Logan Duvall (00:05.055)
Dr. Anthony Chafee, I'm so excited to be visiting with you my friend. So for, just kinda kick it off, you are a neurosurgeon, American neurosurgeon in Australia that is a proponent of the carnivore diet. That seems like a lot of things going on right there.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (00:27.578)
Well, first of all, neurosurgical residents, so I haven't finished up yet. But yeah, so I've had an interest in diet nutrition and how that affects health and disease, but also athletic performance. That's how I originally got interested in it. You know, I was an athlete growing up and I was an all-American rugby player and then went on and played sort of at the top levels in the US and Canada and then over in England as well. And so nutrition was always important to me. I wanted to be my best. And so...
Also I was pre-med so I was looking at biology classes, botany classes, nutrition classes, it all fit together. And so I, yeah, I just sort of came across some information in my undergraduate degree that made me think of it differently. I was taking botany, I was taking biology, I was learning plants have toxins, they don't want you to eat them, they're living organisms, they like staying living organisms, and so they defend themselves like anything else.
I took cancer biology, we learned that there were dozens if not over a hundred carcinogens in normal produce, vegetables, and fruit that we eat on a daily basis, and they're actually quite abundant as well. My cancer biology professor even professed that he did not eat salads, he did not eat vegetables, he wouldn't let his kids eat vegetables because in his words, plants are trying to kill you, so don't eat them, we're not designed to eat them. And that made sense because our ancestors have been eating meat.
since the dawn of man and during the ice ages, there really isn't anything else to eat except meat. So we're adapted to meat, we're designed to eat meat, and whatever you're designed to eat, whatever you're adapted to eat, that's what's optimal for you to eat. And so it all made sense. And so just going on that premise and understanding just how toxic even normal vegetables were, I just said, right, I'm not eating these things.
and I'm not putting my body and I felt absolutely amazing for doing that. And I only ate meat just like our ancestors would have. And I felt absolutely incredible because of it. After that, I just started digging into the research, digging into literature, trying to figure out what we could prove, what we knew and what, you know, what we had spelled out, what else we needed to figure out. But there's actually an abundance of information out there that supports this.
Logan Duvall (02:47.939)
There really is. And so where I'm coming from, I'm kinda caught in this weird situation. Like, you know, where I have been a proponent of meat-based, but I started out, after my son was diagnosed with cancer, reading everything I could. And the very first thing that I got hold of was the China study, right? And so that completely terrified me of meat. We cut it out. I just kept diving in. But pretty soon after...
I got a hold of Steven Gundry's The Plant Paradox. And that is when I started questioning about everything. So I'm sitting there, my son's five, stage four, Wilms tumor, so kidney, and we're terrified, right? Like looking for whatever we possibly can. And so as I kept progressing in there, went from China study to Plant Paradox to Terry Walls' work where she started incorporating organ meats and that's where that shift.
came, so it's been a long, long drawn out process for me to even experiment with carnivore. When you are talking about the undergraduate with the cancer biology and plant toxins, that's a hard one for me too based off of I have a farmer's market to where I sell produce for the vast majority of my living, right? But I still want to be open and objective and I want to...
to dive into what works and what we need to be concerned on. So can you go back to that a little bit on like, plants are having things in them that we shouldn't eat. Can we dive into that?
Dr Anthony Chaffee (04:21.994)
Sure, so it again comes back to biology. Things want to live. Everything is trying to eat each other. Plants and animals, they're all trying to live and at the expense of others if necessary. And for animals, it has to be at the expense of something else. We're heterotrophs. All animals are heterotrophs, meaning that we have to eat something. Something has to die for us to live, be that plants or animals, fungus, algae.
something like that. Something has to go. And so everything has a defense as well, because it's kill or be killed. It's very wild out in nature. And so if you don't have a defense, you're dead. Nothing has made it through to this point without being able to defend itself, otherwise it would go extinct. 97% of species are extinct. And that's because they weren't
Dr Anthony Chaffee (05:20.01)
of their predators or competition. Plants are no different. While animals can run away or fight back, plants can't. And so they have to use other means of defenses. They have a lot of defenses. There are a lot of very interesting things that they do. They can grow little buds on their leaves that look like caterpillar eggs. And so butterfly goes like, oh, that one already has eggs. I'll go lay my eggs on something else. So pretty clever. They also make latex, which is a...
chemical use for gloves or really sort of rubbery sort of thing, but the plant uses it as a defense. So when an animal starts chewing that leaf, it starts secreting this tacky sap latex and it actually physically glues the mouth of the animal shut. And so now that animal can't eat that plant anymore. So it's pretty elegant. The animal now can't open its mouth anymore, so it can't chew that plant anymore. Saves the plant.
problem for the animal is that it usually dies after that because it can't get its mouth unglued. So the plant is more than happy to defend its life with your life. And that's just one example of many, many. So plants are really the great chemists of the world. They make about one million different chemicals, most of which are defensive in orient. And so they can make latex, which just sort of physically stops you. They can make thorns or hairs or different sorts of things.
poisons, they can have nettles that have little stinging poisons, you know, poison IV, poison O, those sorts of things, and or they can be physically poisonous. So there are a number of different classifications of these toxins that they make. So there are cyanogenic glycosides, so they make cyanide. Now cyanide is poisonous to all living things, so they can't keep it in that form. So we keep it in two different forms.
