In this episode Dr. Anthony Chaffee, an American medical doctor and neurosurgical registrar discusses his research on optimum nutrition for human performance and health, asserting that many chronic diseases can be improved or reversed with dietary changes toward a species-specific diet. Marcus and Dr. Chaffee also explore the economic burden of chronic diseases, the role of insulin and blood sugar in health, and how a high-fat, meat-based ketogenic diet can address various health issues. The conversation also compares the critical thinking approach of Dr. Chaffee with that of acclaimed author Thomas Sowell, noting the importance of evidence-based conclusions and practical dietary applications.
Episode Highlights:
02:03 The Real Healthcare Crisis
04:01 The Cost of Chronic Diseases
12:10 The Role of Insulin and Mitochondria
15:58 Ketogenic Diet and Cancer
25:41 Role of Mitochondria in Cell Regulation
26:49 Warburg’s Theory and Modern Evidence
27:55 Link Between Glucose Metabolism and Cancer
28:35 Nuclear Transfer Studies
29:34 Thomas Sowell’s Influence
Dr. Anthony Chaffee is an American medical doctor and Neurosurgical resident with over 20 years of research focused on optimal nutrition for human performance and health. He asserts that many chronic diseases are rooted in dietary choices and can be reversed with a species-specific diet. Dr. Chaffee began his academic journey at 16, studying Molecular & Cellular Biology and Chemistry at the University of Washington, later earning his MD from the Royal College of Surgeons. An All-American rugby player and MMA enthusiast, he currently practices in Australia, balancing his work as a Neurosurgical registrar and a functional medicine clinician.
You can learn more here: youtube.com
Episode Transcript:
00:30
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words instead. Observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and today’s guest absolutely embodies that phrase.
01:00
Dr. Anthony Chafee is an American medical doctor and neurosurgical register who over the span of the last 20 years has researched the optimal nutrition for human performance and health. It is his assertion that most of the so-called chronic diseases that we treat are caused by the food that we eat or don’t eat and can be improved and in some cases, even reversed with the dietary changes to a species specific diet. He began university at the ripe age of 16, studying molecular and cellular biology.
01:29
with a minor in chemistry, which culminated in an MD from the Royal College of Surgeons. He’s an All-American rugby player, former professional player in England and the United States, and has also trained in MMA at AMC Kickboxing in Kirkland, Washington. And more recently, he’s volunteered as a doctor in the refugee camps in Bangladesh, helping the survivors of the 2017 genocide in Burma. Anthony, doctor, thank you so much for being here today and for taking the time. You’re a very busy man. In fact, you’re getting ready to be en route to the airport soon. So thank you for taking the time to be here.
01:59
Not a problem at all. Thank you for having me. Of course, it’s an honor to have you. Before we hit record, we were talking about this $13 trillion weight of this health crisis that we are facing right now, and how that that’s something that’s very much at the tip of your tongue with this. Tell us what that looks like and tell us, because the system is very much broken, it’s gonna be really hard to reverse at this point. Yeah, so it’s what I think is the real healthcare crisis. We talk about what is the best system for promoting healthcare and providing
02:29
medical attention to our people. But what we’re missing side of is the growing burden of the chronic disease that is afflicting and plaguing humanity at the moment. And so that weight is very great and it’s getting greater every year. And it will crush any system. And so it doesn’t matter what sort of healthcare system you have as a public, private or something we’ve never thought of before, it will all just…
02:57
crumble underneath the weight of this. It’s just simply not sustainable to keep us growing burned of illness and disease. So I think that’s a real healthcare crisis. And to quantify this a bit, the Harvard School of Public Health just studied, you know, crunched the numbers on this and looked, just looked at five so-called NCDs, non-communicable chronic diseases, right? So these are just the chronic diseases that we treat nowadays. Also called
03:25
human diseases because they can afflict animals. And then it’s like, Oh, that’s weird. That dog has lupus. I’m like, how’d that happen? Or that dog has diabetes because he was feeding him bread at the park or something like that. And, and we’re, we’re sort of missing the connection. We feed them human food and they get human diseases and well, what are we eating and what diseases are we getting? And so these NCDs, these non-communicable chronic disease, they looked at five. So just cardiovascular disease, COPD, cancer, mental health issues, and diabetes. That’s it.
03:55
those five, there’s autoimmunity and a lot of other things that afflict people. And so just those five, and they found that in 2010, it cost the world economy just over $7 trillion in direct and indirect costs. That’s what it costs people to treat these diseases due to 2010. It’s gone up every single year. And by 2030, they’re expecting that to be over $13 trillion a year.
04:23
worldwide, so it’s nearly doubled in 20 years, right? So that’s a massive, massive increase. Now we say, oh, okay. Uh, maybe it’s just medications have gotten more expensive. Well, that’s, that could be a problem, right? Or interventions and all these other sorts of things as well. You know, as you, as you get more advanced, you get more new technology, they become more expensive and there’s inflation and all that or other sort of things, but what about the opportunity costs, just people like.
