Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Making Sense of a Plant Free Diet - With Dr. Anthony Chafee - Episode 98

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. podcast. This podcast covers topics that expand human consciousness and performance. On the Make Sense podcast, we acknowledge that it's who you are that determines how well what you do works, and that perception is a subjective and acquired taste. When you change the way that you look at things, the things that you look at begin to change. The Make Sense podcast is sponsored and primarily funded by the Make Sense Academy. Our private community, where open and curious seekers of growth and expansion, apply the Make Sense principles and systems to move from simply going through life to growing through life.

Starting point is 00:00:41 So check out the Make Sense Academy, risk-free, for less than you'll spend today on shit that you don't need. Welcome, my friends, to the uprising of the sleepwalking masses. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. Dornick podcast. Really cool to have you here. I will say that there's certain types of guests that I find myself working very hard to get on here, and you're one of them. Sorry about that. I love this topic.

Starting point is 00:01:11 And it's one that hits home for me because I've been through my own health transformation and the name of the podcast is makes sense. And I just find myself progressively finding this topic that makes more and more sense. So what I'd love to do is start off where my listeners can kind of get a little bit of a read on your origin. I know that you went to school for surgical school or neurosurgical. Did you not end up going that path? And kind of what brought you from that stage where you were heading down that path and got involved in what you're doing now? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:01:47 Well, I did my undergraduate degree. I got my undergrad in molecular biology. I had a minor in chemistry. And then I went to medical school. So I did just traditional medical school, but I went to the Royal College of Surgeons over in Europe because I was playing rugby professionally over there and decided I wanted to stay and live abroad because it was fun living in Europe. And then I started going into down the neurosurgical path, first in Europe, and then I took time off because I had some family health issues. And then after that, there was an actual genocide in Burma.

Starting point is 00:02:22 And the unofficial numbers is that they killed about 200,000 people in about a month and a half, six-week period of the Rohingya people in Burma, now called. of Myanmar and about a million of the Rohingya fled into southern Bangladesh and so they had these big refugee camps there and and there wasn't really people enough people there to go around and help them so I decided to go over and help and volunteer as a doctor in the refugee camps there. And then I was sort of a free agent and sort of say, okay, well, where do I want to go and finish some neurosurgery and I decided to go to Australia. And I was working in neurosurgery there as what they call a registrar, which is, you know, someone who is still working on becoming a surgeon but isn't done yet. So I was a registrar there in neurosurgery for several years,

Starting point is 00:03:06 but I was always very interested in diet nutrition and how that affected health and chronic disease. And I applied that to my studies in neurosurgery and how this could play a role in that as well. People have chronic pain issues, have spinal stenosis, they have impinged nerves, they have cancer, you know, that these nutritional changes can and will play a role in that. And I interested from that standpoint, but also from a general holistic standpoint. And so I also did some work because I was interested in it. It was I guess called functional medicine, preventative medicine. But as a metabolic health clinic, you know, you're just sort of addressing root causes of things

Starting point is 00:03:42 and trying to get people better and get them off medication as opposed to on more medication and let their body work properly so that it just works. The difference between health care and sick care, you know, which is what we typically do. So I really like that concept. And I really like that being able to apply diet and lifestyle interventions and see how well they worked. And you could reverse chronic diseases that still to this day, people think are irreversible. Diabetes now people are understanding you can reverse this.

Starting point is 00:04:06 But two years ago, vast majority of people would say that's not possible. I was seeing people reverse that seven, eight years ago. And other people have been seeing it reversed longer than that. I'm sort of late to the game eight years ago, you know. And so but autoimmunity, mental health disorders, getting improved cancer outcomes. There's so many benefits to proper nutrition and being able to apply that to people. Hormonally, I mean, there's a large component of that. People have hormone replacement sort of things, you know, TRT, all these sorts of things.

Starting point is 00:04:36 But I see when you just change their diet, you may not even need to give them hormones or certainly not as many hormones. I've, you know, as guy as old as 72, whose testosterone triple and is now optimal for a healthy 25-year-old man. Not the 25-year-old men that are running around nowadays, but like, it's 20. 25-year-old man that were running around in like the 70s, you know, because we're at the lowest testosterone rates we've ever been in recorded history. And so, you know, since we've been testing testosterone, we have lowest testosterone rates and lowest fertility rates. And I don't think that's a

Starting point is 00:05:06 coincidence with all the garbage that we're eating because when I changed their diet, their testosterone just slams up. And regardless of age, that's pretty much universal across the board. My background is chiropractic. I'm retired for about nine years. So I was fascinated in the same thing. My parents are both professional athletes, and I was kind of brought up. Oh, nice. Nice, but I was brought up in a very, very holistic, healthy paradigm. It was one of those kids that say, I was brought up out of a garden. So what's interesting about all of this, my fascination from a human behavior standpoint,

Starting point is 00:05:40 is it seems that we can get so indoctrinated into things, and due to things like cognitive bias, like find out that they're not right, yet still find a way to justify them. When I talk to people and say, yeah, I've got Dr. Anthony coming on the podcast, and I just share a little tidbit about some of the things that you speak about. You can just tell that they'll say something like, oh, Jesus, right? And then I'll say, well, here's the data. And there's this funny thing that happens when you present fact where people just have this ability to go, oh, that's a bunch of nonsense. And then they have nothing to present. So I just find this all so fascinating and just got to mention on on the rugby level i don't know who you played for but i'm married to

Starting point is 00:06:24 a south african we're springbok fans like i didn't i didn't really have much of a choice in that but in this house we don't watch a lot of sports outside of rugby and cricket who did you play for uh well i was an all american in the in the u.s we played for the junior national team and sort of all the sort of the the select sort of sides and things like that up until the national team so i didn't didn't play for the full national team in the U.S. But it was just what I played for all, you know, in all the top leagues in North America. So in like the Super League, you know, Division I, U.S. and the Premiership in Canada.

