This interview episode features Dr. Anthony Chaffee explaining how nutrition directly determines fertility outcomes for both men and women. The core insight is that fertility is a baseline indicator of health, meaning difficulty conceiving is not an isolated problem but a signal of systemic metabolic dysfunction. Listeners learn how hyperinsulinemia (chronically elevated insulin from carbohydrate consumption) disrupts the enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen in women, leading to conditions like PCOS and hormonal imbalance, while men on vegan or plant-heavy diets suffer from lower testosterone, reduced sperm counts, and poor sperm motility and morphology.
The episode also covers how uterine fibroids, another leading barrier to conception, are driven by the same insulin dysregulation and can be reduced or reversed through a ketogenic or carnivore diet. Listeners hear real-world accounts of perimenopausal women conceiving unexpectedly after switching to carnivore or keto, and Dr. Anthony Chaffee outlines a practical approach: optimize nutrition first, reassess hormone levels after roughly three months, and only then consult a fertility specialist to isolate any remaining specific issues.
Key Takeaways
- Chronically elevated insulin from carbohydrate consumption blocks the enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen in women, causing excess androgens that lead to PCOS, facial hair growth, and irregular or absent periods. Eliminating carbohydrates lowers insulin and allows this conversion to resume, often resolving PCOS symptoms without medication.
- Vegan and vegetarian diets measurably reduce male fertility by lowering testosterone levels and significantly reducing sperm count, motility, and morphology. Because cholesterol is the precursor to testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and cortisol, diets low in animal fat and cholesterol directly impair hormone production across all major sex hormones.
- Uterine fibroids, a common cause of infertility, painful inter-period bleeding, and sometimes hysterectomy, are a symptom of metabolic ill health driven by hyperinsulinemia. Adopting a ketogenic or carnivore diet can help shrink or reverse fibroids by bringing insulin levels down, potentially avoiding major surgery.
- Women who have been unable to conceive for years, including those approaching perimenopause, have reported unexpected successful pregnancies after switching to a carnivore or ketogenic diet. Dr. Anthony Chaffee recommends trying a strict carnivore diet for at least three months to normalize hormones before pursuing fertility treatments or hormone replacement therapy.
- How Nutrition and Diet Affect Fertility in Men and Women
- Vegan Diets, Low Sperm Count, and Miscarriage Risk
- PCOS: How Insulin and Carbohydrates Cause Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome
- Uterine Fibroids, Hyperinsulinemia, and Carnivore Diet as Treatment
- Carnivore and Keto Diet for Hormonal Balance, Menopause, and HRT
This is an auto-generated transcript from YouTube and may contain errors or inaccuracies.
hello and welcome to the how to carnivore podcast i'm your host simon lewis and you're tuning in to the plant-free md series with dr anthony chafee dr chafee is a surgeon nutritional researcher and former pro-rugby player he's been strict carnivore for three years and an on and off carnival for more than 20. dr chafee looks and feels like a real life superhero if losing fat building muscle finding focus and getting the most out of life is important to you you're going to love the plant free md series hey guys back with the how to carnivore podcast and youtube series we're with anthony chaffeemd again and today's topic is fertility now this is a really important one because what could be more important than bringing new life into the world so we're going to give you advice if you're looking to get pregnant whether you're a male or a female and this is something that you're going to want to listen to it's absolutely vital so anthony welcome hey thanks very much good to see you good to see you too um all right mate let's let's get into it uh how is our nutrition affecting our fertility well so i mean you know at a fundamental level fertility is is a sign of good health you know your body's not going to let you get pregnant or or impregnate someone if you're in poor health you and you're not going to be able to support that baby uh while it's while it's gestating and then you know for the few years that it's it's basically you know feeble and needs constant constant protection so hot facts it might hurt people to hear that but there you go yeah well that's the thing it's it's um it's very difficult you know this is a very dangerous time and so if you if your body you know doesn't feel that that you have if you're not healthy you're not going to be able to do that and if you're not getting enough nutrition you're but you're not going to be able to do that and and you'll all die and and that's a that's a problem so that's not going to perpetuate the species and so uh we have we have developed ways of of shutting down these processes if you're if your body doesn't feel the effect like so when they get their body fat percentage too low you know they stop having their period um