The Hard Science Behind the Carnivore Diet, with Professor Bart Kay

hello everyone this is dr chafee i'm here with a very special guest professor bart k who i'm very excited to speak to professor k has been in academia for over 25 years holds three advanced degrees and has been you know doing very very good work explaining the actual science behind our metabolism and why a carnivorous diet is not only uh appropriate but you know the most beneficial and optimal professor kay thank you very much for joining us absolutely dr chaffee um thanks for having me it's a privilege yeah well thank you very much um i just wanted to uh maybe see if you could give us a bit of a background tell us about yourself and uh where you came from academically and and what you're doing now for those who don't know you right sure yeah my my first degree was actually an exercise physiology or the exercise of the physiology of rest and exercise if you like back then it was just called sport and exercise science i don't know what they're calling it now from there i went on and became specialized later in my career in cardiovascular pathophysiology so heart disease diseases of the vessels atherosclerosis strokes all of that kind of stuff as part of all of that i became very very interested in human nutrition because it's so important to both of those areas both the sporting performance and also in the maintenance of health long term and then the third area i studied was actually pure and applied statistics statistical inference research methodology ethics and all that kind of bizarre so kind of that gives me a rounded picture of what's out there what's been done what hasn't been done where the good science is and where it is not so i spent um as you rightly said i spent about 26 years as a senior academic teaching various aspects of health science over the years published a number of research articles and areas of physiology nutrition um pure and applied statistics obviously as well and undertook some consultancies externally with some major organizations such as the australian defence force for example the new zealand army was another one i did a stint with squash new zealand way back when and also i had a bit to do with the preparation of a funny little rugby team called the all blacks for their 2011 world cup campaign which as we all know was successful so that's pretty much that in a nutshell after after that period of time in academia i got sick of swimming against the current frankly because academia is an area where there is dogma there is a trodden path there are ideas that people subscribe to whether they are actually scientifically validated or right or otherwise and anyone who just puts the head above the parapet and says anything different from what's in the curriculum basically becomes a heretic so that's what it was in academia i enjoyed it for the first bit but that gets old pretty quick and after as i say 26 years of it i thought you know what i think i'll go and do my own thing so that's what i do now i'm a private consultant for people that want to talk to me about various aspects of their health nutrition exercise preparation for whatever they're doing maybe they want to look at some statistical stuff i run about five different youtube channels [Music] that have various different styles of presentation i play various different characters in those channels um mainly it's about science and what's wrong with it and who's wrong on the internet and there's a lot of that going around as we know we'll probably get to that later and and i'm also involved in marketing a crazy blue green cyanobacter supplement from klamath lake in oregon [Music] that's me in a nutshell very good so as far as your your you know switching in uh roles i mean how do you how do you see yourself in your in your new role is just something you you feel you've been you know been able to affect more change are you enjoying it more like how how how are you able to uh you know influence people in this regard and you think that's that that's um doing what you wanted to yeah when i was teaching in academia i probably taught probably tens of thousands of students over the years and various different i mean the largest class i ever taught was i think there were 650 sets of eyeballs in that lecture theater on any given day um i've supervised more than 20 dissertations of postgraduate students one-on-one to to a very you know close into personal working relationship there [Music] but as a youtube influencer you can or one can influence tens or hundreds and in some cases for some influences millions of people on a weekly basis i mean guys like dr king berry for example has nearly two million subscribers it's incredible wow and he's great at what he does he said he knows information is fantastic so there's that it is an opportunity that you can take whatever style you choose i've got a lot of different styles that i like to approach that's why i've got five or six different youtube channels and i present myself very differently on each of those channels on my main channel for example i tend to go for the click bait idea of using lots and lots of curse words very very short one one syllable words and being very very abrasive actually to people that i disagree with and that's what i support it's to get clicks is to get attention it works it works incredibly well it's not hugely professional in fact a lot of people say it's usually unprofessional and i say well great you could you replace those several tens of thousands of followers that love that there's some people that love it just as much when i wear a suit and tie and don't say naughty words and i'll do it i've got another channel where i do just that i'll wear a collar and it's high and i never say dirty words on that channel ever or insult anybody i just stick to the facts the science and i present myself like as if one lecturer in a university setting it's got one tenth of the following of my main channel people like to be entertained as well as informed i guess up in another channel that's co-hosted by a funny little yellow teddy bear as well that's that one that you can see up on the screen now here he is the actual article is yellow ted uh my constant companion for the last 50 years actually i'll be i'll be 50 in 16 days from now all right well happy birthday thank you um yeah so i'm looking for well i'm not looking forward to that but i'm actually i've decided i'm going to be 49 a is what i'm going to do yeah and um i know it's a gimmick and i know it's a bit of a joke but i have one of those ridiculous bio electric impedance scales here in the house and it's telling me i'm getting younger and younger so i'm actually not going to turn 50 i'm actually going to start aging backwards so there you go that's it yeah just go by your your metabolic age and uh everyone would be happy well we'll be happy anyway i don't know and i guess just to finish off on that question the other thing that's much better now that i'm not employed by a university then i can do my own thing i can say what i want i can you know do what i want i can represent myself any way i want to there's also no limit to the income because whether you're an md or whether you're a professor of health science or any other subject or whether you are an electrician or whether you drive trucks you have a salary and that's what it is [Music] whereas as a creator i basically set the income by making videos that people want to watch and then i get advertising revenue from youtube for doing that and on top of that i also you know encourage those people to become clients of mine as well so i can encapsulate that business offline as well [Music] plus the supplement range so i'm actually doing better yeah good income wise than it was so you know it's a great thing it is a hard road though it's not for the faint-hearted it's not for you if you have a thin skin you've got to be thick-skinned you've got to have broad shoulders you've got to be prepared that um everybody's got an opinion and they'll tell you what it is yeah so there's that um but if it's if that's you that's the sort of thing and i'm talking you meaning everybody that's watching and it's a great opportunity yeah yeah and of course the other problem is that some of the platforms that we do stuff on like for example youtube are not best receptive or not best helpful towards people who hold or espouse an agenda that's not in line with their own they do act as a sensor both overtly and covertly so you need to be aware of that too and have your workarounds anyway long-winded answer but that's it yeah no um i remember you you know obviously you're on academia like there are a lot of uh egos and and uh and and so forth you have to work your way around and i think i remember saying one of your interviews that uh someone told you uh that uh science advances one funeral at a time you have to wait for one of the big egos to drop and then that makes room for everyone else which i've certainly seen my father has certainly said that as well he was a physicist at the lawrence livermore radiation laboratory at berkeley um you were talking about professor tim knox the only sort of person that actually held up to the academic and scientific standard of admitting when you're wrong and saying you know you've disproven my whole life's work and thank you for doing it i think i've um i've heard of one example of that as well and that was a physicist my father worked with at the lawrence lab when they were you know working with louis alvarez on the with the bubble chamber and you know crack the atom and work on subatomic particles and they were they were noticing the the the attractive forces uh these plasma forces between electrons and protons and it was 42 orders of magnitude more powerful than gravity and obviously here for the the entire theory of the universe was was based in gravitational forces and uh my dad's um professor one of his doctoral advisors he came into his office one day and he guys just looked shell-shocked and he said and my dad's asking what was wrong he said i think i've wasted the last 20 years of my life you know i've been studying i've been focusing on gravitational physics but it was 42 orders of magnitude more powerful attractive forces in the plasma forces like it can't be right it you know that that can't be the answer and so he actually did just completely rearrange his entire his entire career but that's very very rare generally you do have to wait for as you say someone to die because they're just going to cling on to that whereas people like professor knox and people like my father's professor um get get so much more credibility when they go like wow i was i was way off and and here's what it is i think that that that people really like that i think that people really uh respect that as well and i wish that more people uh would have the you know the bravery to do that that's great um i want to talk to you uh obviously you know in your in your field uh about some of the biochemistry that that goes behind the the carnivore diet and and what makes us carnivores as an animal um there are quite a lot of things that um you know that i talk about you know you know biochemically you know i argue that this so-called fasting state is not a fasting state that's a primary metabolic state that's a primary metabolic state of you know so many animals in the wild and the only reason we've called it a fasting state and you know carbohydrate-driven insulin hyperinsulinemic state fed state is just because by the time we were able to look at this biochemically at a molecular level everyone was eating carbohydrates and they just said oh when you eat it looks like this when you donate it looks like that and it was very simplistic what are your views on that is that is that something that you you think uh holds water or am i way off base here no i i i think you you put the nail on the head as as pretty well usual actually i i've watched your material i've listened to you talk we actually didn't for those who don't know um dr chaffey and i did an interview a week or so two two weeks ago whatever it was and i have not come across anybody else who is as accurate with with everything he says so i think um well that's just the way it is you know absolutely spot on so for me the whole thing boils down to what people need to understand is that the whole area of and i'm going to use these the whole area of human nutrition science is anything but a science it is a philosophy it's a theology actually it's it's elevated itself to a level of theology in fact there's one branch of it that i that people take one particular view on it and i refer to them as the church of anorexia v ghana for example um [Music] there are others who will proclaim and plant a flag and cling on to the cliff face of saying we are biologically and evolutionarily omnivorous