And then when you start chewing it and crushing it, so it's masochism, when animals chewing it, it releases those two chemicals. They join to make hydrogen cyanide. And that, it's sort of like a kill switch. You know, you have like a, mom's like, okay, you kill me, I'm gonna drop this and it's gonna get all of us, right? So that's what the plant's doing. And so you start biting that and it releases cyanide. And so you get hit and that tissue gets hit as well. So 2,500 different plants that we know of use hydrogen cyanide.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (07:44.642)
there are things called oxalates which form into oxalic acid which people know if they've had rust on their house or somewhere they can make oxalic acid diluted in water, they spray it or scrub it and it just strips the iron and rust off of their house. Well, that does that in your body as well and it strips different minerals like iron, like calcium and others from your body, from your blood, makes oxalate crystals.
in your tissue, can damage multiple organs. In fact, people will not know about gout, but gout isn't just from uric acid. It used to be classified as five different causes of gout. One of those was oxalates. Now they sort of say like pseudo gout. It's like true gout is oxalate or uric acid crystals, and then pseudo gout. So they play around with these things. But as recently as 2000, people were talking about, actually there are five causes
gout and one of them were oxalates. So that can cause a lot of problems. Oxalate poisoning can cause a lot of problems. There are a lot of oxalates in spinach and other sorts of leafy greens. Liam Hemsworth, the actor, he actually went to the hospital with acute oxalate poisoning because he was drinking green spinach smoothies every morning for three weeks.
and he had been on a plant-based diet for a while, so this had been building up for a while, and so he put himself in the hospital and had massive kidney stones, had to get those surgically removed, and people, there's actually reports in the literature, case reports of people having a big dose of oxalates and dying, they actually died from acute oxalate poisoning. And they can make kidney stones as well, so around 75% of kidney stones are calcium oxalate stones. So the oxalates,
find the calcium in your blood, strip it out, and this will actually cause deficiency because your body has to then strip calcium out of your bones in order to keep your serum calcium up or else your heart will stop because calcium is very important. And so that can cause problems as well. There's a lot of calcium in spinach, but because there's so many oxalates, it's not actually bioavailable. There was a study, I believe in the 50s, where they gave people a lot of spinach to see if that would raise their calcium because they could see that there was a lot of calcium in it.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (10:07.926)
but this goes out to bioavailability. That's another way that plants defend themselves is they bind up nutrients in ways that we can't access them. And that's a defense because now it's not as profitable for us to eat that plant. So we won't do it or we won't thrive if we do it. And so in this study, they found that even though they gave people calcium rich spinach, their calcium levels actually dropped because they had so much calcium, it was actually bound up. They couldn't actually get the calcium in the spinach.
and actually stripped out more of the calcium out of people's bodies. Then there's stuff called lectins, which are a huge class of chemicals. And there are a lot of these things. Animals make them as well, but they don't seem to cause us any harm. The ones in plants are very, very toxic. So maybe you've heard of a poison that sometimes people use called ricin. Have you heard of that? Yeah. So ricin is a lectin.
and that's in the castor beans, that's sort of in the shell around a castor bean. What is a bean? What is a legume? What is a seed? What is a nut? What is a grain? That's a plant's baby, right? So that's gonna make a new plant. So it's growing that seed in order to make a new plant. So all living things tend to protect their babies more than anything, and plants are no different. So seeds, grains, legumes, nuts, all that sort of thing, that...
tends to be where you'll find the highest concentration of these poisons. So in castor beans, they have little casing around the castor bean and that has, that's packed with ricin. And that is the single most toxic substance we know of on earth. One microgram per kilogram of body weight will kill anyone. And most animals too. I don't know of any animals that are actually adapted to ricin.
but it will kill most animals, if not all of them. And there are other lectins like gluten, wheat germ or glutenin that can bind in our gut and rip up our gut lining at a microscopic level, at a molecular level, and actually cause what's called leaky guts. So it causes gaps in the tight junctions between the cells. And so instead of having barrier protection, all of a sudden it's flapping loose and things can sort of get in your stream, just like having little cuts on your skin.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (12:28.31)
things can get in bacteria can get it lectins can get it other toxins can get it and your body looks at these are what we support we don't like these we don't want these and so they make antibodies towards them and because they make antibodies towards them if people are genetically susceptible you can get actually cross reactions called molecular mimicry and those antibodies can be close enough to something on our cells
Dr Anthony Chaffee (12:55.946)
that's a suggested cause of autoimmunity. So that Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, Graves' disease, all these different sorts of things that seems to be from exposure to lectins and other plant toxins that get in our body through these little gaps. And there are many, many more. Furanocoumarins, all citrus have furanocoumarins, parsnips, celery.
and these are light sensitive, so UV light will react with them and they'll bind to proteins and DNA irreversibly and cause damage. So there are actual case studies, and this is something that's actually known about in dermatology, but not everybody studies dermatology, and so they don't know about it, but it's called celery dermatitis. You eat a lot of celery, you pick a lot of celery, you handle celery, you get that sap on your hands, and people burn like crazy.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (13:53.166)
gloves and long sleeve shirt because if they get that sap on their skin in the sun, they'll get bad chemical burns. The broad name for it is phytophotodermatitis. So phyto from plants, phyto from light, dermatitis damage to your skin. And so you can actually look in the literature and find cases and examples of people getting second degree burns from squeezing limes in the sun.
I've seen pictures of this with these kids with these just massive chemical burns down their arms, but it happens to adults too. It's not just kids who are susceptible to this. One little girl, I saw a case report of her and that was actually reported in the newspaper where she was just sort of teething so the mom gave her a piece of celery to sort of like gnaw on so she could help get her teeth out. So just...
little juices from the celery was just sort of going on our face and they're just sitting out in the sun. It wasn't like a particularly hot day or anything. And this poor little girl had these massive burns all over her face. It was really, really sad. And so that's another way that these things defend themselves. You see animals, normally it doesn't happen to wild animals, but animals that are in a pasture or something like that. They run out of their forage or feed.
They'll start eating other plants that they normally wouldn't and they can get really bad reactions and some of these are these photosensitive reactions. So you'll see these animals, they'll have just horrible blisters and burns all over their face, any sort of exposed skin. It doesn't have hair and fur all over it. And actually there are a lot of illnesses in livestock where if they eat the wrong sort of plant, they'll get very, very sick. So big head, lip, neck, crazy cow syndrome, big tongue. These are all...
names for syndromes that actually are from eating plants that they're not evolved and biologically designed to eat. And so they have toxins in them that they can't handle. Actually big head is from oxalates, from oxalate poisoning in cows. It actually strips the calcium out of their skull and their bones and then your body tries to rebuild the bones but it actually does it in sort of a sloppy way and it sort of gets big lumpy sort of big head. And that's actually from oxalates.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (16:13.91)
So we know about these things in animal husbandry, and then we just think, can't happen to us. No, we're perfect. And so, but of course it does, and it can. And so we're actually getting sick and we're getting diseases that aren't actually diseases. They're actually poisons. We're getting poisoned, low grade, long-term, over and over, day after day, and it builds up. And just like if you smoke two cigarettes, it's not gonna kill you. But if you smoke...
pack of cigarettes a day for 30 years, it's probably going to do some damage. But there are people that smoke their entire lives and never get cancer. They'll probably get emphysema, probably get heart disease. But my grandmother smoked from when she was 13 to 76 and she ended up living to 93 and she had emphysema quite badly. But she didn't get all the other sort of things and she lived a very long time. So it's not...