and that can be for a number of reasons it can be for you know why how they're uh going about getting their their body fat percentage down and that can also screw up their hormones and damage their health in other ways uh by you know vegan diets or you know starving themselves if you if that really messes up your hormones a lot of people i know in the bodybuilding community the female bodybuilding community they will eat in such a way that this causes a lot of hormonal disruption and and they lose their periods and they feel awful and so that is is that because they've got to lower body fat or commonly unnecessarily i think it's a combination i think the combination of of um they're starving for they're trying to cut down and they're they're eating basically no fat and you know as we've spoken about before cholesterol is a precursor to all of your major hormones like estrogen progestogens uh even testosterone cortisol you know most of your your major hormones are all uh made from cholesterol and so if you're if you're dieting and you're starving yourself and you're only eating plants you're not getting cholesterol and you're not gonna be making hormones and your body's gonna be very unhealthy so you're getting your hormonal balance right making sure you're properly fed you know having this caloric intake and this this caloric continued caloric not excess but but having it having it be optimized you're you're going to optimize your body and all the different sorts of systems that need to click into place for your body to say okay yeah we can do this this will this is this will be okay so you have to do all that and and obviously if you're eating what your body was designed to eat namely meat and fat then your body is going to run optimally so that's that's the first step and that and that's sort of everything sort of comes back to that point but you know we can go through things a little more um a little more in detail you know we look at this for men as well um vegan men or uh men that eat a lot of uh plants and low meat and fat well they're going to screw up their testosterone they have lower testosterone they also have lower sperm counts a lot lower sperm counts and then the motility and morphology of the sperm which are very very important for fertility for male fertility are all screwed up on vegan and vegetarian diets and low meat diets and low fat diets because of a lot of different things but one of the things is hormonal dysregulation and so they're not going to be as healthy they're not going to be able to uh conceive with a woman even if even if she's very healthy and then on the other side if the woman is sort of doing a similar thing she's going to be uh very poor off so you have much lower you know conception rates and vegans are vegetarians you have a much higher rate of miscarriage in vegans and vegetarians because they're just not getting the requisite nutritions and they're bringing in a lot of plant poisons that are going to be harmful for that fetus as well you have a lot more uh birth defects and developmental abnormalities and um and this is actually caused a rash of increased levels of unwanted abortion so miscarriages and then actual unwanted voluntary abortions because the child is so misformed and and developmentally stunted or deranged that you know they get cautioned that look this isn't this isn't ethical to continue this pregnancy because this child is just going to suffer and die if he even come if they even come to term and so they make a very hard decision to abort the pregnancy even though they wanted the pregnancy and they wanted to keep the pregnancy that is that's a devastating thing uh for a family to go to i i have two absolutely i have two personal family friends that have that um they're they've had a family member that have uh had to do that unfortunately just in just in the last couple of years and so that that's a devastating thing to have to go through and we're hearing more and more about it as well yeah and and and that's and that's and these people again were trying to conceive for years and so you there's already a marker of of um of some sort of health issue um [Music] there's a dr kiltz um who's the ob gyn you know owns a bunch of fertility clinics uh throughout america and he's saying the exact same thing and he actually is a proponent of a carnivore diet for women's health and fertility and and he was saying as well like this this is the baseline level of health is being able to get pregnant naturally and if you don't have that it means that there is a health issue so it's not that there could be there is a health issue and so that's not something that's nice to hear because because you know it we don't we don't like to feel uh like we're not adequate to do this but you know it can be something that's very easily fixed as well yeah and it can it can be a wake-up call in a way yeah you know what i mean like if you hit with this huge hurdle it's like yeah what that scene but just to make a change yeah and so and that's the thing you know i i don't you know i i've never gone through that that sort of issue so um yeah i can only i can only guess how you know physically and emotionally taxing it is to go through these these processes i can imagine and be very disappointed