Anthony Chaffee; Carnivore MD.

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This week on the podcast Mikki speaks to Dr Anthony Chaffee, doctor and host of the Plant Free MD podcast, about the carnivore diet. They discuss the problem with nutrition science, meat, why it’s the thing in the diet that makes sense to eat, how he found himself eating an animal-based diet and the profound impact it had on his health and those he now works with in private practice. 

Dr Anthony Chaffee https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzoRyR_nlesKZuOlEjWRXQQ

Dr Anthony Chaffee is an American medical doctor and neurosurgical registrar who, over a span of 20+ years, has researched the optimal nutrition for human performance and health. It is his assertion that most of the so-called chronic diseases we treat are caused by the food we eat, or don't eat, and can be improved, and in some cases even reversed, with dietary changes to a species specific diet. 

He began University at the age of 16 studying Molecular & Cellular Biology with a Minor in Chemistry, which culminated in an MD from the Royal College of Surgeons.

He was an All-American rugby player, former professional player in England and America, and has also trained in MMA fighting at AMC Kickboxing in Kirkland, Washington

He is now based in Perth, WA.

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Creators & Guests

Host

Mikki Williden

What is Mikkipedia?

Mikkipedia is an exploration in all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. I sit down with scientists, doctors, professors, practitioners and people who have a wealth of experience and have a conversation that takes a deep dive into their area of expertise. I love translating science into a language that people understand, so while some of the conversations will be pretty in-depth, you will come away with some practical tips that can be instigated into your everyday life. I hope you enjoy the show!

00:00
you

00:03
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mikkipedia, and this week on the podcast, I speak to Dr. Anthony Chaffee.

00:14
is an American medical doctor and neurosurgical registrar and the host of the Plant Free MD podcast which shares case studies, research and opinion all about you guessed it a carnivore approach. So Anthony and I spend a large part of time discussing the problem with nutrition science and historically what we've been told are health principles that we should live by with

00:43
And I think that anyone interested in nutrition who is unaware of the history of nutrition science will find this really illuminating and I certainly really enjoyed discussing this aspect of nutrition with Anthony. And we also discussed the carnivore approach and how Anthony found himself eating an animal-forward diet and the profound positive health impact it had for him and

01:11
positive performance impact it had and subsequently how this then resulted in his private practice helping others eat a species specific diet which is what we also talk about in this podcast. So Dr. Anthony Chaffee can be found over on Instagram and I've got a link to his Instagram account and also on YouTube where he has over 440,000 followers and

01:37
This is where he shares a lot of his information, so if you have any interest in this area at all, I absolutely recommend that you check it out. So Dr Anthony Chaffee is an American medical doctor and neurosurgical registrar who, over the span of 20 plus years, has researched the optimal nutrition for human performance and health. It is his assertion that most of the so-called chronic diseases we treat are caused by the food we eat or don't eat and can be improved.

02:03
and in some cases reversed with dietary changes to a species specific diet. He began university at the age of 16 studying molecular and cellular biology with a minor in chemistry which culminated in an MD from the Royal College of Surgeons. He was an all-American rugby player, former professional player in England and America and has also trained in MMA fighting at AMC Kickboxing in Kirkland, Washington.

02:30
Dr Anthony Chappie is now based in Perth, Western Australia.

02:38
Before we crack on into it, I would just like to remind you that the best way to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favourite podcast listening platform. Because that increases the visibility of Micropedia and amongst literally thousands of other podcasts that are out there. So more people get the opportunity to learn from the experts that I have on the show, such as Dr Anthony Chaffee. All right, team, enjoy this conversation.

03:07
Anthony, thank you so much for taking time to speak to me this morning about your carnivore approach. And I was just thinking about it actually yesterday. I was on your YouTube channel watching just some of your interviews with people who have adopted an animal forward sort of diet slash carnivore diet. I don't know what people like. You know, people have different, they like to call it different things. And thinking, gosh, this just so would not be newsworthy if I was, you know, talking to someone who is completely plant-based.

03:37
Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing is that everyone has different ways of eating and I think a lot of us or all of us are trying to find the best way it works for us and works for our health and there are different theories on that. And so this is just the one that I've come to and I believe it's evidence based. I believe it's what the best evidence shows that we should be eating and my personal experience is that it's I've never.

04:05
in my entire life and my professional experience has been that changing people from all the very healthy alternatives to this way of eating confers the most health benefits that I've ever seen and in fact, better health benefits than many groups of medications because people are coming off medications. They're coming off their diabetes medications, their blood pressure medications, their heart failure medications. I've had a number of people.

04:31
go from an injection fraction of less than 15 and in a few months on animal-based carnivore diet they have gone to normal ejection fractions. And so they're circling the drain for death or a heart transplant and now they're completely normal. So this is something that defies our current wisdom and understanding but it works and it's something that...