Starting point is 00:06:56 And I started, you know, sort of in the preseason with the MLR, the Major League Rugby. The new iteration of Major League Rugby, this is sort of the third iteration of Major League Rugby. Well, something with that name is this is completely different organizations previously. But I was in the preseason. That was actually when I went back on Carnivore, what, seven, eight years ago. And within two weeks, I just felt amazing. I was just back from Bangladesh and, you know, was trying to get back in shape. I was 38.

Starting point is 00:07:19 I was trying to get back in shape to play some rugby just for fun. And all of a sudden I went back carnivore, which I had done in my early 20s while I was playing high-level rugby and just felt like a superhero. But I figured I was as well, in my young early 20s, of course I feel like a superhero. Of course, I don't feel like that now because I'm older. But no, that's not true. I felt better at 38 than I did at 28 playing professional rugby, far better. I felt like I was 22 again. And I said, time to go play some rugby again.

Starting point is 00:07:44 And so I went back out and I was playing with the Seattle Saracens and Sea Wolves and was sort of in there with with them and getting ready to start actually playing and then end up hurting my knee. So I didn't end up actually playing that season. But and then in England I played with Newbury in the championship league. And yeah, and you know, played in Ireland in the All-Ireland 1A, which is just a step below their premiership as well. But that was when I was in medical school and, you know, couldn't really dedicate the time to like, playing fully professional. That was actually in my medical school interview. The interviewers actually sort of knew who I was in my background. And they said, okay, well, you know, how do we know that you're not going to just, you know, come here and start playing and then just, you know, start

Starting point is 00:08:28 playing professionally again and then just, you know, that's going to be your focus. And then you're not, and you're going to, you know, give medical school, you know, put that on the, on as a second, as a second effort. And I said, look, you know, I've accomplished what I wanted to accomplish in rugby. I've really enjoyed it. But I'm, you know, ready to, you know, of make this. I mean, I will always play rugby. I told them that. I was like, I even have my rugby boots with me now just in case like there's like a pickup game or something like that on this trip. But my main focus is going to be medical school. So yeah, it's long played for, yeah, all the different sort of teams. You won a couple national championships in the U.S. for

Starting point is 00:09:03 sevens and 15s and sevens national championships in Ireland. I was on a professional touring seven side. We went to sort of like these cash tournaments. We've won a few of those on the Dubai. sevens, one of the Kinsale Sevens in Ireland, got invited to all these other things as well. So yeah, so it was a fun time. And, you know, it's nice to be able to pass that on to people and say, like, look, this is, this is what I did. And from 20 to 25, I was only eating meat. I've never felt better in my entire life, never played better. And then 25 to 30 playing still high level rugby just never felt the same. And so I should be more experienced. It should be fit or I should be better. It should be, you know, a veteran. I should be more dominant and definitely did well. But

Starting point is 00:09:44 I never felt as good as I did in those first five years and as I do now. So I mean, I'm 45 now. I feel better than I again, I feel better than I did at 28. But I have a jinky knee now. So I can't, that's the only reason I'm not playing. Well, your jinky knee would be jinkier if you didn't follow your, that's another interesting component. Some people say, well, I have this problem. So F it. But what would it look like if you weren't doing it? So, you know, just first and foremost, on the rugby thing, I just, the reason why to bring it up is when I told my wife that I was interviewing you and I said he's from Australia. They said he better not be, you know, an Australia fan, you know, because like, apparently Australia is like the devil in this house. But anyway, so what I'm from, I'm from the US originally.

Starting point is 00:10:29 So I've only looked at the hospital. I told her she allowed the interview at that point. Yeah. South African women know more about rugby than most men. So this fascination that I have about how human beings can get so deeply indoctrinated into anything. I've heard you speak a lot about, you know, the fact that biologically were carnivores. And if you do any research and you go back, you'll see that something happened. And I'd love you to discuss a little bit about the biological component, but something happened where we needed to find something else to eat. And as far as I'm concerned, what I can see is like it was a second option when we couldn't

Starting point is 00:11:08 find meat when we were foraging and things like that. But somehow, and I don't know what's backing that still today, this idea of like ignoring the data and still saying something, somehow we just got like hooked on it. Was it a resource thing? So tell me a little bit about this idea that we're biologically carnivores. Well, if you go back to the fossil record, you see that humans have been apex predators for over two million years. That's what the best data shows. And that we know that people have been living in the Arctic Circle during the Ice Ages. What exactly is there to eat in the Arctic Circle during an ice age? Right? I mean, it's just ice flows, right? So you're going to be eating the animals that live there. And they're going to be sparse. They're going to be scarce. So you're going to get fish. There's a lot of fish up in those Arctic regions, whales, seals, polar bears, migrating Macedon, woolly mammoths going through that area on their way to better, you know, greener pastures, things like that. So that's what people ate. The other thing is when they say, like, well, you know, we should be eating plants and this. And there's a lot of mental gymnastics and just flat out lies and aberrations from the truth,

Starting point is 00:12:14 saying, yes, well, you know, and just make all these excuses. You know, the agricultural revolution happened about 10,000 years ago. Some say actually 8,000 years ago. So it's not that long ago. And we know that genetically we haven't been eating starchy plants for very long. Oh, we've been eating roots and trubers and mostly that. And sometimes we would hunt. That's nonsense.