04:49
sick days, disability leave, all these other sorts of things. They calculated in what that hit the economy at. And between 2011 and 2030, they estimated that to be around $46 trillion loss from the world economy. These are trillions with a T, right? And it was just an astronomical amount of money. And then the worst of all of them was they looked at the cost and impact on the economy from…
05:18
early deaths from people dying young, someone having a heart attack in their 30s or 40s and dying or stroke or cancer or something like that in their 20s and then never being productive again. And what does that cost? What does that cost humanity? They calculated that to be in 2010, 2010, 11, they, they estimated that to be around 23 trillion dollars a year. And that’s gone up every single year. By 2030, they’re expecting that to be.
05:46
about around $43 trillion per year that this is costing the economy. So that’s nearly doubled again. So that increase in just those five, that’s just five, five chronic diseases. And there’s so many others that cause a huge burden of morbidity, mortality, and economic burden as well. And they’re very expensive. I mean, autoimmune medications are insanely expensive and cause a huge burden of disease.
06:16
And so this is insane. That, that, that, those are insane figures. So you have the medical establishment worldwide in totality, making nearly $14 trillion a year to treat these diseases. But it’s costing us in loss opportunity costs and early deaths. It’s costing us another $50 trillion or so. So when you’re looking at this, it’s just, it’s insane. I mean, you’re talking about nearly 60.
06:45
trillion dollars per year that we’re paying just for being sick. Right. And the thing is, is that why are these increasing? This is increased more and more and more over the past 20 years. Well, what does that mean? Does that mean it’s genetic and just where our genetics are just changing as we age or something like that? No, of course not. Something’s happening in our environment. And I think the leading cause of that, again, going back to animals, eating human food and getting human diseases, we’re eating the wrong thing. We’re eating things that don’t belong in our body. We’re not.
07:15
combustion engines, we don’t burn things. You can’t eat wood and just like fuel yourself, right? You know, and so this whole idea of the calories is a bit insane. Oh, it doesn’t matter just as long as you sort the calories out, nonsense. We are chemical factories. We put chemicals in our body, we get chemical reactions. And we are, and we’re getting physiological and biochemical stress and damage. And this manifests as what we call non-communicable chronic diseases. And so this is an exposure relationship. And so…
07:41
We have to treat it as an exposure when you know, we in medicine have someone, we find that they have lead poisoning, which can manifest as multi-end organ damage and we can see that, Oh goodness, what’s going on? If you don’t figure it out, then you’re trying to treat different things and, and you’re not really going anywhere. And then you figure out like, Oh, okay. This is this person has lead exposure. What do you do first thing, get rid of the lead exposure. And then, you know, you treat and chelate the lead if you can. So what are we doing? We’re just treating the symptoms. We’re basically, we have no idea. This is lead poisoning.
08:10
And we’re just, we’re just trying to patch things up and patch the leaks and, and treat things symptomatically as best we can. That’s not going to do the job. And so we have to recognize that this is an exposure relationship. And then we remove that exposure, get rid of this, this food that does not belong in our body, we start eating what does belong in our body, what we’ve been eating for as long as humans have been humans, uh, which is fatty red meat predominantly. And these problems go away.
08:36
largely because you remove that exposure and you just allow your body to heal and get the stuff out of your system. So I think that that is the real healthcare crisis and that is the solution all in one. I agree and as you say, as we chase symptomatology, what does that do? That creates alternate symptomatology. So we’re really sort of chasing around until it’s a fool’s errand. And again, as you were mentioning this $46 trillion that’s affecting humans all over the world, again, this removes life from their years and years from their lives.
09:04
And so the quality of life is going down. All of these, again, these diseases, as a matter of fact, you made a comment which I love, which is this concept of there’s type one, type two diabetes, which many people are aware of, but a lot of these other things that are neurological, you’re essentially calling type three and type four and type five, can you expand on that? Sure, so diabetes is really referring to when a body can’t deal with insulin and blood sugar properly.
09:33
So real diabetes, it would be something’s going wrong with your body and how your body uses insulin, maybe you can’t make insulin. That would be type one diabetes. You should be called juvenile diabetes until the nineties. And they, they had to change the names around because all of these diseases were going crazy. And they, and they said like, Oh, because there’s a juvenile diabetes and adult diabetes. And I said, well, wait, 10 year olds are getting adult diabetes. Like how, how can that be? And so instead of thinking about it for one second and realizing that something changed and there’s an exposure relationship here, they just said,
10:03
Probably happening all the time. We just didn’t notice it. And then just to spobbed it off and. Renamed it, it’s called it type two diabetes and type one diabetes, but these are just crazy as in your blood sugar. And that, that can be dangerous because higher blood sugar actually is damaging for your body. Your body has about four grams of glucose throughout your entire circulatory system, and that’s enough glucose to run all the physiological processes of your body and brain and one extra gram is a toxic dose.
10:30
and your body responds to it as a toxic dose by trying to detoxify it by raising insulin. And, um, why do we call it toxic? Because glucose molecules and other carbohydrate molecules will physically fuse to other chemicals and molecules called glycation. It’s not enzymatic binding of these carbohydrate molecules to other molecules. And it causes damage, it causes permanent damage. And this is what kills diabetics is a long-term buildup of one extra gram.