05:00
more and more people are finding because it works. And so I think it's just very important to let people know about that so they can try it for themselves. Yeah, I also think, because I really wanna chat about how you initially came onto like a carnival type approach. But what it does strike me is that the number of people that I listen to in this space and have had a similar experience to you professionally and personally, is that it's not backed by any sort of agenda. You know, like there's no,

05:29
big pharma out the back, or it's not sponsored by General Mills or anything like that. You can't really say that for a lot of the plant-based agenda that is out there, and even the likes of professional bodies like the American Dietetics Association and other big bodies that are supposed to be there informing our health. There is just this undertone of industry.

05:55
There absolutely is. And a lot of these different studies that support plant-based ways of eating are, first of all, they're epidemiological survey studies. So they're telling people, say, hey, what did you eat in the last two years? Like anyone would ever remember except me, because I've only eaten meat for the last two years. But I couldn't tell you exactly how much I've had every single day for the last two years. But they, so it's pretty...

06:24
soft science anyway, it's pretty weak, it's very easy to manipulate, which they do. It's also generally funded by Kellogg's and Nestle and Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or the different lobbies that work for them, like the American Beverage Association. They pay influencers and lobby to push sugar-friendly and sweetener-friendly legislation and advertising.

06:52
And as well as, you know, the Beyond Meats and the Impossible Burger, those sorts of people, you know, these are companies that are owned by these big tech billionaires that are trying to push this agenda and also push their product. And they're paying for a lot of research at Harvard and at Stanford with Dr. Willett and Dr. Gardner. And the Dr. Gardner had a study that came out trying to say that look at...

07:21
twins and one of them went vegan and they're so much better. And it was flawed on many, many levels. I would say intentionally flawed due to his ideologies. But it was also funded by the fake meat industry and they made a Netflix special about that. And that was also funded by the fake meat industry as well. So yeah, there were definitely strings attached. There's definitely an agenda there.

07:49
It's an agenda that pushes a product. The agenda of the carnivore-based movement, the ketogenic meat-based movement, is not being driven by an industry. It's not being driven by a product. It's being driven by results. It's being driven by doctors and researchers and patients who have seen this work and are really excited about getting this out to people because it actually works. It's not something that sells something.

08:18
I've been very loathe to take even any sponsors for my podcast or any affiliates because I didn't want to like taint that. I do have them, but they're only very specific ones that go very much along those lines, you know, like working with ranchers that have regenerative pasture-raised, grass-fed, and finished beef. And it's just like, okay, you know, that's not a bad...

08:46
sort of thing and that's an individual family producer. It's not like a big corporate whatever and the reason they wanted to sponsor my podcast is because of what I talk about, about how meat is healthy. I don't say that because they pay me. That's the other way around. So yeah, there are definitely agendas and even more agendas than that, but a lot of these like the American Dietetics Association,

09:13
was founded by a lady named Lena Cooper, for instance, who had religious ideology that made her vegetarian vegan in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. They don't believe in eating meat. They think that it's sinful, it causes lust. That was 100 years ago, but they're still around and they're still pushing policy. They're still major funders of plant-based vegan sort of studies like from Walter Willett and...

09:43
Dr. Gardner, they push out a lot of research. They also are a part of the peer review process. So they're the peer reviewers. And when these studies get put in, they have a bias and a publication bias that is also going through. And they teach this at their medical school. They have, you know, different professors and things like that that are going and proselytizing this, you know, elsewhere. They have, you know,

10:11
They had the government report that vilified cholesterol originally in 1977 that was written by a Seventh Day Adventist. Dr. Pritikin, who first pushed a really low-fat, no-fat sort of approach, really no-meat approach, he's called the father of plant-based diets. He was a professor at Loma Linda Medical School, which is the Seventh Day Adventist Medical School. So, lifestyle medicine, that's something that was...

10:39
It's a specialty in medicine. It's not really a specialty. It's a certificate course that you can get. It's like 20 hours, 20 to 40 hours of online work where you can get this certificate in lifestyle medicine. And it's all about diet and lifestyle and how that's the first step. And then you use medicines after that. Totally agree with that approach. But the diet that they're spousing is a vegetarian diet. And that's the origins. They founded that.

11:09
and they call it the Garden of Eden diet. When we need to be eating whatever, Adam and Eve were eating the Garden of Eden, we're just eating plants. Well, I'm sorry, we weren't in the Garden of Eden and that doesn't work and there's no B12 in the Garden of Eden. So, you know, it's funny, they even say that too. They said, well, because we were cast out of the Garden of Eden, we don't get B12 from plants anymore but you know, still just do it. You know, it's like, what are you talking about? You know.

11:35
So it's very strange. But yeah, there are a lot of hidden agendas and motives behind the plant-based movement. And I feel like it's a little bit confronting for people to hear that and actually want to take that on board, particularly the likes of someone like me who, you know, I studied a science degree in a university around nutrition. Like if anyone was going to know about nutrition, surely it would be the lecturers who taught me that I then went to teach others about, you know. But even just the knowledge, you can't even really.

12:04
trust the science that is in the journals that are informing the messages that are out there. I wouldn't have thought that that would have been the case 20 years ago, when I first started sort of teaching and stuff. It's just mind blowing to me just how corrupt the whole system, that whole system even is. The likes of last week with the low carbohydrate diets are associated with type 2 diabetes. That's starting to come.

