know differences in population uh and sort of you know like you have the pygmies in africa you know they're at full height those guys are not that tall however uh you know you do have different populations like in asia we have you know people that went through you know the the you know the forced famines through of mao zedong and the other other communist famines um obviously they were had stunted growth and you have all these these uh elderly chinese people are very short and then they come over to america and they have kids who are six foot four you know because this is a nutritional issue this is not just a genetic issue and we look at brain size as well okay so this is this is a chart of our brains growing going back 10 million 10 million years and it's slowly creeping up slowly creeping up slowly creeping up and then you see it around two two and a half million years all of a sudden this spike up and that's because during that slow rise we're eating more meat and more fat and we're growing our brain because we're figuring out you know how to get better quality food we're starting to figure out tools and all of a sudden when we're basically forced to go full carnivore because we don't have any other options with the ice ages our brain development skyrockets and it has this exponential growth right up until the end there where you can see right there at the end it also has a sharp decline downwards okay you cannot argue that that is a genetic change like that that is that is something that happened in the environment like the genes don't happen that fast so it's nearly a straight line when you look at it you know in proportion at that small area and then almost direct line downwards okay so that is a sharp sharp sharp decline and so something happened there something happened that it was not good for us and if you actually look at that that coincides with the advent of agriculture and plant-based nutrition becoming more prevalent not even as as as dominant as it is now just more prevalent okay before that we were carnivores we're living as carnivores then we add in plants on a wide scale bam our brain size goes down that's not good all right so you know that is a very clear piece of evidence that this is not the way we should be eating so anthropologically looking at different populations around the world that have lived as carnivores and do survive as such and thrive you have the native americans uh they have they drove buffalo over the cliff this is this is likely what uh our ancient mastodon hunters did as well they you know maybe use fire or other sorts of techniques to spook these animals uh at your run over a cliff and crash and die at the bottom and they would use stone tools to cut them up and dry them and and make pemmican basically in order to in order to preserve that meat and fat and nutrition throughout the rest of the year and they would they would do that they would have one big buffalo drop a year sometimes and they would feed their entire family and community for an entire year um they were also very very strong very very powerful very very uh physically and mentally dominant people you know just because they didn't have technology they didn't have the iphone does not mean that they weren't intelligent does that mean that they weren't more intelligent than we are now and they likely were um you know when you have harder harder environments and situations to live in it actually necessitates more intelligence and ingenuity now we have it pretty soft we don't have to use our brain as much we don't have to figure out how to survive they did and they actually you know were quite a lot taller than they are now you know there was um uh uh dr steve finney uh has talked about this multiple times but there was one example that he gave these paintings of these native americans were very tall and slender with large heads and they said that these guys were actually and this was from the 1800s early 1800s and they would say that these guys were actually like six foot seven six foot eight and they're like that's not possible look how big their heads are they would have been like a beach ball and no in fact they were and there's there's a lot of documentation uh to show that they actually came and met uh you know the great white father uh thomas jefferson who was president at the time and thomas jefferson who was like six foot two you know he even commented like these guys were giants they were massive with big old heads and you know big old head means big old brain so uh that was that was a commonly recorded uh thing we even have uh documentation of you know sailors coming over to the new world and they were very brave you'll talk about indian braves they were very brave they had no fear they would just jump out into the ocean swim out to the boat climb up there and walk around just look around expecting people butt naked you know didn't have anything with them and they the the captain actually wrote in his his journal or whatever that subsequently became published that you know these guys without a stitch of clothing on them you know were just physical specimens and they were they were more beautiful just in their nakedness than you know the you know the and then any english gentleman in their finest regalia they said these people were just beautiful and beautifully built and very tall very strong and very muscular and this is something that that you know that we see as a as a rule around the world in these carnivore populations of humans genghis khan you know this was an entire nation a massive one an entire empire that just ate carnivore they ate horse meat they drank horse blood they would have some fermented milk products as well uh and they they they dominated most of asia and most of europe is the largest contiguous empire that has ever existed and they ran solely on a carnivorous diet and that gave them extreme benefits and advantages to warfare and governing huge tracts of land first and foremost because they didn't need to eat four times a day they didn't have to stop and cook and eat and have low energy all the time they could go five days without eating then they would eat 10 pounds of horse meat and in a go and they'd be good for another five days that that actually routinely happened or they were on a ride and they're