10:57
of blood sugar. So it’s actually pretty scary. So your body has to raise its insulin. That would be okay as if insulin only drove energy into cells. That’s what people say. Well, it’s a perfectly normal physiological process. Blood sugar goes up, insulin goes up, and that drives energy into cells, and the blood sugar goes down. It’s perfectly normal. Well, it’s normal because we see it a lot, but that’s not actually physiological. And so…
11:25
It’s a, it’s more of a defense mechanism. Your body is just trying to detoxify. And that’s how your body responds to these things. You know, we know, we can know what certain toxicants are in our body. Would you put them into our body and our body tries to get the hell out, get them the hell out of your body because they are doing damage, right? And so you see how your body responds to this and you can say if it’s a nutrient or toxin, right? So your body treats blood sugar as a toxin by raising insulin. Now. Apart from, you know, you get these spikes and apart from that area under the curve above.
11:54
four grams, that would be fine. You know, you probably be okay for a while anyway, until your body wasn’t able to handle that and you started getting higher and higher blood sugars. And then you would start getting the damage that we’ve seen in diabetics. But the problem with that is that insulin doesn’t just drive energy into the cells. It actually affects over 100 different physiological processes in your body that are very important. These are not minor ones. It’s actually
12:22
Glucose management is probably the most minor function of insulin in the body. And so this has to do with your hormonal regulation has to do with blood pressure as a rectal dysfunction. Uh, women can develop PCOS. You can get, uh, insulin resistance in different sorts of parts of your body, high blood pressure. Alzheimer’s is now being called type three diabetes, because this is shown to be insulin resistance of the brain. And we have PET CT. So this is where you.
12:51
looking for cancers and things like that because cancers really love glucose. They, this is called the Warburg effect. They require 400 times the amount of blood sugar as normal cells. Right. And so we, we do a PET CT where we give them a radio labeled glucose, right? So we’re giving them glucose and we’re doing a scan to see where does that glucose go. You can see, Ooh, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, all that sort of stuff. But you also see it in tissues like the brain and other elsewhere that have high glucose uptake. And so.
13:20
In people with Alzheimer’s, you actually see a much reduced level of glucose uptake in the brain. Which is why I was being called type three diabetes because your, your body’s not able to regulate insulin and blood sugar properly. So you’re not getting enough energy into the brain and your brain is suffering from the naked atrophy. It can just not have adequate energy just to run normal processes. And this is why going on a ketogenic diet, especially a high fat meat based ketogenic diet has been shown to be the most effective treatment.
13:50
Uh, today’s it’s, it’s better than every single pharmaceutical drug ever trialed for Alzheimer’s and very simple. You’re just bypassing that insulin resistance and ketones can cross freely into the brain and they can even reconstitute into fatty acids and help form the physical structures of the brain, but they also fuel the brain and your brain is actually a primary fuel source for two thirds of your brain, especially the cortex is a ketones. And why do I say that? Everyone said, Oh, we have to have a sugar for your brain. Well, first of all, in ketosis, you will make.
14:19
blood sugar actually right there at four grams exactly where you need it, not above. But if you have ketones and you have glucose at adequate levels, your brain will only run on ketones for those areas, the two thirds of the brain. So that’s a preference. Your brain is preferring to you because there’s glucose available, but it only runs on ketones at that time. And so when the ketones start coming down, they start filling in the gaps with glucose. So that’s a preference, obviously. And you can bypass this with the Qijing diet with people with Alzheimer’s. And then
14:48
Type four diabetes is actually a hormonal dysfunction in women where, uh, people don’t necessarily realize this, but women make testosterone first. And that’s converted into estrogen and the ovaries, but that conversion is actually blocked by insulin. And so if your insulin is up and you’re getting insulin resistance and you’re getting higher and higher insulin levels, because you’re desperately trying to get your glucose down to stop poisoning yourself, you’re going to block this process and women can get much too much testosterone.
15:18
and too little estrogen against serious fertility problems. PCOS is the leading cause of infertility in women in the Western world. So it’s very, very serious issue. And how do we treat this in fertility clinics? Give them metformin, give them diabetes medications, right? So that’s where they’re calling it type IV diabetes. Or just stop eating carbs, your choice. And your insulin comes down, blood sugar comes down, and all these problems go away. When they were, I’ve started terming
15:47
I five diabetes is cancer itself. You know, just for that, a, for the, you know, the warburg effect, you know, it is dependent on glucose. You really want to get that glucose down. So you treat this in the same way as you treat diabetes. Diabetes has been clinically proven in humans to be reversible with a key high fat meat based ketogenic diet and a Virta health show that published on it. And they’ve at this point treated over 25,000.
16:12
Americans with diabetes and reverse their diabetes. And there’s other groups that have even more than that. So, and then individuals, I couldn’t even tell you how many. Dozens or hundreds of people that I’ve had come into my office that have pre-diabetes insulin resistance or full-blown diabetes, and you put them on a ketogenic carnivore diet and it’s gone in very short order. So that same treatment again, okay. Get rid of the carbs, get the insulin down. So you starve out the energy requirements of these cancer cells.
16:42
And you’ll make some, some carbohydrates, but at least you’re not getting these big spikes and keeping your, your average blood sugar up where the, the, the cancer is, is really feeding on this. And when I talk to people about this, you know, I tell them, okay, you’ve had a PET scan and it’s like, oh yeah, you know, had all these spots all around. Okay. Every time you eat a bagel, just remember that because that’s where all the glucose goes. You’ve got an injection of glucose and also, and they just sucked in to those areas. Okay. Every time you have pasta, every time you have bread, every time you have a Snapple.