It's not that, something doesn't have to be able to kill you that day to be poisonous. I don't think anybody's denying that cigarettes are bad for you or that they're poisonous. And certainly all the chemicals that they put in it, formaldehyde and things like that they use to cure tobacco is definitely poisonous. And yet it doesn't kill you that day. Well, can't be poisoned then. Oh, I ate a salad the other day. I didn't die, therefore it's not poison. Yeah, long term it builds up just like alcohol is poison.
It doesn't kill you in a day. It doesn't make you very sick in a day. It doesn't give you diabetes in a day. It takes years. It takes decades, but it does. It gives you fatty liver disease. It gives you diabetes and it can predispose you to a host of other metabolic issues. Well, so can eating things with these other toxins, these other low-grade poisons that cause low-grade harm to us, but it builds up and it builds up and it builds up. And I think that's what we're seeing. I think that's why we've seen this massive uptick.
and the so-called chronic diseases that were very, very rare before the 1980s and now they're just getting going higher and higher and higher in prevalence every decade. I think I just saw a statistic today where it said that now the autism rate in kids or in 2018 or something like that was like 1 in 25. It's quite common. And sort of 10 years or so before that, it was 1 in 44.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (18:40.554)
And then in 1995, it was one in 500. So what the hell's going on there? You know, why is that happening? Well, we just weren't diagnosing it as well. Okay, well show me all the 70 year old people with autism then. You know, if we weren't seeing this, if we just weren't diagnosing this, well where were all the other people that have had this and have grown older now? They don't exist. So this is new. And you know, if we hadn't been able to diagnose it in the past, we absolutely were paying attention by the 1990s.
every single decade after that, this has gotten more and more and more prevalent. So has heart disease, so is cancer, so as diabetes, so as autoimmune issues. I mean, you're telling me that no one's going to notice when someone has Crohn's disease and has bloody diarrhea 30 times a day, that probably just didn't see that back in 1976. Well, of course they did. It just didn't exist in the numbers that they had.
that they have now. And I'm not the first person who said this. In 1975, there's a Dr. Voeklin who wrote a book called The Stone Age Diet. He said, hey, look, we're carnivores. We're apex predators. Apex predators are by definition carnivores. And this is all the evidence to show that we're apex predators. And I believe he was a gastroenterologist and he just basically argued, if you stop eating plants, my profession doesn't need to exist. These things go away. These problems go away.
And so these problems are a product of the food that we're eating. More people wrote this. You'll go back. There was an Harvard professor, Wilhammer Steffanson, who lived with the Inuit for 12 years, learned their language, was a polar explorer and ethnologist, and wrote a book called The Fat of the Land. And he found that, hey, they're just eating meat and they're as healthy as hell. They're not getting the diseases of the West that we're getting in civilization. And he wrote a book. This was called...
cancer is a disease of civilization. They just don't get it in these primitive populations when they're only eating what we are designed to eat, what we're normally adapted to eat. Before that, in the 1800s, there's Dr. J. H. Salisbury wrote a book called The Relationship of Alimentation and Disease, the 30-year research project into the optimal diet for human beings, lived with the Plains Indians that were just eating bison, they weren't getting sick, they were living to be 120, 130 years old.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (21:05.686)
People say like, well, they were just saying that. Well, we know it's geneticists now, that you're designed based on your chromosomes, based on your genes, we are designed to live 120 years on average. Meaning that if you just stay out of your own way, you don't mess up, you should make it to 120 without doing anything special. So why are we dying in our 70s, 80s, 90s? My grandmother died at 93. She died 30 years young, right? Well, she smoked a lot, but she ate a lot of bacon. She ate eggs every day, right? And so...
Logan Duvall (21:33.64)
Shit, baby.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (21:34.806)
that at least helped. But he wrote this book and he said, and it's called The Relationship of Alimentation and Disease. So, alimentation is digestion. So, the relationship between the food that we eat and the diseases that we get. And he showed that you could, that the people that were eating plants, this was long before processed foods, you know, sugars and seed oils and all that sort of stuff was prevalent. So this was just…
people eat a lot more grains and things like that. Ancient Egypt, the Ebers Papyrus, they knew what angina was, they knew what heart attacks were, they knew what heart disease was. They were eating a lot of grains. And Salisbury saw this as well. And he showed that you can reverse things like rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's, gout. Um.
you know uh... blind disease chronic line disease and even help people get over tuberculosis in the eighteen hundreds hundred years before we had antibiotics rate useful medications any of these two any of these illnesses they show that you could reverse these things or at least put them into remission by putting them on a pure red meat and water diet as well first bad diet was referred to historically as the first bad diet but that was it yet people are on a just a red meat water diet and people took off with a
became much, much more healthy. And this carried for a long time. And now we've had processed food companies and the vegan push and the vegetarian push started in the 1800s and went on from there. It was they, like the Seventh-day Adventists who pushed a vegetarian diet because they said meat was evil because it causes lustful feelings. And then you shouldn't eat it because of that because lust is a sin. And so they pushed that. And Dr. Kellogg, Harvey Kellogg was a Seventh-day Adventist. He started...