12:33
It's laughable if you understand physiology and how to interpret research, but if you are just a lay individual reading a news headline, to them it's yet another study to prove that the alternative doesn't work. I feel like it then shuts off this opportunity to so many people to actually make really good decisions around their health because they're just the anything that goes against the narrative is...

13:02
there's an agenda to keep the real story out of the news. Yeah. Well, and that's the thing too. The processed food and beverage industry, they spent 11 times the amount of money on nutritional research, just nutritional research, than the National Institutes of Health, the NIH. And so, you follow the money. It's always been the same story.

13:29
They're paying for this. It's just, I mean, you could think of it as part of their marketing budget. They just, this is marketing. They're just trying to push this thing, oh, aspartame isn't all that bad actually, you know. You'd have to drink like, you know, all these different cans and, oh, it doesn't really do, oh, it's fine. And sugar doesn't make you gain weight. I mean, I swear to God, there was one study from, I mean, they call it a study from Coca-Cola that argued that like...

13:55
drinking Coca-Cola and eating sugar actually made you lose weight. And I was like, shut up, you're going to lose weight. So it's funny how they can manipulate these things. But the tobacco companies did the same thing. They did this for decades. They lied about how dangerous their product was. They finally got caught lying about how dangerous their product was and they got fined $400 billion or something like that in the 1980s. But...

14:22
that's just par for the course. They paid different scientists and researchers to pump out data to say, oh, well, look, cigarettes aren't that bad, and they don't cause cancer, and they're not addictive, they don't cause emphysema. And so I remember seeing some of these hearings as a kid. And they were saying, well, different senators saying, well, what about these studies and these studies all saying,

14:52
And they would say, well, but we have these studies and say, you know, the opposite. So we just don't know. I mean, we just need more data. We just need more studies. And so the default, if we just need more studies, is that we get to keep doing what we're doing. We keep getting to sell people poison and you don't get to stop us because there's 30 studies that say it's bad and there's 30 studies that say it's fine. And so we just don't know. So they intentionally muddy the water in the literature. And

15:20
they have been doing that for decades and decades. And then we got the tobacco memos that someone leaked those out and showed that they knew damn well what they were doing. And they knew exactly how harmful tobacco was. And they were perjuring themselves and lying in front of Congress, which is actually a criminal offense. I mean, they got a civil fine, but they should have been put in jail. I mean, they're...

15:48
putting out a product that they know is harmful and deadly. And so people died as a result of that. And that's, you know, that's, I mean, in my book, that's, that's at least manslaughter, but you know, maybe even worse because, you know, in America, you know, third degree murder is if you killed someone, but you didn't mean to do it. Second degree murder is you meant to kill them, but you didn't premeditate it. You know, first degree is premeditated. Well, they may not have meant.

16:17
to kill people, but they sure as hell knew what they were doing was going to kill people, you know, and because their own research said that. The interesting thing is that other institutions were doing that as well. The sugar companies were doing that in the 50s and 60s. They were paying off different researchers like Ancel Keys and a number of people from Harvard to lie and screw up data to make it look like cholesterol was a problem in regards to heart disease as opposed to sugar.

16:46
which was the other going argument at the time. I think it's a combination of things, but I think sugar and seed oils on the processed foods definitely play a role, a big role, and especially that combination of sugar and seed oils. But either way, that was the other going argument. And so they wanted to protect their product, and so they lied and paid these people to lie as well.

17:13
Ansel Keys famously did the Seven Nations study, which showed this sort of this arcing, upwards curve of countries that had more saturated fat and cholesterol and they had higher rates of fart disease. I think most people know this, but he had complete data for actually 22 countries at the time of publication and he cherry picked the ones that fit the most dramatic curve. But even if he didn't.

17:43
There are two major things wrong with that. One, it's an associative study. You cannot make a cause and effect statement from an associative study. And two, which not a lot of people understand or even know about, is that the relative increased association, so the R value for cholesterol being associated with cardiovascular disease was exactly the same R value as sugar.

18:14
and cardiovascular disease, which seem to not make the headlines, right? So, he goes around saying that sugar is safe and cholesterol is the worst thing ever. They have the exact same R-value in his seven nations study. So, ignoring the rest of the 15 other countries that he omitted, he was also involved in – but again, it's an associative study either way and you cannot make a cause and effect statement. You have to have an experimental data set like a randomized controlled trial.

18:43
to really show that large high-powered randomized controlled trial. And there have never been any randomized controlled trials or experimental data ever showing a cause and effect relationship between cholesterol or saturated fat and cardiovascular disease, not a single one. But there have been at least five randomized controlled trials, large numbers of thousands of patients showing the opposite, showing that there's absolutely no relationship between

19:13
or in the two larger studies, one of which Ansel Keys was involved with called the Minnesota Coronary Experiment that had nearly 10,000 participants that were institutionalized and so they could perfectly control every meal that comes in, which is very difficult to do with these long-term dietary studies, that they found that by replacing saturated fat with unsaturated vegetable oils and margarines that...