just going and their horse would be bled they would get uh some uh blood from the horse and that would that would last them for the day or two and their horse would make more blood and they would just keep going so this was a renewable resource as well the blood of the horses as well as the the the milk as well and people talk about how agriculture was just the the finest advent because this allowed us to have cities well i'm sorry you know we have the largest contiguous empire ever that existed on a carnivore diet did not need agriculture did not need farmland did not need to grow crops and grains and they had the largest contiguous empire that's ever existed the only thing that eclipsed it as far as land mass is concerned was the british empire more recently but that wasn't that was a naval power you know that was that was scattered all over the world this was one huge chunk of the world and you know you know what is now russia is really uh some of the remnants of the mongol empire but look at a map sometime and just and just uh google that and see just how big this empire was and then see for yourself if you believe the whole idea that you had to have grains and agriculture to have a civilization or cities the native americans did the same thing there was a city that was found abandoned uh because of you know 95 of the native americans died off through diseases brought over from europe accidentally in the early 1600s and they found this this city in what is now st louis that had you know buildings and structures that were estimated to be able to house one million full-time residents and they had trade routes going off in five major directions all across the continent in order to bring in uh food and trade and goods and so forth so right there there was a city a million uh million people in it that's the population size of ancient rome as well so it can be done then you have the inuits you know these and other other populations that live up in up in the arctic circle there's no plans to access even if they wanted to which they actually don't there was uh there was a a you know a chronicle or journal of a new england settler and explorer that spoke about this where you know a couple months out of the year in the more southern reaches of canada it you know it was such that it would thaw out and they said that you know okay i understand that you know during during the winters you know they're very harsh you can't there are no plants you can't cultivate anything and so you have to just eat meat but you know in the you know two three months of the fall you know surely they can live off the bounty of the land which is how he he phrased it which i thought was great and he said but they didn't they did not do that what they did was they ate meat even in those times that they could have grown uh crops now people say well they would have ate berries and did this than the other you know especially when you go up further north there really weren't berries accessible and the ones that were these little lincoln berries are extremely sour and in fact most of them didn't like them they didn't want to eat them so you know the gathering part of that hunter-gatherer motif was at most two months out of the year for things that no one really ate like lincoln berries you have uh the maasai in africa and and many other populations and tribes out there as well they still just eat me look at these guys they're tall they're slender they're strong there were studies back in the 1980s looking at the messiah and saying like these guys are just built like olympic athletes they can just run forever they never get tired they never run out of energy they just go go go and they found that they thought that this must be because of the amount of exercise they did because this was this was right when people are saying that fat cholesterol killed you made you fat and horrible and sick and yet these guys were eating a lot of fat they were drinking blood drinking fatty milk which the milk of their livestock is about eight percent milk that was ours about 3.5 to 4 from cow's milk so these guys were extremely healthy and extremely fit and so they said well it must be because of their exercise level they're just they're just out there they're out there being fit and so they did a study and looked they found that well actually no not really that on average their daily you know exercise uh and energy expenditure you know through um you know athletic endeavors was 1.6 times that of the average american which was you know always said to be very sedentary very slothful bunch of couch potatoes and you know you know with with belly fat and and no cardiovascular health so that sort of throws that theory out the window as well the native australian aboriginals so much document documentation about how these guys were hunters exclusively they knew which plants that they could eat if they had to but they didn't unless they had to or to use medicinally they were hunters they hunted kangaroo and other animals and they exclusively ate meat and they were very healthy they're very tall they actually have very very tall slender builds just like maasai very muscular and trim and now that is not the case so remember i was talking about these human diseases those were really called the diseases of the west previously so previously diseases of the west uh were things like obesity and and uh you know diabetes heart disease all these sorts of things heart disease really wasn't described until the 1900s but you know people getting these these sorts of diseases and getting sick they only saw these in western populations and you know i remember learning as a kid that you know when eating a western diet native americans were four times as likely to get all the western diseases chronic diseases that we get today like heart disease diabetes you know cancer obesity as well and i remember thinking at the time well doesn't that mean that the food is causing the disease you know because if they don't eat the food they don't get the disease and we eat the food and we get the disease we just get at a lower rate you know and what is what is a western diapers in a non-western diet what are they eating that we're not and vice versa you know they didn't say it at the time but you know later learned that they were