Starting point is 00:12:33 Of course that's nonsense. You know, we've been apex predators for over two million years. We have not been eating roots and tubers and things like that. How do we know this? Because amylase is an enzyme that breaks down starch, right? We've only been making amylase as human beings, as homo sapiens for about 10,000 years. That's when it came into the gene pool. That's when we've tracked that gene back.

Starting point is 00:12:54 It was about 10,000 years ago. Lactase persistence, you know, drinking milk and drinking milk past infancy. That's about 10, 12,000 years old as well. Okay, so we know that there's this transition in our eating behaviors around that time. on a population-wide basis. And so, you know, why would that be? Well, let's go back originally. So we know that humans have been, or early humans, eating meat,

Starting point is 00:13:17 and there were scavengers at first, and they figured out tools, you know, osteopithecus, made the first formed, sharpened tool to, you know, cut and dismember, you know, meat off the bone. We see this butcher remarks going back millions of years on those bones and things like that. And, but we have also noted that pre-pre-humans, we're actually using stones that rocks as pound stones to crack open the skulls and bone marrow of carrying animals, dead animals have been picked clean by other animals.

Starting point is 00:13:42 And we can get in, we can get into the brain. We can get in the bone marrow. We can still get these really valuable nutrients out of that. Then osteopithecus got sharpened tools and we could start killing more things. We could dismember them. We didn't have teeth, big teeth. We didn't have big claws, things like that. So, you know, we needed those stone tools.

Starting point is 00:13:57 We needed that technology. And then after hundreds of thousands of years, you get to Homo habilis, who was, you know, the first tool using a sort of considered the first true human and, you know, Homo habilis means basically refers to sort of major tool users of the time. And so through that technology, we were able to become apex predators through our intelligence. Because we didn't have big teeth and claws. We evolved our brains instead. And so we were able to figure out how to use tools and tactics to make fire and scare a herd of animals over a cliff.

Starting point is 00:14:26 So they crash and burn. And we use these stone tools to carve them up and eat them or preserve the meat to have for the rest of the year. We have, you know, the Native Americans doing buffalo drops or they scare a herd of buffalo over. cliff, they crash and burn, they carve them up, dry the meat, mix it with fat, and that's what pemmican is. That's high fat. It's a two to one grams of fat to proteins. Well, wild animals are lean, we should be eating lean meat. Now, the muscle body is muscle, because that's what it's supposed to be. The body has fat, so subcutaneous fat, intramedomal fat. There's quite a lot of fat. If it's a healthy animal, it's going to have fat in it because those are its fat stores, right? That's its healthy

Starting point is 00:15:00 animal, it's able to maintain those stores. And if you preserve those and you keep those fast stores, you mix those with the meat, then you're going to get a very fatty outcome. Whereas now we're told, no, no, get rid of all the fats. They're trimming all the fat off and throwing it away. That doesn't mean that fat doesn't exist. That means that it's being wasted. And so with Homeobilis, they were pushed into that position of being apex predator because of the ice ages.

Starting point is 00:15:23 And when the ice shelf started coming down about two, two and a half million years ago, that wiped out a lot of the plant life, that wiped out a lot of the animals that relied on those plants. And there was a lot of animals that went extinct. a lot of early humans that were more omnivorous or more herbivorous. They died out. Homo habilis is who survived and that's who were descended from. And people will, again, lie and just say, you know, oh, no, no, no. When ice shelves came down, everyone just went towards the equator. I mean, they just make this up. It's just without any evidence that they're asked for or provided,

Starting point is 00:15:52 they just make these claims without ever looking into it. The fossil record actually shows that as the ice shelves came down, homoobillus went up into the ice, right? Because that's where the megafauna was. That's where the big fatty animals that they were hunting and they preferred to hunt were. And so they were living up there for quite some time. So now we've been apex predators for quite some time, using tools, using tactics to take these things down. Then you have, in fact, you see the different weaponry like bows and arrows, things like that. They're used for like quicker, faster animals, like birds and things like that. Like as these food sources started going down, we start getting these different weapons because we have to, you know, get hunting, kill different animals,

Starting point is 00:16:26 smaller, faster animals and things like that. It's a big lumbering elephant and things like that. You know, you just need big, heavy, hard spears and things like that. You don't need like bone arrows. It's going to do anything to a woolly mammoth, you know? And so that sort of changed with the animals that we were hunting as well. Around 12,000, 15,000 years ago, you have the end of the last ice stage and you have a mass extinction event.

Starting point is 00:16:51 So all these megafauna died out. That was our main food source. And the larger the animal, the larger the percentage. of fat as a percentage of body weight. And so that's what we went after. And then we started saying, okay, the next one down was like cows and buffalo and things like that. We still prized the fat going after whales. Whales have a ton of fat, seals, all these other sorts of things. We're going for high fat animals because fat's very important. But then certain areas, they didn't have that. In Great Plains in North America, there's hundreds of millions of bison,

Starting point is 00:17:20 American buffalo. And so they could all eat that. And they would, you know, as the buffalo herds came through, they scare a part of them over a cliff. That was their food for the year. You know, there's different, you know, legends in Native American cultures like the, of the buffalo dance and like the, you know, the Cheapton's daughter ends up, you know, saying like, hey, you know, you guys are like turning and you can't go. Like, well, it's not going to feed our family. And they're like, hey, well, you don't care about us. You know, you're just letting us die. This is our family. It's okay, well, we'll do this buffalo dance. That will return your spirits to the herd and they'll be reborn. And this whole, this whole big thing in their culture and how important and

Starting point is 00:17:54 significant that that buffalo hunt was, but it was once a year, you know, and so they come through and you have meat for the entire year. And so certain areas didn't do that, didn't have that. And we had evidence of mammoth drops over a million years ago, of scaring mammoth over a cliff to crash and burn as well over a million years ago. So we have all this evidence that humans have been apex predators. Apex predators are by definition carnivores. But then we see in certain areas where they didn't have access to all of these things. Maybe they start animal husbandry and they started cultivating animals and trying to grow them big, get as much fat as they could, and fatten them up so that, you know, you see this in the Bible, the fat of the lamb, you know, the fattened calf and all that sort of stuff.

