DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: Carnivore Diet For Beginners - Complete Guide

From last year, but this is an excellent overview what to eat, what not to eat, and why.  18 minutes long.

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: your ferritin will raise and will go up. So that can actually be a marker not of just high iron but of inflammation.

2:13.  The body has a really good reason to put iron into ferritin.  What do you think about that?

2:18.  Yes, the iron levels of ferritin levels there are different ways of testing iron, multiple different ways of testing iron and iron's binding capacity.  You know how you store because you can actually sequester iron in your bone marrow and things like that try to hide it away for different reasons.  And then have it bring it out and ferritin, of course, can change dramatically depending on what you're doing.  Ferritin is actually quite useful as an acute phase reactant meaning that if you have a lot of inflammation in your body like an infection or some sort of autoimmune issue or similar, that your ferritin will raise and will go up.  So that can actually be a marker not of just high iron but of inflammation.  

3:14.  It's not something that you should look at solely to consider your iron levels because there are a lot of things that affect your fairing 10 levels and so you need to get a complete iron profile and panel to see exactly what's going on to see if you're sequestering it or you just don't have enough and if you have too much or whatever but if iron overloaded that shows up in different ways people with hemochromatosis like halves specific problems that you can test for you can see clinically in doing carnivore tendon not have those issues even if they're iron is sort of slightly high or elevated or more elevated than they have been or maybe they're ferritin is up or something like that they don't actually display the clinical issues some may have an issue but I don't work with hemochromatosis myself.

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: You eat breakfast carbs and a whole bunch of carbs and some fruit juice, and some fruit, or whatever, you have 5 hours . . . you just shut down your bacterial immune system.

                               You eat breakfast carbs and a whole bunch of carbs and some fruit juice, and some fruit, or whatever, you have 5 hours . . . you just shut down your bacterial immune system.  And after 5 hours, it's still only half effective.  Then at lunch you have some more of this stuff.  Then you have more of this stuff.  So basically your entire day your immune system is impaired.  You don't need to eat 1 gram of glucose or fructose.  You don't need a single gram.  But who can do this in a healthy respect where it will cause no damage?  No one.

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: The microbiome that they've tested in carnivores and different sorts of people that only eat meat or animal products is actually quite a good profile. Very very diverse.

Every single day that you eat, if you eat something different you will have a different microbiome at the end of the day.  Bacteria turnover is 20 minutes.  They rely on what we send down the pipe.  If you eat different things you'll have a different biome every day.  So whatever day you take that test you'll have a different result.  You eat something, you know curry chicken this day, you send it in, you're going to have a different result.  You have a vegetarian meal that day, you're going to have a different result.  You just eating steaks with no seasonings, you're going to have a different result.  The microbiome that they've tested in carnivores and different sorts of people that only eat meat or animal products is actually quite a good profile.  Very very diverse.  You have all these different sorts of different bacteria.  You're not supposed to have an overgrowth of a few.  They seem to be the ones that are correlated with better health.  Now, is this because the bacteria themselves play a role in contributing to our health, or is it that what we're eating has a direct effect on our health and that also has a direct effect on what bacteria are going to be living in our gut?  I think it's probably both.

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: Plants are trying to kill you. Eat more meat instead.

Plants are trying to kill you.  Eat more meat instead.

15:33.  It's not until they dump the plants and eat only meat that they alleviate all their symptoms.  So I think it's very clear that these plants are toxic.  We know they're toxic.  We've known for thousands of years that they're toxic they're in every botany or horticulture book in the world and this is something that we've known for a thousand years of years we've known that plants can cause certain diseases.  Adele Davis was a nutritionist from 100 years ago very smart lady well ahead of her time and she talked about oxalates and how toxic they were and how you needed to if you just you don't just eat raw spinach.  You needed to poach it in milk because the oxalates would bind to the calcium.  They would chelate it out.  So you had to neutralize the oxalates before you ate them.  This is something that people knew for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.  That's why they ferment things.  That's why they cook things and mix them with ash or clay to lower the toxic load.  Corn a thing called maze only eaten. If it was prepared in a certain process called Nish tamalization which is a seven step process of chemical heat and processing soaking it in lie for 24 hours, mixing other chemicals with it, doing all these other sorts of thing. To lower the toxic load and increase the bioavailability of the nutrients.  Because that's another way the plants defend themselves is by just not being as nutritious they bind up their nutrients and ways that we can't access because we don't have the enzymes to break them down so through technology we figured out how to break those bonds and release those nutrients and to lower the toxic load and that's why we've prepared plants in very specific ways for thousands of years because they're poisonous because they're toxic.  And we knew that and in the last century we've been told to forget it and that's something we need to ReDiscover I'm not inventing the wheel here the wheel has been invented.  It's just that we've forgotten about it.  Oh I'm trying to do is reawaken that large body of understanding that plants have toxins and you need to prepare them in certain ways to lower the toxic load if you're going to eat them.  But if you don't have to eat them if you're not starving and you're not in that position or you don't want to eat them just eating meat is a perfect way to avoid those toxins.  You get everything you need just by eating that.