19:42
that did indeed lower cholesterol and LDL cholesterol, but then more people died of heart attacks and strokes as a result. And so Ansel Keys was actually one of the lead researchers in that Minnesota coronary experiment that went from 1968 to 1973. And yet it never got published until 2014 because they buried it and they didn't want anybody knowing about it because they were being paid off. They were being paid to get a result for the sugar company and they found the opposite.

20:11
And so, you know, knowing full well that with experimental data, with a large randomized controlled trial, they completely upended the cholesterol heart hypothesis. Four years later, the McGovern report is written. Ancel Keys is still pushing for that model. And then we get the USDA declaration that cholesterol causes heart disease, and that's the end of the story. And yet they knew. They were involved in...

20:41
randomized control experimental data that showed an inverse relationship actually showed that reducing saturated cholesterol caused harm and yet they kept pushing this. I mean to me that's tantamount to murder as well. I mean these should be criminal trials. So all this is published. That Minnesota heart coronary experiment that was uncovered by Dr. Ramston over at the NIH and he published that.

21:08
in 2014, he actually got the data from one of the other researchers' children, and they were doctors at the time, and they found their dad's old stuff. And they were able to uncover this data. It was all like punch cards and things like that. So it was like, it was old stuff. And so they pushed that out. So I mean, it just shows the lack of integrity in the scientific disciplines. You cannot...

21:35
just blindly trust things just because they're published in a peer review system. The peer review system by definition is, you know, old boys club. You know, they're going to let in the things that they want anyway. Quite often, you know, if it's something that is new and pushes boundaries, the peer reviewers will go, no, no, no, no, that's not what I learned in school and they won't let it go through even if it's fully supported by...

22:00
you know, by the data that they present. I've seen this in physics, you know, which is, is just supposed to be a hard science. And my, my brother-in-law is actually a PhD from MIT in computer science and, and theoretical quantum computing, right? So this is a wild thing. We don't have quantum computers, but you know, they theorize, show mathematically what we can do with a quantum computer.

22:27
if and when we get them. So that's his PhD. It's a pretty esoteric, highbrow sort of thing. But he started, so it's a very new field, right? Because we don't even have quantum computers. And he theorized, he actually showed and wrote this huge paper about, hey, this is how we can change things. That's how we can look at things and how we can do things without these big, horrible, complex equations. We actually do it much more simply. And he actually showed that they can do this much more simply. And the peer reviewers just said, they didn't even read his paper. They just said,

22:57
for this sort of subject, you'd actually normally see this big long equation and you don't have that anywhere in your paper. So, we're not going to look at it. It's like, no, the whole paper is arguing that you don't need that big long equation, right? And you didn't even read it. You just look for, oh, is there a big long equation here? No, we're not going to listen to it. And so, that's the gatekeepers, the peer reviewers. If it looks different than what they recognize, it's just very blind or so. They don't take it in.

23:26
And you can also have the peer review system like we see at Loma Linda and the Seventh Day of Venter's Church where they let through things that go along with their ideology. So unfortunately, you cannot just trust something because it's been published. You have to look at who published it, who paid for it, and actually read the study. You don't just read the conclusions because it can – or the headline. They say, oh, this is what it is. And then you actually read the study. And you're like, that's not – it's not supported by – Yeah.

23:56
what's in there. So it's a bit of a minefield, but you have to navigate it. And I mean, Anthony, this isn't, it's not like you learned all of this in your undergrad because you went through medical school. And as I understand, you're either a registrar for neuros for brain surgery or you're on their path, but you've actually taken a little bit of a sideways step into this field of health and nutrition. So what started you on that?

24:25
Well, on the health and nutrition side of things, yeah, I've always wanted to be, you know, a doctor and specifically a surgeon. So that's what I've been pursuing is neurosurgery, brain and spine surgery. And that's what fascinates me. I absolutely love it. And I've been working in that here in Perth since 2020 as a neurosurgical registrar, as you mentioned. And I've had a particular interest in diet and nutrition, how that affects health.

24:53
and specifically athletic performance because I was a professional athlete in my earlier life and that was something that was very important to me when I was trying to aspire to become a top level athlete. That's what I thought about was nutrition because obviously you're fueling your body. You put the wrong fuel in a car, it's not going to run properly, right? And so the same thing goes for our bodies. And so I was looking at learning the traditional sort of arguments and taking nutrition classes in college.

25:23
this many carbs and this much protein, this much fat and all that sort of stuff that we get taught. And you know, the sort of the formative moment for me was when I was taking a class in cancer biology at the University of Washington in Seattle and our professor started talking about how plants actually had a lot of carcinogens in them. I already sort of understood the concept because I'd taken botany and biology and I understood that plants' major defense is chemical. They go about.

25:53
They can't run away or fight back like animals can. So they use chemical warfare to stop from being eaten. But no one had ever really made that argument as far as the food that we eat. Of course, that makes sense. It's not going to be just some plants that are poisonous and some aren't. It's just that they're all going to make poisons. It's just that certain animals are going to have more defenses against certain poisons than others.