Kellogg's cereals, about 36 other cereal companies started up around him, and that was the induction of processed food. And so they've been pushing that sort of plant-based narrative, and they've actually been funding all the research and nutritional studies. They've been peopling and populating the guidelines, you know, the boards that decide all the guidelines. They're on the WHO. They have all these people placed, and then they're pushing this sort of ideology.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (23:51.138)
But the simple fact remains, plants have toxins that we're not designed to weather, and we can get hurt from, be it short term or long term. If you get lost in the woods and you run out of food, obviously you can't eat any random plant, right? Most of them will make you very sick, because out of the 340,000 plants in the world, less than 1% are edible, meaning that the rest will kill you, right, because they're toxic. So the ones that we eat that are edible,
That doesn't mean that they are devoid of poison because they'll kill other animals. This is why we have dogs and cats. We're like, okay, you can't let a cat eat avocado. That's poison to a cat, right? You can't let dogs eat chocolate. That's poison to a dog. So there are these poisons in plants that we can do something with, but that doesn't mean that they're perfectly safe for us. That's something that we need to recognize.
these vegan proponents, plant-based proponents, saying that we actually should eat things that we haven't been eating until very recently that maybe didn't even exist a century ago, like seed oils. That makes absolutely no sense. There's an immutable law of biology, which is that of adaptation. If you are exposed to something, you're exposed to a stressor, you will adapt to it or you'll die if it's a big enough stressor.
what you've been eating for millions of years, you are by definition adapted to it. That's going to be very good for you, right? Just like koalas are adapted to eucalyptus, cows are adapted to grass, pandas are adapted to bamboo, we're adapted to meat because we've been eating that for millions of years. Some people have had exposure to agriculture about eight to 10,000 years ago. There's actually a clear distinction in the fossil record.
smaller brains, smaller jaws, crooked teeth, shorter legs, signs of poor wound healing, signs of infection and things like that. We got very sick directly after agriculture, but the people that survived had different adaptations. So the children of that, people of European descent and others who had agriculture early on, we're descended from people that had adaptations.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (26:09.062)
And so we have some adaptations, some protections to some of these plants, but not all plants, just certain plants. And we're eating a lot of plants that didn't even exist 10,000 years ago because we've made them through hybridization. But that doesn't help any of the other people that didn't have agriculture until the European powers came and visited them, like the Native Australians, like the Native Americans, who are four times as likely.
You had obesity, heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, cancer, and all the rest when eating a Western diet, but only when eating a Western diet. So what does that mean? That means the food is causing the disease because if they don't eat the food, they don't get the disease. And from the West, we get the disease, we just get a lower rate, right? So Native Americans, Native Australians, they were hunters. They ate meat and they did not get the so-called diseases of the West. And that's what they were called. They're like, wow.
These guys aren't getting the same diseases that we get in England and Spain and so on. And so, okay, fine. When they started being incorporated into Western society and started eating the food of the West, that's when they started getting the diseases of the West. It's very pinpoint right there. That's when it happened. You can see this in the Inuit. Over the course of the 20th century, early 20th century, no cancer. And then it's like...
20 years, like, okay, a bit of cancer. Another 20 years, okay, a little more cancer, a little more cancer, a little more cancer, as they're being more involved in Western society and eating more Western food. And now they're more susceptible to it. Heart disease, same thing. As far as the 1990s, there was very little heart disease in the Inuit, even though on average they started smoking from eight years old, right? That's a heart disease risk. And they ate a whole bunch of
blubber and saturated fat, my god, that's the cause of heart disease according to some people, right? And yet they weren't getting it as much as the rest of Canadians. Even though they weren't just looking at the Inuit who only ate meat, they were looking at them as a people. So some were eating in the cities, some were eating Western food, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, and the rest. And yet they, as a whole, they weren't getting as much heart disease. And they said, okay, well...
Dr Anthony Chaffee (28:28.81)
in particular say, they said, okay, well, maybe they're just genetically protected from heart disease because they've just been eating fatty meat all the time, so they're perfectly adapted to that. And they found actually no, they have all the genetic risk factors for heart disease. They have none of the protections. So actually they are more predisposed to getting heart disease, not less. So obviously, and they didn't know what to conclude. They were just like, okay, we don't know what's going on here. So obviously...
you know, these genetic factors aren't really all they're cracked up to be or maybe there's something else going on because we have no idea because these guys are super high risk. Well, it's because saturated fat, animal fat is not a risk. It's actually protection. It's actually good for you. Smoking is not. That's not a good factor. But you know, it's eating these...
Logan Duvall (29:14.891)
So you have definitely made the case for the plants, the plant issues. And it's very eye-opening. And I think that is, on top of using plants and making the processed foods, that's led to the vast majority of the issues we face. And based off of Thomas Seyfried's work and the metabolic approach to cancer, when we're looking at metabolism, it messes it up, right?
through deficiencies, through all these things. So help me now move to the proponents and kind of those big questions around carnivore. Like, what about the lack of fiber? What about the gut microbiome? What should we be eating as far as some sort of a hierarchy? Because...
Dr. Chaffee, what we're trying to do is build out a localized, resilient food system that is nutrient dense. So we have to support agriculture in a way that provides food for our locale. So help me address some of those concerns, the fiber, the microbiome, and the hierarchy of meats. I'm in central Arkansas. What can we focus on to have this prosperity diet, in your opinion?
Dr Anthony Chaffee (30:34.45)
So, well, I mean, obviously the issue with fiber is that it was never actually proven that it was any good for us in the first place. It was argued that we should have it in the 1980s because everyone started getting constipated and we started getting fat. It was all about fat busters and all that sort of stuff because in 1977, the USDA declared that saturated fat cholesterol caused heart disease and the McGovern report came out and said the same thing.
the people that, well the head of the USDA was actually on the payroll of the sugar companies and he was bought and paid for and he was paid to do that. So that was actually published in the Journal of American Medical Association in 2016. They published actual internal memos from the sugar companies back in the 60s detailing how they paid off three Harvard professors to falsify data and publish fraudulent studies to make it appear as if cholesterol caused heart disease when it was really sugar or was likely sugar and there was studies showing that there was a strong correlation.