eating just a pure carnivore diet maybe some plants sometimes if they had to maybe but generally they didn't the vast majority of what they ate was just meat and the australian aboriginals were no different and in fact you know nat when i first came to australia to practice medicine i learned right away that uh basically the health of the australian aboriginals was was was quite poor and i was told that whenever treating an aboriginal patient that whatever their age said on their chart just to add 20 years to that because that is just how quickly they age and so if you had someone who's 45 you basically consider the diseases that someone would get in a 65 year old because that is just what you generally see and so if you're seeing like a range of diseases or cancers in this this you know from 60 to 70 or 60 to 80 you know you can actually look at that from 40 to 60 in the aboriginal population so that is seriously affecting them and that is because they didn't have exposure to the agricultural revolution like european uh uh populations did and others around asia and uh you know india as well and northern africa in certain parts so these these people are going to be much more affected by the plant toxins that exist to defend these plants against predation and they are going to become more hurt and this again goes back to the fact that these are not diseases this is a poison dose relationship when you remove this substance these diseases go away that is a toxic toxin toxic relationship that is not a disease relationship okay so you can even go further back and look at herodotus this is a story that i that i've told before but i think it's it's very very interesting eroticist was the father of uh of history he's the first person that started chronicling things down and and and giving us a historical record he went all over the world and chronicled very important things and that's the only reason we have uh records of a lot of these things and these wars and these meetings between different dignitaries of different countries one of them was between a diplomat from the persian empire who went down to ethiopia after persia had taken over egypt and they were you know talking getting to know their new neighbors and the king of ethiopia asked the persian emissary you know what do your people eat and how how long do your people normally live and so the persian guy described growing crops and making bread out of wheat and they said that our people would normally live around 70 years and the king of ethiopia sort of laughed at him and said well no wonder you live such short lives if all you eat is dirt you know we lit we exclusively eat boiled meat from our livestock and we only drink the milk from our livestock and our people would live 120 years and sometimes more and you know that might sound a bit far-fetched in fact in in the australian aboriginals and the inuits and messiah and native americans and other other such cultures that just ate meat they actually talk about this longevity and dr salisbury uh you know chronicles that in his book in the 1800s he lived with the native americans they said these people were hail and hearty running around the pack on their back following the buffalo herds day in and day out at 105 110 115 years old you know they're not sitting in a nursing home turning to dust for 40 years they're active adults in good health all of this sounds very far-fetched to modern day people who start breaking down in their 30s and just start dying and getting you know obese and heart disease and and and other sort of issues very early on in life but we've actually known for about 20 years now as geneticists that chromosomally humans are designed to live about 120 years on average meaning that if you just stay out of your own way and don't mess up you should make it to 120 years without doing anything special okay so why are we dying in our 60s and 70s on average right that is literally middle aged and yet this is the common this is the common theme around the world is that our bodies just start breaking down after 30 they really start breaking down after 40 and then you get into your your older age in your 50s and we call this a senior citizen you know we get senior citizen discounts at 55 in some places you know that's um that's less than middle age that that should be in the prime of your adulthood and yet it's not and yet we're breaking down and getting more and more sick unless you don't eat things that cause harm metabolically you know we talk about in biochemistry a you know fed state versus a fasting state so fed state traditionally would mean if you eat this is what your biochemistry looks like and then you stop eating and your biochemistry switches into a different program in order to keep you alive and maintain things while you don't have any incoming food i think that's completely wrong i think that our so-called fasting state is actually our primary metabolic state this is the primary metabolic state of all animals in the wild you know basically all animals in the wild and we have studies on this going to you know 1980 81 with wolves and they said well you have to eat carbs burn carbs was the thought and so they said okay but you know wolves don't carbo-load before they chase caribou for 10 hours you know do they have blood sugar do they have muscle and liver glycogen they found out yes they actually do and it's rock solid it does not change no matter what they're doing it's basically the same there's subtle variations but they are in this so-called fasted state and that allows their body to mobilize energy and nutrition from their fat stores and that's our primary metabolic state as well when you eat carbohydrates it raises your insulin insulin basically shuts down your metabolism and it slows your metabolism your basal metabolic rate drops on average by four sorry 300 kilocalories a day so on average you will burn 300 less kilocalories food calories a day when eating carbohydrate-containing foods so if you have 2 000 calories can and and with carbs in the mix and 2000 calories without carbs in the mix you will burn 300 more food calories a day without the carbs and so you know this whole calorie and calorie out thing gets a bit a bit more complicated because it's not as simple as as people think because what you eat