26:23
defenses. We actually use a lot of technology to detoxify a lot of these things, cooking, fermenting, a process called niche-tomalization, which is how we used to process corn. There's all sorts of different ways to lower the toxic load of plants. Actually, people are still getting hurt. Five kidney beans undercooked have put people in the hospital, as per the WHO, who is no fan of the carnivore diet. So, that's not me saying that. That's a fact.

26:53
And so we were going through this in cancer biology and he was just talking about carcinogens and he was talking about how 24 years ago that Brussels sprouts had 136 carcinogens identified just in Brussels sprouts and over 100 just in mushrooms and over 60 and 80 in spinach and kale and lettuce and cabbage and cucumber and broccoli and all these different fruits and vegetables that we had eaten and literally even pages of all the different produce items that we've...

27:20
typically eat and the number of carcinogens that had been identified in them, which was pretty wild. And I remember just being blown away, we thought that he must be joking. We realized he wasn't. And I remember thinking in my head, well, but vegetables are still good for you though, right? Even though I hated them and I didn't want to eat them, which should have told me something. My natural instincts were telling me. And he just sort of gave us a funny look and he just said, I don't eat salad.

27:50
I don't eat vegetables. I don't let my kids eat vegetables. Oh wow. Yep. Plants are trying to kill you. I was like, right? Forget plants. I just stopped. I never felt better in my life. I defaulted into just eating meat and eggs because I'm just walking around wide-eyed and confused in the grocery store after that class. I'm like, what the hell do I eat? Because prior to this, you were interested in nutrition. It wasn't like you were eating the...

28:18
the cereals and things like that anyway. No, no. No, always whole foods. I mean, we would have breakfast cereal around, but every other meal was home cooked. We never ate out. It was like on birthdays, maybe we'd go to some restaurant or something like that. But my mom really liked cooking and she was a fantastic cook. So we learned from her and we just cooked.

28:47
that first generation where processed food and packaged food really started coming into prominence and sort of my generation just sort of didn't get taught how to cook from their mothers. And so most people my age would have grown up not knowing how to cook and then they didn't know how to cook so they couldn't cook for their kids and it's just like ordering ready made meals or Uber Eats or just buying prepackaged stuff as well.

29:15
And now you're sort of two, three generations away from anybody who's ever seen a stove before and then knows what the hell to do. But we didn't do that. We were always whole food, whole food, omnivorous diet, but always very heavy in meat, but like generally lean meat because my dad read Dr. Pritikin's book and he was very up on like, we got to stay away from fat for heart health. And he was very, very adamant about that.

29:45
because he didn't want to die of a heart attack. He wanted to be there with his kids and enjoy his life and his family. So that's how we grew up. But it was always whole food. It was always home cooked. It was very, very clean. I never ate junk food. And so just that change. And people say that, well, the only change is you go to a whole food carnivore diet where you're getting rid of the junk food and that's the only benefit. No, sorry. I was only eating a whole food omnivorous diet.

30:15
And just dropping the carbs and vegetables made a massive difference, massive difference in my health. And years later, I mean, I did that for about five years, but then I started slipping off because I didn't realize how significant what I was doing was. And then when I was 38, so 13 years later, I came back around to it, sort of. Why was that? Well, I saw Dr. Baker on Joe Rogan talking about that. My brother was

30:44
blown away. He was saying that he was just like, wow, I saw this doctor on Joe Rogan and he was a doctor and he played professional rugby as well and he's saying that you can just get all the nutrients you need from eating meat. Instantly my teaching, it was just like, what? Well, yeah, but my initial instinct was like, oh, that's crazy. But I was like, but hold on a second. I mean, I basically did that for five years.

31:10
And I didn't eat anything else and I remember thinking to myself every few months I was like do I need a banana or a multivitamin or something like that? You know, I'm not gonna get in trouble and I remember thinking to myself I was like well, you know, I feel good my gums aren't bleeding So let's just ride this out see see where it goes and you know I never felt better and you know when I was 25 I sort of slipped off of it when I was living in England playing rugby over there and At 25 years old I felt like a superhero 25 and a half when I just started slipping off of it

31:40
I didn't. I remember thinking, why don't I feel as good as I normally do? Why don't I feel superhuman amazing as I normally do? I chalked it up to age, but you don't just decline like that in a matter of months. Were you in the UK? Was it the curry, do you think? Something that carries the pubs? It wasn't even that bad. It was more convenient to get chicken that had a bit of crumbs on it. That was it.

32:08
That was all it was. That was the only thing. So, I had that a few times a week. A lot of that I was eating just eggs and meat and then just some crumbed chicken and that was it. I started not feeling as good. I didn't know what it was. But of course, when you allow one thing back in, because before that for five years, I was just, oh, that was a plant, not eating it. It was just a litmus test. Plant, no, not doing it. Plant wore mushroom, not doing it.