animals wrong there are those who will say we're frugivores absolutely wrong [Music] there are those who will say that we are carnivores they're the ones to have it right and human nutrition science is not underpinned by any well-designed well-controlled well-tenured well-powered well-observed disciplined scientific interventional experimental research projects not one anywhere in the field reason being because people want to make statements about what's good for us long term on the basis of what we put into our mouths on a daily basis meaning over a number of years if you eat this way for 20 years 30 years 40 years 50 years here is what you can expect as an outcome to make such a statement here is what you have to do you have to take sets of identically genetically predisposed people in other words genetic twins you have to split them into two cohorts one twin and one lab another twin in another lab those two labs need to be identical every single condition that every single one of those subjects in those labs is subjected to on a day by day basis has to be identical waking hours sleeping hours amount of exercise mode of exercise everything the way they're treated the way they're spoken to what they're taught the whole thing and you have to do that from birth until if you want to make statements about what's good for you over 50 years nutrition wise that study needs to last 50 years so you can see what the problem is here number one you're never going to get ethics to lock people in labs and take their life away from them for 50 years to subserve science [Music] number two that's going to cost a few dollars to run a study like that forget it who's going to fund that to find out something in 50 years we'd rather know about the science now a certain pharmacological company that sells a certain thing that they didn't want to tell us about for 50 something years or 70 something years now good we found out now though anyway that's for another day that's not why you're cooked um what else has to happen um [Music] it's just not practical you cannot do that kind of research with human beings so what we've got is a bunch of free living human beings who we split nominally into a controlled cohort of people and an experimental cohort of people there's no experiment involved here because they're left to live freely and do whatever they are going to do [Music] and with a free living human being inside a human body there are a myriad of degrees of freedom that can alter someone's health heart health outcomes does this person have a heart attack or not and at what it age for example does this person develop diabetes or not does this person become obese or not etc etc their internal degrees of freedom myriad of them then there's the external degrees of freedom how did they live what educational status did they obtain what was their financial status other than let's say we're pointing the finger out saturated fat as a problem in the diet for example what else did they eat besides saturated fat or not et cetera cetera et cetera et cetera so what they do is we basically get these two cohorts and we get some hard outcomes we say here's a hundred thousand people here here's another 100 000 people these people tended to have a heart attack at on average age 55 plus or minus 20 years these people had a heart attack at two or three years earlier than that plus and one is the same 25 years that's a massive difference statistically because there's a hundred thousand in each population that's called science apparently and so now we can say there's a massive change in your risk of a heart attack if you for example eat this thing and not that thing it's absolute nonsense from start to finish there is nothing less scientific about this it's called nutritional epidemiology for those who want to know and as a statistician i can tell you that it's smoke and mirrors it's bs and it's jelly beans yeah it's let's look over there shiny thing yeah and and we use scary words like risk when actually what we're looking at is an incidence and then also what we do is we adjust what we observed and we correct it mathematically by using a thing called a multiple regression analysis which sounds very technical and is above most people's heads and in such all good science when actually what it is is its fabrication of outcomes here's what a scientist does a scientist looks at the relationship between one variable and another for one variable and one categorical or two categoricals whatever and says here's what we observed and here's the statistical difference between those two things here's what a pseudoscientist does makes some observations crumbles them up throws them over their shoulder into the ash can and says let's make up some other ones instead ostensibly that's what they're doing so there's no science underpinning human nutrition at all so what we have to do is we have to look for where the science on human physiology human nutritional needs human physiology actually is and you will find it in some actual hard scientists areas of expertise where some actual hard science has been done now the areas of anthropology for example stable isotope testing they are areas like comparative anatomy comparative physiology uh biological organ systems comparative studies biochemistry those kind of areas they're the areas that will inform on what a human being ought to consume and what is therefore most likely to lead them to the best outcomes for health longevity and quality of life so what we need to do is we need to ring fence human nutrition science to understand that that is an area which is deeply deeply compromised by conflict of interest by big agra and big pharma largely we have a lot of money and we need to understand that all of that is a fallacious bunch of nonsense which is a theology and an ideology and we need to ignore the lot and go to the areas that i've spoken about that's what i've done as a as a nutritionist and i have turned my back entirely on the fraternity of human nutrition science there's a bunch of crackpots and pseudoscientists again long and long-winded answers sorry about that that's that's where i'm at no it's good and you know and that was something that uh you know mark twain uh popularized by saying you know there's three kinds of lies there are lies there are damn lies and their statistics and you know that that's something that we see all the time people don't you know quite realize just just how much junk science there is certainly in nutritional sciences but but also in medicine i was absolutely shocked you know some of these studies that come out and then we base so much on these these uh sorts of things they actually look back to the origins of these things and they're just based on nonsense absolutely nonsense and sometimes just pure fraud like the cholesterol uh whole issue um which we have hard evidence of but quite a lot of these things were supposition they thought well this is sort of how we understand the body to work and so if we were to stress this system in this way this is the outcome we would expect to get but they don't actually do the studies they don't actually do any trials they don't actually uh check they just said well you know we think this is probably it and so people say best guess and sometimes you just have to like in medicine there's a lot of just best guesses and we learn as we go and we and we adjust our our practices but people really need to recognize especially doctors is that a lot of the things that we do are are based on best guesses and and so you really have to be open to the idea that that that uh it's it's wrong and um that's something that i've seen more and more uh you know it has you know since since graduating medical school and especially since delving into the whole nutrition side of things there's just so much out there that is just based on on little to nothing and we really really need to keep an open mind about these things a couple of the big ones you know everyone always talks about things like fiber you know fiber is really good for you fiber moves your digestion and so forth i would argue that you know fiber is probably not good for you i think that it isn't good for you i certainly don't think it's necessary i think that you know historically you look at when people started pitching fibers sort of in the 1980s when everyone was getting constipated because they stopped eating fat and they said stop eating that and that's what i think drives the the digestion um and then all of a sudden some people say oh you have to start eating more fiber and and you know my question to that is like well why didn't we need fiber before 1986 as a species you know why why was that a thing if we if we needed this just like a gorilla why did we not need it before the 1980s what are your thoughts on fiber absolutely the same as yours there is one and only one remotely well controlled sort of pseudo clinical study short term like most actual clinical studies are so it only gives you a short term snapshot you cannot extrapolate a study beyond its tenure i think from memory uh correct me if i'm wrong you probably know the study as well as i do i think it was a 12-week study something like that maybe yeah or shorter than that maybe and they had 64 participants so not a great deal of statistical power at all either but what they did is they had 64 participants who presented to the researchers at the beginning or the outset of the study were idiopathic constipation basically so idiopathic for those who don't know is a medical word for we don't know what the cause is and doctors don't like to say we don't know so they say idiopathic so the people go oh it's idiopathic impressive um that's basically you know medicine is also one of those things that progresses one funeral at a time as you as you and i both know anywho um 64 participants four groups all of them were constipated at the outset all of them were having bowel movements on average once a week and they were jammed up obviously they had anal bleeding they had pain they had real difficulty moving their bowels et cetera et cetera et cetera so anyway four groups of these people the first group was the control situation if you like they were told don't change anything in your life don't do anything different from what you're doing right now except what we want you to do is to continue to eat exactly the same diet that you have been so in other words change nothing just keep doing it and we'll see what happens over i think it was 12 weeks it might have been less doesn't matter the second group were told you're going to increase your fiber by 25 i think it was because supposedly that's going to help with the constipation because you're not eating enough fiber and everybody knows that constipation is caused by optimum fiber even though that's actually not true as you've already quite rightly said then there was another group who were told reduce your fibre by 50 and we'll see what happens that should really gum you up and the fourth group was told remove all fiber from your diet but it obviously was an isochloric diet otherwise for all four groups um fiber doesn't particularly contain very many calories anyway because very little of it has ever broken down to short chain fatty acids so it's just kind of assumed to be numb um anyway here were the results after the period of time whatever it was the group of people who were the control group who changed nothing remained exactly as constipated all their symptoms remained pretty much the same by every metric they used to measure those their bowel movement frequency remained the same the people who were told to increase their fiber got worse every one of those people in that group not just a percentage of them and you know every single one of them got worse interesting the people who cut their fiber in half found relatively a dose response half or 50 reduction in their symptomology and the fourth group who removed all the fiber from their diet had complete remission of all symptoms every single one of them without any exceptions at all so even though it was a small sample size if the effect size was so large that you can't ignore that yeah every single patient that removed all fiber got complete remission every one of them yeah interesting yeah well also you know the other groups you know uh sort of stack up with how you would expect if fiber was a was an issue here um and it's and at least like you say this is an attempt at a at a clinical trial and and changing variables to see as opposed to epidemiology i think there was um there was some uh mentioned by uh lane norton who's familiar to both of us uh who's a phd in nutrition and very aggressive uh person online which speaks to me generally um as insecurity you know people that that are that aggressive but someone says like well actually my experience has been this and he