So, are carnivores supposed to be lowfat all of a sudden? There’s this weird trend going around the internet saying that if you do a carnivore diet, you should be doing a lowfat carnivore diet because wild animals are very lean and therefore our ancestors would have only eaten lean meat. This is demonstrabably false. What they’re referring to is that the muscle bodies themselves are lean and don’t have the marbling that we see in domesticated animals. However, they have the same amount of fat, if not more, in their subcutaneous fat in their abdomen and around their organs. Some of their organs in their abdomen such as the omenum is entirely made out of fat. The misenter, which is the blood supply to the intestines, is entirely covered in fat as well. And there’s fat around the kidneys, etc. So, there’s quite a lot of fat. In healthy animals, they would have more fat. In starving animals, sure, they would be more lean because they weren’t as successful. If you’re just looking at the lean muscle body, then you’re going to miss the entirety of the fat and the rest of the animal. Also, why are we talking about the lean animals that we see today? We say that a deer doesn’t have all that much fat. of course omitting all that fat that you’ve now skinned off of it, taken off the outside and taken all that fat out of the abdomen and just left there and taken all the lean meat back. So you think that it doesn’t have fat in it traditionally, which of course it does, but these are not the types of animals that our ancestors would have eaten historically. We were eating megapona, we were eating mammoths, we were eating whales, we were eating giant bears and giant sloths and these other sorts of animals that had a very high proportion of fat to their body weight and we kept all that fat. But even just look at modern animals today that humans traditionally hunt in carnivorous populations such as the Inuit. They’re eating whales. They’re eating seals. They’re eating polar bears. These are very high in fat. And the Inuit eat up to 50% of their food by weight as fat, which can be three or four gram of fat per gram of protein. So you’re talking 90% calories from fat or more. What about the Native Americans in the Great Plains who predominantly ate buffalo and bison? Well, they did a buffalo drop once per year generally and they would scare an entire herd of buffalo over a cliff and they would harvest those bodies for the rest of food for the rest of the year. They would take all the fat that they could and they would render it down to tallow. They would dry the meat and powder it and they would mix the two together in equal proportions by weight and this would make pemkin and this is what they would eat for the rest of the year. That’s 2 g of fat to one gram of protein. That’s 80% calories from fat. So, how are we saying that our ancestors ate low fat? because somebody went hunting one time and they found the deer didn’t have all that much fat after they cut all the fat off of it. People talk about how it’s only in modern eras that we bred these animals to be fattier, but that’s because we are used to fattier animals. We’re used to eating mammoths and whales and other highfat animals, many of which died out with the end of the last ice age with some sort of cataclysmic event that wiped out megapona across all the different continents across the globe. So then we tried to get the next biggest animals like cows and breed them to be fatter and also get the fat from their milk in order to increase our fat content because fat was so important for us. All you have to do is look at the nutritional content in fat. You have D3, K2, vitamin A, you have DHA, EPA, you have choline, you have saturated fat, and yes, cholesterol. These are essential nutrients for the body and the brain. And there’s so many more that you absolutely have to have. And so if you’re eating low fat, you are going to be depriving yourself of those nutrients and you will be nutrientd deprived before we talk about anything else. But let’s talk about these other things. If people were only eating lean meat, what would you get? Well, you’d get rabbit starvation or protein poisoning. And this was actually called that rabbit starvation because rabbits are very lean. They don’t have much fat on them. And people that were exclusively eating rabbits, they would get extremely sick. They would have voracious appetites. They couldn’t eat enough. and they actually eventually died after a few weeks because this was very harmful to their bodies eating very low fat, high protein. Think of bodybuilders now when they’re cutting down for a competition. They eat very lean meat and they try to shred down as as much as possible and they can get very sick. They feel miserable across the board. Their hormones are screwed. They feel awful and they say, “You can’t sustain this your entire life and not even throughout the year. You can only do this for a few weeks leading up to competition prep and then you have to go off of it straight away.” So eating very lean meat is not optimal for humans to say the least. And it is not ancestrally appropriate or accurate