32:35
And then all of a sudden it was just like, Ooh, well, some crumbs on it. Well, maybe it's not that big of a deal. Dose makes the poison. So, and yeah, dose does make the poison. Dose is that big. It's tiny. Right. And so it's just a little bit of crumbs three days a week was enough to, to take the shine off of my health and my performance as an athlete as well. And, and then, you know, once, once you start, you know, convincing yourself that that's okay, you convince yourself that something else is okay. And then all of a sudden you just sort of go back into.

33:04
the eating habits of a lifetime and pretty soon I was just going back to eating a very healthy, so-called healthy, omnivorous whole food diet. I never ate junk food. I maybe had, even when I was eating that sort of stuff, I may have had pizza once every two years. So, it's not something that I would have on a regular basis, never.

33:31
poorly, but you know, I'm older now." And then you just sort of normalize it. So this is just what being 30 or 30, which actually is very young, but still, you know, it's not quite as young as 20. So how were you, like, can you recall when you just decided to like, that you heard your brother talk to you about Joe Rogan and Sean Bacon, you're like, right, I'm back on it. Like, was there some, any kind of initial side effects for you?

33:56
Anthony, or did you immediately feel better? What was that? Because a lot of people who are curious understand that there's got to be some sort of transition period and what are they in for? I will ask you about that, but what was it like for you? For me, it was all aces. There's never a bad time to stop eating poison, is the way I think about it. It's good call. You get this stuff out of your system, you're going to feel better. Now there can be a withdrawal.

34:23
sugar on the car and things like that you maybe have a withdrawal coffee caffeine those sorts of things you will withdraw from those things. I wasn't really eating those things I never really had sugar and even at that point I wasn't I wasn't purposefully doing a ketogenic diet I just naturally fell into that because I just noticed that when I had anything containing carbohydrates my back would hurt a lot more and when it would take.

34:49
three, four days for it to calm down after having something. I took my niece out for lunch and we got some Chinese food and I had some egg rolls and things like that. Then my back hurt for the next three days. I'm like, oh, that's weird. I'm like, okay, maybe – I sort of saw that association with carbs. Then a couple of days later, my back was feeling a bit better. My mom had these little bread, cheesy bread balls from –

35:18
from Costco and I'm like, oh damn it, those look good. Maybe I'll just have a couple of those. My back hurt again for another few days. I'm like, all right, screw it. And so I just cut those out just because it hurt my back. Increased inflammation, cut down ketones, all these other sorts of things. And so all I was doing was eating whole food, spinach, kale, broccoli, a lot of those.

35:40
And I figured I was trying to get back in shape. I was just back from doing humanitarian work in Bangladesh, helping with the refugee, in the refugee camp there from people escaping from an actual genocide in Myanmar in 2017. So it was 2017, 18 that I was there. And I was trying to get back in shape. I was trying to lose weight. And so I can go back and play rugby, even though I was 38, I was still actively playing sports and things like that. And or trying to.

36:10
I was trying to slim down and I figured I was like, okay, I can eat all the greens that I want and just, but I'm going to limit the meat and I'm going to keep it lean so I can try to lose weight because that's what you get told. I wasn't losing weight. My weight was fluctuating up and down with the water weight. It wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't feeling great. It was feeling pretty rotten actually. I was just like, well, it's just my age. I just have to really work on getting in shape before I can go back out and play rugby. So, I was working on that. I had a home gym and trying to get in shape.

36:40
and it wasn't working. And then I watched that Joe Rogan thing and I was just like, you know, my brother was like, oh yeah, you can get everything. I was like, wow, that's a bit weird. But I did do that for five years. So this doesn't actually sound all that far fetched. Within five minutes of watching that interview, it just, everything clicked in. I was like, this guy's more right than he knows, you know, because like there's, there was a lot of research on saturated fat and cholesterol that had...

37:07
really blown that out of the water. You know, the NIH study had come out at that point in 2014. So, this was 2018 at this point, just early 2018. And, you know, all these different studies have come out and you're really blowing the cholesterol heart hypothesis out of the water. Fructose was really toxic, sugar and that plants were toxic too. So, I had all these different sort of pieces that all sort of fit in with what he was saying. I was like

37:33
this makes sense and I sort of looked at this and they will learn this when I was a kid. We learned, generally learned this when we're kids is that humans have been apex predators for over 2 million years. Apex predators are by definition carnivores. They eat meat. You know, we've been hunting mammoths for millions of years. There's evidence of mammoth drops over a million years ago scaring a herd of mammoths over a cliff so they crash and burn and we can cut them up with stone tools and then eat for the year until the herds come through the next year on their migration route.

38:02
that is hard evidence. It's not observational study saying, oh, it's giving people a survey. That's looking at the hard data and evidence of what happened. We forget that. Then all of a sudden, the museum just clicked in. It was just like, right, we're humans. Humans are carnivores as a species. It's just the kind of animal we are. We're not eating that way. I thought, well, that could be why we're getting sick because—

38:29
all other animals when they're fed an inappropriate diet for their species get sick. That's why there's signs at the zoo say don't feed the animals, they get very sick if they don't eat their proper diet. You give ducks diabetes by giving them bread and they have signs saying don't give ducks bread for that reason. The most ignored sign ever. Yeah, well that's exactly it. They always ignore that, totally. Yeah, but we ignore it for us too. We're giving bread to ducks, that's giving them diabetes. Where the hell do we get diabetes from? Yeah, yeah.