18:00.   Super fascinating I wanted to ask you one question I had ready for you was there any study that compared people going from healthy omnivorous diet that doesn't have any Ultra process food just a organic veggies and fruits and meat to carnivorous diet and then having better results?  

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: the human brain is designed to run on fat and ketones and be built from cholesterol, not from constant dietary glucose and seed oils that are very poor substitute for what your brain is requiring. So your brain is actually built out of cholesterol and animal source nutrition. Cholesterol works as structural components. The brain is roughly 2% of the body weight but contains over 25% of the body's cholesterol.

Whatever you want to say about cholesterol in the arteries and whether or not that leads to arterial sclerosis, which I believe the evidence shows very clearly that it does not, you cannot say that the cholesterol made in your brain has anything to do with that because it's passed the blood-brain barrier.  It does not get into the bloodstream in it's not able to cross from the brain into your bloodstream.  --Dr. Anthony Chaffee

 

1:45.  This shows up in development as well when the neonatal brain is built for a ketogenic environment.  When we knock out ketones or the ability to use ketones in animal studies actually shows catastrophic energy failure despite normal amounts of glucose in the brain cannot develop grow or function in normal ways while it's developing.

2:04.  Pregnancy has also been called accelerated starvation where women who are pregnant get into ketosis far faster as pregnancy advances so when women are in the third trimester it's actually very easy for them to get into ketosis even when eating carbohydrates at levels that would normally kick other people out of ketosis and that's because those ketones freely cross the placenta into the developing fetuses because the brain requires those ketones to function normally and also reconstitute into fatty acids that make up the physical the building blocks of the brain.  And the third trimester especially the brain is growing exponentially needs as much ketones and fat as the mother can provide.  Breast milk also does this as well because breast milk is deliberately ketogenic even children even though there's a high level of lactose in it, they are still producing ketones because their brain requires it.  And Studies have shown that formula-fed babies have far fewer ketones than breastfed babies.  So the default, the human brain is designed to run on fat and ketones and be built from cholesterol, not from constant dietary glucose and seed oils that are very poor substitute for what your brain is requiring.  So your brain is actually built out of cholesterol and animal source nutrition.  Cholesterol works as structural components.  The brain is roughly 2% of the body weight but contains over 25% of the body's cholesterol.  Cholesterol is a rate limiting step for myelin which is white matter insulation and synapse formation.  So this makes the signals in the brain faster and connect to more cells so that makes your brain and nervous system more powerful.  Lower cholesterol means fewer synapses, fewer connections with different cells and impaired brain growth and development of this myelin which slows down conductivity of these signals from your neurons.  

3:54.  Statins have even been shown to be iotrogenic, meaning that they are man-made medical-based cause of harm and can cause neurodegeneration.  So fat soluble statins can cross the blood brain barrier and blunt the brains cholesterol synthesis.  So it prevents the brain from making its own cholesterol which it's made out of.  Whatever you want to say about cholesterol in the arteries and whether or not that leads to arterial sclerosis, which I believe the evidence shows very clearly that it does not, you cannot say that the cholesterol made in your brain has anything to do with that because it's passed the blood-brain barrier.  It does not get into the bloodstream in it's not able to cross from the brain into your bloodstream.  So the only thing you're doing while taking a Statin and slowing down your brains production of cholesterol is actually slowing down and damaging your brain.  And this is why the FDA has required warning labels on statins saying that it can cause memory issues, cognition, and other sorts of neurological conditions as well.  There was also a withdrawal and rechallenge study in Alzheimer's patients back in 2012, where they took 18 patients who were on statins who had Alzheimer's and tested their cognition score, then stopped their statins and then tested them 6 weeks later without doing anything else, and they found that their cognition scores improved across

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: Even the WHO says that red kidney beans, which are quite commonly eaten around the world, that if they're not cooked and treated properly that as little as 5 red kidney beans uncooked can actually put people in the hospital because of how toxic they are.