just you know curses others and he just says you know f your anecdote or something like that it's like that's that's no way to behave uh when when someone's trying to have a discourse uh if your ideas are good you should be able to defend them the only ideas that you need to you know you know bat people away from or ideas that can't stand on their own uh he quoted some meta-analyses of epidemiological studies and and everyone said well these are meta-analyses these are men analyses and i had a discussion with actually a resident physician in america on this and we had a very pleasant discussion on this but he was saying like look you know elaine's putting forward meta-analyses and you know that's significant as opposed to this person who's only talking from 20 years of clinical experience and and quoting these other studies that aren't meta-analyses um but you know you have a meta-analysis and for those who don't know meta-analyses are you taking several studies and sort of looking at them all together so you get bigger sample size and so forth and they can be a bit more useful but um there's a saying in in science is just junk in junk out and so if you have a lot of epidemiological studies that are that aren't really very useful a meta-analyses of these things are are multiplicatively less useful and so you know we have we tag it as a meta-analysis but it's a meta-analysis of what it's meant analysis of studies that you know suck frankly and so you know and and those and those are specifically men on on fiber talking about fiber um so yeah so i and um and i think the simple fact that you know richard feynman the physicist said you know it doesn't matter how brilliant your theory is and it doesn't matter how smart you are if it doesn't agree with experiment it's wrong and so people can trot out all these meta-analyses and so forth well look at this look at this look at this but you can look at the inuits and you can realize that we've lived through tens of thousands of years of ice ages and if fiber was an essential nutrient that this was something that was was essential for life and conferred such a benefit you know these these people would not be around we wouldn't be around because we wouldn't have survived through the ice times and they knew it certainly wouldn't uh be around now if it was essential if you could not live without it um so i think that's um that's a bit silly to say that you have to have this sort of thing uh but yeah that's that's great thank you and um the two of us together have nearly 20 years of not eating fiber combined yeah exactly yeah and i always hated it anyway so you know yeah we should both be well and truly stopped up by now um we should vote dead um we should both have raging colon cancer constipation you know all sorts of things should have gone wrong to believe all this nonsense about what we're told about fiber yeah take home message from someone who's looked at this very very carefully for more than 20 years in the science such that it is underpinning it as well as the metro analyses as well as the anecdotal evidence so i'm looking at everything here in detail and also as a trained statistician as well as a trained scientist i can tell you without fair contradiction by anybody who knows the first thing about anything the exact amount of dietary fiber required by human beings on a daily basis and throughout a lifespan is not one gram ever none fact yeah yeah yeah and the um you know and the idea that you know you you have to have fiber in order to have you know regular emotions and have normal digestion you know again that's cute and all that that's the theory but you know we we are and people are not having a problem so you're going to get bummed up you're going to get this problem and yet we don't you know so you're wrong i mean it just it's as simple as that but i have this study and everyone knows it doesn't matter it it's not people don't get it so it's wrong and um i think that's important for people to recognize as well uh at least for us for us to you know to to know that we're not doing anything wrong and that you know the the people sort of following this that haven't looked into things as in depth as you have uh just to just to know on simple basic principles this is you know this is supposed to cause constipation but it doesn't and i'm fine so it's wrong um there was the only study that i that i've come across it was at all useful and as far as colon disease was when we looked at 2 000 different patients looking at different colonoscopies and so forth and looking at the the prevalence of diverticulosis and the different sorts of risk factors associated with this and you know as you rightly pointed out many times you know association is not causation and um but the only things that even had a correlation you know that could have any hope of having causation involved uh in diverticulosis which is the out pouching failure of the distal colon is were increased fiber and increased number of bowel motions uh you know heart you know um increased meat was not a problem increased fat was not a problem constipation was not a problem so having having hard nasty blocked up stools this actually didn't cause a problem the problem was from the looks of it from this correlated study was that the overworking of this organ and then it fails begins to fail you see this in the bladder as well you get diverticulae on the bladder as well if you basically don't use it properly and just stretches out stretches out and it gets pressure problems we have heart failure where you're you know pumping your heart against a pressure gradient for decades and eventually your heart just wears out heart failure i i think of diverticulosis is colon failure you just overwork this organ and it's just that's all it's got that that's those are all the miles that it has now and uh and it's just starting to wear off and that is certainly the the association that we're seeing but we're not seeing an association with fat or meat or even constipation so uh the idea that you have to have to have to have uh fiber i think goes goes against uh all the available information that we have um there's something you talked about just before we move on the other thing on that one as well as um we all know that association does not establish causality just because a is is associated with b that doesn't mean a is the cause of b most people understand that except for just about everybody that's talking about ideas antithetical to my own online in terms of nutrition and science but that's for another day but on the flip side of that there's something else that we seem to we seem to miss somehow sure association is not an establishment for causality but if you look for an association [Music] and it is not there there is no association then causality can be dismissed yeah yeah that can happen so when we say well lack of fiber causes constipation all we need to do on this side of the argument is say no it doesn't end of discussion yeah causality is dismissed hypothesis fails scientifically we have to drop it and move on yeah yeah so sorry go on no no yeah no i completely agree um another another common one that people uh talk about is vitamin c and other nutrients and so forth um you talk about this in a couple of your your toxin and you spoke with me about the last time we spoke but can you tell us a bit a bit about you know vitamin c why we don't actually uh need it in the numbers that are quoted if you're eating a carnivore diet not a mixed diet and and its relationship with uh oxalates which which is a bit of a buzzword people are starting to understand in the carnivore community uh what the hell this stuff is and why it's harmful but please professor yeah you bet um basically this idea that we need a certain amount of vitamin c baseline to prevent a condition called scurvy is correct we do need a certain amount of vitamin c which we do need to take in in our diet to prevent scurvy and scurvy is a failure of the synthesis of the most common protein in your body it's called collagen so if you get scurvy basically your body starts to dissolve you get bleeding gums your teeth start falling out your your joints will fall a bit your muscles will start to dissolve it can be fatal obviously scurvy was a genuine uh generally experienced by sailors who went to sea for months at a time and subsisted on a diet of purely ships biscuits actually and in weevils that came with those biscuits and and those people developed scurvy absolutely so that's that's how we learned originally that scurvy was a thing and it could kill you and that therefore we needed a certain amount of vitamin c in our diet so that is correct okay many animals most animals are able to synthesize their own vitamin c and they do so and that's fine there are several animals that for some reason are not able to synthesize any vitamin c at all and the two examples i know about off the top of my head are human beings and for some random reason guinea pigs whatever okay now that tells us something anytime a genetic line of animals that came from the parent line of whatever the animals were so obviously the parent mammal that was a descendant of both us and guinea pigs for example or guinea pigs were probably earlier on actually and then the human developed a bit later after the primate situation we used to eat a lot of fruit which contains vitamin c anyway we also used to be able to make our own vitamin c fine whatever the fact that we now can't tells us that the gene that encodes for the enzyme required to synthesize our own vitamin c in our metabolic system [Music] that gene has been knocked out now a knockout of a gene means necessarily by darwinian i'm not going to say theory darwinian fact the gene is knocked out it's because that gene was a problem that prevented animals of that species from living long enough to reach childbearing age to pass those genes on only human beings that could not produce vitamin c have survived to this day there are no living human beings that can do it when did it happen soon after we came down from the trees stopped eating so much fruit stood upright and started chasing animals around renting those the reason for it i believe this is a theory my theory not science not a fact not proven this is a theory is because excess vitamin c in your system is metabolized through a series of steps down to oxalate which you mentioned oxalate is a substance that will precipitate out with calcium and other cations if you like in your electrolytes in your body mainly calcium and it forms shard-like needle-like crystals in your body which um will pierce your organs pierce your cells calcium oxalate crystals usually form in the kidneys but they can form anywhere in the body including in your eyeballs oh god or you know something like that um for a little brain for example or you know in a bladder or you know anywhere absolutely anywhere these things and that literally if you look at them under a microscope they are literally like first alignment sharp needles these are nasty nasty things and and i think that's what the problem was now the reason we suddenly had so much excess vitamin c when we stopped eating a bunch of fruit was this the protein transporter the transmembrane transporter on the on the cell membrane of every cell in your body which is responsible for uptaking vitamin c from your blood and and getting it into the cell where it does its work in the cell and helping you form collagen for example that transporter is a transporter called glute or which anyone who knows anything about nutrition and physiology will tell you that's the one that transports glucose into your cells out of your blood isn't it yes it is it's the same one and in fact vitamin c and glucose are quite similar molecules ergo that's why the transporter is the same one if you've got a bunch of glucose in your bloodstream that's competing for space through that transporter and a concentration gradient dependent manner to get into the cells and it's blocking most of the vitamin c from exiting your blood and going into your cells that's why most of the vitamin c you take ends up getting urinated out because your cells can't uptake it if you're consuming a whole bunch of glucose or any carbohydrates which will break down to glucose pretty much so the recommended daily intake of vitamin c to prevent scurvy is made under the assumption that you are eating a mixed macronutrient diet containing 60 to 65 carbohydrates ago the amount of vitamin c that you require in your blood to have a concentration that will push its way through into the cells on that transporter is vastly higher so we stop eating fruit we come down from the trees we start eating meat instead we don't have glucose in our blood so much anymore we're relying on gluconeogenesis to provide us with a much lower level of glucose than we had when