determines what your your output will be what your metabolic rate will be and so it's not as easy to figure out exactly what your metabolic rate is it's not as easy to figure out exactly how much energy your body is producing these are also complex organic chemicals they obviously have complex organic chemical interactions with your body so you know a carbohydrate is a lot more than a calorie as our proteins as our fats there are many different kinds of fats there are many different kinds of carbohydrates there are many different kind of proteins and these have different chemical effects in your body they do different things in your body they're used for different things in your body and so you cannot just look at them as a caloric source because that is not what they are they fundamentally change your body and insulin especially is problematic because it will again slow your metabolism it stops energy from going it stops energy from coming out of your cell so it forces energy into cells and stops energy from coming out of cells it blocks proteolysis it blocks lipolysis and so without lipolysis you cannot break down your fat stores to make energy to go through gluconeogenesis and make blood sugar and glycogen and to make ketones to run your body and your brain so you shut down that whole process but it also does something more insidious which it blocks a hormone called leptin which is secreted from your fat stores and uh tells your brain how much energy you have it's like a running gas gauge on how much energy your body has and so your brain looks at that goes oh we got plenty of energy we don't need to eat or it gets blocked by insulin and fructose by the way and now your brain can't see its leptin it thinks you're starving to death and now your blood sugar is dropping because your insulin is up which forces your blood sugar to go down and your brain sends out a panic signal that says if you don't eat now you will die and so this is why multiple times a day people think that they're dying and they need to eat constant amounts of food and so this is a just a depiction of that leptin uh insulin cycle and it gets disrupted by carbohydrates so when you eat carbohydrates your blood sugar necessarily goes up well this is not a good thing people think is oh i'm getting more energy that that helps me no it doesn't actually high blood sugar is actually damaging to your body this is this is because glucose molecules can physically fuse to other molecules and damage them to make them act abnormally pathologically or just not at all it's called glycation fructose is actually worse than this it does it does more of this in your body um so in a defensive mechanism your insulin goes up right because there's high blood sugar chronic high blood sugar is actually what kills diabetics is what breaks them down this is again that toxicity model in you know in in full view where you're eating something and this is damaging your body okay and we've had i think over 100 years of scientific literature showing that a ketogenic diet is very efficacious for treating diabetics okay so again this is a poison relationship you're removing carbohydrates you're removing sugar you're removing alcohol you're removing the precipitous the the precipitate precipitous factors that cause these these diseases like diabetes cancer is another major one so otto warburg described uh in in the 1930s and 40s and he actually won the nobel prize in medicine for his work in cancer biology that cancer cells feed on glucose in fact they get about they need about 400 times the amount of glucose that normal cells do and this is because their mitochondria are damaged otto warburg showed that if you have healthy mitochondria you cannot get cancer all right and this is something that's been uh reiterated and actually proven true by the work of such people as professor thomas seyfried of boston college who i've had on my podcast as well where i encourage everyone to go look at his stuff because and he wrote a book called cancer is a metabolic disease it is if you look at the uh the cancer biology and this is this is in textbooks this is not fringe uh this is not a fringe opinion this is hard biochemistry if your mitochondria work properly they stay in oxidative phosphorylate phosphorylation okay and that uses oxygen to make an abundant amount of atp when your mitochondria get damaged they stop being able to do that and they go into a a fermentative process and so it actually takes a lot more glucose to make atp because you're getting you know 36 atp uh from aerobic um aerobic uh uh oxidative phosphorylation but you're only getting two uh when when you're doing anaerobically and so then this produces lactate as well which is that sort of that burning in your muscles when you're when you're working out that that sort of burn the field of burn that's that lactic acid buildup that actually hurts and so cancer cells produce a lot of lactate and this actually sort of you know makes it sort of a swamp around them that makes it hard for other cells to get in close and and try to attack them okay so this is something too uh that that professor seaford has shown that if you go on to a ketogenic diet this actually starves out your cancer cells it limits the supply of glucose to those cancer cells which again need 400 times the amount of glucose that other cells do because they're much less efficient at making it and they're trying to grow just out of control and the reason they're trying to grow out of control by the way is because the mitochondria are actually what regulate cell growth and so when the mitochondria get damaged and they can't do their job they can't control growth and so we get out of control growth which is what cancer is all right so when you go on a ketogenic diet you will limit the amount of energy that those cells have you will also help the health of the mitochondria maybe it's too late for some of the mitochondria in your cancer cells however the rest of your your mitochondria will be benefited by this there are multiple studies showing that the respiration rate and efficacy of and health of the mitochondria in your cells went on a ketogenic diet when in ketosis is four times that of normal people on a carbohydrate carbohydrate inclusive diet and you actually find you get more