Josh (03:03.186) So we have with us Dr. Anthony Chafee. He's an American medical doctor, neurosurgical resident who actually spent over the last 20 plus years. He's researched the optimal nutrition for human performance and health. And it's his assertion that most of the so-called chronic diseases that doctors treat are actually caused by the food we eat or do not eat. It can be reversed with dietary changes to a species specific diet.
So you've got a lot of credentials behind you here, Anthony. You started university at age 16, so you're kind of one of those weird prodigy kids in molecular and cellular biology, had a minor in chemistry when you got your MD from the Royal College of Surgeons. You're an all-American rugby player. Now, is that active?
Anthony Chaffee MD (03:45.323) So that was, yeah, so high school All-American, then I continued on playing all-stars in college and senior leagues. I played in all the top leagues in North America, and then I played at a professional level in England. And then when I was in Ireland, I played sort of just sort of semi-pro during medical school. So just one step down below, premiership during medical school. And then as a doctor for a couple of years, I stayed over in Europe for a couple of years as a doctor. And then back in Seattle, and I was playing with
my team in Seattle, which then turned into the Seattle Seawolves, which is the professional major league rugby team there. And, um, so, but then I was going to play with them in their inaugural season, uh, major league rugby, but I had already agreed to do humanitarian work and volunteer as a doctor and bang in the refugee camps in Bangladesh, helping the, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. So people that don't know about that, there was about 200,000 people that were slaughtered in Myanmar.
Josh (04:34.542) From the 2017 genocide, yeah.
Anthony Chaffee MD (04:43.235) which formerly Burma and on like sort of religious ethnic grounds and in about a month. And so it was this horrible, horrible, horrible genocide. And those are on official numbers. Official numbers are in the tens of thousands, if not over a hundred thousand. But they keep finding the UN keeps finding these mass graves with like 10,000, 12,000 people at a time, which is pretty horrifying. And about a million people fled from.
Myanmar into Southern Bangladesh and into other neighboring countries as well. But that was, that was the closest to the Rohingya. And so there wasn't really enough people going to help out. It was very dangerous in Bangladesh. It wasn't really getting the publicity that, that other disasters get. It was just, it was a very, very serious humanitarian crisis, but it wasn't like a sexy one like Haiti or, or Nepal or something. Yeah. So it didn't get all the, all the press and media attention.
Josh (05:33.25) like Rwanda or something, yeah.
Anthony Chaffee MD (05:39.051) And, uh, and as I said, it was very dangerous. So ISIS was very active at the time and they were, uh, actively targeting foreigners and, and particularly Americans. They, they blew up a hotel just to, to get one American that was staying there. Killed, I think something like 78 people or thereabouts and, you know, maimed another 160, so, you know, pretty nasty stuff going on there on top of the reason that, that people were going over there to help. And so.
I decided to go over there because there just, there really wasn't the turnout that, that was required to help that amount of people. And there was another thousand people coming every hour. And so, you know, I just felt I sort of needed to go. And so I had already committed to that. So I couldn't play in that, that first season. And then I got back after that and started playing and, and, um, uh, but then sort of messed up my knee. I wasn't able to really go, but that was, that was, um, yeah. So that was, that was sort of my.
rugby career in a nutshell. Uh, kept playing though. I sort of, I did two pre-seasons with the Seawolf and then I came, you know, doing Bangladesh and then I came down to Australia for, for work and, uh, played, uh, well, I started playing that season here, but then my, my knee sort of acted up again. So I ended up needing surgery. I haven't really gone back after that. Um, so I'm just, uh, uh, trying to get that, that rehab and then it's just what I like with work being as insane as it is, uh, don't always have time for that. So that's, that was.
Josh (06:58.722) Of course, yeah.
Anthony Chaffee MD (07:04.035) where it sort of ended up. That was the last sort of season I played.
Josh (07:04.526) in.
Well, you get around by the sounds of it. That's quite the resume you've got. And something I really like and respect about medical professionals, you know, medicine, there's some people who are in it for the money, but those who volunteer, those who give their time, coming on shows and spending your time like this to spread your message, these are doctors who really give it, you know, give a shit. And they wanna really help people, which I think is really amazing. So you've been, you've been kind of get around, you're actually carnivore as well. You are trained as an MMA fighter. So I mean,
Anthony Chaffee MD (07:09.501) Yeah.
Josh (07:37.25) good news is you break someone's skull and you can help them after. So that's really nice. Yeah. The neurosurgery and everything. So we are here talking today about health and nutrition. It's linked to chronic diseases and even athletics. I mean, you being an athlete yourself, obviously you have a proclivity and something ideal was specifically as a gut specialist, I work with a lot of IBD and severe IBS. And so one of the things that I love to talk about
Anthony Chaffee MD (07:40.087) Fix them again.
Josh (08:03.418) is the correlation between food, nutrition, gut disease, dysbiosis. Even when we look at methylation, oxygenation, detoxification, microbes and genes and how they all affect the system and how they're directly linked to our ability or inability to use the raw materials from nutrition, how they affect our health, they create these chronic diseases. So talk to me about that, about chronic disease and how you see it manifesting and sort of your message around how it can really be fixed through diet, food, lifestyle and others.
Anthony Chaffee MD (08:32.871) Yeah, so it comes down to the fundamental sort of premise that humans are animals and animals have a specific diet in nature and based on our biology and our design, we are designed to eat certain things. We're designed to best extract nutrients out of certain sources and to be able to detoxify certain different chemicals that may be harmful to some one species may not be harmful to another species. So we noticed this in the wild animals that can eat actually quite poisonous.
plants, really nothing else can eat, but that animal is adapted to the poisons on that plant so they can detoxify them safely. They can extract those nutrients. A lot of nutrients in plants are locked up in ways that most animals can't actually access. They don't have the enzymes to break down those specific bonds so they can actually extract the iron and the phosphorus and the magnesium and even the protein. So there's a lot of proteins that are bound up in ways and plants that aren't really bioavailable. Even horses.
grass but they aren't even as able to break down and extract the nutrients from grass as well as a cow is, right? This is why you just noticed in the feces, right? So feces like a cow pad is just, it's all just liquid mush. That's because it's broken down and extracted nearly everything out of that grass whereas you know, a horse feces you almost look like you can eat it again, you know, it's just like there's still like whole fibers of grass. So different animals have different abilities to extract nutrients.
and to detoxify things. So when you get outside of that, any, any animal will get sick. Any animal will get, get caught on well, specifically if they're eating plants that they're not designed to eat. Pretty much any animal can eat meat because that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to get nutrients and extract them to build and maintain animal tissue. We are animal tissue. It's actually difficult to turn plant tissue into animal tissue, but
Pretty much any animal can turn animal tissue into animal tissue. And this is why 66% of species are carnivores and even herbivores, you'll see like moose or deer or elk, like eating little rabbits or little chicks and things like, yeah, it's sort of crazy, but you can, people can find that on the internet. There's tons of these, you know, horses, eating little chicken babies and things like that. It's sort of jarring at first when you see it, but you know, that's perfectly.
Josh (10:40.179) Really?