we're eating a bunch of fruit suddenly we've got a whole excess of vitamin c in our systems it's building up into calcium oxalate crystals and killing us primates before we can reach reproductive age and pass that on ergo it's gone human beings cannot make their own vitamin c for that reason simple as that also interestingly you will find in most leafy green plants those plants contain a large amount of oxalate inherently in their stems and leaves and roots and whatever else that is there precisely to kill you so that you don't eat the plants that's why it's there that's why the plants have evolved that it won't kill you instantly because you're a human being and you're quite tough in that regard it'll kill you slowly over a lifetime a lot of time it'll be a lot shorter for your plants than it would if you didn't by the way but if you're an insect and you're eating a lot of oxalates that'll kill you just about instantly insects are very worrisome you know and insects are animals that eat more plants than anything else yeah it all seems to sum up my theory none of that's proven science or experimental science that's my theory based on observation of all the facts at hand looking at the whole picture so that's the take on vitamin c yes you need a small amount of vitamin c in your diet where do you get it you get it from the meat of large room and animals mostly because they have an amount in there and it's enough at the much lower concentrations required in carnivorous human beings to provide all the vitamin c you don't even have to eat you know organs to get enough vitamin c there's enough in muscle meat yeah i don't eat any organs at all and i haven't done for six and a half years no scuba yet yeah yeah no bleeding gums yeah yeah well it's like um yeah well again you're getting getting the first principles they say well you're going to die of scurvy and yet i haven't and yet you have it yeah the inuits don't and they live generationally like this you know and dismissed yeah exactly yeah and you know a lot of people you know i always you i i refer to the inuits quite often and you know people during the ice ages because obviously there are other uh native examples of of people's living as purely carnivores especially historically up until you know the encroachment of the west and in various countries like north america and australia and so forth new zealand but um yeah we have we have clear documents going hundreds of years backwards saying that wow these guys really just eat meat all the the explorers journals and uh publications that i've read from the 1600s you know and so forth 1500 1600 so forth in australia and america every single one has a chapter on the diet of the natives and they're just marveling how they just eat meat and so forth and how you know even even in the northern areas uh there's one in uh who's a colonist in in new england he was talking about the the northern uh natives living in canada what's now canada saying that he was amazed these guys only ate meat all year round they were very very healthy and he said that he understood what during during nine months out of the year when everything's just packed with snow you really can't grow anything you can't you know live off the land but uh and so you understand that you could you just hunt but he said three months out of the year when everything falls down surely they could live off the bounty of the land that's his words which i always liked and they don't they said specifically they don't you say they only meet and he was quite amazed by this but everyone likes to say yeah well they actually did and they said they have no proof of this there's no evidence asked for or provided but that's just their assumption but if you go to the north pole that just shuts that down because there are no dam plants up there you know they're not they're not eating kelp they're just not and probably can't get it the ocean's too deep there so we know these guys when living naturally we're strict strict carnivores and also we know from various polar explorers that they weren't eating organs either they don't get scurvy so we know this is wrong we just know it's wrong um you know interesting about the sailors biscuits there was some accounts from some polar explorers that i was reading and most most of the successful ones anyway looked at what the natives were doing and lived that way basically lived on purely meat alone and they all went like wow i've never felt better in my life this is um you know uh professor stefansson from harvard was a professor of ethnology and you know wrote the book the fat of the land which people know about usually um and he felt absolutely amazing because of this but there are different different accounts of people not doing very well and getting very very sick and having horrible problems and they're trying to figure out what's going on what's wrong with them and then they found in their pack a bunch of sailors biscuits guy just wasn't about it he's like no no no you can't live like that need these sailors biscuits these guys are getting serious uh nutritional deficiencies and as soon as they just they just took it all they did was take away the biscuits and he improved so this is pretty indicative that these biscuits were causing harm in one manner or another by either direct or uh referred from from blocking the various nutrients that he needed um but yeah but this is this is real life evidence of these sorts of things um and uh yeah so i just think that's uh that's that's interesting yeah it's just interesting to know about biochemically but also just you don't need to sorry yeah go on yes just on that as well the the better the land thing um sailors that were getting scurvy eating ships biscuits yes the officers on the same ship were eating dried meat right not chips biscuits no scurvy only the sailors only the men below decks were getting the scurvy interesting i don't see in the meat even though it's dried secondly on fat of the land um it has been made by a bunch of carnivore influencers over time into a bit of an audio book because it's out of print and you know you can't buy the thing anymore et cetera blah blah and it's been read by a number of carnivore influencers as an audiobook one of the chapters is read by yours truly and it's the one on one see nice very good you can find that on my channel i i i will actually that's cool for the fat of the land and you'll find that the the the chapter on vitamin c is voiced but it was truly in these dulcer terms very good all right um so i'm just going to talk about the randall cycle which is something that you're very well versed with it with and this goes into you know people talking about you need to have a balanced diet you need a balance of your macronutrients you need all of these sorts of things um and um but your discussion of the randall cycle you know really does show you know hard biochemical evidence of why this act actually you know may not be the case um you know as we talked about you know different sorts of studies and and some are better or worse but there is hard science out there there's hard science that exists and biochemistry is one of them when you see you know like the you know the krebs cycle and so forth yeah we figured out biochemically this you know this molecule interacts with this molecule to get this molecule and and so forth and down the line that's hard science that is that process now we can look at how this this relates to you know the larger cell and the larger animal but that is a process that exists and that's that's that's uh uh something that happens um so you know uh can you tell us a bit about the randall cycle and why this uh sort of tells us that we actually don't want a balanced diet yeah yeah the the randall cycle was originally proposed and published in 1963 i believe it was so this is not new information and at the time it was obviously was published by a bloke who later became sir randall superficial randall of course and he just called it the glycerol fatty acid cycle at the time later it was named for him because he was the proposer etc to boil it down to um edible bite-sized sound-biting information if you like basically what it boils down to is this any time there is an appreciable amount of both fat of any kind and carbohydrates in the form of glucose which it always is in the blood in relatively evenish amounts you've got some fat and some carbohydrate in your blood basically what happens is both fat and carbohydrate start to on a concentration gradient dependent fashion really with some active transport and and that kind of stuff as well they both try to get access into the cells which they do and they will both enter the cell and they will fill the cell cytoplasm with energy substrates basically to a certain level once that cell is replete with energy the cell cytosol senses that it is full it has all the fat and carbohydrate it could conceivably need or use for the next foreseeable period of hours or whatever else what then happens is the door the doors if you like to the cell the cell transporters for both fat and for carbohydrate are locked from the inside why is that mainly because of glucose glucose is the real problem here glucose in a concentration above the ideal concentration [Music] inside the cell will start to glycate cellular proteins like cell organelles like lipid rafts like the dna basically sugar is a toxin above a certain level and it will absolutely destroy the cell so once the cell has a level of sugar that is above a certain level it'll lock the door no more sugar it'll also lock the fat door as well the cell is replete with energy we need to because we've got sugar above where we want it to be we don't want fat entering either because fat will go through the process the krebs cycle reducing equivalence through the electron transport chain produce atp and that will hold the concentration of glucose up we don't want that we want to get rid of this glucose it's toxic so we lock the door to glucose start to fat as well so now we're going to drain the fat out and the glucose will start draining out as well and only when the glucose gets below a certain level again will those doors be unlocked so as such the blood becomes the sacrificial lamb as do the epithelial cells of the vascular tree because your vascular epithelial cells and your blood cells can be replaced much more readily on a much more rapid turnaround by using a cell line that's an adult stem cell line based in your bone marrow and that's called cd34 plus adult stem cells these by the way are the stem cells that are encouraged to be released from the bone marrow by that blue green algae supplement i was referring to that i involved in marketing but that's for another day so your blood cells white cells red cells platelets all the formed elements basically immune cells in your blood and the epithelial cells all replaceable quite quickly so if there's a problem too much glucose they're the ones that are going to be sacrificed lock the doors to the more important cells like the organ cells liver cells muscle cells for example protect those cells from damage that's basically what the randall cycle is that's what it does so if you eat a diet which is balanced because balance is a great thing and balance is a great buzz word and balance evokes ideas of truth just as the american way and how everything should be for example people think oh balance that must be great so let's let's use that as an ideological term and nutrition pseudoscience and tell people to eat a balanced diet that's a great idea because they they'll be getting everything you need that way and a whole bunch of things you don't need as well like plant toxins anti-nutrients and all randle cycle activation basically so you eat any amount of carbohydrates every single time you do that every time three four five six and some people seven times a day every day of your stupid life pouring carbohydrates down your neck carbohydrates of any form by the way that will necessarily cause and effect with experimental proof absolutely that will activate the randall cycle we've known this since 1963 thank you professor lord randall who has been largely ignored actually on this on this matter for some reason mainly because it didn't suit the ideology of the big agro big pharma group pretty much actually um he was derided and basically you know let's ignore that and it's never really seen the light of day in fact i don't know of any other academics that have spoken about it at length now that i've been talking about it for several years online people are starting to pick this ball up and run with it they get it they go ah this is absolute evidence that we should not eat a balanced diet and that we do come from a line that's descended from a species that ate a diet that was that was specialized the diet that we ate was specialized