It Took Me 10 Years Carnivore to Realize What I'll Tell You in 25 Minutes

It took me about 10 years of treating patients with the carnivore diet to learn what I'm about to tell you. Hi everybody. I'm Dr. Anthony Chaffy, a medical doctor and advocate for species specific nutrition for better health. I'm also going to be at the Bella Steak and Butter Gang Fourth of July festivities in Bosezeman, Montana this July 4th. So if you guys want to check that out, it's a going to be a great event and you can get tickets at sbg.events. So, the main thing to remember about a carnivore diet is that it really is as easy as that. You just drink water. You only eat fatty meat. You don't eat anything else. It really is that simple. When you start trying to complicate things, that's when things start getting messed up. One of the biggest mistakes people can make in anything is taking that horrible advice of everything in moderation. So, let's apply that to everything else. You're saying everything in moderation. Okay? So junk food in moderation, sugar in moderation, alcohol in moderation, heroin in moderation, cocaine in moderation, assault in moderation, genocide in moderation. Obviously, there are things in this world that you just don't want to do and don't want to take part in and certainly don't want to put in your body. Cyanide in moderation. So you these are not serious arguments. The only people that say, "Well, you need a balanced diet. You need a balanced approach, or you need to have everything in moderation," are people that just don't understand what we're biologically supposed to have and what is biologically optimal for us. The difference between success and failure happens in the margins. It's very rare that you get some overt catastrophe like someone just says, "Hey, I'm just going to eat cake all day for the next week." And if you did do that, then you would know exactly what happened and what went wrong. But when you're trying to do the best that you can and you're not quite getting the results that you think you should be or that you see other people getting, the difference probably lays in the margins with the little details that maybe you're doing a slightly differently than other people. So it's generally something in the margins. A lot of these problems come from people just not eating enough meat, not eating enough fat certainly and still thinking that fat makes you fat or fat is a problem and you shouldn't have too much fat, which is sort of strange because we're not biologically capable of absorbing more fat than our body wants because once you run out of bile, it's almost impossible for your body to absorb fat. You can absorb some some of the MCTs, medium chain triglycerides, but over 90% of the fat that you eat is actually going to go out in your stools. it's not going to cause any sort of problem because it's not going to be in your body. And of course, the major thing is trying to live in moderation and eating things that that aren't really appropriate on a carnivore diet. Things that don't belong in the category of meat, eggs, or water. People generally think that, well, if I'm just eating a lot more meat, then, you know, that could be enough or or meat is magic or special in some way. Meat is great. It has all the nutrients you need, and that's very important. People can get very sick from not getting enough of the appropriate nutrients, as we'll discuss later, but the main thing is not consuming things that cause harm. You can be healthy as you want. You can exercise. You can eat perfectly, but if you're drinking alcohol every day, that's going to cause damage to your body. Is it going to cause as much damage as someone else who's eating horribly and doing other things? Yes, it's going to cause the exact same amount of damage. It's just that when you're doing other healthy things, it can at least be healthy from those perspectives. But the alcohol does just as much damage if you're drinking in an [snorts] otherwise healthy state than if you were eating garbage. Now, there's caveats to that, too, because we have studies in mice showing that even when drinking alcohol in these mice, as long as they're eating properly and eating more saturated fat and tallow in particular, their livers got less damage than the mice being fed polyunsaturated fats, which are said, "These are these are the most healthy fats. These are the ones you you want." In fact, study after study shows that that they're not what you want either for humans or for most animals tested. So, a major part of this is cutting out things that cause harm. And that's that's one of the most important parts about the carnivore diet. And it really is that simple. It's it's the same thing that I've been saying, that Dr. Baker's been saying, that Dr. Shaom Mara has been saying that you know [snorts] Bella and her groups have been saying that everybody's been saying that this is really important that there are things that cause harm in this world and you want to try to eliminate out as many of those as possible and trying to convince yourself that a bit of stevia here and a pop-tart there or even a salad or some asparagus or something like that is totally fine and just having every now and then isn't going to be that big of a deal is you know it's it's gambling. Yeah, look, if you severely limit these things compared to what you were doing before, look, it's going to be better than where you're at. And that's great. And I I think that's very laudable to try to improve your health in these ways. But if you want the full benefits, the full extent of these health benefits that you can get from eating a proper diet, you really do need to eat the proper diet to its completion. So, you know, some people can get away with that as well. and just improving their diet by 90% or 80%, they're going to get a significant bonus. But there are some people that actually can't tolerate that. They can't handle