Starting point is 00:18:33 There's what they're trying to do. We're trying to fat, fat and you're using dairy to get more fat, get the butter, get the cream. That was very, very highly prized up until 50 years ago. I mean, that's what you went for. You know, skim milk 100 years ago was a throwaway product. They used to slop pigs with it because it was a byproduct of the butter in the cream industry. They didn't even want it. So they'd give it to pigs.

Starting point is 00:18:52 it actually helped them gain weight. And that's, so skim milk, even though it doesn't have fat in it, actually triggers weight gain and overeating in pigs. And that's what they would give to pigs. They give grains and skim milk in order to get their poundage up and make them gain weight faster. That's just breakfast cereal. And we're telling us that our people, ourselves, that those are good. So certain areas had to convert and start eating more plants.

Starting point is 00:19:15 And you see this sort of transition from being hunters to hunter gatherers. And we figure out what plants they could eat in order to survive. But it was survival. It wasn't like, ooh, this is optimal. This is the best thing ever because plants have toxic. Plants defend themselves by being toxic. Animals can run away or fight back, but plants can't. And everything has a defense.

Starting point is 00:19:32 And so defenses that plants typically have are chemical in nature. So we have classified, categorized, and named nearly a million different defensive chemicals that exist in plants. And these are used to stop animals and other insects, et cetera, from eating them and from predation. So during that time, people started figuring. out that you could eat certain plants to survive. Something you just brought up. I would just imagine that when we were trying to figure out which plants we could eat,

Starting point is 00:20:00 the premise was survival, as you said, but we were trying to figure out which ones we could tolerate. We probably didn't even understand how they could nourish us yet. We were just trying to figure out what we could eat. And when you would find something that you could tolerate, you had no idea what it meant for you, but you found a new food source. And I would assume that had a role. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:21 Well, and also because we had developed our brains, because we had to figure out, develop our brains because we had to figure out how to take down a mastodon that outclasses us by every physical metric. And so, and yet our ancestors were hunting these things going back millions of years. Okay, how the hell did they do that? You know, says, oh, we don't have big teeth and big claws. And so therefore we're not carnivores. Well, that's nonsense. I mean, there's carnivores don't even have teeth. And yet they're eating other fish or birds that have beaks. They don't have teeth, you know, all these different sorts of things that are, it doesn't matter. Corrillas have big fangs. They don't eat meat. So, you know, that's a nonsensical argument on its face. But the thing is, we didn't need to do that because we don't kill things with our mouths. We kill things now with guns, but back then with spears or with tactics, we scared them over cliffs and we like gravity do the works. We used our brains. That's the defining feature of our species is that is that our brains are more powerful than than pretty much anything else. Maybe whales and dolphins, but they don't have thumbs. So maybe they can't, you know, they can't do anything with that intelligence. But it's that technology and our brain power that that got us to where we are. And now when you're in that period of me, as I look, it's survival time where our brains allowed us to survive because we were able to figure out how to survive on suboptimal fuel sources and food sources. And one of the ways we did that is by figuring out that we could chemically alter and manipulate plants to lower the toxic load, to make them safer, and to also bring out the, you know, break the chemical bonds in the otherwise not bioavailable nutrients and to make them more bio available it raises the

Starting point is 00:21:55 nutrient load and lowers the toxic load fermentation is a great example of this there's also and this is throughout cultures you know you see fermentation of different things or even just fermented milk you know you get rid of the lactose because most most people are actually lactose intolerant you know i mean the um the mongols like gangis con the mongol horde they're horribly lactose intolerant the mongolians and yet part of their survival they were carnivores they ate horse meat and horse blood but They also fermented mares milk. That was a major part of their diet as well. It was fermented merriment, but they're lactose intolerant.

Starting point is 00:22:27 So they fermented it. And so that made it safer and brought out the nutrient load as well. You know, there are nutrients that we just can't access because we don't have the biomechanics to break down these chemical bonds. That's another way that plants defend themselves is because they protect their nutrients in ways with chemical bonds that we can't break because then this is, this is proof positive that we're not designed to eat these things because we don't have the enzymes to break down these chemical bonds and release these nutrients or to break down these toxins,

Starting point is 00:22:55 which is any great degree anyway for some of these things. So we've figured out that we could ferment them, that we could cook them, that we could mix them with lye and with ash and with clay and with all these other different sorts of things. There's a process called nishtomalization, which is where the word tamale comes from because that's what the people in Mesoamerica would do to corn, which is a completely cultivated crop. That's a completely man-made crop. People can Google what the original corn looks like. It looks nothing like a corn on the cob. And they didn't just eat corn on the cob.

Starting point is 00:23:25 They didn't eat it raw. They didn't eat it cooked. They actually would take it off, scrape it off, and they would crush it, and they would mill it. And they would mix it with lie. They would mix it with different chemicals. It was like a seven-step chemical process, you know, using heat and cooking and this and that to then get this corn mash, this corn pulp.

Starting point is 00:23:40 And that had a much lower toxic load and much more bioavailability. For instance, in corn, it has a lot of niacin, but it's completely not bioavailable to the point that people in the early 1900s were getting niacin deficiency from eating so much corn because they, you know, they weren't eating nutritious things that had B vitamins, you know, like meat because they were poor. It was really cheap to buy corn and grow corn. It was very easy, easy crop to grow. And they're getting something called Pallagra, which people thought was an infectious disease for a while, but they showed that it was actually a niacin deficiency.