17:12
All right. Just imagine that you’re just, you’re just lighting those things up, right? Not what you want to do, but also a lot of these things have to do with the mitochondria and mitochondria are vital for proper metabolic health and function. And a lot of diseases are being tied to mitochondrial dysfunction. I mean, very recently at Harvard, they showed a, with Professor Chris Palmer that is strongly tied to schizophrenia, depression, OCD.
17:40
anxiety, things like that, bipolar, and they’re actually doing large scale, um, randomized controlled trials. There’s already large scale interventional trials. There’s just not controlled trials, randomized controlled trials. So now they’re, they’re doing the bigger randomized controlled trials, but a lot of people just taking this on themselves and say, Hey, you know, the, the interventional trials are good enough for me. I’ll give it a try. And they’re actually significantly improving their issues. And they think that’s largely due to the monitor.
18:05
There’s a lot of different reasons, but one of them is due to improve mitochondrial dysfunction. Another action of insulin. So we have something called autophagy. And this is something that people in the, you know, when they delve around into the sort of the health circles and things like that, they come around autophagy. They’ll, okay, you have to fast for 72 hours to five days and then you’ll go through autophagy and your body will clean out these little pre-cancerous cells, these sort of dead, dying little ghost cells or something like that. And then, and replace.
18:32
the organelles inside the cells as well. So it’s sort of like, you know, turning in your car, you just got the fan belt fix and you’re off to the races, right? So it’s like, you just have like some screwed up organelles, you just replace those, you don’t have to swap out the whole cell. And so that’s part of it as well. People think that we have to starve yourself and your body’s on a hole, pick up all these things that uses energy now that someone is doing this is normal housekeeping for the cells. It’s just that
18:57
we’re not supposed to have elevated insulin all the time. And so we’re actually suppressing that because that’s one of the actions of insulin is as it goes up, autophagy goes down and so you don’t actually have to fast. You just have to fast from car. You just stop eating carbs. You get your blood sugar down, you get your insulin down and you will go into autophagy and you will also replace your mitochondria is called my topology. And this, this is sort of the proof that it’s not there just to catabolize these, these organelles and cells to then
19:27
uses energy, altruistic, plenty of fat. I mean, even though even like a top athlete at 65 kg, with only 6% body fat has upwards of 150,000 kilocalories stored in their fat, only 6% body fat, right? Well, I mean, come on, if you’re not, you’re not, you’re not snipping around little cells here and there like mitochondria to get energy, got plenty of energy, right? That’s, that’s nonsense.
19:52
So what they’re doing is they’re actually replacing these things. She seems to get damaged or identified as not working properly. They take the mitochondria, they break them down to their constituent parts. And what do they do? They make another one. Right. So it actually is energy dependent. If they’re not gaining energy from this, we don’t have less mitochondria. As a result, you get more mitochondria, mitogenesis and mitopoge. So you replace the old senile damaged mitochondria, and then you make more of them. And so ketogenic diets.
20:21
especially things like the carnivore diet, an animal-based, high-fat, meat-based ketogenic diet, because the ones with plants and plant oils actually showed to be not all that great. It actually really needs to be a meat-based, animal-based, animal-fat ketogenic diet that after three to four months, you’ll have four times the number of mitochondria in your cells and they’re four times as effective, right? So this is a massive multiplication.
20:47
of the energy dynamics of your cell. It’s not just the energy dynamics of your cells because the mitochondria don’t just sit there pumping out ATP. People don’t know they’re called the powerhouses of the cell. They’re actually the workers in the cell. So actually running around, they move inside the cells, hundreds of things about these things or thousands of these things, you’re just moving around constantly. And they go to this part and they pump out ATP and they turn this on and they go here, turn this off and turn this on and turn this off. And that’s what they’re actually doing the job. And so…
21:14
If they’re broken down, they’re slowed down, they’re getting there a bit late. And then they’re not able to produce energy at the, at their rate and, uh, abundance that they would otherwise, or they’re old saying that they’re a day late in a dollar short and things don’t work properly. And that’s what we’re seeing in this sort of, uh, metabolic dysfunction. Your cells aren’t working properly. Goes for your brain as well. Your neurons don’t have enough functional mitochondria and they’re just, it’s not firing properly. You’re not turning things on when they need to be turned on. You’re not turning them off when they need to be turned off. So you get a lot of.
21:44
miscommunication in your neurons and when you multiply that out by potentially two trillion neurons, it’s a big deal, right? This can manifest as mental health disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, OCD, and depression and anxiety. So back to cancer, if you manage your blood sugar, you’re going to keep that blood sugar down, right? So less energy available to the cancers.
22:14
insulin down and you’re going to be able to go through autophagy and mitophagy and you’re going to keep your mitochondria healthy. And so it’s, it has been shown in clinical trials, preclinical and clinical trials to be quite effective. Some are smaller studies with bigger and bigger studies are happening and there are some bigger studies in certain cancers, there’s dozens and dozens of these things in several different cancers. There’s dozens of studies in each cancer and they have been shown to be quite effective.