Anthony Chaffee MD (10:55.771) extractable and bioavailable nutrients. The reason that plants need to have this low bioavailability, they need to defend their nutrients in that way is because they're sitting ducks. They're not mobile, they're static and so they can't run away or fight back like an animal can. So they need to have other defenses. They need to be physically poisonous. They need to be hard to get to, maybe woody and spiky and then they need to put their nutrients.
bound up in ways that we can't get to them. So like cellulose, cellulose are strings of glucose. Like we could use glucose, but we can't use that glucose because we don't have the machinery to break that bond. No vertebrate animal can break down cellulose. So certain animals like herbivores, they cultivate a specific bacteria that can actually eat the fiber. And as a byproduct of that, they actually excrete short chain fatty acids, which are 100% saturated.
and then the bacteria die off and that turns into a protein source for the animal. So even gorillas that just eat green leaves and cows that just eat grass, they get 70 to 80% of their calories from saturated fat and the rest from protein pretty much a little, little bit from carbohydrates, but mostly it's fat and protein. So really what you need is fat and protein and certain nutrients and we can't extract fat and protein from fiber. So we need to get that, that from animal, animal tissue. So that's, that's the main premise. And when you,
Go to like the zoo and things like that. You see these signs. They say, don't feed the animals. It makes them very sick. Don't feed the animals the things that you're eating right now, right? And what does it make them? So, and what do they get sick with? They get obesity, heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, cancer, autoimmune issues as well. They say they get human diseases. You feed these animals human food, they get human diseases, right? Well, dogs, sorry.
Josh (12:47.618) Joke's on us, hey? Joke's on us.
Anthony Chaffee MD (12:51.359) Well, that's it, right? So, I mean, just by virtue of eating this food, all of a sudden cancer is communicable to an elephant? Probably not. It's that the food is causing the disease in us and the food is causing the disease in them. So you have to eat a species specific diet, a species appropriate diet. And the main reason being is that plant, well, in so far as eating plants, because plants defend themselves chemically. And so if you don't have the
evolved ability or the biological ability to safely break down and extract nutrients, break down poisons and extract nutrients. Those nutrients are not going to be as bioavailable. So you're not going to get as much healthy nutrition, but you're also more importantly going to be slowly but surely, you know, toxified. And people say, well, that doesn't make sense because I had spinach last week. So obviously that's not poisonous.
Well, you know, people smoke last week too and drank alcohol last week too. I guess that means that those aren't poisonous because it didn't kill them on the spot, right? Slow poison is still poison. And we understand and recognize that tobacco and alcohol are poisons. And over the years, over the decades, you break down your body, you break down your systems, you, and you prematurely age and you get all sorts of different diseases, emphysema, lung cancer, liver disease, diabetes, heart disease, and, and so on and so forth. So,
This is what's happening with all sorts of species in appropriate diet. And it's just these specific different toxins that are causing harm, but also the lack of appropriate nutrition because you can't get everything you need from plants, you need to eat meat, you need to eat fatty meat, and we're not doing that in the amounts that we need to. And so our bodies aren't able to function properly, develop properly as kids. Our brains are actually smaller than they were before the agricultural revolution back when people were.
predominantly eating meat or in some areas exclusively eating meat, especially during the ice ages, when there really weren't any plants available to eat at all, we were really just eating meat. And since then, since we started eating a lot more plants and becoming much more dependent on plants, the average brain size of an adult male has actually increased by 11%. So we are cranial capacity and our brain size, right? So actually going up exponentially is as fastest increase in, you know, we've ever seen going up, up, up, up, up,
Anthony Chaffee MD (15:14.899) Agriculture revolution bank straight down that doesn't happen and that doesn't happen. That's not genetic. That's not an environment That's not an evolutionary thing going like oh, well, we just started just to have smaller brains now Maybe there was more developed a more refined. No, that's that's idiotic like You had a big frame you would see this, you know and No, that was environmental. So that's it. That's a that's an environmental Developmental delay so we're not getting the requisite nutrients and we're getting things in the
Josh (15:29.729) Look, we're getting stupider.
Anthony Chaffee MD (15:44.455) actually curtail and curb the proper development of our brain and even hype. You know, you see these, these populations that were like big mammoth hunters. They were just eating mammoth all year round, or even the native Americans that were just eating Buffalo, they were very, very tall. Some of these guys were pushing seven feet. So there was a, there's the, um, some native Americans came to visit, uh, president, then president Jefferson, uh, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Jefferson was about six foot two, six foot three.
And so he's a tall guy, especially for then. And these guys came in, these guys were all pushing seven foot and, and, and it's chronically saying these guys were giants. They were just giants. They were just these huge monsters. They were just eating meat. They were just eating Buffalo. And so they, they scare her Buffalo over a cliff. They would all crash and die. And then they'd harvest the meat and that's what they would eat for the entire years, they would eat pretty much meat for the entire year and if they could. And so.
They were very tall and in the populations of these mammoth hunters, the skeletal remains, I mean this is tens of thousands of years ago and more. And they found that these guys were anywhere from between five foot 10 to six foot two, sometimes even six foot four on average, right? So these are big, big bastards. And this is a long time ago, the average adult male height now is five foot eight, right? So.
You know, and other countries are less than that. So the average height of a population denotes the average health of a population. So our health is, is, uh, suffering. And I think that is entirely due to eating, uh, the wrong food, just as you would see in zoo animals, just as we see in dogs and cats, dogs and cats are known carnivores and yet we give them grain and plant based kibble and they get that so-called human diseases. And in fact, veterinarians are saying there's a, there's an increased prevalence prevalence of
uh, so-called human diseases in these domesticated pets. Well, we just don't know why maybe it's intensive breeding from these breeders. It's like, well, those breeders have always been there. A lot of these things are pure breeds. What does that mean to you? It means that this is, this is, this is a, you know, basically genetic clones. And, and, and yet we haven't seen this, you know, the average age of a golden, uh, average life expectancy from birth of a golden retriever in the 1970s in the U S was 17 years and now it's nine years. Okay. So that doesn't happen. That.
Anthony Chaffee MD (18:05.643) quickly that you just completely rearrange the genetics of an entire breed of dog in that short amount of time. It just doesn't work like that. That's not how population genetics work if anyone has studied population genetics. And so I think this is directly related to the things that we're eating and they're getting human diseases, right? So it's in the name, oh, they're getting these human diseases. So it was, okay, so we just bred them into having...
lupus and Crohn's and things like that. And like, no, that's silly to think about. Yeah, it is. So, you know, that didn't happen. That didn't happen to us either. You know, the prevalence of these diseases is going up and up and up every decade. Okay, so you're going from one decade to another decade, these things are going up, okay? So it's not even enough time to have a generation of people, right? So even if you could change,
Josh (18:34.978) That's stupid.