38:57
Same stuff, you know? And so, you know, when I switched, all I was doing was just dropping the vegetables and eating more fatty meat, really. So I was already ketogenic and without meaning to be. And so when I saw that, I was like, right, I knew it. I knew plants were trying to kill me, get rid of these stupid things. And I just cut out all the spinach, broccoli, and kale. It's disgusting anyway, especially kale. It was rotten. They used to give that stuff to livestock, you know?

39:26
And it had to stop because it was killing them and giving them massive goiters and thyroid dysfunction. There's an entire class and category of plant toxins called goitrogens that cause goiters and thyroid dysfunction. And they're giving them to sheep and they were getting weird birth defects and still births and they had massive thyroid, massive goiters the size of their heads. I've seen pictures of this. So, they couldn't do that because they were killing the livestock and damaging them. Then they gave them to dairy cows.

39:56
so that they could produce more milk. They need a lot of feed to produce all the milk that they do. And the milk from these dairy cows were giving the people who drank it goiters, right? And so then they just said, yeah, well, let's just give it to people then. It's like, what is wrong with you? Like, obviously this stuff is toxic. And it is, you know, it's horrible stuff. And so I got rid of it and I just started eating meat and more fatty meat.

40:23
And I felt better right away, and especially two weeks later when I got most of this garbage out of my system, I felt like I was 22 again. I felt like I was a superhero like I did at 22. I felt better at 38 than I did at 27 playing professional rugby, but not on a clean meat-based omnivorous diet that was often ketogenic because I would generally have meat and a salad because I'm supposed to have a stupid salad, you know, but I wouldn't eat a bunch of carbs or anything like that ever.

40:51
and I wasn't interested in it. I felt better at 38 than I did over a decade earlier when I was able to train for multiple hours a day every day. It was wildly different. At that point, I just started digging into the research going, okay, what do we know? What can we prove? What has been done? There was this entire body of data and information and studies.

41:18
been published that just do not get taught in medical school and residency because they just you know, they're just an alternative point of view and they're not backed and most importantly not backed by a major industry that is then saying, you know, when we get educated as a doctors, we go to conferences but we also get drug reps coming into us saying, oh, here's the new research on this drug and on this drug and on this drug. That's and doctors treat that as like the research wing of their hospital or something like that. No, it's a salesman.

41:47
They're showing you exactly the studies that they want. They're presenting it in the exact same way that's going to sell their product. That's fine, but you have to understand what they're doing and what their motivations are. They are not there to just educate you. I would see doctors going, oh, I love Tuesdays. Oh, I'm going to get educated. Oh, I'm going to learn about studies. I was like, no, you're not. You're going to get propagandized. You're going to get an advertisement. There's all these studies that show the benefits of a high-fat meat-based ketogenic diet in

42:17
thousands. It's the only diet that's ever been studied with this amount of rigor. And there are thousands of these things, but there's no product on the back end of it, like you said. And so there's no multi-million, multi-billion dollar marketing budget going out there pushing this and getting this into hospitals and getting this into medical schools and getting this into residencies. You have to find this yourself, but it is there and it's growing. There's more and more every single day.

42:46
you will find them. And so I looked and I found. And so that changed the course of my thinking and certainly my practice. And so while I still wanted to do neurosurgery and I still do want to do neurosurgery, I had to include this. I had to start incorporating this in my practice as well because it was just too powerful. Yeah.

43:04
And Anthony, I know we're running short on time. There's so much that I could ask you. I first say, I just, I love how passionate you are about how much you hate vegetables. I mean, I'm quite different. I quite like vegetables, but you have that, it's like shared passion of loving meat and absolutely despising vegetables, which I find quite hilarious. But I understand where you're coming from. So what do you eat in a day? Like I'm super interested to know what your sort of routine looks like with that. Because the other thing I will say as well is, as an athlete,

43:31
particularly as a rugby player to not eat any carbohydrate is really unusual as well, but also speaks to what we know in the research about carbohydrate and athleticism really, which is again ignored by large bodies of nutrition societies, et cetera. Yeah. Well, also because they just don't know about it. They haven't looked for it. They've been taught a certain way and a certain approach. And so that's the thing that people assume.

43:59
is that if it wasn't taught to you during your degree, you have a degree, you are an expert in this. No, you're an expert in what they taught you. That doesn't mean that that's the entire body of the information. It's just a starting point. And people used to understand that that was a starting point from which to continue. And so they think that if it wasn't taught to them in school or during their residency, it wasn't fit to print. And that's not true.

44:28
You know, it's, and there was a famous address to Harvard, graduating class at Harvard Medical School like in the 30s by, I was told it was Dr. William Osler, he's a very famous medical professor and teacher. And he said, or whoever said, half of what you've learned here at Harvard is going to turn out to be wrong. But no one's going to tell you which half, because no one knows.