22:43
And so you can help treat this with, with a key, it’s called ketogenic metabolic therapy. One of the top researchers in this is a professor, Thomas Seyfried from Boston college, who is building on the work of professor Audubon Warburg, who came up with the Warburg effect. He found this and what he showed. 80 years ago was that cancer was a disease of mitochondria. It was not on a genetic disorder. And so he showed that.
23:13
All cancer cells have dysfunctional mitochondria that can’t go through oxidative phosphorylation. So they have to go through a substrate level fermentation of glucose and he didn’t know it at the time, but glutamine. And so he said that if you have healthy mitochondria, you cannot get cancer. And so what do you do? You keep your blood sugar down, you keep your insulin down, and you can go through constant mitophagy. And that should in theory.
23:40
significantly reduce your rates of cancer. And we see ketogenic carnivore primitive groups, very low rates of cancer until they start westernizing. And then those cancer rates start going up and there are gonna be a lot of other reasons for this as well. However, there are a lot of things that can damage your mitochondria. A lot of things that can damage your mitochondria. And so if you’re doing things that help your mitochondria and they get start getting damaged, but you can replace them, you can fix them. Well, that’s going to offset some of that as well. And obviously you wanna help yourself about.
24:09
You know, against all of these things that could damage your mitochondria as well. You know, and it’s not just him saying that. I mean, he’s a Nobel prize winner in medicine. So he’s not a dumb guy. And he did a lot of research on this and then Watson and Crick came out and said, you know, look at the DNA and everyone just said, everything’s DNA, forget what you thought. And, uh, and they just threw this out. And so everything became a genetic base. Everything is a genetic disease, right? So the cancer was automatically a genetic disease. There are a few problems with that.
24:39
First of all, this is what was taught to me in medical school was that you have these little mutations and you get eight cardinal mutations. And then as soon as that last one hits, then you start getting this massive multiplication of cells. And it’s just this monoclonal body of cancer cells that just start growing like the blob and then start spreading all over the body. Problem with that is that when you look at a tumor or you look at cancers in general throughout the body and you find cancer cells.
25:09
that are behaving as cancer and they’re in that tumor, they all have different genes. Some of them have genetic changes and some of them have specific hallmarks for these specific cancers, but the others don’t. Some don’t have any genetic changes at all, but they all behave in the same way. They all behave as cancer and they all have damaged mitochondria. And then there are some tumors or some cancers that have no genetic changes whatsoever. But again, they all have damaged mitochondria. All known cancers have.
25:38
damaged mitochondria. And why is that significant? Because, like I said, the mitochondria are the workers inside the cell, they’re going around actually doing things. And one of the things that they do is police the cell functions and the cell cycles. And so when a cell wants to divide and grow, if something’s wrong, there’s certain steps in place, they can stop that and say, okay, we got to shut this down, fix whatever’s the problem. And then we can replicate or maybe just shut off completely.
26:08
but it’s not like an automatic stop function that somebody has to turn it on. Somebody has to turn it off. And so that starts going unless the mitochondria get that signal and the mitochondria stop it. So they might be getting that signal, but if the mitochondria are dead and dysfunctional, then they’re not gonna be able to stop that. So they start growing out of control, which is the whole morbid cancer is unregulated cell growth. The other.
26:35
Is that these cancer cells should normally be able to switch off and just kill itself and die. You know, apoptosis. But again, that signal goes to the mitochondria and then the mitochondria action it. And if the mitochondria are gutted, then that’s not going to happen. You actually see this now. That was one of the detractions from Warburg in 1975 was like, oh, well, it’s good theory. You know, he’s a good old boy. Too bad he’s dead to, he can’t defend himself on this. But just mitochondria, they’re just not damaged. We know that they’re not now. No, they are.
27:04
Yeah, we have electron microscopes that actually show the mitochondria and completely gutted. Normally they have an internal membrane called a cristae and that’s where all oxidative phosphorylation takes place. And they’re gutted. They’re like, they’re just, they’re just little ghost mitochondria going around. They have no cristae. It’s called crystallizes. So there’s nothing there. It’s empty. And there’s a phrase in biology that microbiology, especially in cellular biology, which is form equals function, right? So if the form is damaged, the function is damaged. And that’s very, very true.
27:34
for my condor so it was completely damage they simply got it from christian possibly go to rocks and phosphorylation warburg prove that they can go to a box of a phosphorylation before we can even see that my country were damaged he figures out is he very clever man and then gp was adopted now sorry my condor are aren’t amiss yeah they are getting back to the whole diabetes thing you know this is this is again just a disruption of our
28:02
glucose and insulin metabolism. And if you correct that, you can at least correct some of the problems that can precipitate cancer can stop you from preventing cancer. Stop one of your body’s internal mechanisms from preventing cancer. And it can actually help in the treatment of cancer as well. Potentially, uh, different cancers respond differently depending on the amount of glucose that they rely on versus glutamine. That’s something that Warburg didn’t know, but Stiepried actually found out subsequently.