a bit of even a bit of stevia. They can't handle even a bit of asparagus because they get very sick from it. They can get quite severe autoimmune flare-ups. You know, we see this all over the world. These are these diseases that are here to forthought to be incurable. These are things that we we only have medications that can dampen the symptoms of, but they aren't going to actually cure the disease. So things like autoimmune disorders or diabetes, heart failure, these sorts of things. So they're not addressing the underlying root cause. And there are billions of people suffering with these diseases. And when you remove all of these different plant toxins and carbohydrates and sugar and certainly things like alcohol and these other sorts of things, you're going to get a lot of improvement and you're going to see a lot of these diseases actually go into remission. And when people even add in a small amount of these things, they can actually get a relapse and get quite hurt by those foods. So when people say, "Well, it didn't really cure anything because if you start eating this other food again, it just comes right back." That's like saying that you didn't cure lead poisoning because once you started drinking out of lead pipes, you got lead poisoning again. It's a pretty silly argument. And also when people try to detract saying that, well, wow, you're really that sensitive to lettuce or broccoli or grains or something like that, you know, and trying to be mocking of them. It's a bit ridiculous because everybody's can can be sensitive to these things in a certain degree, but some people are more sensitive than others. And yes, that's exactly what's happening. If you eat broccoli and it gives you Crohn's uh flare up, you know, you should not eat that stuff. So, oh, well, you're so sensitive. Yeah, that's the whole point. And there are people that are sensitive to these things. And the fact of the matter is is that no one else on earth has figured out how to cure cure e cure Crohn's disease before this. But people are putting this into complete remission by just changing their diet. So giving them a hard time by saying, "Wow, that sucks to be so sensitive to, you know, vegetables or whatever." Like who cares? You know, they are sensitive to those things. And that's the entire point is that recognizing that and understanding what the root cause of these illnesses are makes a world of difference. You're giving people their life back. You give making it so they don't have to spend 6,000 $8,000 $10,000 a month for the rest of their lives in order to keep something at bay and still not even cure it, but just try to keep it suppressed as much as possible. And even then, it's it's it's not perfect. But again, this only works for certain people if they go 100%. You can't do everything in moderation because you can't have your trigger for Crohn's disease in moderation. You can't have the cause of diabetes in moderation if you're trying to get rid of Crohn's disease or diabetes. The devil's in the details. Most people don't get sick overnight. They get sick after years and years and years of everything in moderation. and just thinking that, you know, a little bit of this and a little bite of that is probably not that big of a deal because, hey, everything in moderation. It can't hurt me if there's only a small amount of it. And then things build up and they build up with time. And slow poison is still poison. You're still harming yourself. You're still breaking down your body's defenses and you're preventing your body from healing and repairing to the extent that it could or should. And then all of a sudden they're left with these diagnoses and these these diseases and on blood pressure medication, diabetes medication, autoimmune medication, and look back and they're like, "How the hell did I get here?" Well, you got here by trying to do everything in moderation, by thinking that there aren't things that harm you or if they do harm you, it's not that bad. You know, it's the same relationship and approach that people use with alcoholics or people with substance abuse problems. You know, people that doing drugs, they often say, "It's not that bad. you can't, you know, it's not that big of a deal if I only do this or do that. And well, yes, it's bad for me. You know, I shouldn't drink for three nights straight or even one night at all. But, you know, I enjoy it. I enjoy going out and that helps with stress. And obviously stress is a big bad thing. And so, they justify these things. They justify bad behavior, sloavinly behavior, and bad actions and things that are harmful for them because it's probably not all that bad. And so, again, this is everything in moderation. That approach, what is moderation? And how do you measure that? How much is too much? I mean, you don't know. You can't know. And so those people start getting sick and they may not understand that that's what's causing them to get sick because we're not taught this way. We're not taught to think this way. We're not told that these little bits and pieces of things are going to cause disease over time. You would say, well, yes, if you drink over time, then over decades, you're going to have an increased risk of heart disease. You're going to have an increased risk of diabetes. But they don't tell you that with other foods. So if you you are getting diabetes, if you are getting heart disease and you're not just drinking or doing these other sorts of things, okay, well then what else is damaging your body, it's something else that you're doing either in the margins and just a little bit of or you're doing a lot of and and not even realizing it's wrong. But then you come to a carnivore diet and you say like, okay, well, I recognize these things are wrong. But then maybe you still fall back into that same mindset of, well, maybe it's not all that bad. Maybe just a little bit here and there. It's still it's a lot better