in terms of it was rich in protein in fat which does not activate the randle cycle now herbivorous animals tend to eat a diet which is rich in carbohydrates and protein plants not much in facts so they don't really activate their annual cycle either humans came along and said balance is a great idea because balance is great word let's see let's see all of everything let's be omnivores whoops that's not how our biological systems work ergo now we have a random cycle activation which leads cause and effect to chronic systemic inflammation obesiogenesis atherogenesis cerebrovascular disease genesis many forms of cancer many forms of dementia all the big killers basically they're all down to the randall cycle cause and effect period fact end of discussion nothing else that is the cause so stop mixing carbohydrates and fats so you've got two options eat a diet which is rich in plants and poor animal products or eat a diet which is rich in animal products and poor and plant material either of those will work in terms of deactivating the randle cycle issue ameliorating the problem before you get to it however one of those diets is vastly grossly demonstrably absolutely destitute of nutrient required by human beings on a daily basis one of them is not how is that informed it's informed by our biochemistry it's it's also informed by our history what do i mean by our history i mean 350 000 years walking the planet as homo sapiens sapiens i mean four and a half millions prior to that on the planes having come down from the trees it forms very nearly human but not quite human how do we know that again actual science let's look at anthropology let's look at some actual really cool science testing called stable carbon and stable nitrogen isotope testing here's what we do we find skeletal remains of human beings all over the planet of all ages up to and including 350 000 years old we cut those bones open and inside we find out dried but still absolutely viable collagen that protein i was talking about with vitamin c earlier we extract that collagen we powderize it up and we treat it in lots of different ways and get it ready for testing in this really flash machine that does the isotope testing and we look at the ratios of 12 13 14 carbon and 1314 nitrogen and those isotopes are stable over hundreds and thousands and millions of years so we know exactly what the makeup of the carbon and nitrogen in that collagen in those human remains is now and therefore was when that human being died and the other interesting fact we know is that the one way that you can change the isotope level and the collagen in your body is through diet and if we know what the oxygen the isotope make up and the collagen is we know exactly what that human being definitely did eat no question slam dunk unequivocal science experiments using machines that don't make mistakes about you know isotope levels anyway here's the answer basically within the sort of five percent band give or take either way human beings throughout our 350 000 year history on this planet have consumed the diet consisting almost entirely of the flesh and fat of mostly large ruminant animals period also a very very small amount of largely fibrous root type materials tubers and roots with no real carbohydrate content or starch content because actually starchy vegetables are a human invention by the way selectively breakfast these were fibrous rooty things they were subsistence foods when the hunt was unsuccessful or whatever slam dunk human beings have a 350 000 year history of eating meat and fat and not plants and certainly not carbohydrate-laden plants at all yeah end of discussion therefore positive selection pressure and negative selection pressure has informed our biological makeup our organ systems our our nutrition pathways all of that stuff that's how we should eat simple yeah and the um i was going to say as well you know when people talk about a balanced diet it's like what do we what do we mean what are we balancing that with we're balancing good things with bad things uh i think we are and i think you've made a very clear point that we are uh obviously that's not that's not a good thing what uh when people say well we need a balanced diet generally they're just repeating something that's just been you know said over and over again and generally if you repeat something long enough as you know as hitler and the nazi said if you repeat something enough times people just start believing it and that's something that's been going on this whole balanced diet uh nonsense uh but what does that mean to me it means that that if you if you need a balance of everything that either means one of two things one that there are things and all these different things that you have to have and so you must get all of them or you really don't know what the hell it is you need to eat and so you're just going to try to get everything you need and just cover your bases you know cows don't have a balanced diet and insofar as they're eating a whole bunch of different plants they eat you know the one plant that they want same with you know gorillas and and you know koalas and pandas and so forth they have a very unbalanced diet they eat one plant um and so that's the plant that's most beneficial for them that's their evolved biologically appropriate diet and that's something that we should be striving for you know you and i you know argue that it's for a carnivore diet but it is something it is something it does exist we do have a common diet we are one species we came from a common heritage and people saying well you know different people from different areas they they need different things well some people have more resistances to species inappropriate foods but that doesn't mean that they have a different optimal diet i i've posed this to um different doctors and so forth that have sort of pushed that oh well i think everyone everyone has a different different diet that's good for them and i asked them okay then show me one example in nature where you have two members of the same species who have different optimal diets i'm still waiting for an answer i've never heard of any um yeah exactly i mean unless we're talking about you know like insects and different sort of you know pupil larvae sort of states and they eat different things throughout their lifetime but you know you compare like to like you know those those grubs you know these separate grubs at that same stage of life they're all eating the same thing um and humans were as well um as to i was going to say as well you know like you were saying that you know or rivers animals and so forth you know they're they're not hitting into the randall cycle we're not having randall cycle with but a lot of people don't know uh it's something that uh you know sort of uh dr peter ballersthat and others have shown he's a phd in forage agronomy has a degree in an animal uh livestock nutrition which is actual science because those those studies that you were talking about where you sort of put genetically identical people in separate areas with separate similar conditions or identical conditions and then change one factor you can actually do with livestock and people do all the time so we actually have very good science the nutrition science and livestock is way better than for human science uh human nutrition um and that's one of the things that he points out is that you know there's a difference between ingestion and digestion you're ingesting a bunch of fibrous plants and so forth so we think they're getting a lot of carbs but you know no vertebrate animal can break down cellulose so you know they really are farming the bacteria in their gut which then break down the cellulose they eat the cellulose and their waste product or short chain fatty acids you know which you alluded to earlier and that's what these animals are then absorbing and then the bacteria die off and they actually break these down and absorb them and so what they're those uh those animals are getting uh fat and protein as well you know cows get around 80 of their calories from saturated fat uh because of this and you know gorillas get around 70 so it's uh again you're not kicking off the randall cycle those they're still in that same biochemical state and process that is uh that is going on with us which is you know more and more proof that that's something that actually we sh that is uh normal in nature and that that we should strive to emulate um the uh the other sort of uh sort of uh buzzwords and and boogeymen in the carnivore community would be things such as like mtor and tmao and they say oh my god if you eat meat then your m2 is going to go up and you're just going to just get riddled with cancer obviously cancer is a much more complicated disease state than just one factor like that but you know that's something that they they latch on because people are very myopic they look at there's one thing that's a problem and so that's that one thing and they get very focused on this you know forgetting that this is a very very complex system and there's a lot going on that that uh that's involved and then you know tmao and so forth they're saying this is just toxic this is you're gonna die of a heart attack and so forth what are your thoughts on mtor and tmao yeah it's not just myopic it's also completely blinkered in science it's a concept that is actually a two-edged sword because the concept is actually referred to and its name is reductionism it's good in that it's absolutely required actually to make scientific progress and to to derive scientific knowledge of cause and effect to to reduce something is to say there are only two variables at play x and y what we do in science when we do experiments is we eliminate the influence of every other variable z a b c whatever so we just have x and y and that's what we look at as soon as you allow anything else to influence it that actually invalidates your scientific study and they'll say haha you haven't controlled your variables and that's that's not a scientific study that's now where now it's now it's a naturalistic observation to whatever degree and therefore the quality of evidence drops et cetera et cetera so we need reductionism to make clear cause and effect statements about the relationships between set variables the problem is exactly what i've just outlined though and that is that in the real world there are many other variables at play and they do have an effect and as such it limits the utility the applicability of the knowledge that we can get through reductionism so when you look at something like mtor mtor is a system within your entire metabolic system which when looked at in isolation by itself has been suggested as a cause of aging cellular senescence decrepitude and eventual death one of the many reasons that we die and yet at the end of our lives emptor has been activated you eat meat it activates mtor ergo eating meters is bad and will kill you there's that that's the reductionist view the analogy to that is like me presenting you with a cog from a 1982 datsun sunny 180b motor car not telling you that there's a company called datsun or that they made this car at all you've never seen this car you don't even know that cars exist i'm just giving you this one cog this metal thing with teeth on it and a hole in the middle here you go anthony now tell me all about the car you can't do it it's nonsense it's absolutely rubbish mtor does many things in your body um and they will also be a hormetic thing as well as i think that does tend to speed up cellular um respiration cellular life spans etc etc what we would have to do so that's that's what we would call a mechanistic spec in it there's a speculation okay mtor's going to kill you okay that's the speculation great what we then need to do is look at whether there is an association between the thing that we're claiming will upregulate the import pathway the consumption of meat and does that correlate to an increased incidence of death or earlier death on average or any of these metrics that we look at in terms of hard outcomes i.e death for example now remember how we said association can't establish causality but a lack of association can dismiss it well that's what we've got we've got a lack of association the association that's found in these epidemiological studies is what's called statistically significant meaning it is a relationship between these variables that occurred with a 95 probability not due to pure dumb chance to use a very passionate explanation statisticians don't jump all over me i know that's not strictly correct but we have to be accessible to people okay that's in theory that's basically what it is so get a life basically okay so that's that's what we're looking at here um it's it's it's it's a relationship that's definitely not due to dumb chance that does not inform