mitochondria as well so in people in ketosis we'll actually have four times the amount of mitochondria so they're four times as effective and they're four times as plentiful and so this is very beneficial just for overall health but also in the context of preventing certainly and possibly even fighting cancer and this is something that's actually been uh picked up by other uh medical groups such as paleo medicina in uh hungary which have been using at least a ketogenic if not a caramel or a diet for people for like well over 10 years with cancer with crohn's with other metabolic diseases and they're having fantastic results but this is becoming even mains this is becoming uh recognizing america as well and even cedar sinai has has started instituting metabolic treatments for cancer as well which which includes nutritional ketosis as a driving force in that treatment and again going back to the fact that this all stems from plants being toxic and plants trying to kill you the reason i say plants are trying to kill you it's not that they're necessarily out to get you per se uh i don't think they really care one way or the other if you're around unless you know they want you to go down and become fertilizer for them but this all stems from when i was taking cancer biology 22 years ago at the university of washington in seattle and we learned day one how toxic plants were and this is something that actually we learned before that and i remember in seventh grade biology we learned that plants and animals were an evolutionary arms race plants becoming more and more toxic so less and less animals could eat them so they could survive and thrive otherwise they go extinct and then animals who eat plants eating a specific plant becoming more and more adapted to that specific plant and and co-evolving with that plant to become more resistant and be able to break down those poisons into safe by-products so that they can survive and thrive and so if you're not in that evolutionary arms race you're going to start losing right because you're not going to have those built-in defenses against these poisons and we were looking at this from a cancer perspective and we were taught that just brussels sprouts had 136 known human carcinogens in them and mushrooms had over 100 spinach lettuce celery cabbage cucumber broccoli you name it they all had 60 80 or or over a hundred known human carcinogens in them and and they were quite abundant we know from the work of professor bruce ames from berkeley in 1989 he published a paper that actually compared the plant toxins already existing in uh the vegetables that we eat comparing them to the the pesticides we spray on them because we say oh well if you grow it in your own garden then it's okay oh god we'll get away from these pesticides no no it's the plant that was the problem in the first place and they were saying this in the 80s too we got to get rid of these pesticides we've got to get rid of them so he sort of did a study and said okay well what are we looking at here and he found that that there were 42 different poisons identified in these plants and 20 of which were shown to be carcinogenic in the lab and obviously we found many many more just in the you know 12 years that in between when i took cancer biology and learned all this but back in 89 they found that of those 42 chemicals they were 10 000 times more abundant by weight than the pesticides we sprayed on these plants okay so the spinach was worse than the pesticides right it was 10 000 times more abundant and the naturally occurring poisons were orders of magnitude times more likely to cause cancer than the pesticides we spread on them this is why we still have pesticides this is why they weren't outlawed and banned because they showed scientifically that the plant is worse than the pesticide so if you're going to eat the plant you probably don't need to worry about the pesticide now you know that's not to say that pesticides are good for you especially things like roundup and all these other sorts of things no they are not but the plants aren't either that's the whole point and so we were quite taken aback by this uh as you could imagine and i thought that he must be joking everyone thought he must be joking everyone was looking around thrashing their heads around wildly looking for a ta you know cackling in the corner you know trying to keep it together because this was obviously a joke it was not a joke he was not joking it finally dawned on us and i remember thinking like okay he's serious but but vegetables are still good for you though right and you must have just read our minds because he looked at us and just said i don't eat salad i don't eat vegetables i don't let my kids eat vegetables plants are trying to kill you so i said right screw plants and i just stopped eating plants from that day on that's why i've been doing carnivore inadvertently for about 22 years now because i learned that plants were toxic they don't want you to eat them they if they if you start eating them they are going to make it hard on you and they're going to make you feel like crap and they're going to try to kill you we know this intuitively if you get lost in the woods you can't just eat any random plant most plants will kill you or at least make you very very sick okay so these are inedible plants right so why do we think that the so-called edible plants are just from the garden of eden and just couldn't be better for you in fact they're not they're actually quite harmful as well it's just they're not as harmful as a hemlock okay so let's look at some of these things there are a lot of different toxins that exist in these you know these are things like cassava which are the third most uh uh you know as a caloric source is the third most important caloric source in the third world you have almonds which contain cyanide there's 2500 different cyanide containing plants that we know of and they go by crush receptors so or pressure spots so they don't just exist free floating in the in the seed or the nut um but when they're crushed then the cyanide is released right well what is crushing that's that's something chewing and masticating that thing and the plant goes right you're going to eat me i'm going to poison you so it releases this poison pill and it says i'm going to