Starting point is 00:24:13 And the irony there is that corn has a lot of niacin. It's just not bioavailable to humans. And so it has to go through this process of nishtamilization, which is what the Mesoamericans figured out. And so those traditional ways of recipes and ways of cooking things, it's not just culinary cuisine. You know, there are actual reasons behind these things. People typically never ate soy. They would just ate tofu. They would ferment the soy.

Starting point is 00:24:35 That was always the traditional way of eating soy in Asia. And you had to do these sort of natural things to lower the toxic load. I mean, there's an issue with oxalates. Oxalates are a plant toxin and it's form of oxalic acid in spinach and that can get in your bloodstream. You can strip out calcium. You can strip out of their nutrients. You can cause these little splinter-like crystals to form in different tissues in your joints. You can get gout. One of the causes of gout is actually oxalate crystals in your joints. It's not just uric acid crystals. There's multiple causes of gout, now called pseudo-gout. But they all look the same. You can't tell the difference unless you take a needle aspirate, stick a big honk a needle in your toe joint. try to get some juice out. No one's going to do that. They're just going to say, here's some alipurin, I'll get your uric acid down. So that's not helpful because that's only one of the several different causes of gout. You know, I've read a nutritionist named Adele Davis, who's working 100 years ago, wrote several books. She was way ahead of her time. And a lot of the

Starting point is 00:25:30 things that she wrote, I mean, still absolutely stood the test of time. And it was like, and she was out there, you know, saying at the time, he's like, no, I think this is what's going on. And retrospect, you're looking back 80 years, 100 years later, like, no, she was just bang on there. That's pretty well done. So she in there said you never eat raw spinach. You never eat raw spinach. It's really bad for you. What you do is you poach it in milk and the calcium in the milk leaches out the oxalates and pulls those out. So then you can eat the spinach safely and you're not going to get all those oxalates that are going to be harmful to you. There's a study in the 1950s where they gave people a bunch of spinach because it has a high

Starting point is 00:26:06 calcium content or so it says you put that through a mass spectrometer and you'll see yeah, lots of calcium. Great. You should eat it. You should get it. right? Well, like in the case with corn and niacin, that's not necessarily the case. And it's not the case in spinach and calcium either because the calcium is bound up in non-bi-available ways. And you can't, you can't break these things down. And it comes with a lot of oxalates, which actually get into your bloodstream and bind your own calcium, strip that out of your bloodstream. And then you need to demineralize your bones, your serum levels up. Because if your calcium level gets too low, your heart stops. So that's not good. And so your body's going to preserve your heart

Starting point is 00:26:40 your skeletal tissue and that's where the priorities are going to go. So she was saying you never eat raw spinach. You never just eat a spinach salad. You would poach it in milk and then now leach out those oxalates. Now you can eat that safely. And you'll think about all these traditional ways of eating spinach. It's always cooked and it's generally with some sort of cream or cheese or some sort of dairy product that has a lot of calcium in it like Spanical Pita, right?

Starting point is 00:27:03 It's a Greek dish that is spinach with cheese with feta cheese and all these other sorts of things. So if it's cooked in with a dairy product that has calcium, it's going to leach that out. So that's what we were able to do. That transition period was through necessity, and it did cost us. But because of our brains, we're able to figure out how to prepare and treat these things and at least improve them. And now we're saying, no, just eat everything raw and all that sort of stuff. It's super good for you. And things are getting worse.

Starting point is 00:27:28 But you see this sharp decline in the fossil record as soon as agriculture came in. And it wasn't just like around the world because we had our brain size going up, up, up, up, up, up. And then, you know, with the inflection of homobiles going apex predator, there's a sharp inflection up. There's exponential growth of our height and our brain size. And it's going up, up, up, up, up, up until about 10, 15,000 years ago. And bam, sharply down, right? So the brain size went down by 11% for adult males and 17% for adult females.

Starting point is 00:27:57 And that happened basically instantly from a, from a geological point of view, from an evolutionary point of view. So it didn't take hundreds of years. It wasn't this slow top off. Or we just reached our limb in that it started going down. No, it's a sharp decline. It was a sharp angle. And so that's not evolutionary because it's not long enough, right?

Starting point is 00:28:14 So that happened pretty much instantly. And this happened with agriculture, but not around the world. And that's the thing that people miss. It's not like around the world, people's height and brain size started coming down. It was only in the areas that adopted agriculture, only in the areas that adopted agriculture. And we can tell the difference in the fossil record, we can tell the difference between a skull from pre-agriculture and post-agricultural societies. And they're smaller, jaws are smaller, teeth are crooked. They have all these signs of chronic disease and infections and all these other sorts of things.

Starting point is 00:28:43 And so, and they're shorter. You know, they drop down five or six inches. Brain shrink, like I said. And this happened only in those isolated areas that had agriculture. The rest of the areas around, they still had big brains, very tall, these sorts of things. And we saw this everywhere and every when this happened because agriculture came about independently seven different points that we know of around the world on different continents. And when that happened, you see the exact same reduction in high. and reduction in brain size within a generation or two, right?