but i think that it's a very positive thing because it's it's it can be reversed very easily there are a ton of women just going on a keto diet let alone a carnivore diet and then a carnivore diet as well and they haven't conceived in 10 years and now they're sort of perimenopausal and all of a sudden they have this late pregnancy uh as a surprise that's happened to a few of my friends as well and this is something we're seeing uh happen all throughout you know the carnivore community people are and the keto as well because keto has been going around for longer they've had more people uh involved in it over the last you know couple decades and they're people that go on this ketogenic diet and they're perimenopausal they're having infrequent periods then all of a sudden they get regular periods again and their hormonal health is is fixed and then all of a sudden they're getting pregnant they're like what the hell yeah and like um you know and that's uh something that that is happening because now you're healthy again you're much more healthy uh than you thought you were um a couple of main issues with pregnancy uh the main i think i think it is the main cause of infertility is something called pcos polycystic ovarian syndrome i heard a lot about this yeah so it's uh yeah it's getting much more prevalent which you really shouldn't but at the same time when you look at why this happens there's no there's no wonder why it is happening polycystic ovarian syndrome looks like there's a bunch of cysts on the ovary but they're not they're follicles and um you know when you your body your ovary uh you know ovulates it makes this follicle and that is supposed to drop one down but now it's a whole bunch of them in there and but it doesn't mean that you're more affordable actually means you're less fertile or something something happening is draining the process it comes along with generally um excess weight sometimes even obesity and hirsutism which is an appropriate amount of hair so they'll get facial hair they'll get body hair uh in inappropriate spots and um and this is because they have high androgens so androgens being being you know male male sex hormones and so this is a problem um that will obviously derange your your ability to conceive if your hormones are are very very deranged like that so what's happening well we actually we actually know now that what's causing pcos and we have all these drugs and all these sorts of treatments but they they don't actually go after the root cause the root cause as it turns out is actually due to insulin so when you eat carbohydrates and this is why carbohydrate this is why carnivore diet and even a ketogenic diet really helps with this because when you eat carbohydrates obviously your blood sugar goes up blood sugar is very toxic this this damages your body physically and so in response your body increases the insulin insulin goes up tries to get this stuff the hell out of there but it but it stays up and then we feel tired and we're like oh my blood sugar's low i need to eat more carbohydrates and so you know you have to eat carbs or burn carbs right so you just keep eating carbs keep eating carbs and you just keep your insulin level up and it just stays up well the problem with that is that you know women women don't just just produce straight estrogen people don't don't realize that they produce testosterone which then gets converted into estrogen in the ovaries and insulin blocks that okay so it blocks you know it blocks the enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen so these women have an abundance of testosterone and an opacity of estrogen and so they will get this this issue called polycystic ovarian syndrome but the thing is even if you don't get pcos you will still have too much testosterone not enough estrogen and so that's going to that's going to make it difficult to conceive for anyone whether or not you have pcos but the good news is it goes away you know if you just if you just stop eating carbohydrates because then you're then your insulin level goes down and now your body can convert testosterone into estrogen and and your hormones normalize and they're going to normalize for other reasons as well because now you're getting enough cholesterol now you're going to be able to make enough of these hormones now you're not you're taking in all these these phytoestrogens and phyto hormones and hormone uh even chemicals at your range or hormones as well like in soy there's just a ton of this stuff and so you're going to be optimizing your body is just going to work the way it's supposed to and your body is designed you know to procreate that that is the meaning of life biologically i know everyone goes searching for the meaning of life there it is it's to procreate and uh you know and you could argue that from us from a spiritual and personal side of things as well but biologically you don't need to go to mecca just tune into this podcast and anthony jp will tell you right there no but seriously though but like biologically the the purpose of life is to procreate that's the definition of life it is to um that's just that's just what it is and so you are designed to procreate men and women and when you aren't able to do that that means that there's something there's