28:30
I’ll end it with just this one more thing to just prove auto Warburg was right. There was a series of tests called a nuclear transfer studies where they took cancer cells with all the damaged DNA that you’d say that’s cancer DNA. They took out the nuclei of these cancer cells and they put them in normal cells with normal cytoplasm and normal mitochondria and they did not behave as cancer. And you could actually clone them into frogs and mice and things like that. Right. So very strange, but then they took the mitochondria out.
29:01
of the cancer cells, put those into normal cells with normal DNA and normal nuclei. They did behave as cancer. You couldn’t clone them. They just died. Right. And then just put the nail in the coffin. They took healthy mitochondria out of healthy cells and they put them in cancer cells, suppress the cancer, proving what Warburg said was true, which was if you have healthy mitochondria, you can’t get cancer because the mitochondria or what run the ship. And so that’s why I call cancer.
29:30
type five diabetes. Wow. I love that. Your research into all this subject matter reminds me of a gentleman named up Thomas soul. Are you familiar with him? I love Thomas soul. He’s absolutely my favorite author ever. And thinker ever. I truly think and believe that he is the most brilliant and well-developed thinker that America has ever produced hands down. Tell me about the first time you read him and what sort of impact that quote had on you.
29:59
Oh, well, the thing is, is that I’ve sort of read him by proxy since I was a kid, because I’m a fourth generation soul reader. My, my great grandmother would read him and, uh, my great uncle read him and, um, my parents definitely read him now. I’m reading him too. And so I, my, my dad absolutely loved soul. And so he would be reading columns by soul all, all growing up as a kid. And he would be reading his books as they came out and he’d be telling me how he’d just be so fascinating.
30:28
this guy’s brilliant. And he spent two hours telling me about all the different cool things he was excited about in the book. And I was just like, wow. And he was like, yeah, what do you think? I was like, yeah, that’s amazing. So I go, do you want to read the book? I was like, I feel like I just did. Two hours, like what’s going on? You know, so because of that, I actually didn’t read him properly. I mean, I would read his columns every now and then as well. Brilliant. I mean, that guy can break down such a, he has, he’s a particular genius for breaking down extremely complex.
30:56
issues into very simple terms and just showing them in black and white what they are. And you have all the sides arguing about what’s going on for weeks, you know, months, years, you know, these things that, you know, he, he just proved things back in the early eighties that they were still arguing about now. And so in his columns, you just say, okay, look, this is what these guys are saying. This is what these guys are saying. Here’s the evidence and here’s how deep it goes. What do you think? And you go, yeah, okay, obviously, you know, that’s, that’s very clear what’s going on because you just use some lays it out.
31:25
in such a logical form. He writes beautifully. He’s a brilliantly articulate and educated man, but he has a mind of a mathematician. That’s what actually his doctoral advisor and long-time colleague, Milton Freeman, who’s a Nobel Prize winner in economics, said about him. He said, you have a mind of a mathematician. You probably should have studied math. Actually, his son is quite a brilliant mathematician as well, apparently.
31:51
So, uh, but he thinks like that. And so his writing, it’s just, it’s built like a mathematical proof. It’s just, it’s just bulletproof. And you’re just looking at it and like, yep, airtight, you know, 750 word column. You’re like, yep, yep, yep, yep. You know, taking that down and, um, so yeah, it’s brilliant. And then, yeah, it wasn’t until I was, you know, full grown adults and had a bit more interest than I just said, okay, well, I’m going to try actually reading the whole book instead of just.
32:17
You know, hearing about it and hearing amazing things about it. And then I read the book and the columns are amazing, but there’s 750 words. The depth that he can get into, um, in, in the book, I mean, it’s still using a very clear logic, you know, he’s not, he’s not wordy and all that sort of stuff. So it’s not just bloated with, with text. It’s job. I mean, you can’t trim an ounce off this stuff, uh, but it’s just so rich with facts. It’s just hard facts.
32:45
And you just read that and it just absolutely blew me away. So I absolutely love his writing. Yeah. I mean, I would spend hours like working out at like my home gym and, uh, and just listening to Thomas soul book, books on tape or interviews or lectures or debates or things like that. And for hours, I sort of figured that if I, I could justify, you know, lifting weights for four hours, if I was listening to Thomas soul and listening to books and things like that, that I wanted to read it, it was a while I’m going to kind of spend time doing this anyway, I might as well lift while I’m doing it. And so.
33:12
That’s what I did. Yeah, for a long time I did that. So that was, yeah, that was my gym buddy, Thomas Soule, for years. You guys putting in the time. And I love that because that’s what the true scientific method is, right? Like we postulate, we prove, and then we balance the equation or we check away what is not true. And so many times we see, you know, Nietzsche says, they muddy the water to make it seem deep. So with all this academia, they get caught up in the semantics and these jargonistic, you know, back and forth.
33:40
And they’re doing that intentionally to try to make it more difficult. But that’s why when you were talking, that’s what you remind me of where you go through and you say, well, how about just, let’s just talk about insulin. Let’s talk about glucose. Let’s talk about when I went into the ketogenic world and then into the carnivore world, it was this idea that I had injuries, I had inflammation. And then obviously once I started doing those things, all the inflammation went away and it reminded me of when people would say, well, you’re supposed to have 15 to 20 pounds of glycogen and like.