which over at heart disease and uh... and then to say that sugar was safe those what they concluded that it was just an empty calories stops no problem and one of the professors now they didn't disclose that by the way they never disclose that they that was being funded by the children's companies which is illegal and unethical one of those professors was the head of the u.s. t a and he was he who authored and published that nineteen seventy seven u.s.t. declarations so we know that's fraud we know that's uh... con and bribery
So you throw it out. Anytime you have something like that, you just throw it out. You have something that's known, fraud, you throw it out and you start over. But in the 1980s, we didn't know that at the time. And so people stopped eating fat. And they're like, oh, gotta get rid of fat. Well, fat actually drives your digestion. Fat is actually what lubricates things and keeps your stool soft, is the excess fat that you can't absorb. And so now all of a sudden everyone's getting constipated. And they're also getting fat, by the way. People started gaining weight.
dramatically, the obesity rate was only around 8% in 1980. It sort of increased dramatically after that. Now it's 42%. A hundred years ago, it was 1.2%. Very, very, very low. So it dramatically rose after that report saying, don't eat fat. It makes you fat, gives you heart disease. Just the opposite. The heart disease rate has tripled since the 1980s.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (32:59.266)
and some misleading people will try to mislead you and divert and say, well, the cardiovascular mortality rate actually peaked in the 1960s and started going down after the 70s right in time for these measures with cholesterol. That's not what we said. We said the rate of heart disease. That's gone up. People are having first time heart attacks. It's going up.
because we have open heart surgery, we have bypass surgery, we have stenting, we have early detection, people are taking aspirin, they've stopped smoking. And so there are a lot of different things that we change and we have better interventions. You can have a clot, we can send up a little wire up there, pull out that clot, put in a stent and you don't die that day. And you don't die six months from now when your heart stops working because it's so damaged. Or you have a stroke and you can go up, pull that out or give a clot busting drug.
So we have better interventions now that save people's lives, but more people are having their first heart attack than they were in the 1980s. But we've reduced cholesterol. We've put on cholesterol-lowering medications. We've stopped eating meat. We've stopped smoking. We've started doing all these good things. Heart disease is going up. So we know that's wrong. But in the 80s, they didn't and everyone was getting constipated. I remember this as a kid actually. They were saying, well, you should eat fiber because it's bulking and it works with your
with your gut to use peristalsis to move things through. But why didn't we need that before 1986? You know? Did our entire digestive tract as a species change while we were alive? I don't think so. So you never really needed fiber. And there was another argument they made for fiber is that you should eat a lot of plants, you should eat a lot of vegetables because they have fiber and so you don't have...
really any nutrition in it. It's just like eating a plastic bag, it has no calories, it has no nutrients, but it feels like you're full because it has bulk to it. And so that will stretch out your stomach, it will release a hormone called leptin, and your brain will say, oh, we're full, no problem. And there's something called the celery diet, which is funny because they would just, they said it actually takes more energy and more calories to process, digest, and pass celery.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (35:25.722)
you actually get from the celery. So you can eat as much celery as you want and you'll just have negative calories. You'll just be losing this. Never happened. Never worked. People were miserable. They were sick. They were bloated. They were hungry as hell and were not happy. And people were just getting fatter and fatter and sicker and sicker. So that was the argument with fiber. And since then, there have been a number of studies. Not all of them are great.
I've read a lot of these things. I've had people say, well, what about this meta-analysis? And meta-analysis sounds really strong. But if you have a lot of really garbage studies that don't really show much, and you put them in a meta-analysis, it's garbage in, garbage out. You put in a bunch of garbage, and then your result is going to be garbage as well. So none of these things are very high-quality evidence. And some of these things, they show, like, well, it reduces.
Blood pressure as well as I okay, so I went through you know, I have like 30 studies in this meta-analysis I just went through you know, just three at random They all had you know, they dropped blood pressure by like one point two points like okay Technically, yes, you've dropped blood pressure, but it's like it's really not anything to write home about You also have to think about what the mechanism of what hybrid does in your body you cannot
break it down. No vertebrate animal can break down fiber. None. Herbivores that eat fiber, they actually cultivate bacteria that eat the fiber and actually produce as waste fat and protein. We can't do that anymore. There's actually further evidence that we're not supposed to be eating it because other animals can. All the primates can't like gorillas. Gorillas just eat green leaves and they get all this protein. No, no, no. It's the bacteria. They can break down fiber with their bacteria.
and they absorb fat and protein. We can't do that. We need to eat the gorilla and get his fat and protein. That's how we survive. When you eat fiber, you can't really do anything with it. It actually forms a lattice and it can actually form barrier protection. It can actually stop you from absorbing about 30% of what you're eating. Okay, whether you're eating a lot of high octane crap and a lot of processed foods and sugars and carbs and other sorts of plant toxins that aren't great for you, sure.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (37:43.69)
Reducing that by 30% is a great idea, right? But if you're eating that with meat, which is nearly 100% bioavailable, perfect nutrition, no toxins, you don't want that. You don't want to delay that. And there are other things in plants that actually delay, that stop you from absorbing things and then binding nutrients, blocking your enzymes to break things down and so on. But just with fiber, it's never really been shown convincingly.
that this is something that's actually good for us. It's been pretty garbage studies that have shown maybe a bit of help. But when compared to eating a standard American diet, which is by all accounts garbage, and so if you're reducing your absorption of that garbage, you get an improvement. Great. They're not doing that with people like myself who aren't eating fiber because they're only eating meat, and you don't need fiber. So I don't think it's going to cause an improvement for me. Now, there are other studies that...
have shown in people that were symptomatically constipated, had painful bloating, bleeding when they passed stools, and just difficult symptomatic constipation. They took them and they split them up into four groups. They said, okay, you keep eating the same amount of fiber, you increase fiber, you decrease fiber and you guys eliminate fiber completely. And the results were the opposite of what everyone would have guessed, which is...