Anthony Chaffee MD (18:57.215) the population genetics from one generation to another, which you cannot unless there's a massive, massive genocide, die off or huge population influx into a certain, a certain area. You know, you're not going to get that, but this is worldwide as well. This is getting more and more prevalent in every country around the world. So I think that is, that is directly related to eating the wrong thing. And that's because we're eating things that are directly toxic to us to a small degree, but it's enough.
that it builds up over time and especially in the genetically susceptible, they can become more harmed by this. Like I'm not going to get Crohn's no matter what I eat, it appears, but some people do. Some people eat the exact same thing that I do and they'll, they'll get Crohn's disease, but they're in the literature right now. There's a reversible nature to these diseases. You can put someone on an elemental diet and elimination diet, they get off all these other things. They only getting just pure nutrients and all of a sudden that's a better treatment for Crohn's disease for an acute flare up of Crohn's disease.
than steroids, than putting someone on prednisone or prednisolone, which is the gold standard, that boom, that will get them out of this acute flare-up. It will just completely suppress the immune system. Well, just not eating plants does the exact same thing better, it does a better job than steroids. Just not eating what you're not supposed to eat is a better treatment than steroids. Diabetes, we've shown in large clinical trials with humans that if you just stop eating carbohydrates and put them on a ketogenic diet,
especially if you're removing seed oils, which are just completely manufactured. These are industrial waste product, well, industrial, uh, lubricant. And those originally designed for these things aren't even a hundred years old. And yet we eat them and we think that, oh yeah, you know, you need them. These are essential fatty acids. It's like what, you know, nothing that didn't exist a hundred years ago can be essential to humanity that has existed for at least tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands to millions of years. So, you know, that right there doesn't, doesn't, doesn't hold water, but.
You know, when you eliminate out carbohydrates, when you just put someone on a specific diet, diabetes goes away. This has been shown in clinical trials, and in fact, this has now been taken up in Australia and other countries in the official guidelines for treating diabetes as a ketogenic diet. So we understand this. There's a reversible nature to these diseases. What does that mean? That is not a disease. It's a poison, it's a toxicity and exposure relationship. So if you have lead pipes and you get lead poisoning,
Anthony Chaffee MD (21:23.531) You're going to have specific degradation and damage to your body as an end organ damage to your brain and other, other organs. And you can see this physiologically. You see, Oh, well, this mechanism here is getting disrupted and all these sorts of things. And you could come up with a novel drug that costs billions of dollars to create a supercomputer and it could mitigate and slow down this process and have you die slowly over 40 years. Or you can recognize that if you remove the lead, all these processes go away. Everything goes back to normal. So this is a
dose, this is an exposure and toxicity relationship. And that's exactly the same relationship we're seeing in these diseases. You remove this exposure, you put people back on a pure red meat and water diet, which is in the literature since the 1800s for curing these diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, and many, many others. I mean, even tuberculosis, we found that people were surviving tuberculosis much easier.
much more easily on a pure red meat and water diet in the 1800s, a hundred years before we had effective treatments for these things. And so, you know, just by doing that, by removing the exposure and putting, letting people just get on with things, people are getting better. So that is a, that is a toxin toxicity relationship. And then of course, not getting the appropriate nutrients. We're not getting as much of what we need. Our bodies aren't working the way that they should. And I think
that when you look at medicine through that lens, that humans are carnivores and that's just the kind of animal we are biologically and like all other animals, if you eat what you're not supposed to eat, you will get sick in some sort of way, your body and process and physiology is not going to work as well. Then everything just starts making sense as far as medicine is concerned, all these different diseases, they just, they make sense to me now. When I looked at it through that lens, everything just started slotting into place and you can actually see this reversible nature.
We don't have everything in the literature, but I see anecdotally with my patients I've had hundreds of patients over the years that we've tried a carnivore diet and they reverse things that you just would not imagine Could be reversed. I had a gentleman who's 86 years old actually wasn't my patient but a a friend of mine who's a geriatrician was seeing him and he basically checked himself into a nursing home because he
Anthony Chaffee MD (23:43.039) felt he couldn't take care of himself at home. And he was basically checking himself into a nursing home for end of life care, basically to die, to live out his days and just sort of waste away. And he came across my videos apparently, and just thought, okay, well, as a last ditch effort to sort of get my life back, I'm gonna go on this carnivore diet. And he did. And within a few months, he was out of the nursing home, back living at home independently, was lifting weights three times a week.
was swimming twice a week and was off all medications. At 86 years old, he was on no medications, came off all of his medications. And there's a gentleman in Arizona, I can't recall his name, but he actually has a nursing home with end stage Alzheimer's and dementia patients. And he's putting them all on a carnivore diet, a high fat carnivore diet, which is what we're biologically evolved to eat and supposed to eat. And he's rehabbing.
these end stage Alzheimer's and dementia patients and getting them home again, which is insane. You know, this is supposedly a neurodegenerative process that only goes in one direction, and yet he's reversing it and he's getting people home. He's giving people their life back. He's giving people their brain, their mind, their humanity back and giving them back to their families and letting them live for years, even potentially decades longer. And I think that is just the most amazing thing that you could ever do for someone and just recognizing.
that dose response, that exposure relationship, and just removing the exposure is so powerful. You know, it doesn't matter how many pills you take for lead poisoning, if you don't get rid of the lead, you're not gonna get rid of the lead poisoning.
Josh (25:24.078) Wow, this turned very quickly from like a podcast interview to a medical lecture. And I don't hate it. That was brilliant. That was like a good 15 minute runner. And I just have so many questions that kind of accumulated during that whole time, most of which are, I've kind of lost my brain, but things like plants and plant defenses, you know, what are they? Is it lectins? Is it poisons? Is it inability? Is it small scale molecular? When we talk about digestion, you know, I love eating a salad. I feel great after I have a salad. Is that in my brain?
Anthony Chaffee MD (25:29.715) Sorry.
Anthony Chaffee MD (25:40.404) No.
Anthony Chaffee MD (25:44.711) Mmm.
Josh (25:53.774) dressing. We talk about carnivore. Is it just the meat? People want to eat a steak or eating organs and marrow and other things. How does that affect your gut microbiome? What they truly your flora loves fiber, it loves starches and these other things. What are we feeding our biomes that they can so adequately adjust to and actually extract from these carnivore diets and organs? And then on the last bit here with dementia.
I love that you're writing these down, this is great. I'm just coming off the top of my dome. But with dementia, I think it's amazing because it's looked at as this degenerative disease, like you said, neurodegeneration. Just like anything else, oh, it's degenerative. Oh, well, it's because you're getting older. We've accepted slipping of medicine. Dementia isn't a loss of your brain, it's a loss of access to those parts of your brain due to neurodegeneration, due to lack of conductivity, whether it's the nerves themselves, whether it's their sheaths and casings that loses.
conduct and they can't reach those parts. But there was some really great studies like you said about restoring. So, let's start from the beginning of the list. Let's just kind of run through that. I'm so interested to hear what you have to say.
Anthony Chaffee MD (27:04.136) Yeah, well, so, I mean, there are a ton of different toxins. And we've classified these and quantified these in botany and in medicine. It's just not many people know about this because they don't study it. They don't find botany interesting. They don't think it's applicable. But of course it is. And as doctors for thousands of years, and medicine men and things like that, we have absolutely known the toxic nature of plants and how to use them medicinally or just how to avoid them.
just explicitly. And this is something that is well known, it's well known in veterinary medicine as well. There are whole ranges of diseases that are, that describe instances where an animal, a livestock animal will have gotten into forage that they don't normally eat. Generally this doesn't happen in the wild, but if you're in a pasture and you're sort of in a fenced off area and you run out of the grasses that you eat and you don't have hay or whatever, whatever you're feeding them, they'll just sort of out of desperation eat.
eat whatever they can and they can get very sick. So there's things like big head, lymph neck, crazy cow syndrome, and big tongue, all these sorts of things. These are diseases and disorders, but they're not. They're like, well, this animal eats that thing that has a whole bunch of oxalates in it, and it gets big head because it actually damages their bone. Oxalates strip out calcium from their serum. They have to strip out calcium from their bones, which is a big calcium reserve, to keep the serum calcium up or else you just die.
you don't have a certain serum calcium. So you strip away the calcium from your bone, demineralizes it, makes it soft and your body tries to regenerate that and build that up and the bone sort of is regrown in weird ways. You get this big head, sort of lumpy big head look to them. That's from oxalate poisoning. And so, you know, there are all these different sorts of diseases that we know of in veterinary medicine that come as a direct result of eating the wrong thing.