to say that humans did that. So now when people are saying that well we should eat lean meat and this is what is more ancestral appropriate. They’re having health issues and now they’re starting to add back in carbohydrates because they think they’re supposed to for some reason maybe to save off the ill effects of the protein poisoning and other nutritional deficiencies that they’re facing and to get energy and to not feel as rotten as they did when they’re just eating lean meat. However, if a highfat carnivore diet isn’t ancestrally appropriate going back 2 million years, how are eating carbs ancestrally appropriate that didn’t even exist 2 million years ago or not even 50,000 years ago during the last ice ages? These are postaggricultural products and would not have been in the staple diet. We talk about how dairy was only added to the diet in the last 10 to 12,000 years. We see lactase persistence start to rise in the genome about that time. But we also see amalayase starting to be produced in a wide proportion of humanity at around 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture. Prior to that, we did not have the genes to break down starchy vegetables properly. And so this is clear evidence that this was not a major staple of our diet. We were not eating carbs. So why would you replace fat with carbohydrates because you think fat is not ancestally appropriate when you know that carbs are not ancestrally appropriate? Then there’s this idea that being in ketosis long term, eating low carb or no carb long term is somehow detrimental to our health or our metabolism. This largely comes from the Ray Pete school of thought which has been thoroughly debunked before it even started. I have a long video on this with my friend Richard Smith and we go into gross detail about all the different studies and science and physiology behind this. We showed that the actual long-term studies on ketogenic diet actually showed that you get no drop in your metabolism. You get no drop in your thyroid function. you get no untored elevated risk in your cortisol. And in fact, being in ketosis increases your basil metabolic rate by 350 kilo calories. So how are we saying that lowers your metabolism when in fact it is raising our metabolism demonstrabably in scientific studies? Being in a ketogenic state also lowers and optimizes insulin and leptin and removes leptin resistance which improves metabolic function. So again, how is this slowing down our metabolism? There’s an argument that long term on a ketogenic diet like a carnivore diet, you’re going to start lowering your metabolism. You’re going to start putting on fat. And yet, I haven’t eaten carbs in over a decade. And I don’t put on fat even during COVID when I couldn’t work out. I remained very low body fat percentage, well under 10% and very lean and muscular. And people kept asking me, “How do you stay in such good shape? Do you have a gym at your house? Are you just doing crazy calisthenics? What are you doing?” And I would just tell him like, “I’m not doing anything. I haven’t done push-ups in months. This is all diet because eating optimal nutrition is going to keep you lean, strong, and healthy throughout the year regardless of how much you exercise. Certainly, exercise can improve your health, will improve your physique, will improve your fitness, but you don’t have to do it to stay lean and keep your metabolism elevated. What are some hard examples of populations that don’t eat carbohydrates, that eat highfat carnivore, and have done so since time in memorial? Well, obviously all of our ancestors throughout the ice ages when they were eating megaponer which were very high in fat and they absolutely cultivated the fat and preferred it. This is why they went for the fattiest animals like whales and mammoths. Also the inuit these populations have been extremely closely studied for centuries and they find that they are on a very highfat diet generationally. They stay very lean, very healthy throughout the year. They don’t have metabolic diseases. They don’t get chronic diseases. They don’t slow their metabolism and gain weight. They’re very lean throughout the year even though they’re eating 80 even 90% or more of their calories from fat from animals and no carbohydrates. The same is true of the Nette in Siberian plains. Also in Australia with the Australian Aboriginals who would focus on the fattiest parts of the animal like the kangaroo tail. And then of course you have Maggie White who has been doing a carnivore diet for over 70 years and is very outspoken about how you need the fat and she adds a lot of fat to all her meals. I’ve been to her house. We’ve shared meals together. She eats a ton of fat. She gets at least 80% of her calories from fat. She says that’s very important to optimize health. She’s been doing this for over 70 years. She’s skinny as a rake. She’s well muscled and she still works on her ranch on a daily basis, hurting cows, rebuilding fences, digging post holes, and coring raging bulls. She has absolutely no nutritional deficiencies. She is in optimal peak health. She’s on no medications and has no serious