34:10
edema in your body and it’s like, well, that actually is just swelling. That’s the indication that the body is sick in many ways. And so it came back to sort of that simplicity you were describing with soul. Well, that’s the thing. It’s a, I always loved soul in debates when he was on a show called firing line with a William F Buckley. Um, great show. And you had very good guests, very interesting guests. And if, if he agreed with them, you know, then he would bring someone else on,
34:40
professor from an Ivy League school that would challenge them in that field. Like a professor of economics from Columbia went and hammered it at Sowell and they had fun back and forth and things like that. But I mean, Sowell just absolutely plastered him on the floor. It just smeared his remains against the wall. And then like a law professor from Vassar went after him as well. And he was…
35:07
He was very nice. He’s very polite, but I mean, he just eviscerates these people and they’ll take this whole argument and he’ll just like one line, just cut it to shreds. Right. It is. It’s so brilliant. And like you said, it’s that simplicity. I mean, he cuts down to the bedrock of a situation, uh, better than, than anybody I’ve ever seen in my entire life. And, and he was so apt at just, you know, just cutting through and just saying all these sorts of things. You just said one line, bam, and it would just cut it to shreds. You’re like, Oh, yep. Okay. That’s what it is.
35:37
You know, I can do the same thing with nutrition. You know, we, they, exactly like, like you said, you know, they muddy the waters to make them seem deep talking about nutrition where you need all these degrees. Why do you need a PhD to know what to eat? That’s ridiculous. Right. What if humans been eating as long as humans have been humans? That’s what you should be. What have lions have been eating since lions have been lions? That’s what they should eat. What have koalas, what have koalas been eating since koalas been koalas? That’s what they should eat. You know, a zoologist doesn’t form studies and take out flyers and send out pamphlets
36:08
questionnaires to zebras to see what they eat. They just look at what zebras eat. Right. I was like, okay, that, right. And they see that they eat something else. They start getting sick. Hmm. That’s not good. And, uh, it’s pretty simple. So, you know, you eat what your species evolved to eat. You’re going to be as healthy as you, as you, uh, are biologically capable of being. And so that’s, that’s all you need to know what have humans been needing for the longest. I mean, that’s the immutable law of biology and evolution, which is, it’s, it’s,
36:37
adaptation, life adapts to pressures. And so you adapt to your situation, adapt your environment or you die. And so humans have been apex predators, top of the food chain, which is definitionally a carnivore for two to 2.5 million years and then carnivores before that and, uh, but not apex predators. And so that’s what we’ve been exposed to the longest. We’ve only had agriculture eight to 10,000 years.
37:05
for some populations and then the Native Americans, Native Australians, Native Canadians and Alaskans, they knew it. It’s only been 100, 150 years for these people, right? So much less time to adapt, actually no time to adapt, 100 years, nothing. And that’s why you see, this is again, this is another sort of proof of this, Native Americans have a far higher rate of non-communicable chronic diseases when eating the same foods as the rest of Americans, right?
37:35
And that’s because they don’t have 10,000 years to adapt. It’s only been a hundred, 150. I mean, some, some areas have had cultivation longer than that, but the vast majority of people in, in North America have largely been eating meat. You know, to build the bison were, were wiped out. It’s just, I think is a disgrace, but that was why, because that’s what they ate. And they would do a Buffalo drop. They drive the herd over the cliff and they, you know, they crash and burn. And then they, they eat, they dry it up and make an into pemmican.
38:03
which was mostly fat. It was like two grams of fat to one gram of protein, 80% calories from fat. And that’s what they would eat throughout the year. It’s actually interesting. When you look at anthropological records, they talk about how these primitive populations have, they have a change in their sort of the health struggles that they face. And now, so in primitive populations, they’ll see infectious disease and injury basically being the largest ones, infant mortality, childbirth, deaths, and things like that, and bleeding, those sorts of things. And they actually,
38:32
infant mortality, because that will skew an average life expectancy from birth. But if you look at how old people die, when they die of old age, they’re actually living as long or longer than people in civilized countries and developed countries. And so when you see them transition into a more civilized sort of society and less primitive society, they transition to the illnesses that they get, the problems that they get afflicted with are now become diseases of civilization. Which are.
39:02
non-communicable chronic diseases, right? Or human diseases, if we’re talking about animals. Or 150 years ago, Western diseases, because the Western empires that went around the world, they found that they were getting diseases that people just weren’t. And so there was like, oh, it’s Western diseases, and then they get infectious disease. So it was just diseases of the West. Western people got these diseases. The native Aboriginals in Australia and the native populations in America did not.
39:31
until they switched to the Western diet. And then they started getting sick and actually at a much higher rate than Westerners got. And there was a study in 2001, they looked at old records that somebody actually went out into the Great Plains in the late 1800s and looked at the these people that had traditionally been eating bison and carnivores, high fat carnivores for millennia, but really not millennia. I mean, for millions of years, they’re just carrying on a tradition, right?
40:00
And so they found that these were actually the tallest human beings alive on earth at the time. And, uh, one of the populations, the Cheyenne were the tallest of these and they were on average adult male height with five foot 10. So adult male height average in America right now is five foot eight. Right. So, and depending on where you look, I mean, there’s different sorts of things, but five foot 10, right? So, you know, there are some places that sort of rival that now, but not then. I mean, they were, they were well taller than, than everybody else. But the really interesting thing.