than what you were doing and that's great and a lot of people can live there and a lot of people can do just fine there but a lot of people can't. I mean I don't have any autoimmune issues or diabetes or anything else thankfully but at the same time I still feel a thousand times better than I did before. I've had back pain since I was 15 years old. I have none now. I'm 46. I I don't have any aches or pains or damage. I mean I have a lot of damage from from you know playing sports and rugby for most of my life certainly my entire adult life. And yet I don't I don't have any of these things causing problems now. I'm essentially painfree. I have tons of energy. I I just I feel great all the time. As soon as I start eating something else, that is not the case. That was a very different story and it happens very quickly. So I don't live in the margins. I stay exactly where I'm supposed to be or I pay for it and I'm because I'm paying attention to it and I understand that's what's happening. I see it a lot more easily than other people might. So really the best thing that you can do is just eat fatty meat until it stops tasting good. Get enough fat so you get soft stools but not loose stools. And just eat until it stops tasting good. And cut out everything else. Absolutely everything else. And it really is that easy. So why does this work? How could this possibly work? Because it's simple. It's just the pure nutrition that we need. It's our biologically appropriate diet. It's just the vitamins, minerals, proteins, and fats that we require that are essential that are in the best bioavailable forms and in their perfect proportion and nothing else. It cuts out other things that can cause harm. And that's really the most important part of this. We get told it's just about the nutrients. It's just about the vitamins. It's just about the proteins. And I'm sorry to say that no, it is not. You can get a lot of supplements and protein powders and vitamins and pills and things like that and just drink Coca-Cola all day and eat dirt and think that you're doing something positive. Well, I've ticked all these boxes on nutrients, but that's not food and that's not food for us. And there are other things that come with that that cause harm and that's really important. And it's just sort of a bit of a bait and the switch that food companies and and you know, whoever else is doing because they're saying, "Well, it's just about the nutrients. It's just about the vitamins. It's just about iron." Okay. So, they put iron filings in cereals and say, "Okay, well, that that's supposed to be fine then because it has iron." It doesn't have iron that's any good to us. It's not bioavailable. It's not appropriate and it's not going to do us much good. And of course, what else does it come with? So, why am I saying this is our biologically appropriate diet? It's like, well, because that's what all the best evidence shows. There is more evidence that humans should be eating a carnivore diet than anything else. Everyone says, "Wow, the Mediterranean diet, a plant-based diet." No, that's actually not true. I've been writing a book on how chronic diseases are not diseases. There's a combination of toxicities and malnutrition predominantly coming from a species inappropriate diet. And having gone through the research and looking at literally thousands of studies on the subject, I can tell you quite definitively that the best evidence and the preponderance of evidence is supporting an animal-based carnivorous diet lacking in plants. And there is no other diet that has more robust evidence, randomized controlled trials, human data, epidemiological population studies going back literally millions of years, looking at all of our ancestors and people living currently today. There is no other diet that has more better evidence supporting it than this. There's some food frequency questionnaires that are simply fraudulent and are completely inaccurate just on their face. And we say, well, we have a lot of these studies that say one thing, but they're garbage studies. It's not good evidence. There is more and better evidence of a carnivore diet being our appropriate diet than anything else. So, we get all the nutrients we need in the proportion that we need them just by eating meat. There's nothing that we need from plants that we cannot get from meat. There are many things in meat that we cannot get from plants. And plants come with harmful defensive chemicals. You know, believe me, just read a book on botany. This is this is botany 101. Plants defend themselves by using toxins, you know. So, what are the some of the things that eating a proper human diet can help with? You know, some of these these diseases that are not diseases, they are a combination of toxicities and malnutrition, things like developmental issues, neurological developmental issues, neurological degeneration issues. I mean, just think of B12. If you have B12 still in the normal ranges, you can actually find that people get neurodeeneration and they they lose the mileination of their axons. Okay. So why are we calling that a normal range if it's so low that you're getting brain damage, right? So it's just because these reference ranges are just averages and the average person is eating a mostly vegetarian diet. 70% of the calories consumed in America are plant-based. And the definition of a hyper carnivore is any animal that eats over 70% of its calories from plants. And so Americans and the American diet, the western diet is not a meat-based diet, is a plant-based diet. It is a hypervearian diet. It's not even vegetarian. It's hypervearian. And so this can cause problems. We have hundreds of studies showing that getting an inappropriate amount of B12, so a low amount of B12, even though it's still in the so-called normal range, kids are getting neurological developmental issues. They're not performing as well in school. Mothers who