44:56
And so you have to go out and figure out which half and you have to figure out, you have to change that and you have to then teach the next generation what you found. And that's something we forget. We say, oh, I learned it. This is what it is. Nope, I learned that medical school. That's what it is. And, you know, okay, but what's that based on? And is there, is there an alternate theory and is there evidence with which to test those theories against, you know? And so that's what you need to do.

45:23
And so there's a ton of data around, but people don't look at it because it wasn't spoon fed to them. But it's there. And if they want to look for it, you know, they can. What I eat in a day, it's pretty monotonous, just like a lion, just like a cow. You know, animals in the wild, they eat very specific things. They just keep eating that thing because you need a very specific constellation of nutrients, vitamins, minerals, proteins, and fats.

45:53
resource that you get that from. It's very rare that animals would have a wide variety of different things that they eat in order to gain their nutrients. That's exquisitely rare. And yet we're told that's what you have to do. Well, that's because we're eating very low quality, low nutrient dense foods, plants. And a lot of them have anti-nutrients that can block out the absorption of good nutrients. And so if you're doing that, then yeah, you need a whole wide variety of stuff.

46:24
and you have to include meat because you can't get basic nutrition without meat unless you supplement. We've only had supplements very recently, so we certainly weren't doing that in nature. But you can just eat meat. Just like every other animal, we have a singular single source dietary diet that we can thrive on. So that's what I do. So my days are just meat, pretty much.

46:52
99% of what I eat is beef. I tell people just eat the meat that you enjoy, the fatty meat that you enjoy that makes you feel the best and that you have access to and can afford. For me, that's beef. Nice one. And I feel the best on that. I don't have too many organs. It's mostly just steaks. I mean, now and then I'll have a bit of liver. I've actually sort of grown to like the taste of raw liver. I don't like cooked liver. Interesting. For some reason, raw liver tastes way better than cooked liver.

47:21
And so that's what I'll eat. I generally eat about once a day, and usually that's in the evening. So I wake up, I'm not hungry, I don't need to eat breakfast. I just get up and I get ready and I go. And I'm able to work all day. I don't, I'm in private practice at the moment, seeing patients and I don't take a lunch break. I just go all the way through and just get it done. I can see more patients, I can get more done. And I feel fine doing it. After work, if there's time, I'll try to go to the gym.

47:51
And then I'll eat after that. And if I don't have time to go to the gym, I often don't because I'm sort of working from 8 a.m. till midnight most days, seven days a week at the moment. So I have to fix that. But then I'll eat at the end of the day and that'll do it. If I'm working out regularly, then I'll typically need to eat twice. But it's always the same thing. Whenever I eat, I eat fatty meat until it stops tasting good.

48:17
And that's how I know my body has had enough. I don't count calories or back rows or weigh things. I just eat fatty meat until it stops tasting good. Eggs are fine too. But particularly I don't have any issues, but people with autoimmune issues typically do need to, well, they'll do best if they stick to just beef and lamb and water and avoid other things. Do you salt? I don't anymore. I used to, and I just sort of salted to taste. If you are...

48:46
Transitioning onto a ketogenic diet, when your insulin is coming down and normalizing, you can lose too much salt and electrolytes. You can get hypovolemic, you can stand up and get sort of osteohypotension, get sort of dizzy. If you're getting that, then you should up your salt even beyond salting to taste, actually add it in and get more water as well. That typically goes away once your fat adapted and your insulin has come down to normal levels. And so, most people actually don't need to add excess salt.

49:15
past taste, but some do. So just be mindful of that. At this point, since I've been doing this for nearly a decade now, so it's like in seven years since I got back on this, it's been, I've used just less and less salt. I used to salt pretty heavily at first and then it was just sort of using less and less and less and now I don't use any at all. Now it just tastes perfectly salted without any salt. And if I had salt, it tastes too salty. Yeah. And final question, what's your favorite cut of steak?

49:45
Like fatty ribeye. Yeah, yeah, yeah, nice. Dr. Anthony Chafee, thanks so much for today. You are a wealth of information and we've really, not that, I mean, we had 45 minutes, we got through it, we could, but your YouTube channel is amazing. So obviously we'll point people in the direction to that and all of your other resources in the show notes. Thanks so much. Thank you, appreciate it.

50:18
Hopefully you enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed talking to him. As you could tell, he just knows his stuff doesn't he? Super passionate. I've never met anyone who hates vegetables to the same extent he does. And whilst I do not share that particular dislike, I think that Anthony and I are really aligned in how important it is to eat animal protein in your diet and to be critical of information that is in front of you when it comes to nutrition.

50:46
Next week on the podcast I have returning guest Brandon DeCruz who talks to us all about his High Energy Flux model and if you're a fan of Brandon you're really gonna love that episode and if you're not hey listen anyway because he shares so much great information and to be fair if you're not a fan of him it's probably just because you haven't caught his previous two episodes on this show. Alright team until next week you can catch me over on Twitter, threads or Instagram @mikkiwilliden

51:14
Facebook @mikkiwillidennutrition or head to my website @mikkiwilliden.com and book a one-on-one call with me. Alright team, have the best week, see you later.