Yet we forget that humans are animals and that can absolutely happen to us as well Even if we are designed to eat certain plants It is certain plants. It is not all plants and it is not a wide range of or a variety of plants animals in the wild eat very Specific plants those who eat plants at all eat very specific plants. Most of them just eat one Right. There's three hundred and forty thousand plants in the world koalas eat one
Anthony Chaffee MD (29:19.775) Pandas eat one, cows, horses, grazing animals eat grass. That's it, but they eat specific grasses. The grass that a cow eats is different from the grass that a sheep eats, so you actually keep them on the same pasture because they don't compete for resources. The leaves that a deer eats are different from the leaves that a gorilla eats. Those are different from the leaves that a giraffe eats and so on, and you mix these leaves around, they all get sick or die, right? So a koala eats eucalyptus. Almost nothing else eats eucalyptus. It's toxic, right? But...
Josh (29:47.85) I thought koalas got sick from eating eucalyptus but ate it anyways.
Anthony Chaffee MD (29:51.635) Well, they get high. That's the idea is that they get high. But you know, who knows? I mean, who knows what their actual experience is? I always thought that's quite strange. And people say it's like, oh yeah, this is a narcotic, it has a narcotic effect. And it's just like, okay, maybe to you, it has a narcotic effect. Does it have a narcotic effect to them though? It's hard to tell what their subjective experience to eating that is, but it's very toxic. Sorry.
Josh (30:12.953) It's not like dolphins pushing around a puffer fish to get high on the toxin. It's just a food of a different experience.
Anthony Chaffee MD (30:16.943) Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it could be it could be that they get they get a bit high and
to say, but, uh, but yeah, no, the stuff is toxic. It's absolutely toxic. And, um, and it can actually build up in their bone marrow. So like you could eat a koala, but if you like ate it's bone marrow, there'd be, there'd be enough toxins in there to make you very sick. So, but that, but that sort of underlies, you know, why it's, it's more safe to eat animals because they sort of work as a filter acts as a filter for these toxins, you know, if they're designed to break down these toxins, uh, appropriately, then they break them down, they eliminate them and you can eat their meat.
Josh (30:26.126) Sure.
Anthony Chaffee MD (30:54.647) and you don't get those sorts of toxins. So there's a ton of different types of toxins. This is something that's well documented and recorded in botany. You know, I have doctors talking to me, wow, this is crazy. You know, why don't more people know this? And I point out to them that every single botanist on earth knows this. It's just that no one studies botany. And then, you know, you learn this. And I mean, I learned this in seventh grade that plants and animals are an evolutionary arms race. Plants becoming more and more poisonous so less and less animals can eat them so they can survive and thrive.
And then animals becoming more and more adapted to specific poisons in specific plants so they can eat that plant and survive and thrive just like a koala and whatever. But you know, then you go home and you get salad for dinner. I'm like, oh, I guess this is good for me, you know? So you forget that immediately, but that is the nature. So you know, if we are designed to eat plants, it's going to be very specific plants. And it's going to be plants that we were eating 50,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago.
500,000 years ago when our ancestors were evolving into homo sapiens which are about 300,000 years ago was the first one discovered. So it's not going to be anything that wasn't in existence in the last 50, 100, 200 years which is almost every single plant that we eat now. Almost every single plant that we eat now has been bioengineered and bred from other plants that has no resemblance to the plant that they were before. So
You know, even things back in the Egyptian era with the original wheat and things like that. We have statues, the statuary reflected what people looked like. They had a pot belly, they had gynecomastia, they had, you know, guts and man boobs and they had atherosclerosis. They had heart disease. And that wasn't just in the, you know, the pharaohs and things like that. They could afford all the fatty meat and all that sort of stuff. This wasn't everything. And we have a stabilized to top technology. We can actually tell what people were eating, what animals were eating.
in the fossil record and the peasants were eating the same thing that the pharaohs were eating. They were eating a lot of grains. The pharaohs obviously had more access to it, had better access, they weren't going hungry, but they were eating the same things. They were eating a lot of grains, they were eating some meat, but they were eating mostly grains and they were all getting atherosclerosis. They were all getting heart disease, even the peasants and as well as the pharaohs. So before that, you don't see that in, well, it's hard to see atherosclerosis if it hasn't been mummified.
Anthony Chaffee MD (33:18.943) Before the agricultural revolution, you can certainly see skeletal differences in teeth and jaw formation. You can actually tell the difference between a skull and a jaw before or after the agricultural revolution because it's so misformed, malformed and crooked teeth, rotten cavities, smaller jaws, don't have their wisdom teeth they're not crooked. That's all nutritional. That is not genetic, right? So before the agricultural revolution, all these big wide jaws,
Everybody had their wisdom teeth in and they all had full rows of teeth and no cavities, no missing teeth and things like that. Like this was, they were very, very healthy teeth. You know, think about that animals in the wild, you know, you lose your teeth in the wild, you're dead. Like that's it. Teeth are so important. And so, you know, they don't have dentists, they don't have toothbrushes. They just go and they do their thing. You're talking about the microbiome. Well, you have an oral biome as well. And if you're eating the wrong thing, you're going to cultivate the wrong bacteria and that's going to rot your teeth.
And so, you know, what we are supposed to eat, we should be able to eat that without getting any rot, without having to brush our teeth, without having to floss or go to the dentist or anything like that. We should be able to. And in fact, you have these indigenous populations like the Maasai or even the native Australians or the Inuit. And you know, when explorers saw them, they're like, wow, these are these, you know, it was very dark complexion people with bright white teeth.
Why do they have bright white teeth? They didn't have bleaching kits and dentists and scraping their things off. Well, they were eating what they were supposed to eat. They were eating largely meat, if not exclusively meat in a lot of areas. And so they had the right oral biome. Well, if you're eating what you're supposed to eat, you're gonna have the microbiome that you are supposed to have as well, oral biome as well as your microbiome. And in fact, there have been studies with the Inuits and they found that they have extraordinarily healthy microbiomes, very diverse and the types of microbiome.
microbiota that are extremely healthy and there's a number of microbiome experts who love the carnivore diet. It's like, yeah, it's very, very healthy microbiomes. I'm not an expert in that, but that is something that I've seen peripherally. But as far as fiber and carbohydrates, there's some bacteria that are quite benefited by carbs and fiber that are actually associated with a number of different autoimmune diseases, especially like multiple sclerosis.