People who stayed the same stayed the same, and people who increased fiber actually got worse. People who reduced fiber got better. People who eliminated fiber completely resolved their symptoms, completely. Okay, and there are studies with Crohn's and ulcerative colitis showing that if you remove carbohydrates and fiber, you can keep people in remission up to 51 months without medication, just by removing fiber and carbohydrates. So is it the carbohydrates, is it the fiber, or is it something that comes with both?
don't really know but that's an interesting study. And the list goes on, there's actually a study with over 2,000 patients that actually was shown that the people with the high fiber group actually died more often of heart disease. Don't know what the mechanism there is but that's the association. That's 2,000 people and that was a long-term large study and they showed that the more
Dr Anthony Chaffee (40:10.318)
the more likely they were to die of a heart attack or a stroke. So I don't think you need fiber. There's also other studies that show a strong correlation between increased fiber and increased bowel motions and colon disease called diverticulosis. So does this help you? Why would it help you? It's something that we can't absorb, we can't utilize, and it's difficult for us to process. No animal eats things that they can't digest. Why would that?
Why would you eat something if you can't even use it or digest it? The animals that eat fiber can use fiber. We can't, so we shouldn't be using it. There are no animals that I know of that eat fiber that cannot process fiber at all. It just doesn't exist. So I don't think that's something that we should eat. As to the microbiome, well that's simple. There are studies with the Inuit that actually show that just eating meat...
gives you the best microbiome you could possibly get. So, yeah, so just eat meat. If you're eating what you're designed to eat, your body's gonna work the way it's designed to work. We have a symbiotic relationship with these microbes. Our oral biome, our gut biome, these are all things that we've been living with as a species forever. And so what you eat, your biome eats. Your oral biome eats, and if you're eating just meat, you're eating what you're supposed to eat, you're gonna have healthy white teeth.
that don't get cavities, don't get rot. And that's why animals in the wild don't rot out their teeth. The Maasai and the Native Americans and Native Australians, when Westerners came there, it is all these accounts of these very dark skinned people with bright white teeth. They don't have toothbrushes, they don't have dentists, certainly not in 1600s. And yet, why did they still have their teeth? Why is it that before the agricultural revolution,
Sometimes the only remains of a skeleton that you had was the teeth and they were perfectly formed, no cavities, no problems. Then 10,000 years ago, hard line, the teeth of the skeletons were rotten, misformed, crooked and diseased, right? Because you're eating something you're not supposed to eat, you're going to cultivate bacteria that you're not supposed to cultivate and it's going to damage your enamel, it's going to damage your teeth. The same thing goes for your gut.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (42:35.422)
If you're eating what you're supposed to eat, you're going to have the gut biome that you're supposed to have, as evidenced by the Inuit who are eating what they're supposed to eat. If they're eating only meat, they have the gut biome they're supposed to have. And that makes sense because what we are supposed to eat that's going to feed our gut biome, and, you know, if that is indeed our optimal diet, we should get our optimal microbiome from that. And we do.
Logan Duvall (43:05.419)
Well, let's break into the meat. I think that's great. And I personally have experienced long stretches of carnivore, and it is the best that I've felt. And there has been no constipation ever when I have gone on large time periods of strickly carnivore. So I can attest to that. And the fiber things that the, I mean, just read the literature. I mean, it's there. It's not really that hidden if you try to look.
On meat, so we are an agrarian state. We are home to Tyson, you know, so chicken central. And I really want to understand that chicken component from where you are, and then go into how you would rank the meat, please. I have come to the conclusion, I feel like eggs and bone broth are like superfoods, but that chicken muscle meat is not. I don't even know that we should be eating it.
And so I really wanted you to go into that from your perspective and should we be eating chicken?
Dr Anthony Chaffee (44:11.562)
Well, it's not as ideal as other things, especially like the ruminant animals, like the ruminant meat like cows and bison or venison, sheep, things like that. That's actually something that Dr. Salisbury noticed in the 1800s was that beef was A number one, lamb was a distant second. If you're going to eat red meat, you want to go for beef. So they sort of rank that out.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (44:41.002)
nutritional rankings of these things, they are very different. But a bigger difference comes from how that animal is raised. And so a big problem with chickens these days is that they're fed a lot of things that they didn't grow up eating that they're not designed to eat. And so the monogastric, so things with only one stomach, obviously the ruminants have like four barrel chamber stomachs. And they can deal with things that...
They weren't necessarily designed to eat as well. So, and I even saw a report or an article saying that they could process an excrete glyphosate, you know, like a roundup sort of, roundup herbicide, right? So it was probably really bad for us. And it seems that if cows eat that, they can actually detoxify it and eliminate it. So it doesn't get in the meat.
whereas other animals, it can, or at least that suggested that they can. So chickens are sort of in that category. There's monogastric, they're getting fed chicken or corn and soy, and that's not what they're designed to eat. So, you know, soy can have a whole bunch of things that they're not supposed to have. They have a lot of limelight acid and omega-6s, which you need some of. It's an essential nutrient, but you only need a small amount of it, and more than that can cause significant harm.
And so a lot of indigenous populations that are lean and strong and have very low rates of disease, they seem to have linoleic acid consumption that doesn't go above 2%. And that seems to be pretty consistent in these populations. Even if they eat a very diet, either very heavily meat-based, very, very fat-based, maybe coconut milk and things like that, or even tribe in Papua New Guinea that actually eat a lot of yams.
Obviously not their native cuisine because that's a new world plant that got taken there by the Europeans. But they still had a very low level of omega-6s and they had a low rate of disease as well. So interesting. But in any case, when animals are being fed something they're not designed to eat, they're being fed a bunch of plants that they're not designed to eat in particular, they're
Dr Anthony Chaffee (47:02.794)
going to build up things that aren't necessarily supposed to be there either. So chicken and pork and even fish, they're fed grains and soy and corn, things like that. They'll build up a lot of linoleic acid in their fat. So have a high omega-6 content in their fat. And then we eat their fat and it's like we're eating those seed oils by proxy. So that can be a problem. Eggs are fantastic. I mean, I would agree. They're like a superfood.
all the building blocks and nutrients that you need to form a new life. And so obviously that's all the building blocks for life. It's a perfect protein. It has all the amino acids in the right proportions that we need them. But again, depending on what the chicken is fed, that egg is going to be better or worse for you. So I can't remember the gentleman's name, but he does a lot of big regenerative farming in America. And he was talking about...