have lower levels of B12, even in the proper uh reference ranges, their children are getting worse scores academically for years afterwards. And so this is causing serious harm to us and our children in particular. So there are even more I mean things like type2 diabetes which I just call carbohydrate poisoning because it literally is high blood sugar causes glycation damages your arteries which then damages and cuts off the blood supply to [snorts] every single tissue and organ in your body. You get multiorgan failure. You get kidney failure. You go blind. You have to get your legs and toes amputated. Causes heart disease. It causes Alzheimer's. There are so many things that this does that that completely damage and disrupt your body and it's all from carbohydrate poisoning. So just like lead poisoning, if you have carbohydrate poisoning, cut it out. Cut it out of your system and you're not going to have have much of a problem anymore. You know, even things like heart failure, there are studies with with going into ketosis that your heart runs better on fat and ketones. It does. We know this physiologically and that can increase the contractility of your cardiammyio and so you actually get stronger contractions and this actually improves cardiac output can actually help improve congestive heart failure without medications or even maybe get people off medications. I've had a number of patients that I was able to get off medications or their cardiologist took them off their medications because they simply didn't need to have them anymore because their cardiac function actually improved so dramatically by going on a carnivore diet. Even exogenous ketones where you give people a drink with ketones that has been shown to improve cardiac output as well and certainly being in a state of ketosis does that. We are seeing more and more people anecdotally who've been able to reverse atherosclerosis. I have a number of patients who have done this and now we're seeing more with like the lean mass hyperresponders where in their new data 30% of their patients I think 30% of their patients actually reversed significant amounts of their atheroscllerotic plaques. They did not advance them even though their cholesterol was up in the familial hyper cholesterolmia levels. And so, you know, this goes against everything that we're taught in medical school. And so, we really need to sit up and ask questions about why that is. You there's systematic reviews and meta analyses of randomized control trials published in the journal American College of Cardiology that show that increased saturated fat can actually protect against having a stroke and does not increase your risk of developing heart disease. So, when people say no, you don't want to eat too much fat. that is bad for your heart. They really aren't following the evidence. Autoimmune issues are generally helped. I mean, I I've yet to see an autoimmune issue that doesn't respond to a carnivore diet. We've had people, you know, professors of immunology and immunologists since the 1980s and '90s like a Dr. Freed FRWD who have published papers arguing the body really can't attack itself. That's just not how the body is made and that none of these autoimmune conditions are actually explained by the body attacking itself. But everything that we see in autoimmunity can be explained perfectly by the known consequences of lectins and plant toxins. And then now we're seeing things like glyphosate which are strongly associated with autoimmune disease as well. So just removing these things seems to be removing the underlying root cause and people can put these autoimmune conditions into remission which is amazing. I mean who saw that coming? Well, there are actually people since the 1800s who saw that coming and actually been using a beef and water diet since the 1800s to help fix autoimmune conditions such as Dr. J.H. Salsbury and many others who have figured this out. But there are randomized control trials in humans showing that you change people's diet by putting them on an elemental diet, which is just the nutrients they need with nothing else. And it is a better treatment for an acute flare up of Crohn's disease than putting them on prenazone. steroids and and it doesn't have any of those side effects of the steroids which are are quite severe and can be severe. And so, you know, that implies that there really is something in the diet, something that you're eating that is causing the disease because you're putting these people into remission just by changing their diet, just by removing something besides raw nutrients out of their diet. And that's what a steak is. It is an elemental diet. It's just it's just raw nutrients and nothing else. There's another randomized control trial in humans on with Crohn's disease showing that if you remove carbohydrates and fiber, and if you think about how many plants have no carbohydrates and no fiber, there's not many. So really, what are you left with? It's pretty much just meat. That those people were able to stay in remission of their Crohn's disease without medication for up to 51 months, which is pretty amazing. So that's over 4 years staying in remission without medication. And not only that, they contrasted that with people who did not come off carbohydrates and did not take out all fiber and they were not able to stay in remission for even one month. So it was a massive massive massive disparity in outcomes. And so that suggests that there is something that exists naturally in carbohydrates or fiber or something that comes along with one or both. the plants and plant toxins that are actually at the root cause of this issue and actually causing the Crohn's disease, ulcer colitis and potentially many other autoimmune diseases as well. Not only that, there are literally hundreds of issues that are attributable just to elevated insulin and elevated blood sugar, damaging the arteries, damaging