Out of the 400,000 plants in the world most of them will kill you.  The main reason I stopped eating plants was because of basic botany and biology though.  My professor of cancer biology at University of Washington in Seattle told me 26 years ago just how toxic plants fruits, vegetables, grains and all the seeds and legumes and beans that we eat as a normal mainstay of our diet, and how harmful these are, how toxic they are to the human body and to health.  We're told that they're extremely healthy but they actually they can be quite harmful and they can even be carcinogenic.  Even the WHO says that red kidney beans, which are quite commonly eaten around the world, that if they're not cooked and treated properly that as little as 5 red kidney beans uncooked can actually put people in the hospital because of how toxic they are.  Again this is a well-known fact in biology and botany that plants defend themselves by making toxins.  This is why out of the 400,000 plants in the world most of them will kill you or make you extremely sick.  There are very few examples from a percentage-wise basis of plants that we can eat in a raw form.  There are maybe a few hundred and we've increased that to a few thousand by fermentation, by cooking, by soaking them with chemicals and other sorts of industrial processes to bring down that toxic load and make these things more edible and nutritious.  But this is proof positive that we are not designed to eat these plants because if we were then we would have the biological capacity and enzymes to do this naturally. We wouldn't have to cook it. We wouldn't have to soak it and lye and clay and ash and other sorts of chemicals or ferment it in order to reduce the toxicity to make this edible.  We've made a lot of inedible toxic deadly plants edible by chemical treatment and other sort of techniques such as fermenting and cooking.  If you get lost in the woods and you run out of food, you can't just eat any random plant because most of them will make you very sick or could even kill you.  And just because something doesn't kill you on the spot, doesn't mean it doesn't have any toxins in it.  We eat grapes and avocados without cooking them but if you feed those to a cat or a dog that can actually kill it.  So there are toxins in there. There are things that are harmful.  It's just that we have a bit more defenses to some of those toxins.

TRANSPLANTS ARE NOT THE GREENER PASTURE. IT'S JUST THE MEDICAL COMPLEX PUTTIN' YOU OUT TO PASTURE. IT'S EXTENDING YOUR LIFE-EXPECTANCY BY A FEW EXTRA MONTHS WHILE ON REJECTION MEDICINE

5 Years in the ICU What Every Patient Should Know!

I think lung transplants specifically don't do as good as some of the other organ transplants.  --ICU Nurse, Nurse Jennifer

And so you're inheriting the problems that [the organ donors] had when they died and sometimes that's quite severe.  --Dr. Anthony Chaffee

ICU Nurse, Jennifer

11:42  Less than 10 [lung transplant patients] go home and go completely back to their normal life, and the people who do do well are very young.  Those are the ones that seem to do well are the very young.

12:30  Most of our patients are on the unit for over a year.  In a 10-bed unit, the patients are there for a very long time.  Once we have a transplant patient there, they're typically there for the long-run.  And even after they transfer off the unit, they typically come back with respiratory failure. 

13:00  Would this be indicative of programs across the country, or do you think this is more exclusive to your hospital?  

13:13  I think lung transplants specifically don't do as good as some of the other organ transplants.

16:11  How long was your Department suspended from doing lung transplants?  

16:13  Around 6 months where we weren't doing procedures.  I wasn't able to find information online about it.

16:29  That's concerning too that there were restrictions put on the departments but then the patient can't go and find anything about that pause or why the 6-month moratorium on transplants.  

17:00.  The other thing that you pointed out would be what other people wouldn't have even thought about, which is that some people who get lung transplants they're getting lungs from people who obviously have passed away, but how did they pass away?  And so you're inheriting the problems that they had when they died and sometimes that's quite severe. 

Are We Like Gorillas?

Are We Like Gorillas? https://t.co/N4t3GkmRNJ via @YouTube

— Mike Walgenbach (@Walgenbach82743) June 23, 2026

 Find it way more interesting.

Microbe function on balance.

One of the biggest mistakes that people can make in anything is taking that horrible advice of "Everything in moderation."  So let's apply that to everything else.  So you're saying everything in moderation?  Okay.  

So junk food in moderation. 

Sugar in moderation.  

Alcohol in moderation.

Heroin in moderation.

Cocaine in moderation.  

Assault in moderation. 

Genocide in moderation. 

Obviously there are things in this world that you just don't want to do or want to take part in, certainly don't want to put in your body. Cyanide in moderation?  So these are not serious arguments.  The only people that say, "Well, you need a balanced diet.  You need a balanced approach or you need to have everything in moderation," are people that just don't understand what we're biologically supposed to have and what is biologically optimal for us. The difference between success and failure happens in the margins.  