take you down with me and you look at that pit that's like a peach pit when you open that up you crack that stone open it looks sort of like a shriveled almond it's actually called a bitter almond and this has enough cyanide in it that when chewed to release the cyanide it one or two of those can kill you okay almonds it takes around a pound or two depending on the almonds because they have varying amounts of cyanide in them a pound or two of almonds to get a lethal dose of cyanide okay i have sat down and just you know hand balled half a pound of almonds from a costco bag of these things before while watching tv that's potentially half a lethal dose you know i'm a bigger person you know so you know maybe it wasn't enough it wasn't uh half of a lethal dose for me but that that is absolutely terrifying we just sell this in stores where kids can get them you know because like that that is insane and you know while you may not get uh you know dead from eating these amounts of cyanide they can actually cause a lot of harm to your body you can cause uh damage your thyroid damage to your brain as well they're neurotoxic so let's look at some of these uh in specificity look at hormone disruptors there are things like called phytoestrogens these are are very commonly uh commonly produced throughout the plant kingdom um most notably in soy about three ounces of soy have over a million nanograms of uh phytoestrogens in them put that in comparison to a fertile woman who makes about 180 000 nanograms a day right so this is 10 times what they would make in a day just in those three ounces the birth control pill depending on the birth control pill would have about 35 000 nanograms of estrogen they say like oh well what about beef beef you have this hormone tree they have all these hormones in them right three three ounces of lean beef that is hormone treated given growth hormone uh supplementation throughout their life has about four nanograms of estrogen in it so not the same thing not on the same scale whatsoever there are other things that increase testosterone but also things that block and suppress testosterone block and suppress estrogen even just carbohydrates will suppress the conversion of testosterone into estrogen in women women don't just make estrogen they actually make testosterone first and then that testosterone is converted into estrogen in the ovaries but high insulin levels will actually block that conversion so just that high insulin is actually causing harm throughout your body it's blocking leptin it's blocking conversion of your hormones it's doing a lot of damage throughout your body so that's again another way that we can tell that that's not our normal biochemical state because we're actually screwing up our biochemistry so this is where pcos comes into play when uh you know women are eating a lot of carbohydrates some will be more sensitive than others however for all of them when they're eating carbohydrates their insulin will go up that will block the conversion of testosterone into estrogen and so they will necessarily have more testosterone than their body wants and they'll have less estrogen than their body wants or needs and so this disrupts our hormones quite significantly and there are other factors that that do that as well then you have nutrient blockers these are these are uh you know different substrates and substances that that block absorption or digestion we already talked about fiber how that makes a physical barrier between your enzymes and the food so it can't break down the food into amino acids in the first place or into short chain fat or into shorter uh portioned out uh fatty acids and then once those things are broken down this is a physical barrier from those nutrients getting to the border of your of your intestine to be drawn into the cell uh in the first place so those get blocked and taken out but more specifically in things like multiple different things but just looking at soy and wheat they make a protease inhibitor protease is released from your pancreas to break down protein as it sounds something like ace ase that means it's breaking something down so protein breaker or downer and then protease inhibitor stops that okay so soy and wheat have protease inhibitors that block protease from breaking down our protein okay this gets into bioavailability of plants as well the the protein that's available in or that exists in plants are not available necessarily gluten makes up 80 of the protein in wheat gluten cannot be used as protein your body cannot break it down it cannot absorb it it cannot use it as protein period and it has protease inhibitors so what little is left of the protein and wheat that your body can actually do anything with now your body can't do anything with it because it's blocking the breakdown of it but also if you are eating meat with with it is this very bioavailable proteins and fats when you're eating it with wheat like in a sandwich or you put some croutons or something or bread chicken well what you're doing there is you're going to block protease from breaking down the meat as well and so you're actually going to again waste nutrients waste nutrition and that cannot be beneficial uh to our survival so that cannot be what we're supposed to eat soy does the same thing soy has protease inhibitors as well and there are many many others and many other examples of these nutrient blockers photosensitivity this is one that not many people know about but there are many um there are many plants that actually cause us to be much more sensitive to sunlight and others it just increased inflammation increased damage so we get some damage from sun and that increases that inflammatory response and damage so we our sunburns are worse they hurt worse they damage our dna worse and so we get worse peeling and at higher risk for skin cancers and things like that but specifically the things that cause you to be much more sensitive to uv light are things like limes so there's oils and limes and now remember a lime is an unripe fruit now the plant may or may not want you to eat that fruit mostly wants other animals to eat that fruit most fruit will kill you most berries will kill you but there are some that you know may not be as toxic or contain fructose and that they generally are have much