the blood supply, and then having to get your insulin up so that you can try to protect yourself from this damage. I sort of think about it as having a house fire and then calling the fire department to put out your house fire. So they come, they spray with a bunch of water, they're able to put out the fire, but now you got all this water damage. And that would be fine if you could then heal and fix and repair all of that damage. But then what if you have another fire in the kitchen the next day and it's dowsted out and then another fire upstairs the next day after that is put out. Eventually you're going to get to the point where you're having fire and quenching, fire and quenching. you have a soggy mass of ashes and the house is going to fall down. It's not going to be able to be habitable anymore. And that's that's what we're doing to our body. If you think about every other species of animal on this earth, you come to realize that all animals have a species appropriate diet. They have a specific set of nutrient requirements and they are harmed by different sorts of toxins and plant toxins in particular. They may have some defenses against some of those toxins, but they aren't defended against all of them. Even strict herbivores can't eat every plant. In fact, they can't eat most plants. The vast majority of plants will kill cows, will kill elephants, will kill any other herbivore and any other form of life on this earth because no one has defenses to all of the toxins in every plant on Earth. In fact, they generally have less than 1% of those toxins that they can take care of and break down safely. And then people just think for some reason even though we know that this is a zoological fact as a biological fact that animals are like this that you don't see proper, you know, zoos and manageries giving just any old random food to animals because they get very sick. You have signs at zoos and at parks that say don't feed the animals. It makes them very sick if they don't eat their natural diet. I've even seen the signs at parks that says don't feed ducks bread because it gives them diabetes. I mean how how much more clear can you get? So if that's the case for every other form of life, not even just animals, but plants as well. They have specific nutrients and specific things that cause harm to them. If every other form of life on this planet follows those rules of biology, why are we any different? Why would it be different for humans? Why, well, everybody's just a beautiful individual little snowflake. like, yeah, okay, that's true. But that doesn't mean that we don't require B12, and it doesn't mean that, you know, cyanide is going to be safe for some and beneficial for others and detrimental to the rest of us. That does that doesn't make any sense. So, realistically, people are basically arguing that humans are just a different form of life. Maybe we just came here just beamed down from space or from heaven or wherever, and that just physical laws don't apply to us. We are not angels. We are not ethereal beings where the physical laws of nature do not apply to us. Of course they do. We have specific nutrition requirements. We know that we have certain things that cause harm. We know that. So why are we pretending otherwise? So when we get sick in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and we have radically changed our diet and then all of a sudden we start seeing diabetes and heart disease and cancer rates massively increase, obesity rates massively increase. Why are we pretending that food has nothing to do with it? We're looking at this saying, "Well, it must be something else. It couldn't possibly be that. Why couldn't it be that?" Have you investigated that? Have you even asked that question? The answer largely is no, or it is yes, and they just said, "Let's let's not let's not talk about that because we know what the answer is, and it hurts our bottom line to address that." But if you think about it this way, if you have a lion in a zoo that's sick and it's eating its natural diet, the solution to helping that lion is never changing to an inappropriate diet. It is never the answer to give that thing carbs or processed foods or a bunch of vegetables and broccoli that it is not designed to eat. That is never the answer. Sometimes the answer is you need to get rid of that stuff and get them back on their natural diet. And vets know that. Well, at least the good ones do. And so why are we pretending that that doesn't apply to us? So, just like it's never the answer to fix a six lion by changing it from a carnivore diet, it's never beneficial for us either to take away essential nutrients that we are benefited by and adding in harmful chemicals that do us harm. That could never be the answer and it never will be. You can use medicine. You can use plants medically and those toxins can confer some benefits under certain circumstances. But the definition of a medicine is a toxin that under certain circumstances confers more benefit than harm under those circumstances. But outside of those circumstances, they only cause harm. So you really need to remember that and remember everything's in the margins. It's a game of inches. And if you are not getting the results that you want or that you think you should, think about what you're doing and think about are you only eating fatty meat, are you only drinking water, are you eating anything else? Cut it out. It's very simple. Some people with autoimmune issues need to be even more strict and just eat red meat and water or even grass-fed and finish red meat and water. That's not most people, but it is some people. And are you eating enough? Are you eating enough fat? Are you getting proper sleep? Are you in a stressed state? Are you getting outside in the fresh air? These are all things that matter. But under no circumstances is reducing your nutritional quality and adding in toxins ever going to be the