us on the magnitude of that how important is the association how much sooner would you die per x percent increase in your mtor activation and then translate that to some kind of metric on a serving size size of meat per day or whatever anyway the answer is that the difference between meat eaters even in the tenth or top decile of meat consumption versus vegans who can say consume no meat at all over a 100 year life span in any given human being the difference between this group and that group is in the sort of range of eight or so ten thousandths over a lifespan of 100 years plus the meat frankly that's you know the lack of association okay the hypothesis as a meaningful cause of death meat eating dismissed okay the same sort of relationships in epidemiology can be found with cancers of all kinds and meat consumption in fact most epitheliological studies the raw outcomes before you adjust actually show that meat eating is somewhat protective though not meaningfully it doesn't show that there's an increase in the risk of cancer so that's that one's busted same with heart disease busted same deal so you can pull that in tall as a cog out of a gear box as a reductionist thing you can pull out eating 5gc there's another one acylic acid they say it's associated with media team that'll kill you absolutely that one will same thing no association so forget it tmao not only is there no association but also if you look at the thing holistically in people who eat a lot of meat their gut bacteria is adapted and speciated such that there's also a prevalence of another range of bacteria who actually gobble up tmao and render it you know null and void anyway so of course there's no association because the only people that build up tmao when they eat meat is people who don't habitually eat meat so what they do in these studies is let big vegan people meet and say oh look there's a huge increase in tmao so that'll kill you so stop eating meat you idiots eat these plants okay that's what they'll say yeah rubbish not science it looks sciencey it looks cool they publish all these papers and yet absolute clowns like um joel the used car salesman joel conman calm coming online and saying i'm a world expert in tmao and i can tell you something that'll kill you and all this kind of stuff oh god well joel khan wouldn't know the difference between his anus and his elbow if i labeled both of them and taught them how to read mandarin as an adjunct adjunct professor by virtue of having been involved in cardiovascular medicine for many years not because he's an academic and he's got his name on hundreds and hundreds of papers like this tmao thing by basically being a networker and getting his name on all these papers and saying let's do the stuff on tmao and prove that it's going to kill you and all this sort of stuff and it's all funded by the physicians committee for responsible medicine which as we all know is the thing put together by neil barnard who is another well-known priest of the church of anorexia began another well-known vegan basically with an ideology to push um all of these guys are running around doing pseudoscience this is just rubbish all of it it's just nonsense it's it's only serves to give them something to do to bolster their egos and to basically line their pockets at the expense of preying on the fear of basically ill-educated people in um in society who will believe pretty much anything really yeah if you if you tell them exactly what you said before dr chapie if you sell somebody something that's for your safety for example enough times they'll start believing that it's yes the the the segregation of a group of people and their mass extermination as dangerous and you know problematic in the 1930s for example it's for our safety absolutely of course it's for our safety let's do that yeah you do it of course we don't want to be involved in that you guys do it but we're okay with it and we'll stand by and let you do it pretty much um there's a similar thing going on now actually with a certain intervention that's being pushed around the world that shouldn't be um for example and we're just being told over and over again safe and effective safe and effective safe and effective and anyone that says uh no actually it's neither of those things it's neither safe nor effective um they've been censored yeah actually so anyway you didn't that's that's not why you're cool yeah yeah and and uh you know to your point a lot of these things you know obviously um you know associative and so forth but also like you know what are they looking at um you made a very good point that you have very good different gut bacteria when you're eating a carnivore diet anything you eat you're going to have a different different gut biome and so these experiments are done with people that are quote unquote meat eaters that are still eating predominantly plants and they just eat more than x amount of meat or red meat per week and they say oh well these people that eat more red meat and still eat all the other crap too maybe have a worse outcome in this dissociative correlative you know pretty poor uh studies um you know but the you know sort of i the way i've thought about it as well is that you know when you're eating meat exclusively exclusive to anything else first of all you're going to have different gut biome but also you're going to absorb nearly all of it and so you're going to absorb all this stuff like you know 98 99 of the meat you eat depending on how much gristle you get you know the salisbury steak was you know mixing out the the gristle and you basically are absorbing 100 of that and so meat's not getting into your colon in the first place so you know it's not a given that you're going to have that kind of gut bacteria to you know make uh you know tmao uh but even if you did you're you're the meat isn't going to get there in the first place so maybe you make a bit of tmao it's not going to be all that much but you may or may not have the gut bacteria that you that would need that would be requisite to do that and as you pointed out you you would have other gut bacteria that would actually eat up what little tmao you would make um and then in a mixed diet of eating plants and fiber and so forth that's really the only time you're going to run into this as a problem if it becomes a problem and maybe that's what their you know studies are showing because you're eating a bunch of fiber this blocks enzymes to get to the food that you're eating it stops it for me it blocks it physically blocks it from getting to your lumen of your intestine and so this is going to be uh expelled and goes into your your large intestine this is one of the original reasons they said we should eat a bunch of fiber because it actually stops you from getting nutrition and you'll get less calories which by any any stretch of imagination could never be an evolutionary model to actually limit the amount of energy and nutrition that you got from your food most most animals are starving to death and really struggling to survive so that doesn't make any sense so when you're you're doing that and you're eating plants and you're eating fiber only then are you going to get the meat down into your colon at any significant to any significant degree and at that point you're going to have a different different set of gut bacteria and so you know they're going to have the gut bacteria that's going to cause something harmful and you're going to have enough meat down there to to cause enough of this sort of stuff so let's say let's assume for arguments say the tmao is super bad um it's only going to cause a problem if you're eating you know stupid ass plants and like if you're just eating meat you know you're not going to have the requisite gut bacteria that's going to cause the majority of the problem and you're going to have protective gut bacteria as well as you mentioned and also it's not physically going to get there in the first place so it's just really a moot point and um you know i wanted to ask your sort of question was because this is something that you would have looked into more than me because i've literally just dismissed this as an issue based on that because i'm like well if i'm not eating fiber it's not getting down there in the first place so even if it did make mtor or sorry um tmao like i really don't care because it's not it's not applicable to me or other carnivores and so i've just sort of brushed it aside but um you know it's good to know that uh that wasn't it wasn't completely wrong on that one um you've covered that absolutely expertly that was brilliant from from start to finish that was absolutely once again nail right squarely on the head okay good um so what about what about polyunsaturated uh fatty acids there's there's controversy is obviously there's been a lot of push for this in the with the cholesterol model of heart disease saying you need to replace saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats and even the people that are saying okay well cholesterol may not be that big of an issue but saturated fat still is well saturated fat was only vilified because it increased your cholesterol and so but now they're saying no it's this independent marker of disease but i've certainly seen studies showing that you know when they replaced saturated fats with like linoleic acid ldl cholesterol reduced but actually heart disease and cardiovascular death increased and all-caused mortality increased as well what are your thoughts on polyunsaturated fats well okay so polyunsaturates the problem with them is twofold really and you can also lump monounsaturates into this as well actually in to a lesser degree but they're not innocent innocent in this regard either so first of all polyunsaturates will upregulate two separate inflammatory pathways and down regulate the different one so on average you've got one down and two up inflammation chronic systemic inflammation not a good thing the amount of polyunsaturates in our diet prior to roughly 80 to 100 years ago close to zero so 350 000 years none to speak of 100 years or so let's eat a bunch of that and see what happens well again cause and effect not established because we're talking association here but in the last hundred years what has happened to the rates of obesity diabetes heart disease cancer cerebrovascular accidents all of those are at their root cause chronic systemic inflammatory disorders dysfunctions all of them etiology cause and effect has our inflammation status as a society vastly increased in the last hundred years or so yes is that associated with the period when we started to industrially produce the stuff for food large scale yes does that mean it's the cause and effect established no that's a pretty good association sure there are other things pollution stress lifestyle shame absolutely fine if you like but there is that um monounsaturates down regulate one pathway slightly and up regulate another one markedly so again on balance monounsaturates the good ones are still pro-inflammatory at large in the population as well just not as much as poly so that's the first thing inflammation the second thing is because of the unsaturation of one or more of the carbon-carbon bonds in a mono or polyunsaturate those molecules are prone to doing that basically twisting around one of those carbons and that will form a thing called trans fat the things that will cause trans fats are heat and pressure and certain chemical treatments all three of which you will find in modern industrial food production pressure heat and chemicals trans fats have only just in the last year or two being banned from food in many countries altogether because again it's an association but it's very very powerful the incidence of problems associated with the intake of trans fats is so large as to be you can't ignore this so trans fat's not so good thirdly both mono and polyunsaturates are prone to forming a very very dangerous primary and secondary oxidation products as a function of metabolism as well as as a function of the again the manufacturing process of some of these oils one example i'll give you i was involved in a study with my partner pim johnson j a in it was my hot swedish girlfriend by the way and we did a study a few years back where we looked at the nuclear magnetic resonance spectrum of a bunch of omega-3 oils that we bought commercially we just went to chemist shops in the uk where we were living at the time and we said give us a recommendation on a good omega-3 supplement oil-based supplement sell it to us if you would please mr mrs or miss pharmacist whatever they did we took them back to the lab we analyzed them to find that two-thirds of them were badly tainted with aldehydes for example right out of the bottle aldehydes will destroy lipid rafts tear cell membranes to pieces destroy cell organelles bind to dna