Starting point is 00:29:12 And we saw this in real time with Western expansion when the European countries started going around to other continents and other areas and bringing agriculture and post-agricultural food and things like that. And so you saw this decline, Dr. Weston A. Price in the early 1900s, he saw this in real time with these primitive populations or pre-agricultural populations. Our civilizations are pretty primitive in respects to a lot of things. But he saw that there's this transition that these people. jaw, facial development, brain size, and overall health was actually declining as the generations

Starting point is 00:29:44 went on after they were exposed to agriculture or even siblings in the same family that were developing differently. Their jaws were smaller, getting crooked teeth, fallen dental arches, things like that. And he found that he could actually reverse this by giving them animal products and animal fats in particular. And we know this now. It's in dentistry journals that you have to have these animal fats to get proper facial development, jaw development, teeth development, specifically because you get these fat soluble vitamins that only exist in animal fats. So vitamin D3, vitamin K2, for instance, those are extremely important in calcium and K1, but K2 and D3 are required for proper facial development and jaw development.

Starting point is 00:30:21 And so everybody before agriculture, they had big teeth, wide jaws, you know, perfect teeth, straight teeth, perfect dental arches. They all got their wisdom teeth. You know, not getting your wisdom teeth in, that's actually pretty recent phenomenon. That was just a normal thing. Those are teeth that were supposed to be in our head, and yet we're not getting them. And so, you know, this is something that Weston A Price saw in real time happening and he could actually reverse it in real time as well. We saw this again in real time, you know, population-wide

Starting point is 00:30:48 basis with the Native Americans, the Native Australian aboriginals because when they were sort of forced to switch over to a more post-agricultural way of eating in the late 1800s, early 1900s, we actually saw this sharp decline in the height, brain size, and health of these populations. And that's what we've seen, the fossil record is where the health declined as well. And the Native Americans have a far higher rate of chronic disease than European Americans do. And same with Australian aboriginals. They have a far higher rate of chronic disease than European Australians do. And when I first moved to Australia as a doctor that I was told day one that if you have an Aboriginal patient,

Starting point is 00:31:26 you have to add 20 years onto whatever it says on their file because they just age so much faster. And their bodies just break down and decline. And we don't know why. They just break down. Well, that's because they've only started eating post-agricultural diets within the last 100, 150 years. And to any great extent, really, you know, certain areas would have more agriculture, used a bit more plants. But, I mean, we're talking about a continent here. It's not like every single person had, you know, farms and this is and that's or whatever.

Starting point is 00:31:51 And when they had access to meat, they ate it. They knew which plants they could eat to survive on. But when they had access to meat, that's what records, the European records going back, hundreds of years say that they ate meat whenever they had it available, was quite often. And then if they had to survive on something else, they would. But there were some areas that the meat was so abundant, they never had to. They could pick the type of meat that they wanted. You know, in Tasmania, they only dove for mollusks and abalone and things like that. They just ate that. That's it. They didn't even want normal fish. Like the Europeans in the 1700s tried to offer them normal fish. And they don't want that crap. We do mollusks here. And so they were spoiled for choice.

Starting point is 00:32:26 And now they're not. They're much shorter. They're smaller brains, much sicker. There's a book called Kings and Grass Houses in the 1800s, or it was based in the 1800s, and it was talking about, you know, these people that in the aboriginal, they were extremely tall. They're called like gentle giants and things like that. And there was a, there was a sort of a massacre by the British in Western Australia where, you know, some sort of dignitary or whatever was killed. And they thought it was these Aboriginal peoples. And so they went just wiped out a whole bunch of people.

Starting point is 00:32:54 And apparently it went back like a year or so later and they just left all the bones out there, and they weren't buried or anything. And they were just amazed because they were shooting these people, but they went up and saw the skeletons and the forearms, so the only on the radius, right, of the forearms. They actually found the forearms of the Aboriginal people that were killed in the skeletons were longer than the outstretched arms of the British soldiers. These guys are huge, right? Now they're not. They're not particularly tall as the population, right? But there was a study in America, it was called The Tallest in the World, is published in 2001.

Starting point is 00:33:27 and it looked at original source material data that was collected in the late 1800s in the Native Americans in the Great Plains. And they found that the people in the Great Plains were the tallest human beings alive on Earth at the time. Tulles population of human beings alive on Earth, far taller than European-American adult male height, something like 5-4 or something like that at the time. Now it's only 5-8. It's not that much better. But the Cheyenne Indians, for instance, they were on average 5-10, far higher, far tall. than they were. And the interesting thing about that was that was in the late 1800s, and that was after the buffalo herds have been wiped out, nearly to extinction, and they were put on reservations and had to drastically change their diet. And in that, in that original source data, they even said, they even noticed this and said the older generations, like the fathers and grandfathers were by far the tallest. They were far and away the tallest. So just the young men, they were the shortest. Their fathers, much taller, their father's even taller, right? And so they said if they'd done that study 50 years ago,

Starting point is 00:34:33 100 years ago, I mean, these guys, the average height would have been far higher, well over 6 feet tall. As we see, like the Maasai average 8, average 6'3 foot 3, they're eating meat, blood, and milk. And that's pretty much it. This is also fascinating. And coming to the end of our talk, I want to kind of get some short form answers from you to pull this out. So what's interesting about this topic is that I could interview the expert that claims that the other, that you're crazy and that they're right. What would you say is the most common thing that the person on the other side that claims that he's completely wrong, fruits and vegetables and all that? What is the platform that they stand on? And what are your thoughts on that? Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of these things that,

Starting point is 00:35:14 you know, sort of like butcher some of the data just to just to fit their narrative, like saying, well, you have to, you know, people didn't go up into the ice. They went down towards the equator. That's not true, but they'll just say things to say them. You know, I saw some guy, Dr. Neil Barnard, I believe it was, said that, oh, cheese is the most, the highest macro that it has is, is carbohydrates from lactose. And then it has fat and then it has it. There's almost no carbohydrates and cheese. Like, it's just, they just make things up.