less defense chemicals in them and that's why we we find fructose to be sweet uh because we recognize that as safe and so it's okay this can give me a quick hit of energy and that will make me survive but you know fructose in and of itself will cause a lot of harm as fact is known to break down into alcohol and um and cause the same damages as alcohol which is something uh that i talk about in many uh episodes as well so limes being an unripe fruit it its seed is not ready to be eaten it has defenses it has defense chemicals is where like you know green tomatoes come from these are these are traditionally known to be toxic and you don't eat them you want them you want them to be vine ripened in a lime it creates it secretes oils on the outside and if you touch them if you handle them they will soak in your skin and it causes you to be very very sensitive to sunlight and actually there's actually documentation documented cases of people getting second degree burns just from handling limes in the sun that actually happened to my younger brother when we were kids in southern california we had a lime tree and he was out there sort of picking limes and playing around and all of a sudden came in he had these massive red welts and wheels all over his his body and we thought that you know he must have be having a sensitizing uh reaction and the next time he would get anaphylaxis and he'd be dead and so it was like okay keep that kid away from limes and lime trees um that wasn't the case you know that he has eaten and used lime since then you know and and hasn't had any sort of problem so that is is really looking back likely what happened there are other things that uh will also do the same there's a thing called celery dermatitis where people who handle a lot of celery pick celery eat a lot of celery will get very very sensitive to life they'll have to wear hats and long sleeve shirts and even gloves and put sun cream on everywhere because they will just get absolutely scorched in the sun and so this this also goes into uh why we generally don't see too many you know tan vegans a lot of them will get burned and torn up and you know i i do fine i don't get burnt in the sun you talk to any carnivore he's been doing this for a while they're amazed they don't get burns in the sun you might get red that's just blood going to the skin but that just turns into a tan layer you're not really going to peel or damage your skin unless you really overdo it and again you know we talked about the cyanogenic properties of different plants and again there's 2500 different plants that use cyanide as a defense and so this is very clearly designed to stop animals from eating them because it has that crush effect they only release the cyanide when they are crushed okay and you have night shades these are potatoes tomatoes eggplants peppers these have been known for thousands of years to be just an entire you know class of plant that you just don't go near you know the europeans and you know going back you know millennia knew that you don't touch nightshades and they could tell when they went to the new world they say oh that these are these are nightshades don't eat them they brought them back as curiosities what a strange-looking plant look at what we brought back from this strange new land and you know it's um it was seen that the some of the natives were eating these things but they were doing very specific ways they were taking the tomatoes they were blanching they were taking the peel off they were taking the seeds out they were only eating the pulp and that's actually what traditional you know tomato sauces were made out of was just that pulp of vine ripened potato tomatoes it would peel the skin of a potato up until very recently it's only been within my lifetime that people said no no no you don't want to peel these these plants and these vegetables that's where all the nutrients are that's where all the vitamins are yeah okay it's also where all the poison is that's their barrier protection that stops insects from eating into them and eating this part of the plant that they don't want eaten okay and um you know gluten again you know this is is a protein but it is not possible to use as protein but it also causes a lot of harm it actually uh causes leaky gut which is the the breakdown of those tight junctions in between your um your or intestinal cells in the intestinal wall and this allows chemicals such as lectins and other things even bacteria getting into your system and getting into your body when normally they would not do that they would stay out by that barrier protection just like your skin stops you know bugs and weird things from getting into your body your gut lining does the same thing so really you're you're the the lumen of your intestine that's the outside world really you know your body's not letting that in unless you're eating things like gluten and that breaks down those that barrier protection so now these things uh can get into your body cause harm this is where lectins come in lectins you know i mean there's a whole book written about this in 2019 by dr gundry uh who showed just how harmful lectins are you know things like kidney beans you know which are very normal normal things to eat when you don't process them properly when you don't soak them in water and then boil them for at least 10 minutes those lectins can make you very sick very very sick and even then they're not they're not perfectly done away with they're not perfectly disabled they still cause harm in your body and of course your heat treatment isn't going to take care of all the plant toxins out there but lectins specifically will get into your body through these tight junctions they've actually been indicated to be a causative factor in autoimmune issues because the body makes antibodies towards these lectins because these are foreign molecules your body does not want them in your body and so it fights them makes these antibodies to go out and attack these things well there's something called molecular mimicry where some protein or something on one of your cells may be similar enough to one of these lectins or a bacteria or virus that your body's fighting off that these antibodies stick to them because they don't have a mind of their own they're just acting chemically