and basically cause carcinogenesis and outright cause cell apoptosis at very very low concentrations they are vastly vastly toxic for example so there's that and you'll find the same thing in a bottom of a bottle of olive oil or rice brain oil or any of these kind of things basically so anything with the heart foundation tick on it that's liquid at room temperature that you buy in a bottle whether it's an oil for cooking or salads or whatever else or whether it's a supplement in a pill don't touch it not with a barge pole ever because my is my not advice because i'm not going to give you advice i'm just going to say i don't and i would suggest very strongly that others probably shouldn't either so that's the problem with monounsaturates or the three problems the three clear ones that we can look at reductionist wise and say there they are they can then look holistically and say are there associations yes there are are they powerful yes they are on the flip side are the associations that vilify saturated fat powerful no they are not in fact they are absent there are five major meta-analyses with tens of millions of person years of follow-up now available in the literature five of them and they all agree they also there is no association whatever between the intake of saturated fat and the development of heart disease or cancer or diabetes or anything else so lack of association hypothesis dismissed saturated fat is not a nutrient of concern and in fact many of the world's nutritional authorities are now starting to pick that ball up and actually put that in their position statements that it is no longer considered a nutrient of concern for human beings ansel keys was wrong and criminal actually he cherry picked some data to make it look that way um in order to get something published and become famous and he did he should have spent the rest of his life in prison but having done so instead he's lauded as some kind of great scientist actually he wasn't even a nutritionist he was he was a fish physiologist yeah i studied he studied cold water fish that's what you studied actually anyway that's and so keys for you so saturated bats not a problem polyunsaturates and monounsaturates no good also let's look at the let's look at the stable carbon isotope testing again and nitrogen testing again whoops the fat that was taken was animal fat which is largely saturated yeah four and a half million years of positive selection pressures let's do that let's not believe something that was put together 100 years ago to subserve somebody's bank account yeah which has killed directly in my opinion hundreds of millions if not billions of people in the last 100 years before their time yeah absolutely should not avoid saturated fat and you absolutely should not consignor can consume unsaturated fat under any circumstances yeah you should never pass your lips yeah there you go absolutely great that was great um obviously there are you know people such as uh you know elaine norton who's a phd in nutrition really likes to make sure people know that by yelling at them and saying you know i i must be right you must be wrong because i'm a phd in nutrition which you know i i think again is just um you know you're arguing a weak a weak position if you have to resort to that you know as they say in law if you have the facts or good facts if you don't have the facts argue emotion and so he i see a lot of emotionally driven uh you know arguments um unfortunately from him and obviously there's a lot of people that support him and so forth and tell him what a good boy he is and he obviously responds uh very favorably towards them anyone who says anything uh saying well actually you know what about this he'll either just ignore it if he uh you know doesn't have a good response to it or he'll just yell at them and cuss at them um [Music] so and then obviously you know michael greger and so forth he's a very big proponent of of um veganism and so forth uh lane doesn't doesn't propose uh veganism per se but he thinks that that uh plant-based is better than than uh meat based and i think that he had a recent thing where he talked about if he had to go vegan or a carnivore which he said himself you know he you know he would never sort of be in that position um but for you know argument's sake he would go vegan because he could still get all the protein he needed to you know uh lift weights and have the physique he wanted um and you get all the nutrients and nutrition um but you know obviously you know if you went carnivore you'd be lacking so many nutrients that just wouldn't be possible and obviously be lacking fiber which as we know is an essential nutrient because you know the government said so and and so that's why he would do it um and and that's again you know appealing to authority i mean he's appealing to himself as an authority i'm an authority therefore i'm right um i thought that that wasn't wasn't a great uh analysis i thought that you know he was missing all the fact that you know plants had are missing many many many uh nutrients that we know of uh dozens and meat isn't we know that inuits and so forth and uh and ourselves and um you know and this says nothing about you know the toxic nature of plants and how they defend themselves so i thought that was a bit uh a bit off but what what are your thoughts on on the things that he has to say and you know that um that sort of position yeah i i actually made a response video to lane's video that you're referring to there um in the last week or so it's actually up on my channel now for those that want to watch it it's on my main channel which is that one i'm sorry over there that channel i tend to take the style of um being abrasive i spent an hour going through lane's video and debunking it and probably a fair proportion of that time is me actually swearing at him because that's how he conducts himself and because what he's saying is so wrong and offensive and frankly fundamentally uh imbecilic ridiculous arrogant and the extreme ignorant and the extra just wrong completely wrong i agree with your assessment that it's not a great video i think it's one of his worst not the worst because he's made some real doozies some real shockers actually but it was not great whatsoever and i said so very very clearly using very very very short words some of the worst words you can probably think of actually many many times four letter ones uh not just the ones were there the other one as well um well my people love it if you're using using um yeah if you're using short words you can you can pack more in too so they're getting more content as well and i can use it more often also i didn't really appeal to my own authority which is vastly vastly in advance of his in every way actually clearly i mean i don't need to argue that because my cv's above approach is a matter of public record people can go and check that out for themselves i think one of the things i called him many times was academically i called him a boy in short pants which is what he is he's a bloke with one advanced research degree and a moderately short very short list of quite obscure publications in all sorts of areas actually not even related to his phd which is in nutrition and a phd in nutrition is actually a period of indoctrination as we spoke about earlier in this video the boys are full he really is absolutely one of the worst and i said so so i think that covers that one nothing he said was valid or correct in any way shape or form and um and i've covered it there in that video people want to go and have a look at it at length over an hour yeah definitely um i think you did a a response to michael greger as well he was talking about you know different i think he he was talking about mtor as well or sorry um timo as well but you know he sort of uh yeah was making a lot of a lot of claims and um and arguments as to why we should only be eating plants and specifically we should not be eating meat uh what are your thoughts on on our uh our esteemed colleague dr greger if you don't eat your fruits and vegetables yeah that's basically all he's got again michael michael grigor is not a doctor he's entitled to the to the honorific if you like the professional title absolutely he passed his examinations as an md the boy never even started a residency at any time ever he is not a medical doctor he is not a doctor he has never seen a single patient not one ever yeah and he's also a priest of the church of anorexia began and it's such a paid shell to push their ideology their spin doctory their propaganda their lies their disinformation their pseudoscience and then nonsense plus take a look at the boy honestly would you take health advice from him michael grigor is significantly younger than i am that's all you need to know yeah just go and have a look yeah absolutely if you want to take advice from michael greger on anything frankly that's darwin in action yeah there's um [Music] yeah i think that's a good point too you know something you know i've uh pointed out other people pointed out that you know he doesn't you know not not to you know attack embarrass personally physically i i'm not trying to do that um and but but if you if you do just look at how he's aging as compared to other people around his age and then you and i and you know you know uh dr shawn baker and so forth uh who's who's you know even older than that i think he just turned 55 very good shape does not look his age he actually put up pictures of himself at 42 versus now he actually looks younger now dr baker does and certainly more uh more in shape and he was saying even then when he was 42 he was actually working out way harder than he was doing way more exercise and he did not look like it uh as compared to now um there are a few notable uh you know carnivore um proponents and experts and so forth who have started talking about well actually we're not carnivores completely i think they still use the titles yes we're carnivore or meat bits this time the other but now they're saying that actually you can't survive as a carnivore you can't actually subsist is purely carbon you do need some carbs you do need some fructose or else you're going to have thyroid dysfunction you're going to have you're going to drop your testosterone you're going to have other sorts of organ and hormonal disruption um [Music] the two that comes to mind you know most frequently be like you know carnivore aurelius and uh and dr paul soldino these are guys that um you know i we didn't we didn't touch on it but you we didn't talk about it but um you mentioned you didn't eat organs i don't need organs i don't think you need them um you know the inuits need them they fed them to their dogs and so and we have people living decades with just on skeletal meat so again you know there's not even an association with with poor outcomes if you eat that way um but they were saying you have to have organs you have to have liver and so forth so they would be proponents of that and they've started coming into some sort of health problems and they've gone away from that and from the pure meat and water uh sort of diets and thinking that you know carbohydrates and so forth are a necessary uh addition to the diet as well what are what are your thoughts on that um yeah carl um carnivore aurelius and dr paul saladino are both wrong on that you do not need to eat organs again ever you're quite right against the lack of association there's a long history of human beings selectively eating the mussel meat and leaving organs actually or feeding them to dogs there's also a long history of human beings scavenging on carcasses left behind by lions lions will eat the organs and leave the mussel meat so that's that's the niche we've evolved and great we'll have it absolutely it saves us killing that antelope or whatever else um so there's that absolutely organs can be toxic i'm thinking specifically of the i've never seen an actual bona fide case but there is a possibility of retinol toxicity vitamin a toxicity can occur for example there can be other toxins stored in various organs that can be negative for humans [Music] they can exacerbate some of these problems yes okay in terms of the carbohydrates thing um the exact requirement for carbohydrates in the human diet on a daily and lifelong basis is not one gram ever how do i know that look in any biological textbook you like and look for gluconeogenesis there's the end of that discussion we're done with that um if you have a very very low carbohydrate diet which you go to very very suddenly having come from a standard mixed macronutrient diet without doing a proper [Music] conversion to a to a carnivore diet over actually i think 20 plus or minus six weeks not 20 plus or minus six minutes actually then at some point even several years later you can develop a problem like electrolyte wasting that