Starting point is 00:35:40 But what they generally go back to is just like, okay, you point out there's plant toxins. And you have these things, oh, no, there's no plant toxins. Then they read a book and they say like, oh shit, actually there's a lot of plant toxins. I don't want to look like an asshole. I say, well, actually, those are good toxins. But they'll continue to stand on that platform. That's what I'm trying to figure out is it's just human nature to decide what's true and what's not. Rather than actually like looking, you're looking at it evolutionary-wise.

Starting point is 00:36:04 And that's what I love about it. It's like, well, I mean, look what happened when this happened. But we just live in a society that can just turn their heads to that and say, well, here's the new data. No, but also like, you know, no understanding that these things have plant toxins, knowing that they cause harm. The WHO has a whole web page dedicated to all the different toxins that are found in food. Every single one is a plant, a mushroom, or algae. Not a single one is a toxin that originates in meat, not one, right? And so that's interesting, but they'll say that meat is toxic and that plants are really good for you.

Starting point is 00:36:35 So this all hinges and started with, you know, saying that, that, you know, saturate fat is bad and cholesterol is bad and that causes heart disease. therefore meat is bad. That was the whole thing. And so the argument was, it's like if something had fat and saturated fat and cholesterol, whatever, it was bad. And therefore, anything without that was good. And so you'd see this and, I mean, you still see it today. Sometimes you have like a candy section, a bag of candy, fat free. It's like it's candy. Who cares if it's fat for even if fat were bad, that doesn't mean that candy's good. And but that was the argument. So fruits and vegetables didn't have saturated fat and cholesterol. And so therefore they were de facto good for you. And then this whole idea. ideology came from that. And then there were a lot of people, you know, propagandists and things like that, vegan propagandists, you know, at, you know, very highly placed at, you know, Stanford and Oxford, you know, it's like Dr. Gardner at Stanford, Dr. Willett at Harvard. And they're vegan activists. That's what they are. I mean, Gardner just has described himself nearly as such. And they're heavily involved with and paid by the processed food industry, which is all plant-based. You know, It's not meat-based processing.

Starting point is 00:37:40 It's a lot cheaper and has a much higher, you know, profit margin and things like that. So they make, they make trillions, literally trillions off of this. And they pay a lot of people. They splash the cash around to push this ideology. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars in nutritional research. Coca-Cola alone in 2015 spent $119 million on nutritional research, right? I mean, what are they doing? What are those studies coming up with that Coke and sugar are good for you?

Starting point is 00:38:07 I bet. Okay. So that's part of it. And then a lot of the time is when they hang their hat on is that they always go back to is like, well, look at all this, look at all these studies that just say people that eat more plants are better for you, right? Do they live longer, they have lower cardiovascular disease and things like that. Who did this study and what did the study actually show? These are typically epidemiological studies called food frequency questionnaire. It's not even like an epidemiological study where you're observing, where you're looking at a native population like the Maasai, like they did when the British did in the 1920s. They looked at the Maasai and they looked at their neighbors, the Akikuyu, who were largely vegetarian, the Akikuyu. And they actually found massive disparities in their health. They found that exact disparity in the pre-agriculture, post-agricultural fossil record. The Maasai were five inches taller, 20-something, 30 pounds, heavier of lean body mass. You know, they had bigger brains, better teeth, had less health issues, less metabolic health issues. They didn't have diabetes, things like that, which the Akikuyu did.

Starting point is 00:38:59 The Akikuyu had a lot of, and then the Maasai were 50% stronger. And the, and the Akikuyu were weaker. They had, you know, different problems. health issues, they had nutritional deficiencies, and even when they replaced the nutritional deficiencies, it didn't actually improve their health until they took away the plants, started giving them meat. Then they got healthier. So you don't look at that. That's actually really interesting epidemiological data. They're using something called food frequency questionnaires. This nutritional science is something that was spearheaded by Dr. Willett at Harvard.

Starting point is 00:39:29 And it's frankly nonsense. You could use it to gain some interesting information, but you can also manipulated heavily. And the thing is that you ask them, okay, what have you been eating? What do you eat on a day basis? How many times do you have this? How many ounces of butter do you eat a week? How many, you know, times you, how many ribs do you have? I mean, some people don't have ribs more than twice a year. How are you going to, how do you going to cut that down on how many ribs you have a week? I mean, it's just nonsense. So sometimes they're not asking this every day. They're not asking you say, write down what you eat every day. Just track your meals and see how healthy you are. They're saying, okay, what health issues you have, what things do you have, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 00:40:05 And what do you eat? And sometimes they're asking them to remember all the meals that they've eaten over the course of years, sometimes two to four years. You're trying to say, remember every meal that you had in the last four years. How is that possible to be accurate? That's nonsense. It's absolutely nonsensical. And then you can manipulate that data and use that any way you want. And you can call things every thing.

Starting point is 00:40:26 Well, this person says they eat pizza three days a week. The pizza has meat on it. They usually have meat topic. right so we're going to consider that meat because they're eating meat and we're looking at people that do and don't eat meat and fast food well usually there's a burger patty in there you know forget the buns and forget the sugary sauces forget the fries you know french fats yeah and and the sugary drink and things like that there's two ounces of meat in there therefore that's meat so the county junk food and they're ignoring all the other things that are in the junk food they're just

Starting point is 00:40:55 calling that meat and they're saying people that eat more meat are less healthy and people that eat more meat they eat more junk food they're also more likely to smoke they're also likely to drink in excess. They're also likely to die in car accidents. They're also more likely to die in extreme sports. Okay. So you look at all cause mortality and it's just like, oh, their life expectancy is lower. They have higher all cause mortality. Right. And it's just like, what are you looking at? You know, that's not from meat. You know, there's a lot of other things that are involved in that as well. They can do whatever they want. That's what money is. They manipulate the data. And so those are the things they hang their hat on. Those epidemiological

Starting point is 00:41:29 food frequency question are nonsense. But you look at it. You look at studies for like the pure study from McMaster. They use similar sorts of techniques, but they're not, you know, biased pricks. And so they actually tried to look at actually what is actually there for them to see. And they actually found the opposite. They're actually finding that, no, people that eat more plants aren't actually more healthy. As people eat meat are actually more healthy. And there's a large study that looked at 175 countries out of Adelaide, University of Adelaide and Australia.

