25 Years of Medical Advice in 15 Minutes (from a Surgeon)

Here's over 25 years of medical advice and research in under 15 minutes. Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Anthony Chaffee, a medical doctor and researcher, and here are some of the key insights that I've come to learn in my career in medicine. Okay, so basic rule, if you are going on more medication then you are less healthy. And if you're coming off medication then you are getting more healthy. So how healthy are you exactly? If you need more medication then obviously it's because more and more things are going wrong. And so you are not getting healthier, you are getting sicker. Food is medicine because it is fuel for your body and you put the wrong fuel in your body and you'll get the wrong performance, aka sickness and disease. You don't put lawnmower fuel into a jet engine and expect good results. And if you put diesel into a gas-powered engine, it's not going to run properly. Harmful components in your food can cause damage directly and anti-nutrients can block out essential building blocks. Not enough nutrients can starve your system. Essential materials for life. All of these determine on whether or not your body is working properly or not and is healthy or sick. If you correct your nutrition, 90% of chronic disease can improve and the rest can get a lot better. Focus on your metabolic health and nutrition and the rest generally falls into place or at least gets a lot better. Sunlight is a nutrient. Just exposing yourself to sunlight can increase BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is like fertilizer for your brain, allowing it to grow, heal, and repair, and even regrow neurons. It also stimulates nitric oxide, which improves your cardiometabolic health, lowers your blood pressure, and improves your cardiovascular health. It helps your body create vitamin D, which is not just a vitamin, it's a hormone and has over a thousand different effects in the body, including development during childhood and puberty. It improves mitochondrial function, regulates your hormonal system, improves your sleep, and so much more. By optimizing your light exposure, you can help optimize all of these things. Sleep is one of the best things you can do for your body and your brain. Averaging 6 hours or less a night can increase your risk of developing Alzheimer's by over sixfold. And getting less than 5 hours of sleep per night for just 7 nights in a row can cause such physiological distress that it gives you prediabetes, and it takes a full 7 days of proper night sleep between 7 and 8 hours to reverse this, not just one or two nights sleeping in on the weekend. Stay active, exercise, and move your body. Benefits of exercise are too many to count, but some of them are, such as increasing BDNF again, helping to regulate your hormones such as human growth hormone and IGF-1. They can help your body and tissue rebuild and repair, helping you age more youthfully and gracefully. It optimizes other hormones such as testosterone, estrogen, improves insulin function, protects muscle mass from atrophy, and sarcopenia, which is directly correlated with longevity and cognitive function. You want to avoid the need for doctors unless there's an accident or an emergency. And if you follow these principles, you can reduce your risk of having to. These principles may sound basic, but they're a culmination of decades of research and work and clinical practice in the field of medicine and have stood the test of time. Many of these go back hundreds or even thousands of years, such as let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food. An old saying in medicine goes, "Before you try to heal someone, first ask them if they're willing to give up that which is making them sick." We are designed to be healthy. We are designed to thrive. And so if something is going wrong and we are sick, something is impairing that. Most likely, it is something from our environment or something that we are doing to ourselves. Because naturally, we should be healthy as a species. Maybe one or two individuals in a group may have a genetic issue that holds them back even if they're doing everything right. But the majority of people and the majority of examples in any given species will be healthy by and large. And even those with very serious genetic issues, when they approach life and health with these basic principles, are now finding that they can even improve these very difficult and sometimes life-threatening genetic diseases. I've interviewed many of them on my channel and we are seeing more and more as time goes on. The things that I'm seeing in my practice that are reversing by applying these principles would be considered incurable by any modern standard. And yet, I and many others are seeing this on a day-to-day basis. Most doctors, if they heard of the things that my patients are reversing, it would be very hard for them to believe it until they saw it themselves. But on a near daily basis, I'm seeing so-called incurable diseases improve and sometimes go into full remission, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, heart failure, autoimmunity, cognitive issues, certainly weight issues and body composition, and so many other issues that are afflicting most people on this earth right now. I had a patient come into my office last year with multiple sclerosis, which is a disease that damages the protective layer around the nerves and axons in the central nervous system. On just 8 months on a ketogenic carnivore diet addressing these principles that I laid out here, she actually not only improved her symptoms dramatically, but shrank her lesions on MRI by over 40% without medications because she had come off her medications the year earlier. Her neurologist looked at her and said that he had never seen that happen before. He'd never even heard of that happening before, and he could not explain how it happened. Because so far in the literature, no one has been able to show that you can reverse lesions of the brain from MS. But this is what we're seeing again and again, and we're even getting ready to publish a case series on 10 people who have actually reversed their symptoms and shrunk down their lesions for many of them. And others have just remained stable for years even without medication, which also is unheard of for multiple sclerosis. So again and again, we are seeing more and more value from the simple tenets that doctors for millennia have has been espousing. Focus on your nutrition and health, fix your metabolic health, get outside in the sunshine, be active, optimize and prioritize sleep, and let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food. And just a quick addition to that list is the number one thing that I think could revolutionize medicine tomorrow if we implemented it besides everyone going on a proper human diet. And that is changing the reference ranges that we use for lab in lab tests to actual objective measures. You may have noticed that any lab that you go to uses completely different measurements and reference ranges depending on the lab and the location. Even