Anthony Chaffee MD (35:40.387) and rheumatoid arthritis that go away when you stop eating fiber and carbohydrates. One of the things that people say that you need fiber for to feed your gut is because some, like I said, most herbivores, well herbivores that actually are herbivores and can eat breakdown fiber, have the gut bacteria to breakdown fiber, they break down to short chain fatty acids. Some of those are butyrate, butyric acid.
And that is something that enterocytes really like. So we have some of that bacteria. You could cultivate some of that. We really don't have the ability to break down fiber though, which is how you know we're not designed to eat fiber because we can't break down fiber. So it's very straightforward. It doesn't matter. And you can go through comparative anatomy. And I do in some of my talks talking about human digestion, but it's, and showing that humans really do have a carnivorous elementary track. But regardless of that,
It's just functionality. Can we break down fiber? Yes or no? No, we can't. Can we break down and extract all these nutrients from plant easily? No, no, we can't. Can we get, you know, everything we need for meat in the proportion that we need it and it's all bio available? Yes, we can. We absorb about 98% of the meat we eat because, oh, well, meat stays in your gut for 10 years. And when it does it, it's a one way track. It's going to come out just like fiber would. And they say, oh, you want to eat fiber. You can't break it down. Yeah. And
Josh (37:00.102) It's a 35 foot tube.
Anthony Chaffee MD (37:04.347) And this thing you always say, like, well, you should eat fiber because you can't break it down, but you shouldn't eat meat because you can't break it down. And what the hell are you talking about?
Josh (37:12.288) What do I eat? I become an aeritarian and just swallow air.
Anthony Chaffee MD (37:15.695) Yeah, exactly. But the thing is though, that argument is contradictory. It's internally inconsistent. They're saying eat fiber because you can't break it down and that helps peristalsis move this through your body. But don't eat meat because you can't break it down and it'll just sit there in your gut. Well, which one is it? It's either gonna be a bulking effect and move through and you're just gonna have just solid clumps of meat coming out in your stools or not. But in fact, it's not. You absorb nearly 100% of the meat that you eat.
And the fiber that you eat, you cannot absorb no matter what. You cannot break it down at all. There's some bacteria that can break some of it down in some people. And some of those breakdown products is butyrate. And so they say, oh, that's really good. That's really good for your colon and your enterocytes. So that's good. You have to have fiber. Forgetting that one of our main ketone bodies that you make is butyrate, butyric acid. And butter actually gets its name from the amount of butyric acid that's in it.
So you get plenty of this stuff without having to eat fiber because you just make ketones. And even if you're not in ketosis, you're still making some ketones. You do need these things. Your brain will always run on some ketones. Your brain's primary and preferred nutrient source. It's always sort of there, but... Sorry, if you're gonna ask something.
Josh (38:39.646) Yeah, I mean, I have so many, I want to ask so many things. I have so many questions. You know, it's interesting we talk about the microbiome because I'm a big fan of it, right? I understand it's everywhere. It's on the skin, it's in my hair, it's on, it's in my eyes, my mouth, it's in my nose. I mean, you get it in your colon, in your stomach, and women have one vaginally and like it's everywhere. And I used to go to the dentist once a year, like everybody else for a cleaning, they have to go and scrape all the plaque. Since I changed my toothpaste over to a biome-based toothpaste, it's got clove and other things. My teeth, I've got...
Anthony Chaffee MD (38:41.463) Yeah.
Anthony Chaffee MD (38:49.458) Mm.
Josh (39:09.13) no plaque, no buildup, no issues, sensitivity gone away. Is I mean, I'm actually working on getting some holistic dentists on the podcast as well to talk about this, but teeth are living tissue, they can repair themselves. And I've seen a lot of cases where cavities have repaired themselves, I think is very interesting. But I do have a question, we talk about the restoration of the biome, and the immune system, you know, because I deal with a lot of IBD, so you got.
your ulcerative colitis and your Crohn's, your colitis and microscopic colitis, wherever it happens to be, even IBS on its, I look at IBS as a sliding scale spectrum. When I often describe it, my analogy I use is that, it's like you're wearing a pair of shoes or a sock and your heel rubs and rubs and rubs until it gets red, then it blisters, then it breaks, and then it bleeds. And that's effectively this progression from IBS to IBD.
unless it's an autoimmune case or an instant bacterial infection, antibiotic induced or whatever else. So how do you see or have you seen instances, people with gut disease, dysbiosis, IBS, IBD, or anywhere in between who have switched to carnivore? And I ask because I do have SIBO clients I see who present with ulcerative colitis, but it really is SIBO. We put them on carnivore, we stop feeding them microbes, it's overgrowth and they feel better instantly.
Have you seen cases like that or even anecdotal studies or circumstance where you're getting these types of reversals?
Anthony Chaffee MD (40:25.567) Mm-hmm.
Anthony Chaffee MD (40:32.599) Oh my God, yes. So I mean, especially with autoimmune, especially with Crohn's and all sorts of colitis, SIBO, there's even published literature showing that specifically a carnivore diet is actually extremely good and helpful in treating SIBO, so small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And so that's actually in the published literature and the peer reviewed literature. And these things are preliminary, it's sort of a burgeoning area of research now.
but more things will be coming forth with. And in fact, there was a hundred years of medical literature and evidence talking about that, and hundreds of years before that talking about nutrition and what you eat and how this is gonna affect disease. I mean, there's a book written by Dr. J. Salisbury in the 1800s called the relation of alimentation and disease. So the relationship between what you eat and the diseases that you get. And he was, Salisbury steak was named after, right? And he was putting people with Crohn's and ulcerative colitis and rheumatoid arthritis.
on a pure red meat and water diet and reversing these things. A hundred years before any real treatments for this. And then we started, we got into the pharmaceutical age and we just, just completely blanked the last hundred years of medical research, literature and treatments. We said, oh, it's easier to give them a pill. It's hard to change people's diets, but if you just give them a pill, it's fine. And this is better. Well, no, it's not better. And it's not fine. It causes a lot of harm. It costs a lot of money.
And there are a lot of harmful effects that these medications have as well. And so, if you can just change your diet then, and get that effect, then why wouldn't you? And if that's not working, you have medications, that's great. Or maybe people just, oh, I just can't do it. I'd rather have the pill. Fine, let them make that decision, but let them make the decision. Because I talked to so many people, it was like, why didn't my doctor tell me this? I've been on these drugs for years and I've had so many problems with them.
and yet my Crohn's have never gone away. And yet I changed my diet and with three weeks it's gone. And again, we have this in the literature, you remove, you just put someone on an Almond diet, a complete elimination diet, and it's a better treatment for Crohn's than prednisone, than steroids. So there are a lot of different mechanistic sort of ideas as to why that would be. One is with, you get different sort of lectins, like gluten.