a wrench in the gears and you need to find out where that is well the right in this case the ranch is carbohydrates but the bigger range are plants in general fungi and just not eating what we're supposed to eat that's the biggest thing it's interesting how back to front we've got it in terms of say food choice because you might think that like cupcakes and sweets are a feminine food but you're eating these things and they're blocking testosterone turning into estrogen making you more masculine most feminine thing you could eat is you know fatty meat yeah that's true yeah because you're going to be you're going to be as healthy as you possibly can be your hormones are going to be as healthy as they they can be and you're going to be more of yourself um another thing is people have a problem with this fibroids you run into fibroids these physically get in the way of a baby growing there if you have very large fibroids you might need to get them cut out and if you have to get too much cut out just quickly what's a fibroid fibroid is just uh it's just the muscle in the in the uterus that's just grown it's a tumor basically it's just a benign tumor it's not cancer but it's just a lump that shouldn't be there growing abnormally and so it physically gets in the way if it's a physical obstruction to the you know the purpose of that organ which is to you know contain it and grow a baby you can have you can get pregnant with fibroids but if they get too big that can cause real problems they can also bleed this is the this is a leading cause of anemia and you know inter period bleeding uh and post menopausal bleeding in women is is fibroids because they you know they they're not they're not normal tissue and so they can they can just start bleeding and just leaking blood and leaking blood and they can be very uncomfortable as well um being you know more pregnancies um is associated with less uterine fibroids and and you know in the literature they'll say it protects against uterine fibroids i don't really know about that i think that you know you're not i i you know again it's association it's not causation you can't say which direction it's going i think it's more likely that being metabolically healthy has allowed you to get pregnant more often and have more kids and at the same time you're not going to be growing a bunch of fibroids because you're metabolically healthy because again these fibroids it's just like you know some of the the muscle cells in your uterine you in your uterus has just have just decided just to go a bit haywire and they start growing abnormally but again this is a symptom of metabolic ill health because this is again stimulated by too high of insulin and so you can actually help reverse your uterine fibroids by going on a ketogenic diet or or you better you had a carnivore diet and so that's that's another thing that that people don't don't realize that can seriously help their fertility and just their overall health you know you draw fibroids yeah quite difficult to live with um but there's something you can do you don't have to get major surgery you're going to medication yeah yeah because you some of these people need hysterectomies or or you know cutting these out um and then trying to patch the uterus back together if people are past menopause they just take the whole thing out they're just like oh just just get it out of there you know which isn't which isn't ideal you know it's risky and it can you know anyone can die from surgery even even simple surgeries and that's not a simple surgery that's a you know that's a major surgery and and you don't you don't need to so these things are are signs of something going wrong in your health and specifically with hyperinsulinemia hyperinsulinemia is it is a common theme uh in metabolic health and just overall health so this seems to be a driver of many many many diseases uh such as high blood pressure this doesn't it doesn't allow uh the the vessels and your art ordeal arteries uh to expand and keep them tight and then so this will increase your blood pressure and you have to take a bunch of medications for this it also uh you know damages your ability to convert testosterone to estrogen in women and so you can get pcos or just hormonal imbalance and then fibroids as well so this is this all comes back again to just eating an optimal diet for your body and for your species and that will give you optimal health and one of the major signs of being in good health is being able to conceive naturally awesome all right that was that was epic i really think people are gonna gonna get a lot out of that and it's um as you kind of alluded to it i think it should be comforting for people uh as opposed to um you know i nothing could be more devastating than not being able to fall pregnant but if it's kind of like the canary in the coal mine and then you can improve your health for the long term and then fall pregnant you know that's a net benefit to me so you know i really appreciate you sharing that and i think that's gonna be really powerful yeah no problem yeah and i i agree with you yeah it's just sort of the you know the ground floor of overall health is is being able to conceive and so if you're if you're having difficulty conceiving there could be a problem