00:51. Also, why are we talking talking about the lean animals we see today we say that a deer doesn't have all that much fat of course omitting all that fat taking all that fat out of the abdomen.  But these are not the types of animals that are ancestors would have eaten historically.  We were eating megafauna.  We were eating mammoth. We were eating whales.  We were eating giant bears and giant and these other sorts of animals that had a very high proportion of fat to their body weight.  

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: Plants will poison you with cyanide.

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: Cyanide will block iodine uptake. You have leafy green vegetables such as kale and broccoli and brussel sprouts, etc., that whole cruciferous vegetable family, they're teeming with these things, and those are the ones that people say, "Oh, these are the healthiest." Those are the ones that are going to trash your thyroid pretty quickly.

There is a study showing that black beans block out up to 75% of zinc absorption, and that corn tortillas can block out 100% of zinc absorption.  So zinc is required for the conversion of T4 into T3. People are saying, "Oh my T3 is going down."  Okay, what about your zinc?  --Dr. Anthony Chaffee

Even Long-Term Carnivores Are Eating Carbs Again (Here's Why)

7:05  But there's an entire category of plant toxins called goitrogens that cause a goiter, which is a swollen, irritated thyroid which is dysfunctional.  Now, you're getting thyroid dysfunction from that.  Many of them will block out iodine uptake into the thyroid.  Iodine is required to make thyroid hormone.  And the soil is pretty deficient in iodine anyway.  In Australia, it's extremely deficient.  So almost every single person that I test their blood work on, unless they're eating a lot of fish and seafood, they will be deficient in iodine.  And now you compound that with a blockade of iodine . . . almonds have cyanide.  Cyanide will block iodine uptake.  You have leafy green vegetables such as kale and broccoli and brussel sprouts, etc., that whole cruciferous vegetable family, they're teeming with these things, and those are the ones that people say, "Oh, these are the healthiest."  Those are the ones that are going to trash your thyroid pretty quickly.

And so you're getting rid of these things and then you're getting all the nutrients that you actually need in an unimpeded, bioavailable form.  So you're getting iodine; you're not blocking it out with goitrogens.  You're getting zinc and you're not blocking it out with fetic acid and other anti-nutrients.  And you're getting selenium and you're able to make sure that and you're able to absorb that as well all of these nutrients and many more are required for normal thyroid hormone production.  And when you eat plants, you're blocking a lot of those out; you're just not getting them in bioavailable form.  There is a study showing that black beans block out up to 75% of zinc absorption, and that corn tortillas can block out 100% of zinc absorption.  So zinc is required for the conversion of T4 into T3. People are saying, "Oh my T3 is going down."  Okay, what about your zinc?  People know about selenium, but they never think about zinc.   We have studies showing and also just physiology textbooks that if you're in a ketogenic state, you don't need as much T3 to produce the exact same amount of ATP energy in order to make ATP, the glucose molecule. You get about 30-32 ATP molecules per glucose molecule

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: advanced glycation end product of glucose . . . This is what kills diabetics over time is this chronically elevated blood sugar and this is why you lose your toes and then your feet and then your legs and then your kidneys and then your heart and then you get Alzheimer's and Dementia.

 

Glucose molecules can physically fuse to other molecules, called glycation. So it's a non-enzymatic fusion between any carbohydrate molecule, including glucose or fructose which is actually stronger glycolytic action.  And so we measure this with HBA1C test.  That's the advanced glycation end product of glucose.  It is causing damage.  This is what kills diabetics over time is this chronically elevated blood sugar and this is why you lose your toes and then your feet and then your legs and then your kidneys and then your heart and then you get Alzheimer's and Dementia. This affects every single system and organ in your body.  

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: 25 Years of Medical Advice in 15 Minutes

00:52.  Harmful components in your food can cause damage directly, and anti-nutrients can block out essential building blocks.  Not enough nutrients can starve your system of central materials for life, determine whether or not your body is working properly or not, and is healthy or sick.  If you correct your nutrition, 90% of chronic disease can improve, and the rest can get a lot better.  Focus on your metabolic health and nutrition and the rest generally falls into place or at least gets a lot better.