laboratories in the same town owned by different companies can have completely different reference ranges. So if you go to one lab, you might find that your B12 is normal. Another lab might say it's too high. And depending on which lab you go to, your doctor will make a different decision. That is a bit crazy. We are making objective, even prescriptive decisions based on arbitrary reference ranges. This could even be true for thyroid function. Different labs have different reference ranges because they just use averages for the community instead of looking for healthy people and saying, "Hey, why don't we get a a selection of healthy people and see what their reference ranges are?" Most labs will just take the people that have just walked in the door. So, every few years they'll re-norm these averages, and the first few thousand people that walk in the door, that is the reference range. Now, I've seen some labs that are a little better than this, and they'll have a little line that says, "We look at people between the age of 20 and 39 with normal BMI." And that is is at least something. But the thing is, you can have a normal BMI and still have diabetes or malnutrition or cancer, and that could be non-representative of a healthy population. Also, 70 to 80% of the calories consumed in Western countries such as America, Europe, and Australia are actually from plants. So, 78 70 to 80% calories come from plants in the Western diet. So, this is not only a vegetarian diet, it's a hyper-vegetarian diet. The definition of a hyper-carnivore, like a polar bear or a shark, is any animal that consumes over 70% of meat by calorie. So, the Western diet, the American diet, the Australian diet, the European diet, and most diets around the world are actually hyper-vegetarian diets. They're nearly vegan. So, if you take a Big Mac meal, that is practically vegan. There can be upwards of 90% calories from plants. Think about it. You have this tiny little meat patty with three bread buns, sugary seed oil sauces, lettuce, tomato, and then potatoes deep fried in seed oils and formerly trans fats, and then a large drink with a bunch of sugar in it. So, over 90% of those calories could be from plants. So, that is practically vegan. You take out that little sliver of meat, now it is vegan. And we're trying to blame all this on meat. So, now you look at a nutrient such as B12 or vitamin D or vitamin A or choline, creatine, carnitine, DHA, EPA, etc. And these are nutrients that either come solely or predominantly from animal source nutrients, and you're taking the average of a vegetarian hyper-vegetarian population and say, "Yeah, that must be good." Well, I'm sorry, but it's not. There have been studies that look at objective reference ranges. And they've actually shown that these these ranges are completely out of balance. So, the reference range for B12 is quite often well above the upper limit of most labs. And that's of course because most people are deficient in B12 because most people are on a hyper-vegetarian diet that does not contain B12, and because we're looking at the average of a deficient population, that hides the deficiency in the averages. And so, these people go to their doctors, they say they don't feel well, they're tired, they've got brain fog, and their doctor says, "Well, your B12 is fine, so it can't be that." Even though it could absolutely be so low that they could be getting neurological dysfunction. We have studies showing that below 500 picomoles per liter of B12 can actually cause demyelination of the white matter tracts in the brain and spinal cord. And Oxford University published a paper in 2008 that showed [snorts] that people in these brackets below four 500 picomoles per liter actually showed that their brains were shrinking by 2.5 to 5.2% every 5 years. So, that's half a percent to a percent per person per year because their B12 was so low and it was a linear progression. So, we're saying that that level of B12 is normal because that's the average in the normal population. It seems to be normal. However, in Japan, I found studies where they actually reference the B12 levels above 500 being normal, which is a much more sensible reference range. However, there are other reference ranges that look at optimal ranges. They actually show it above 800 or even 800 to 1200 picomoles per liter, which in American terms translates to about 1100 to 1600 picograms per milliliter or nanograms per liter, depending on the lab that you use. So, this is problematic. Let's say that your B12 was 700 and you go to one lab and it says, "My goodness, you're too high." Another lab says it's okay. Depending on where you go, your doctor's going to make a different decision. And then which one is it? Is it too high or is it okay? Well, actually, it's still too low and according to some studies. And so, in order to make objective prescriptive recommendations, doctors should be using objective measures. We should not be using arbitrary reference ranges to make objective decisions. And it gets worse than that because the majority of people who get blood tests are not just the average person in the population. The average person is sick, they're malnourished, they're overweight, they have chronic diseases. However, the people getting blood tests are even more sick than that because they're the ones that whose doctors have sent them in to get lab tests because there's something wrong. There's something even more wrong than the rest of the population. And these are the ones we're making the reference range based upon. So, very simply, if we take a page out of the functional medicine books and look at actual optimal reference ranges and these studies do exist, then we can look at optimizing our patients' health instead of making arbitrary decisions based on arbitrary reference ranges. >> [snorts] >> If we change these reference ranges to an agreed-upon optimal data set then doctors would have so much more room to go on. When you start looking at people's lab tests through an optimal lens things are out of balance all over the place and there's so much more for you to do. There are directions for you to go in as a doctor, as a clinician, and as a patient. And if everything just looks Yeah, well, everything's normal well, then you don't know what to do and you'll hear the classic Well, I know you feel like garbage, but that's normal. You're fine. There's nothing wrong in your lab test. Just go home and deal with it. And I cannot tell you how many patients that I've had come in to me that have heard that exact statement from their doctors. And then they come to me and we actually see Wow, there's actually quite a lot of things that are out of balance and we fix those with with nutrition, lifestyle choices, and sometimes medications, people feel a lot better very quickly. So, again, number one thing that I think we can do to revolutionize medicine tomorrow is just change the arbitrary and therefore useless reference ranges from random averages to objective optimal reference ranges so that we can apply for optimal health for ourselves and our patients. Thank you very much, guys. See you next time.