Starting point is 00:41:55 A couple of years ago, that actually showed in all 175 countries studied correcting for socioeconomic factors and all these. as much as you can with these epidemiological studies, that more meat consumption was associated with longer life expectancy and better health. And so they cherry pick and they look at these really poor studies. And also you're looking at because I eat more fruits and vegetables. You're also talking about people that are eating whole foods as opposed to junk food. And a junk food diet is still a plant-based diet. 80% of the calories consumed in America are still from plants. Most of it's from junk food, but it's still plants. Those are plant-based junk food. So you say, we need to go on a vegetarian diet.

Starting point is 00:42:31 We're already on a vegetarian diet. It's not working too well. And they're talking about replacing junk food with whole foods. And so people that are more willing to eat fruits and vegetables, and fruits and vegetables probably are a hell of a lot better than eating junk food, right potato chips and Oreo cookies and garbage like that, which are vegan, by the way. And so they're more likely to eat more whole foods. And if you're more likely to eat more whole foods, you're more likely to exercise.

Starting point is 00:42:54 You're less likely to smoke. You're less likely to drink in excess. You're more likely to do healthier things called healthy user. bias. And, you know, people that are being told their whole life that red meat's going to kill them, they say, you know, screw you. I'm still going to eat that. There's unhealthy user bias because they're more likely to smoke. They're more likely to drink and all this other sort of nonsense. So when you actually look at experimental data or even better epidemiological data where you look at populations that eat more meat or eat predominantly whole meats like the Maasai, and once they eat whole plants

Starting point is 00:43:23 like the Akikuyu, massive disparities in health in favor of the meat-based populations. And so, So, you know, they're, that's usually with the hand. They're like, oh, but there's all the human data. And they just say human data, human data, human data, but of course, they ignore the better, higher quality human data that shows the exact opposite of what they want to believe. That's the key. You know, one of my big takeaways is that the big problem we have is that pretty much anything is better than what humans are doing.

Starting point is 00:43:51 So if you're taking data, the problem is, is that our data is coming from a species that is just completely stopped giving a shit about anything. So like even if you just took some lettuce and covered it with chocolate, that would be better than just having taking Osempic and eating a Snickers bar. So they do have a, they do have a leg to stand on there. But what I find fascinating is just this phenomenon where we still turn our head to the data. And also, even if the data wasn't accurate, what I can tell you is that I'm the kind of person that says, well, I'll try it. And I'll actually see what it does. and, you know, I'm 53 years old.

Starting point is 00:44:28 I feel stronger than I've ever been. I've put on eight pounds of muscle mass. And, you know, I have a, my son is six foot three, and he's like an athlete. And I can bench more than him, you know, and it pisses him off. So what I, what I explain to them is, you know, I've got piss and vinegar in me, but I win that battle in the kitchen, you know. So anyway, what I'd love to know is what's the easiest way for people to, other than following you, we'll leave all of your information.

Starting point is 00:44:56 what's the easiest way for someone to get involved in the work that you're doing would you recommend one of your books or to reach out to you through a through a channel well i i haven't finished my book yet there's there's a couple um imposter books that have come out uh trying to use my name unfortunately so don't don't get those yes my books yeah my book's not out yet and i'll definitely publicize that on my channels do you have a newsletter or something like that or just follow you on it on instagram for you know instagram you YouTube. Those are the main ones, you know, Twitter X. But, you know, I do have a website just called The carnivorelife.com. That has a lot of resources on it as well. People can check out. And that has, you know, if you sign up for the email, you'll get sort of videos or sort of getting people going on important videos that are, they're sort of helpful when people are considering a carnivore diet. You know, I have a Patreon group, but that's more for like just, you know, early releases and,

Starting point is 00:45:50 you know, book club and things like that. But if people are sort of interesting, they can check out the website on the carnivorelife.com, you know, I have a part of it. I have coaching group as well at how to carnivore.com. So it depends on what people are looking for. If they're just looking for information, though, probably the best is just going to the podcast, the plant-free MD podcast, and they can sort of start from one and get going,

Starting point is 00:46:09 or they can go to my YouTube channels. You'll have the video versions of my podcast. And so there's a podcast sort of section there, so they can watch it like that. Or they can go to the playlist getting started on a carnivore diet, and I've sort of curated some videos on what I think are important for people. to know about there. Well, man, this has been both educational and, you know, tapping into something that people will either ignore or, you know, curiously look at.

Starting point is 00:46:38 And what I would recommend to everybody is before you make a decision on what you think about what he just shared with us, check the facts and also, you know, recognize that most of what it is that we think, we've been taught to think, and remember that idea that we live in a, you know, at a time where our species is completely lost control. So anything could be positioned as better. So thank you so much for, uh, for taking the time to be here. So I'm very, very grateful for everybody that listens to this podcast that supports us in all different ways, including friends and family. And remember, if you learn something today, give it away, because that's the only way it's going to stay. And by the way, have a nice way.

Starting point is 00:47:22 day. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Makes sense.

Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Making Sense of a Plant Free Diet - With Dr. Anthony Chafee - Episode 98

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