and then you should you should see your doctor about but you know this should be the first you know the first thing to address is getting pro on proper nutrition getting on a proper human diet on what's biologically appropriate species-specific diet which is which is a high-fat carnivore diet and once you do that your body will optimize and there are a lot of people that are discovering carnivore or even keto because of the insulin issues that we talked about that's a major one but carnivore is going to be even better and all of these people are now finding that they're they're easily conceiving even when they're not expecting themselves to or maybe even planning to and and they're that's an indication that their overall health is is much much better and they're going to have a lot better hormonal health and you know this this ties into you know hell you know woman's health throughout their life and their hormonal health developing through puberty we can get pretty uh deranged you know guys and girls when we're going through puberty of just these hormones just raging through you and you get a bit a bit messed up from that but this can normalize you this can normalize your periods it's going to normalize uh you psychologically as well you'll get as depressed and deranged and upset guys and girls and as going through through menopause this is going to optimize your hormones throughout your adult life and then through menopause you're going to have a much easier transition and your your hormones are again going to be optimized after that and so even though you're not making estrogen and progesterone in the same amounts that you used to they're going to be much better than they would otherwise and so you find that a lot of people don't feel they even need to do hormonal replacement therapy which can be very beneficial to a lot of people they can feel much better for that men and women but i always caution people or at least advise them you know when they're in this in this category they want to try out hrt and they're also immutable to a carnivore diet try the carnivore diet first do it for like three months and then just see where your hormones balance out and see how you feel and if you're like me and you just feel great anyway and your hormones are fine well then you're fine you don't need to add anything but you know if you feel you're going to feel a lot better anyway but if you feel great but your hormone levels are you know lower than what would be optimal and you feel like there's just there's something missing you can try that and you can see how it goes i don't think there's anything wrong with that i you know there's really no literature to suggest that um going on hrt to physiological levels is something that's harmful because you've been at physiological levels presumably your entire life at least you know in the early adulthood when when things were as healthy as they're gonna get and you know you didn't have these problems sometimes people think that you know you can have these growth factors going you know for decades longer than they normally do and this can uh you know increase cancer rates and there's some evidence to suggest that but there's a lot of other evidence to suggest that no it absolutely does not if you stay within physiological levels but your body's going to be hormonally optimized and primed even throughout you know menopause and beyond and you are going to feel a lot better than you would otherwise and then on top of that if you need something else then you can do that or if you're if you've optimized your nutrition you've optimized your health that way you're still having issues conceiving seeing a doctor seeing a fertility specialist that can isolate what exactly is going on uh it's going to be great because you've eliminated a lot of possible issues and now you can really focus in on like okay what is what is like the one or two things that are still going to cause the problem even when you've optimized your health and so this is this is going to set you up for for uh very good health and start with come with carnival that's you know you're going to start with a carnival yeah exactly and then you'll you'll set you'll set the stage for optimal health and the ability to conceive and you know bear the healthiest children that the world has really seen in a long time because no one's doing carnivore pregnancies or or rearing except a few people and their kids are doing phenomenally well and they are going to be the genetic leaders of uh of the future because they're just they're just going to have developed to such a you know greater degree they're going to actually optimize and grow and develop to their genetic potential which is so much better than all of all the rest of us have developed to and they're going to be taller healthier stronger you know and more intelligent much more intelligent bigger brains better bodies they're going to be that you know the ancient greek you know platonic form of this this scholar athlete is you know uh you know that's that's extremely athletic and very intelligent and who doesn't want that yeah well i i would hope they would want that for their kids you know absolutely all right anthony thank you so much that was fantastic no problem chat to you soon man bye