Anthony Chaffee MD (42:54.739) Will cause damage to your gut lining can damage these tight junctions and gaps between the enterocytes so the Cells in your intestine and can actually have these things flap loose and and there's barrier protection just like your skin In your intestine so things can't physically go through you get a cut on your skin Bacteria and different sorts of chemicals can get into your system. Well, it's the same thing in your gut so even even fiber can actually cause micro abrasions into the gut lining and
damage the physically damage the lining of your skin and now it's bacteria and different sorts of lectins and other plant toxins that normally would be kept out from this barrier protection can now access your system can actually get into your system. It's thought that there's probably an immune response to this where you get if you get a molecular it's called molecular mimicry. So again in the genetically susceptible there might be people that have you know something on the surface of their cells.
that's similar enough to one of these antigens like certain lectins, there's tons of different kinds of lectins in plants and in meat, really the ones in meat don't seem to cause a problem, but the ones in plants do. And so your bodies are looking at this as a foreign object, as a foreign invader. And so it amounts to an immune response and an antibody response to them. And then in some people, those antibodies are similar enough to something on their cells that it can attack their cells. And then it...
attacks your body, but you know, it used to be thought that this would get a sensitization through this molecular mimicry. And then once those, once those antibodies now start attacking your own cells, then your body gets tuned into attacking its own cells and really starts going after it full force. Um, but you know, when I, when I studied immunology in, uh, postgraduate immunology, uh, you know, we, we learned that like any cell that attacks or makes something that will specifically attack.
your own your own tissue is immediately killed. So it's very difficult for your body to be tuned into itself. Right. So that was always like, hmm, that's interesting that it can then after the fact be tuned into it because it's so rigorously protected against. But what also doesn't fit with that picture is this reversible nature. So you just stop eating these things, your body stops reacting to them, and you stop and your antibodies go down. And I see this in lab tests in my patients.
Anthony Chaffee MD (45:18.775) you can actually measure the amount of antibodies for some of these things like Hashimoto's disease, which is Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which is antibodies to the thyroid and damages it and gives you hypothyroidism. You put someone on a carnivore diet, their antibodies start coming down and down and down and down and down. You can see this in real time. And then they start eating back again, antibodies start coming up again, right? So your body is responding to...
something that you're eating is getting into your body and it's mounting an immune response and antibodies towards that. And you remove those and your body's not attacking them and you're gonna still produce these antibodies because it's just sort of keeping it there, keeping it there, but then it's gonna slowly start coming down, coming down, coming down. And there's this cross reaction, there's basically an overflow because it's just going systemically. It's blasting these things out there to sort of suck these things up anywhere in the body.
And so it's hitting your gut or your thyroid or your nerves, like multiple sclerosis. It's an autoimmune attack on your nerves. And we actually see people respond extraordinarily well to a carnivore diet. And I have patients who have actually a lady who I've had on my podcast, I haven't published yet, but she's a PhD in biostatistics and she does clinical research and she had multiple sclerosis to the point that she was wheelchair bound.
And she wasn't able to really walk properly. And she's in her thirties, you know, as a young lady, a whole life ahead of her. And she was crippled with, with multiple sclerosis, which is unfortunately not an uncommon thing. She's been on carnival for a year. She's got her life back. She's, she's not only walking, she's not only off crutches. She's doing ballet again. Right. And on MRI, her lesions are repairing and reversing. Right.
Josh (47:01.198) That's extreme.
Anthony Chaffee MD (47:10.151) So you've removed this offending substance and your body stops making antibodies towards it and there's no spillover attacking your own body. And eventually your gut lining heals as long as you're not insulting it and attacking it. And after several months it heals. And then people actually find that they are a little less sensitive to eating some of these things. And after sort of six months or so, they eat something, hmm, it doesn't give them a flare up. Sometimes it does.
But, you know, so that's sort of suggesting that maybe that barrier protection is back in place and back helping them. This is, you know, none of this is necessarily proven, proven mechanisms. These are, these are what sort of is thought to be the case, but it seems to describe the, you know, the observed phenomenon and either way, regardless of how it's happening, it is happening. And we have people with autoimmune, especially autoimmune issues.
when they go into a pure elimination diet to a biologically appropriate human specific species specific diet, these problems go away and we actually have that in the medical literature since the 1800s and we just forgot about it.
Josh (48:20.162) Anthony, this is blowing my mind. And it's a lot of stuff I've looked into and I've considered it myself. Like I said, I genuinely feel okay. I love eating a good salad. I like the crunch and the fruit and the stuff I put in. But I do have two quick questions I have to follow up here with just to kind of get things wrapping up. I want to respect your time here as well. I know I blocked us for an hour. When we're dealing with carnivore, obviously in the US, there's a lot of deficiencies in the meat. There's a lot of grains and a lot of hormones and the RGBH they put into
They were coming in bovine growth hormone they put into the animals and the pesticides and there's so much toxicity in our food. So just off the top, somebody going carnivore in the middle of the US just going to their grocery store, big box store, wherever, picking up a beef liver is likely to be horrific for them, if not worse than just eating the plants. What is your take on that? What can people do to make sure they're getting quality meat ingredients, avoiding this junk?
And what does a carnivore diet look like? Like a nice well-rounded diet that people can actually enjoy.
Anthony Chaffee MD (49:22.631) Yeah. Well, you know, a carnivore diet is really just eating, eating meat and, and, and fatty meat fat is very, we didn't touch on this, but you know, the idea that cholesterol and saturated fat cause heart disease is completely fraudulent and pho and bogus as being it does. It absolutely does, but it, uh, it doesn't help people and it doesn't, it hasn't reduced the incidence and prevalence of heart disease and statins don't really help people survive. You know, if you've had a heart attack and you stay on stands for over five years.
Josh (49:35.958) Sells a lot of stat drugs though.
Anthony Chaffee MD (49:52.359) Um, on average you will live five days longer than someone who was not on statins. So, you know, and you come with all the, all the, the side effects and costs that that come with that. And if you haven't had a heart attack and you're on these things for a long term period, you, uh, on average live three days longer. So, you know, that's that to me is, is not really too impressive. And, um, and also, you know, it can actually cause dementia.
and Alzheimer's as well because your brain needs cholesterol, your body needs cholesterol, your body is made out of cholesterol. Every single cell in your body, the cell membrane is cholesterol and your demyelination of your axons and your nerve cells and your brain cells, a lot of that is cholesterol and saturated fat and your brain makes cholesterol, your body makes cholesterol and a lot of these statins actually stop your body from making cholesterol. Some of those statins can actually cross the blood brain barrier and prevent your brain and your neurons and your brain cells.
from making cholesterol, which interrupts the normal workings of your brain and the physical restructuring and rebuilding of your brain. And it can cause reversible Alzheimer's because you take people off these statins and six weeks later, all of a sudden they don't have Alzheimer's anymore and they can go home. Then you put them back on statins and six weeks later, oh, what do you know? They've got Alzheimer's again. No, they're being poisoned and they're being harmed by this drug. And so...
you know, that's, that's not really something that I, that I, I think is really, uh, you know, just a very good, uh, proposition to contend with that, you know, you're, you're maybe going to give yourself five days on average and you potentially give yourself Alzheimer's. So you won't even know about those five days anyway. So I don't, I don't really know if that's a great trade off. Um, you can get much better benefits just from eating the right things. Um, but as far as, as far as the quality, and so I think it's
as important what not to eat is what to eat though. So eating meat, eating fatty meat in particular, fat is so important. It's an essential nutrient. It's not just a calorie source. Like I said earlier, animals in the wild get the majority of their calories from saturated fat. And so carnivores and herbivores, right? Because that's where they break down fiber into. And so you really want the fat. The fat's very important. But as to what not to eat, I think it's very important because there's some of these things can actually cause harm. So my hard rule for myself is
Anthony Chaffee MD (52:14.171) no plants, no sugar or any sweeteners, nothing artificial. And that goes for sauces, seasonings and drinks as well. So it's really just eating whole food meat and just drinking water, salt to taste if you feel like it. You don't actually have to have salt, but salt isn't dangerous. It's not like this cause of heart failure or anything like that that's been touted as. As far as quality of meat, I agree, you know, regeneratively raised farmed cows and...
beef and chicken and things like that are actually much more nutrient dense and have a better constellation of fatty acids as well, better omega-3 ratios to omega-6 ratios. But any meat is going to be better than any plant because they act as a filter. So the animals filtering them out and especially ruminant animals, right? So red meat, this is why especially people with autoimmune issues, they seem to do best with red meat. So some people with autoimmune issues, they can't even eat pork.