SUNLIGHT

Sunlight is a nutrient.  Just exposing yourself to sunlight can increase BDNF, Brain Derived Neurotropic Factor, which is like fertilizer for your brain, allowing it to grow, heal, and repair, and even regrow neurons.  It also stimulates Nitric oxide, which improves your cardiobolic health, lowers your blood pressure, and improves your cardiovascular health.  It helps your body create vitamin D, which is not just a vitamin, it's a hormone including development during childhood and puberty.  It improves mitochondrial function, regulates your hormonal system, improves your sleep, and so much more.  By optimizing your light exposure, you can help optimize all of these things. 

2:06.  SLEEP

Sleep is one of the best things you can do for your body and your brain.  Averaging 6 hours or less a night can increase your risk of developing Alzheimer's by over 6-fold.  And getting less than 5 hours of sleep per night for just 7 nights in a row can cause such physiological distress that it gives you pre-diabetes and it takes a full 7 days of proper night's sleep, between 7 to 8 hours, to reverse this.  Not just one or two nights sleeping in on the weekend.  

MOVEMENT

Stay active, exercise, and move your body.  Benefits of exercise are too many to count, but some of them are such as increasing BDNF, again, helping to regulate your hormones such as human growth hormones and IGF-1.  They can help your body and tissue rebuild and repair, helping you age more youthfully and gracefully.  It optimizes other hormones such as testosterone, estrogen, improves insulin function, protects muscle mass from atrophying and sarcopenia which is directly correlated with longevity and cognitive function.  You want to avoid the need for doctors unless there's an accident or an emergency.  And if you follow these principles, you can reduce your risk of having to.  These principles may sound basic but they're a culmination of decades of research and work and clinical practice in the field of medicine and have stood the test of time.  Many of these go back hundreds or even thousands of years such as "Let food be thy medicine and Medicine thy food." An old saying in medicine goes, "Before you try to heal someone, first ask them if they're willing to give up that which is making them sick."  We are designed to be healthy.  We are designed to thrive.  And so if something is going wrong and we are sick, something is impairing that.  Most likely it is something from our environment or something that we are doing to ourselves, because naturally we should be healthy as a species.  Maybe one or two individuals in a group may have a genetic issue that holds them back even if they're doing everything right.  But the majority of people and the majority of examples in any given species will be healthy by and large.  And even those with very serious genetic issues, when they approach life and health with these basic principles are now finding that they can even improve these very difficult and sometimes life-threatening genetic diseases.  I've interviewed many of them on my channel, and we are seeing more and more as time goes on.  The things that I am seeing in my practice that are reversing by applying these principles would be considered incurable by any Modern Standard, and yet I and many others are seeing this on a day-to-day basis.  Most doctors if they heard of the things that my patients are reversing it would be very hard for them to believe it until they saw it themselves.  

Mike Davies.

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: Normal age-related atrophy is not evolutionary. It confers no survival advantage. If it does occur, it's caused by malnutrition over time.

We accept as normal that our brains are supposed to shrink as we age, and we say, "Well, that's normal age related atrophy."  But at the same time, we know that if you have certain nutrient deficiencies, like B12 in the normal ranges you can still get brain atrophy.  Your brain is shrinking by half a percent or 1% per year. Oxford showed that in 2008 in a published study they did, so and that's in the normal range of B12.  And they said, "Well, . . . my doctor said my B12 is fine."  Well, I can tell you it's probably not.  If your doctor didn't say it was too high, then it's it's not fine.  Because we were just going by reference ranges and doctors just go by reference range.  Well, those are the reference ranges that we use, okay.  But did you look them up and see if they're actually useful?  Because the next Lab down the road, they have completely different reference ranges. So who's right?  And you have a patient that goes to one lab or the other lab and you get one says fine and one says too high.  Well, what is it?  You're making objective decisions based on arbitrary figures.  If you were an architect or an engineer that did that and used arbitrary measures,  buildings and buildings are falling down.  People are dying.  Your accountant that used artificial figures, they'd be in prison.  When you use, you know, imaginary arbitrary figures and measures for humans,  health collapses.  Instead of buildings, it's your health. No other animal in the wild eating their natural diet has normal age related atrophy. There's actually a study where they looked at 99 chimpanzees and did MRIs looking at them, comparing them to people aging over time.  And they had no degeneration in their brain.  Their brain didn't shrink at all.  They had no atrophy as they age at any point.  They even concluded that this is an abnormality in humans that our brains shrink over time.  And they said this is evolutionary anomaly.  But it's not, it can't be evolutionary.  That's not a survival advantage, that's a big disadvantage.  So it doesn't make any damn sense.  And so I think that's malnutrition over time.