health issues whatsoever. The only problems she’s had with her health are injuries she’s sustained on the farm and she’s recovered from those faster than anybody you’d expect. And she’s well into her 80s now, in her mid 80s, in fact. So, this idea that we should be eating lean meat on a carnivore diet because somehow our ancestors ate lean meat because somebody went deer hunting once and cut off all the fat and thought that the muscle meat was lean is not only wrong, but it’s going to get a lot of people hurt. Typically, people need 1 to two grams of fat to 1 gram of protein. This is how they achieve optimal health, reverse these metabolic issues and diseases. And this is how they get enough nutrients like vitamin D3, K2, retinol, DHA, EPA, choline, saturated fat, cholesterol is all that we need to help optimize our body and our health, especially for kids as they’re growing. So important to get highfat animal-based nutrition when you are a child and developing your neurological system and your hormones during puberty. I’ve run blood work on hundreds of people, probably over a thousand now over the last 6 years in my medical practice on people that have gone carnivore and invariably their metabolic markers improve, their hormones improve, their thyroids often improve if they need to and their nutrient levels improve across the board. So the idea that this is not optimal, that this will somehow cause a nutrient deficiency or this will somehow slow your metabolism or somehow the fat is bad for us even though that’s what we’re evolved to eat and these have essential nutrients that you have to have or you will get sick and die is frankly ludicrous and will actually cause harm. And so hopefully this helps people understand that this is not the way forward. you should not eat a strictly lean diet because somehow people have been convinced that animals are sort of lean in the wild even though they cherrypick rabbits and bunnies and deer and forget about the whales and the seals, polar bears and the mammoths that people have actually been eating since time immemorial and focusing on the fat and rendering that fat and combining it like in the case of pemkin in the great plains which again is 80% calories from fat 2 g of fat to 1 gram of protein. We even have evidence of mammoth drops going back over 1 million years of people chasing mammoths over a cliff and having them die at the bottom so they could harvest that big fatty meat so that they could survive and thrive. Even in medical textbooks like from Sir William Osler back in the early 1900s talking about the optimal nutrition for diabetic patients type 1 and type two. They say very clearly cut out all carbohydrates and eat a meat-based diet that has equal parts protein and fat by gram. So again, this is a very highfat diet and this showed a very good health outcome for very sick patients and diabetics before we had insulin or any modern medications for them. So anyway you look at it, humans are highfat carnivores and the fat is necessary. These are essential nutrients that you have to have or you can get sick and die and you can run into very serious health problems. I encourage everybody to not run it fall into that trap. And also remember this, we have five organs all working in concert just to absorb fat. We have our stomach starts breaking down our food and releasing the fat. Our liver makes bile. Our gallbladder stores it and this bile breaks down and emulsifies that fat. The pancreas produces lipase and other enzymes that break this down and release it. And then once that has been emulsified and taken up by the bile, it is absorbed in the small intestine directly into your lymphatic system. It doesn’t even go into your liver because it is so important. Your body just mainines this into your bloodstream. So this is extremely important. And our body is set up explicitly to absorb fat. And if fat was so harmful to us and wasn’t appropriate, then we just wouldn’t have all those organs set up to absorb it. Also, you have to think about the fact that our liver makes a specific amount of bile because it wants a specific amount of fat. After you run out of bile, you actually can’t absorb over 90% of the fat that you eat. It will all go out in your stools. And so why if fat is so bad for us, does our body make a specific amount of fat that just happens to be far too high for our body and our health? That makes no sense from a biological point of view. And this whole argument makes no sense from a biological evolution biology point of view, a biochemical point of view, a physiological point of view, and just a reality point of view. Because the fact of the matter is there are all sorts of animals in the wild that have very high proportions of fat as long as you don’t cut it off and throw it away. And our ancestors were eating megapauna and the fattiest animals that they could find. And when those died out, we cultivated animals that we could get as fat as possible and cultivated fatty dairy in order to get the fat because it was essential for life. So, thank you. Hopefully that makes a lot of sense. And just remember that fat is healthy.