Josh (52:55.574) Really, that dramatic, hey?
Anthony Chaffee MD (53:10.123) Right. They'll still get a flare up on pork just like they would if they ate fruits or vegetables. And I think a reason for that is because we're not feeding these animals what they're supposed to eat either. We're feeding pigs like a bunch of soy and grain and corn and things like that. They are not designed to eat that stuff. And so the toxins that are in so on is quite a lot that are in soy that and we didn't even touch on all the different sorts of things and ways that these things.
Josh (53:35.831) so many things to talk about, hey.
Anthony Chaffee MD (53:37.551) So many, so many different things. They can screw with your hormones. They can disrupt your hormones, estrogen, testosterone levels. They disrupt your absorption. They can disrupt protease. So protease inhibitors in the soy and wheat can stop you from breaking down protein. Even bioavailable protein is now not bioavailable because you can't break down any protein. And there's a number of different sorts of direct toxins that can harm you, lectins as you says, your whole class and family.
of defense chemicals and proteins that can bind to different carbohydrates and directly damage them. Cyanogenic glycosides are the 2500 different plants that we know of that if you chew them, they will release cyanide to poison you. And sulforaphane is in broccoli and it's, oh, this is so good for you. This stuff is so toxic that the broccoli can't actually keep it in its combined form. It has...
It has two different chemicals just sort of sitting here in different sorts of containers that when you chew it and macerate it, when the animal's eating it, then these release and they bind together, turn into sulfurophane to poison and hopefully kill the animal that's eating it so that the plant can survive before this thing finishes it off. Varanocoumarins, there are all sorts of different sorts of things that can cause different sorts of sensitivities to light every single citrus plant.
has ferranicumens that makes you sensitive to light. UV light hits it, they bind irreversibly to proteins and DNA cause permanent damage. So you can get actually like sunburns. So, you know, you're eating limes and lemons, oranges, or getting the juice on your hands in the sun can actually cause serious burns. So you can get quite badly burnt. People have gotten second degree burns on their hands from this.
So also if you're out of coumarins in things like carrots and parsnips and celery, there's a thing, there's an actual medical condition called celery dermatitis where people that pick a lot of celery, handle celery like grocers or farmers or eat a lot of celery like plant based eaters and those people that think they're being healthy eating celery, they actually get so badly burned and damaged from exposure to the sun that they just get scorched. So they have to wear long sleeves, long gloves, hats.
Anthony Chaffee MD (55:51.367) skin cream, all these sorts of things, or they just scorch in the sun. I don't get burned. I haven't peeled since I stopped eating plants. And literally once, I live in Australia, and everyone's here's like, oh my God, the sun here is just so different. I'm like, I'm just gonna run the risk. And I'll get very red, but that's just blood in your skin. Never peels, just turns into a tan. And so I've yet to wear sun cream here. I've yet to wear.
sunglasses or a hat or anything like that. Really, I just, I just walk around with my shirt off on the beach and it's fine. And that's because I'm not eating all these things that can cause sensitivity to light. So I think it's very important not to eat these things because we are not designed to eat them and they cause harm. And so I think that's very important not just to eat more meat, which is very important because you need your nutrients. You need the nutrients from meat and you want to avoid the plants and don't worry about nutrient deficiencies because you get everything you need.
in the proportion that you need it if you're only eating meat. But when you're eating different things, you need a different constellation of nutrients because the plants disrupt your absorption and bioavailability and your body's ability to utilize and absorb different nutrients. And so if you're eating them with plants, yes, you will need more of these nutrients. But if you don't eat the plants, then everything you need, you're getting out of the meat. Quality of meat, yes, that is something to consider, but...
The thing is, especially rumen animals with this rumen in their gut, that special four chambered stomach, that's where they get their name, is extremely good at breaking these things down. So even if they're eating something that they're not designed to eat, like grains or whatever, they're still better able to detoxify these things. And so you're still going to get a filtered after product and it's still turning it into animal tissue. So it's...
perfectly bioavailable protein and fat and nutrients. And yes, there might be some stuff that goes in it, especially in the monogastric, like chickens and fish and farmed fish and pork and things like that. With ruminants, it's better. So for most people, just eating Safeway beef is perfectly fine. And in fact, you do very, very well with it. Some people may need a bit of liver.
Anthony Chaffee MD (58:16.595) just because it's more nutrient dense. And, but most people don't. I mean, I just live on Costco steaks. I just buy Costco steak like in bulk. And that's what I've been eating for like six years. And, you know, every now and then, like, when I was in America, I could buy a regeneratively raised cow that was just eating grass its whole life and get older cows. Older cows are delicious, by the way. They have way more flavor. They have so much more flavor. And I think that's because they have more nutrient density as well, you're tasting those nutrients.
And so that was amazing. And I bought a 10 year old cow was way cheaper. You know, I bought, I went directly to the farmer. It was, it was better for him. He got more money for it. And I got it for a fraction of the price that I would have even gotten it through a butcher, just going directly to the rancher. And, and, and it was amazing. And it was absolutely amazing. I felt super charged. I needed to eat less. I didn't need to eat as much because your body chases nutrients more than it chases calories. And so, you know, I just felt
Josh (59:10.434) the density.
Anthony Chaffee MD (59:14.779) amazing on this stuff. And, you know, and that and that's because it is amazing. And it is great. But if you don't have access to it, you know, second best is Safeway beef, right? And you know, I think of it as sort of the you know, as the Olympics, right? So silver medalist lost a gold, right? But the silver medalist also beat everyone else on earth. Right. And that's how I think like Safeway beef, so grain finished beef. So yes, you know, there is something better.
but if you can't get it and you can't afford it and you don't have access to it, silver metal is absolutely still the best way to go and it certainly is better than any other plants because it at least has, you know, you're one step removed from those plant toxins. You know, had to go through the liver and the digestion of the cow and the ruminant or even the pig and it's gonna break this stuff down to at least a certain extent. But yes, obviously, if it's eating what it's supposed to eat, it's going to be healthier and it's going to...
be better for you. There aren't really any good studies, you're showing really a big difference in end results and outcomes from eating grass fed and finished, which sometimes it's hard to even tell what it is because sometimes you can call it 100% grass fed and it's not, or grain finished. But all cows have been grass fed for about 80% of its life. And then even the feedlot stuff, they go to the feedlot for the last couple months.
but they couldn't find any sort of really big health outcome differences, right? That's not to say there won't be. I mean, we do know objectively that there are differences in the nutrients, uh, quality and, uh, and quantity. So like regeneratively raised, uh, cows are just on grass. And we typically find that they have three, four, five times the amount of specific nutrients. There's one guy, I saw he was giving me a lecture at a, I think Hillsdale college.
and he was talking about regenerative agriculture and farming. And he was talking about the differences in nutrient profile. And he was talking about folate in eggs. And the USDA official sort of averages for the country in the US is about 41 milligrams of folate per egg. Whereas his eggs were over a thousand, right? And that's just the difference in how these things are raised. They're not just sitting in a box eating a bunch of corn.