40:30
is that those studies and those measurements took place after the bison were wiped out and they were put on reservations and they were not able to get their nearly 100%, if not 100% high fat carnivore diet. So they had already started to shrink and that’s in the reports at the time saying these people had already shrunk and previous generations were actually much taller than that. So they said.
40:56
If we had studied this a hundred years earlier, the average height would have been much taller and there’s other delegates that came over, um, to visit then president Jefferson. Jefferson was, was not a short man. He was about six foot two, sort of big for the time. And he said that these guys were absolute giants. They, they were just huge and they just towered over him and, um, their paintings of some of these people at the time, they looked at the scale, the size of their heads and things like that, they estimated these guys were nearly seven feet tall.
41:26
And so, I mean, they’re just huge. And this lines up with the fossil record. When you go back to the mammoth hunters before something wiped out all the megafauna around the world, I think it’s some sort of cataclysmic event is that, Oh, humans just hunted them out. Really? They just, every continent, they hunted them all to extinction at the exact same time. Yeah, probably not. You know? So something probably happened. And in fact, you see the technology in North America breaks. So if you have like arrowheads that are much more advanced.
41:55
And also you don’t see anything about 3000 years. And then all of a sudden they come back and they’re, and they’re more primitive. So probably something wiped out the human population on in North America and, uh, and elsewhere as well. And so the mammoth hunters, um, who, uh, were just hunting this mega fauna, which is what we’ve been doing for millions of years. I mean, there’s, there’s evidence that we’ve been doing mammoth drops, and you know, scaring herds of mammoth over a cliff a million years ago. Right. So we’ve been doing this for a long time.
42:24
So the height of homo sapiens who were hunting these mammoths in these areas, they, they found that the adult male high in these, in these populations could be on average six foot two to six foot four on average. So that that’s absolutely massive. And then you see people shrinking down and then directly after agriculture. Drops down and high down about five foot three, right? Five foot three, five foot four for adult male hide jaws become smaller teeth are crooked. That’s not genetic.
42:54
Everything’s genetic. It’s not genetic. Almost nothing is genetic. It’s nutritional. That’s it. And that’s in dentistry journals. Now they talk about that vitamin K2, K1, D3 calcium, things like that. It’s a, that’s what’s important. If you’re missing some of those, you typically people are missing K2, which is a fat soluble vitamin that only comes from animals and you say, Oh, K1, K1 one’s not, not enough to unique K2. And you really don’t convert K1 into K2. K1 is the plant version. Usually the plant versions of these things.
43:22
are not what we need and fairly useless. And so, you know, we see that with this drop in this height immediately and the drop in the brain size, adult male brain capacity dropped by 11%, females by 17%. And that’s persistent until today, but it wasn’t a hundred years, a thousand years or anything like that. It was immediately as soon as we hit agriculture, bam, height, health and brain size went down. Infectious disease, sort of seeing signs of poor wound healing, shortened femurs, which is a sign of.
43:51
of malnutrition and tuberculosis up and down the spinal column, which is, you know, not good. And you see this everywhere and every when that agriculture was instilled, regardless of the type of crop that they went to. And we see this exact same thing in the native populations such as the Native Americans in the Great Plains. They got pushed onto the reservations, wiped out the buffalo, and weren’t able to get their food and they had to start eating more Western food. And we saw the exact same thing with them.
44:21
direct correlation. The plant-free MD, Dr. Anthony, thank you so much for your time. I know that you have to run. You’re getting ready to get on a plane. Where can we learn more about you? Where can we… You have all this incredible research. What can we do to learn more about what you’re talking about with the carnivore diet and support everything you’re doing? Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. I appreciate you having me on. It was a pleasure. I’d love to have you on in the future as well. Oh, I’d love to. I have 100%.
44:49
Yeah, well, I have a podcast is just called the plant free MD and, um, you know, as, uh, they would imply to sort of promote a carnivore diet, a plant free carnivore diet, and there’s reasons why, and then I also have a YouTube channel, it’s just my name, Anthony, shape, EMD, and then Instagram, Anthony shaped PMD, um, or Patriot Anthony, JP, MD as well, but it’s mostly those, there’s social media channels that I have, and I try to make all my videos available for free in my podcast for free. I don’t have things behind a paywall.
45:15
We do have a coaching group for people that want to try a carnivore diet called howtocarnivore.com. But you know, it’s again, I mean, that just gets added support and calls and you know, group sort of chats and messages and things like that, that can help people get a bit of support, but the information is all available for free. I make that available for everybody that wants it on YouTube and my podcast. So people are more than welcome to go there. Thank you, Dr. The Thomas soul of nutrition. I appreciate you. Yeah.
45:44
I wish if I could only get a hold of Thomas Soule and get him on a carnivore diet just to give us another 30 years of his of his genius and then give him another 30 years of just a nice life for for doing so much for humanity I would absolutely if anyone has a has a contact with Thomas Soule, please get me in touch with him because I would absolutely love to Speak with the man and if I could turn him on a carnivore even better. I think that would be a huge testament Thank you so much. Yeah
46:14
Not a problem, thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