paul saladino was talking about because you have no insulin spiking to speak of that you would have had before actually you can resolve that poor by eating more protein or making sure you eat once a day and eating your protein in one bowl and not three or four small ebola over the day that can help with insulin because of the gluconeogenic amino acids that will act as a forcing to give you a small spike once or twice a day that's all that's required actually to prevent the renal loss of electrolytes in terms of thyroid function thing all you need to do is cycle out of ketosis once a day or so and how do you do that well you do that by eating once a day within a four hour window and not eating for the other sixteen that will kick you out of ketosis because your body will naturally fluctuate between anabolism and catabolism and the catabolic form will be what's happening in between meals once you're postprandial and that is where you'll be getting your ketones kicking in as soon as you eat a meal containing really any amount of protein that will kick you out of ketosis every single day that's why these people that think ketogenesis and and ketosis is the point of a ketogenic diet which are different by the way that's why they think oh you must avoid protein because it'll kick you out of ketosis well sure if you want a thyroid issue and you want to avoid and ignore your genetic heritage and 350 000 years of history of feasting and fasting go ahead and take up this bad diet of ketogenic production for the sake of ketogenesis alone no just eat once a day within a four-hour window and make sure it's a decent meal of protein and fat no fruits required for all carnivore aurelius and certainly no organs definitely not honey because that's just sugar some even though you say it's not yes it is it's sugar oh but it has a matrix though dr chaffee it has a matrix yeah it's a great buzzword like balance or yeah or safe and effective there are other you know meaningless buzzwords yeah i think um i saw i saw dr saladino uh talking about a conversation that he had with uh dr gundry uh who was was saying hey look you know fructose is a bad idea and and salzino asked him was like okay well but is fruit and honey a bad idea you know you show me a study that says that you know when your fructose content is from fruit and honey this causes a problem um my sort of thoughts and gundry didn't have a response to that my response would be uh well why don't you show me a study that showed shows it doesn't you know show me the study that you've replaced all the fructose and so forth with honey and and uh fruit and it doesn't cause the same problems as whenever anyone else uh takes fructose in from another source you know you you you're trying to prove a negative there you're saying that well that that doesn't exist yeah well but the but the evidence to back your case doesn't exist either so it is it is it's still supposition uh maybe on both sides but you know the balance of evidence right now is showing that fructose isn't something that you want and you say well it could be in the matrix of honey and and fruit that now you want it in that in that form maybe but i think that the burden of proof uh lies on him in that point to to make that point as opposed to someone else trying to you know uh disprove every point that he makes we probably need to stop with this whole show me a study show me this study because there are no studies in human nutrition we cover that right at the beginning they're continuing on any aspect of human nutrition that proves cause and effect anything long term and at the end of the day any clinical studies that do exist are all sort of a few weeks from duration because that's all we can afford to do and that's all epics will allow access that's worthless who cares yeah who cares what we can discover over a few weeks we're interested in 50 60 70 80 year life spans 100 year life spans yeah 120. you know when i was uh you know taking genetics is impossible yeah when i was taking you know genetics at the university of washington or already discovering you know looking at the telomeres and so forth uh that you know genetically we we should have about an average of 120-year lifespan and so that's when they were talking about like oh the you know the first person that's going to live will be 120 has probably already been born and so forth um but what does that mean that means that that genetically we're designed to live 120 years so if you just stay out of your own way if you just don't mess up you should make it to 120 without doing anything special um but we're not we're dying in our 60s and 70s you know that that's literally middle aged according to our genetic capabilities you look back at different historical records certainly the native americans native australians they would all talk about how oh yeah i know that guy's you know that guy was you know i was born when that volcano went off people like jesus that was like 115 years ago he must be lying he must have just been making that up and but you see this again and again and again these people apparently making up you know how old they are in every continent and every situation um but then we you know you look back at um uh herodotus you know the original uh greek historian he chronicled a story and i sort of told the story before but i i like it and um between the emissaries of uh the persian empire that just taken over egypt and the ethiopian kingdom of ethiopia and they were talking to the ethiopian king and the king asked them like you know what does your emperor eat what are your people eating how long do your people normally live and they describe bread and you know wheat and agriculture and making bread and said that you know our people would live 70 years usually 70 years which is roughly what we're getting to now um and the ethiopian king just laughed at him and said well you know if you just eat what comes out of the dirt no wonder you live such short lives you know we only eat boiled meat and we only drink the milk of our cattle and we would live 120 years sometimes longer than that hit the nail on the head you know i mean this is something we know as geneticists now this is what we're genetically designed to live to is 120 years some people say he was just he was just making that up it's like a bible story with you know methuselah living a thousand years and all sorts of things but actually it is exactly what we would expect in our natural state if we were if we were able to live out our genetic potential it got it right there right on the head and then some people were doing something a little better and maybe more physically active whatever and they were living to be on over over 120. so i think that um you know there is information and evidence that exists outside of a studies but even a randomized control study you know one of the the classic ones that were illustrated to you know used to illustrate this point when i was in medical school was the fact that there are no uh studies randomized controlled trial or other showing that parachutes work you know so we have we have no data showing that parachutes work apparently well no of course we don't of course we do we we know uh just from the physical laws what's going to happen to your ass and you know and we've seen people whose parachutes didn't open and we saw what happened and so you know if we were going by this no show me a study show me a study then i would i would uh say that that guy should go skydiving without a parachute and see what he says there's also no uh there's no randomized control trial to show that the pythagorean theorem works well how do how can we trust that now you know because there's no study saying it but you know i think you make you know very rightly make the point that uh you know there is evidence outside of of these studies and also the studies that we have uh are are mediocre at best because we simply can't control them and run them properly as we would like to and need to to get these sort of causative relationships um professor k i am so happy that you you came on i really appreciate it and i've really enjoyed the talk i think that was very very beneficial i hope everyone finds it uh to be such is there anything else you you'd like to say and obviously please tell us where we can find you and uh and how we can uh come and support you absolutely dr anthony chafee thank you very very much for having me as i said right at the beginning it's an absolute pleasure and privilege to be here um you are one of the most incredible resources out there for people because i have not heard you say anything that i didn't agree with a hundred percent and therefore the quality must be higher because i'm never wrong on anything ever i just asked my partner she'll tell you um no seriously where can you find me look as i've got five or six different youtube channels the the the two or three main ones that i kind of promote mostly are that one there uh it's called the meat militia basically that's a bit of a comedy channel that's a channel where in i play a character who is like the five star general of the meat militia he's a bloke called the field marshall and he has a little yellow sidekick who likes to swear as much as he does um and you know we it's a bit monty python just gets a bit humorous and that's the kind of thing getting to that my other one is that one there that's my absolute main channel that's that's the barca health science channel that's the one where i'm cursing at vegans um yelling at people who are wrong on the interwebs and but i'm actually using science to do it with it's not just abusing people for the sake of it and appealing to authority for the sake of it's just like well actually no i really am an expert here here's my background and you really aren't and here's why what you're saying is not only wrong but dangerous and please stop doing it so that's that's that channel um i have a third channel which is called the institute for health science integrity that's the collar entire all professorial no swear words channel um that one's got about 10 of the following of the main channel as i say i'd like it to have as much because actually i think that information is as good if not better go and check that one out as well uh the fourth channel i have is called it's round like all one word it's round like and that's a channel explaining to flat earth there's why they're wrong basically it's not it's not flat it's a black steroid demonstrably so and it's all about the science behind that and then i've got a few other channels that are just much much smaller than all of those and they're just sort of a bit of fun so that's that's where you find me if you want to book in the consultations if you want to buy merchandise if you want to support my patreon channel which helps me keep the lights on and buy it equipment that drives all this kind of nonsense behind me at the moment then you would go to b i t dot l y forward slash b a rt hyphen k-a-y um and that's a one-stop shop that's a link off page where you can join patreon you can subscribe to my channel you can send me money on paypal you can buy merchandise you can buy consultancies um for incredibly cheap frankly it's a bit of a joke what i'm charging for consultancies based on my knowledge and experience take advantage of that [Music] they're the main ways you can support also if you don't know about it those of you that know anything about youtube or watching the youtube there's a new feature that is incredibly powerful that we should all be using to support our favorite creators if you look underneath any youtube video that you're watching on the right hand side at the bottom sort of down about there you'll see a pair of scissors icon underneath the video it's called clips hit that button pick a section of a video that you've enjoyed whether it's something funny or informative or a good boot or a highlight whatever it is and it's anywhere between a five and sixty second time slots you pull the slightest where you want to start and finish and then that will create a url for that section of that video that you can post on any social media site hey look at this and they people will see that on your fake pages or your instagram or whatever it is and they'll click on it and they'll watch it and they'll go goodness me that was good and then that thing comes up saying do you want to watch the rest of this video or subscribe to this channel etc guys help us out yeah brilliant can you can you see the power of that as a marketing tool get into it yeah absolutely right that's me i'm done yeah i appreciate it so much i really do no no thank you and i'll put put links to everything that you uh said in there in the show notes as well and great well thank you very much professor k is absolute pleasure hope we can uh do it again see you then see you later