Anthony Chaffee MD (01:01:34.279) You know, they follow the cows and the other animals around. So they're in a pasture, but they're only there for a few days so they don't over graze and they're defecating and urinating. That makes the soil better. It makes it healthier. That makes the grass more nutrient dense for the cows when they come back around. And then a couple of days later when the flies are all over the feces, that's when you bring the chickens in. They go and they start eating those bugs because that's what chickens are supposed to eat. They're carnivores too. They're eating bugs and worms and different sorts of things. They're not supposed to eat corn and grain and all that sort of crap.
And so when they're doing that, they're upcycling those nutrients, they're upcycling. So the flies are upcycling the nutrients from the feces, the chickens are eating the bugs, and then that's getting more protein, more fat, more nutrients, more folate, more of all these other things. And so if you do it in that way, yes, the nutritional quality is gonna be much better. So those who are in that position too can go to these regenerative farms, go directly to a rancher, to a farmer, and just say, hey, you know, I wanna...
you know, buy a cow, buy whatever. Generally, you can get it for cheaper if you're buying direct, especially if you're buying in bulk, if you're buying a whole animal, but you need to be able to store it, you need to be able to afford that upfront cost. And not everybody can do that, not everybody has access to that. If you can, I think that's a great thing to do. I think that's absolutely, and I think it is better, I felt better, and objectively, there are more nutrients in it, and a better compliment of omega-3s to omega-6s.
after about three months in a feedlot, there are some studies that suggest that basically all the omega-3s are gone out of beef. And so, you know, that's something to think about. And so, you know, adding in some fish oil or whatever to get some more omega-3s might be a good idea. But, you know, a long-winded sort of answer, but I still think that, you know, Safeway beef is absolutely perfectly fine and in fact is excellent and is better than any of the alternatives apart from...
grass-fed and finished regeneratively raised animals or hunting. I mean, hunting, you get an animal that's just out in the wild, it's probably older as well. That's gonna be extraordinarily nutritious.
Josh (01:03:43.246) Well, Anthony, thank you so much. This has been just a remarkable education and I think I might be converted. I'll have to give it a go. You know, I've tried all the other diets before. I tried vegan because my brother was, I was like, I'll give it a shot. I tried six weeks, I felt like trash. I've never felt worse in my life. The day I ate meat, I felt better. I've basically tried every diet there is except for carnivore and I might be a convert. So I appreciate this.
Anthony Chaffee MD (01:03:52.563) Nice. Yeah.
Anthony Chaffee MD (01:03:58.355) Mm-hmm. Mm.
Anthony Chaffee MD (01:04:10.635) Yeah, no problem, man. Well, you give carnivore six weeks, I will guarantee you you'll feel better than you've ever felt in your entire life. After about two weeks, generally, you get most of this garbage out of your system and your body will start working in ways you really didn't realize it could before. And you'll feel, literally feel like a different breed of human. And in a lot of ways you will be, because your body will be working very differently to almost every other human in the world. And that will just keep getting better. You'll probably lose at least five or 10 pounds in those first two weeks. So that's gonna be water weight.
and inflammation just getting out of your system. And then after that, you're gonna start shredding fat and stacking on muscle, especially if you work out, which it looks like you do. Your workouts are gonna become way easier. You're gonna be able to work out harder, work out longer, recover quicker. You're not gonna get sore anymore. Most people get really upset when I tell them that, but I don't get sore anymore. That soreness is that inflammation, these inflammatory factors that are in plants, and a lot of them in grains and things like that, to cause inflammation, pain, soreness, stiffness, swelling.
Josh (01:04:59.414) Hehehehe
Anthony Chaffee MD (01:05:10.311) and caused that delayed onset muscle soreness. I don't get that at all now. It doesn't matter how hard I push myself. When I got back from Bangladesh, I started pushing myself. I was just like, I'm not getting sore. Why the hell am I not getting sore? Am I not just pushing myself this hard? So I started pushing myself really hard. I ended up doing 32 sets of squats to failure. And I didn't get sore the next day. I ended up going hiking for three hours. Went to rugby practice that night, still not sore. I'm like, what the hell is going on? Two days later, still not sore.
Josh (01:05:29.976) Hahaha
Anthony Chaffee MD (01:05:38.247) went for coffee with a friend and said, okay, can I have coffee? Is that something I can keep in my repertoire? One cup of black coffee within 20 minutes, I was sore. I could actually feel it happening in real time, like, oh, what's happening? What's happening? What's happening? I was sore for two days after that. Not nearly to the extent that I should have been, but it was still stiff and sore. I'm like, okay, well, screw coffee. I'm not doing that. There's obviously something in there that's not agreeing with me. So...
Josh (01:05:55.054) That's bizarre.
Anthony Chaffee MD (01:06:04.739) your workouts will be just insane and you will get so much more out of it. You'll be able to work harder and you'll get more out of the work that you do. You'll, you will never put on muscle easier than when you're on a carnivore diet. You'll never lose fat more easily than when on a carnivore diet. And when you're not working out, you will, you will maintain your physique. So I haven't, I haven't worked out in months. I mean, once every few weeks, maybe I'll do like a workout or something like
but I maintain the physique. So I get in much better shape. I get much more muscular, much more lean, but I never get out of shape. I get in better shape, but I never get out of shape. Doesn't matter. I will always have a six pack. I always have the same, roughly the same amount of body fat, because I never really go above 10, 12% body fat when I am not working out for six months, right? I will still maintain around that. And when I am working out, it will go down. I'll go down to around 6% body fat and I get much more muscular.
but I will never get below that. You know what I mean? I'll never get like worse than sort of 10 or so percent of body fat and you will absolutely feel, but the biggest thing is that you will just feel like a superhuman. You will feel better than you've ever felt in your entire life, especially after a month, six weeks, like you will literally, if you're really just down to bare bones, just meat and water, you will feel like an absolute superhero.
Josh (01:07:26.63) I will do it. I'll get back to you. I'll let you know. I'll follow up. Well, Anthony, thank you so much for your time here. Thank you for sharing your extreme wealth of knowledge and information. So you guys can check out Anthony at Anthony Chafee MD on his Instagram. He's there on YouTube with the same on rumble all over the place. That's Chafee C H A F F E E. So that's going to be at Anthony Chafee MD. He's also got a podcast on Apple and Spotify, the Plant Free MD. So check that one out.
Anthony Chaffee MD (01:07:29.04) Yeah, definitely man.
Josh (01:07:55.646) and get more of these knowledge bombs. Anthony, thanks so much for being here, man. My mind has been blown.
Anthony Chaffee MD (01:08:00.839) Yeah, no problem, man. Thank you very much for having me.
Josh (01:08:03.454) One thing I will ask you Anthony before I fire this off, I'll just stop the record.