and if they can bind to something chemically they will bind to that something chemically it's just a chemical reaction and so by molecular mimicry all of a sudden your body has uh you know started attacking your own your own body that's an autoimmune disease okay so an autoimmune your body is attacking itself but it's not attacking itself it's attacking these lectins and when you remove those lectins from your diet your body stops making antibodies towards those lectins and then there's no spillover effect from those antibodies to your body and this is why nearly every single autoimmune disease that i've ever seen when on a carnivore diet will significantly improve if not completely resolve within a few months i have yet to see someone with crohn's or ulcerative colitis go on a carnivore diet pure [Music] meat and water diet usually red meat and water diet and not completely reverse their disease within three months on biopsy so when these guys get biopsied at three months there's no sign of disease i have yet to see a single case that that didn't happen rheumatoid arthritis as well that just goes away and that people will get much better within the first few weeks as well and then even you know on biopsy they'll find that there's no sign of disease after a few months hashimoto's takes a little bit longer you usually see that take about you know you know nine months to a year uh or maybe just still lingering on a little bit but but again it significantly improves you know and we've had again with dr salisbury he was showing that you could reverse rheumatoid arthritis crohn's and and ulcerative colitis back in the 1800s by putting people on a pure red meat and water diet this was something that was well known and documented in the middle medical peer-reviewed medical literature going back to the 1800s and yet no one knows about it why is that um and then there are other things that are just that'll just kill you uh straight out you know we talk about the the um inedible plants like you know north american you know water hemlock uh this blocks the gaba receptors in your brain uh that that that basically calm down your brain cells when you when your brain cells get too stimulated and overstimulated and out of control this they all start firing at once and this is called a seizure okay they can be quite dangerous they actually damage your brain directly they can make you fall over and crack your head if you don't stop having a seizure you you can die or you will die if you don't stop hemlock blocks the gaba receptor so all the medications that we use to stop the seizures they you know basically all work on that gaba receptor and so this is blocking that and so it doesn't matter how much how much medication and drugs you give these people you know they're going to die of seizures within two to three you know one to two minutes and you're never going to get to them fast enough to stop it anyway even if it does have some effect so this is a very well developed well category catalogued and described phenomenon in botany going back thousands of years that plants use harmful chemicals to stop animals and insects from eating them okay so you know in summary you know this really shows that we are obligate carnivores okay with one optimal diet all right so we are obligated to eat meat we cannot thrive and survive on anything else okay so while we can survive eating other things we're not going to thrive that's not going to be optimal for us i know some people say that well you know um you know everyone's different and you know maybe one person does better with an omnivore diet maybe someone does better with a vegetarian diet maybe someone does better with you know meat based diet everyone's different that is nonsense that is someone who has not thought about this for literally one second okay and when i hear doctors say this sort of thing i i really really get a bit miffed because you know this these are people that are supposedly biologists you know but i guess everyone forgot their biology their biology lesson and and forgot to actually just look out in nature and anytime someone someone says this i ask them i've asked doctors this i've asked other people this that have made this ridiculous comment i said name one example of two members of the same species who have different optimal diets okay it does not exist you know people say well is this good for you know women as well as men what about during pregnancy what about kids the answer is just yes it doesn't matter what condition you are what stage of life you are whatever we are humans we are homo sapien sapiens okay if we had a different optimal diet between two people those two people would be different species of people and yet they're not we don't have different species of people anymore we don't we don't even have you know home of neanderthals anymore we just have homo sapiens and neanderthals work carnivore as well so you have to be actually quite divergent you can't even be a close relative and have a very different diet all right so you know biologically anatomically evolutionarily anthropologically metabolically you know we can show that humans are carnivores that is just the kind of animal that we are and that eating meat is our optimal diet and for no less reason then plants use defense chemicals because they don't want to die and if it's you or them they will make sure it's you okay because it's killer be killed out in the wild even for plants as well as animals and you know i've never seen a cave painting of a salad either all right so i hope you guys like that talk have some of my references here that people can take a look at and i'll try to put these in the show notes as well and there's obviously uh more also so um i hope you guys liked that if you did please hit the like and subscribe button it really does help make a comment tell me what you think tell me what you'd like to see different tell me the sorts of things you'd like to see in the future and i'll try to make that happen for you all right thanks guys okay well i hope you liked it that was the presentation um it wasn't maybe as as polished and smooth as what i did at ketocon um but i tried to add in a few more things that didn't get in the ketocon talk as well um so anyway hope you guys liked it see you later [Music]