The average USDA egg is reported to have about 41 milligrams of folate. But his regeneratively raised, pasture raised chickens had over a thousand milligrams of folate. So, massive difference, really, 20, 25 times the amount of at least that micronutrient. And we do know that grass-fed and finished regeneratively raised cows have four to five times the amount of micronutrients.
than just Safeway beef would. But at the same time, Safeway beef is great. It has everything you need, really in the proportion that you need it. And most people will do fabulously well on that. And so I would sort of rank it like that. I'd have the aruminants up at the top for sure, because they can weed out and eliminate out more of these plant toxins and industrial toxins that we don't want. So they're a great filter for us.
And then you get down into the monogastrics like pork, chicken, eggs, and fish, wild caught fish. Now if those are pasture raised, sort of raised in their natural environment and wild caught fish, those are much better. I would still rank ruminants above that though. And then below all that would be the factory farmed chicken and pork and eggs. And then I just never eat farmed fish. I just never eat those. Those are not good for you.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (49:29.23)
And dairy is great, but some people can have a problem with it because the casein can be pro-inflammatory. So especially people with autoimmune issues and inflammatory diseases, they tend to need to avoid things like dairy just because they're a bit more inflammatory as well.
Logan Duvall (49:47.819)
I'm glad you threw in the dairy. I should have asked about that. I do think there's a considerable difference between raw and pasteurized and commercial dairy there too for everybody. But you brought up folate specifically, and so I wanted to get your opinion on. So I have got multiple MTHFR gene variations, and so since I do, I know my son does, right? And so we have that whole cancer play there.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (49:56.582)
Oh, yeah.
Logan Duvall (50:17.839)
Knowing that like his formula we had because I didn't know anything going in this the rice cereal that he had all the Fortified crap, but we were pouring folic acid in him right so the synthetic version of folate that we are told to prevent spina bifida and all these neural defects I Now know that I was poisoning him by putting that in there What I have also heard is I believe like Dave Asprey and Paul Saladino also have the mthfr
gene variation. And so I'm...
Putting that together, and then if you take like what Chris Masterjohn says about its arrival flavor deficiency, how do we make sure that we get the adequate B vitamins, and how are people with this MTHFR gene variations doing on carnivore, especially long-term?
Dr Anthony Chaffee (51:10.514)
Very good question. That's one thing when people ask me what they should test and things like that on a corn or diet, usually nothing unless you have a problem. One thing I do think is valuable is checking for folate. If you do know your MTHFR, then you will need more folate but not everybody knows that. Check your folate. If that's low and you just being a lot of red meat, then okay. For whatever reason, you're not getting enough.
But, you know, the simple solution is you just eat liver a couple of times a week because there's a lot more liver or a lot more folate in liver. And so that's basically supplements for carnivores is just a bit of organs because those are so nutrient dense that can actually be a problem if you eat too much of these things. You can actually get an overload of the fat soluble vitamins or metals such as copper and fat soluble vitamins such as vitamin A. So you can actually get a problem with that.
So you still want to keep it in proportion. You still don't want to overdo it. So remember that if you go hunting and you take down a buffalo, it has meat on it that's gonna last you two years and it has one liver, right? So just keep that in mind. I've eaten, I mean, not everybody needs that. Most people don't. I mean, I haven't eaten, I've eaten liver, I think the count is six times in the last decade. So not that much. And I've been in carnivore for six years now. And my folate's fine.
But not everyone's is and so if you're in that category, if you have the MTHFR, you're going to be in that category. You need to eat liver, not even all that much, just a bit, two to three times a week. Just have that in your diet and you should be fine. So the people that I've seen that have had problems and realized that they were low folate, they just added in chicken liver or beef liver. Some like to avoid or mix it up because beef liver can have a lot of copper.
And so maybe they'll have beef liver sometimes and they'll just eat chicken liver other times. But just having some sort of animal liver two to three times a week takes care of that. I mean, you should be able to get everything you need just for meeting meat. That's what we're designed for. We're not eating wild animals anymore. The equivalent would be getting venison or a regeneratively raised grass-fed and finished cow, which will have a lot more folate in it, just like the eggs that we were talking about for it.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (53:38.218)
when he's sometimes the amount of folate in it. So you're gonna be fine if you're eating that sort of natural thing. Not everyone has access to that. Most people don't and so if you don't you just go to the next bar up which is organs.
Logan Duvall (53:54.559)
Awesome, great. And then a convenience there, are you kind of pro or anti the desiccated organs?
Dr Anthony Chaffee (54:04.13)
Well, if people need them and they should just get used to or learn how to cook liver, it's a lot cheaper and it actually doesn't taste bad. I've noticed it's sort of like seared ahi. If you just sear liver real quick and keep it raw in the middle, it's so much better. I actually like it. It actually tastes good. But if it's cooked all the way through, no thank you. I don't need that shoe leather.
but if you just sear the outside and keep the inside raw, it actually tastes good. I did some things where I took like strips of liver, very thin, and I put a bit of salt on it, put it on drying racks because I like to dry out my steaks. It sort of concentrates the flavor, helps them brown better. And so I got some liver once and I was like, let's try it with that. The next day it sort of dried out a bit and the salt soaked in and I was like, well, that actually tastes good. And I had like a whole tray of it. So I sort of had a bit every day. After about four days,
They turned like a lot more dry and sort of gummy. They had the consistency of like a gummy bear. And like that was something that I sort of missed was that tactile sort of gummy candy sort of thing. And all of a sudden I had this like meat gummy. I'm like, this is awesome. And I was like, I just loved them. And I actually was like, this is good. And I just like ate a bunch of them. But you know, your body even tells you, your body sort of tells you that it tastes really good because your body wants those nutrients.
But eventually your body just says, yeah, okay, that's enough. And I just naturally stopped. So I had like sort of four pieces and that was it. But there are things you can do. And I think it's best if you do it like that. But if you can't do that and you're just really fighting against it and you are MTHFR or you're a bit deficient for another reason, then yeah, you could do the desiccated liver. But I think it's if you if you're able to sort of
Just eat it. I think it's best to just eat it.
Logan Duvall (56:02.655)
I think that's fair. That's a great answer. One thing I've noticed with like the meat-based diet, the carnivore, is that there's almost a consciousness that goes around it being more connected to food. And I don't know if that's just because we are relying on another living, you know, sentient being there. But we have gone down to White Oak Pastures and filmed a documentary with Will Harris, and actually Will's coming on the podcast tomorrow. The support
Dr Anthony Chaffee (56:29.678)
Thanks.
Logan Duvall (56:32.011)
for regenerative agriculture by the carnivore community is a beautiful, beautiful thing that I am really hoping that we can keep that train going. It's like what you went up and did, I believe her name was Maggie, up in Canada. That was a mind-blowing story. That was so cool. How do you feel we can keep pushing that on? And why is that just so important? It surely is to me and our audience, but why is it important to you?
or for you to see that regenerative movement continue.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (57:06.918)
Well, for a lot of reasons. One, it is better for the animals. It gives them a better life and we're sort of having a trade. We take care of them, they take care of us and that's how that works. You want to give them a good life and a nice sort of more natural life. We protect them from the elements, we protect them from predators and we have them doing what they're supposed to do, which is being out in grass meadows and being with other cows and making more cows.
But also it makes the meat more nutritious. It's a better way of being a steward of the land. You're not stripping nutrients out of the land. You're actually putting nutrients back in the land and that actually helps the growth cycle so more grass grows that makes longer root stock for the grass. And then so they cycle around in different pastures and they come back and it's grown even more.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (58:03.614)
moving animals through bunched and moving like a migrating herd of animals and it puts things back in the land and makes it more fertile, more verdant. Plants and animals are the environment and you need these things living in symbiosis and you start taking one out of the other and changing something and you can damage the earth. So I think it's important from that standpoint. I think it's important from animal welfare point of view. From our point of view, getting more nutrition.
and also because we want this to be sustainable. We want this to actually benefit the planet. We don't want to just drag things down, which is the direction we're going now with large monocrop agriculture. It is actually, as its days are numbered, unfortunately, we are, it's damaging the land. We're losing 27.5 billion tons of topsoil a year. That's a vanishing resource. It takes 500 years to grow a centimeter of that.
And we're losing an area the size of Kentucky every single year with our current farming practices. We till up a whole field and the rain washes most of it away and the wind blows a lot of it away. This is what happened in the Dust Bowl era in America. It almost turned the middle of America into another Sahara Desert. And that's because of our farming practices. And thankfully we recognized what was going on. We were able to sort of stop it.
that is what can happen to say it is actually is a man-made desert and i think that was from agriculture back in the ancient world uh... you know the pyramids and the sphinx were actually they took soil samples in the nineties and realize while these weren't desert people these were actually built in jungles these were jungle pyramids as a jungle sphinx and now it's a desert you know uh... mesopotamia of the persian empire
You read accounts of the Persian Empire, Gilgamesh, all this epic, written epic that we have, that describes an area of green lush grass fields with deer and antelope and all these different sorts of animals and cedar forests and all these sorts of things. That's in modern day Iraq, right? So that's where agriculture was first invented. And it actually...
Dr Anthony Chaffee (01:00:21.874)
strips the land and loses top soil and causes deserts. Animals reverse that. So if we want to be as healthy as we possibly can, we need animals and we need to do it right. We need to do it in a way that helps the land, it doesn't hurt the land. The great thing about animals as well is that you can do it on any land. You can do it in the mountains, you can do it in forests, you can do it in rangelands. You can't grow crops in those areas. You can only grow crops on arable land, which is only 4% of the land.
of the earth's surface, including oceans, obviously. Not that much. So rangeland and forest land make up another 25% or so of the earth's surface, not including oceans. So the majority of land on earth is rangeland forest land. You can run animals through all of that. You don't have to clear it to make a field. You can just have animals go through in this natural environment and make that natural environment better. So in order to support
a growing population and support it well. And to make people healthy and to make the land healthy and the animals healthy and everything healthy and better, you need to go to regenerative methods. And I think that model is the best to meet all those demands.
Logan Duvall (01:01:42.015)
Thank you. Thank you for that. I agree wholeheartedly, my friend. Thank you for the work that you're putting out. Thank you for the... you're in Australia right now in the middle of the night and you jumped on here with me. Appreciate your time, your wisdom. Where can we send people to help benefit you and what's next for you?
Dr Anthony Chaffee (01:02:05.122)
Well, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. It was good to meet you. So thank you for having me on. Well, I have social media on Instagram. It's just AnthonyChafieMD. And I have a YouTube channel by the same description, AnthonyChafieMD, and I put out a lot of videos, at least once a week, if not more. And I have a sort of a back catalog and everything like that. And I have a podcast, it's just called the Plant Free MD. And that sort of tells everybody, not only how to do carnivore, but why.
why we should do karma, why it's important, why it helps us. The science behind it, I speak with people like Professor Seyfried and other top researchers and scientists in various fields that I think all add to the story of what we really should be eating and why. And so I go through that in the podcast and on the YouTube channel as well. And yeah, Twitter, Anthony underscore Chafee and other sort of little things, but people can find me through those other means of social media and on Rumble as well.
Logan Duvall (01:03:04.363)
Thank you. Yeah, it's all amazing resources. You've added so much value. You staying in Australia or you coming back to states?
Dr Anthony Chaffee (01:03:13.21)
I think eventually I'll come back to the States. The more I travel, the more I appreciate it in America. So it's fun here and I really like it and I like my work that I'm doing here. But America is my home. It's always going to be my home. My family's been in America since the 1500s. So it's just like that's where I'm from. I've got founding fathers on both sides. Both sides have people on the Mayflower and ancestors and things like that.
That's my home and so I want to go and live in my home, be around my family. There are weird things happening and I also sort of feel a duty to get back and maybe help out and make it not go to hell like people are trying to do.
Logan Duvall (01:04:02.427)
Amen, that is why we are sitting here, my friend. It's what you just said there in those last few seconds is exactly what the mission that we're on is all about, buddy. Thank you so much.
Dr Anthony Chaffee (01:04:14.946)
No problem, thank you for having me.
