DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: So high blood sugar is damaging, and this kills you. It's part of what kills diabetics by glycation, glucose molecules physically fusing to various molecules.

1:10. Now, I've never seen you guzzling down a carton of milk on your Instagram. 

1:15.  Very very rarely.  I used to love milk, I mean I do love milk.  It has enough lactose that this is going to cause a problem.  It's going to cause an insulin, a blood sugar spike, and an insulin spike, and that's just not what you want.  It kicks you out of your primary metabolism.  It starts making you glucose driven as opposed to running on all of your different energy sources such as blood sugar and glycogen and ketones.  So that gets you out of that primary metabolic State and puts you back into a where you're packing in fat and you're storing fat and your fat cells as opposed to utilizing the energy and your fat cells so it's just a completely different way of functioning as an energy supply.  So milk can do that as well.  So I do stay away from that, yeah.  

2:05.  So even though Dairy is an animal product, it's got lots of fat and protein, but it also has a lot of carbohydrates.  It's got sugar in it.  

2:16.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  The lactose sugar is a disaccharide meaning that it's a combination of glucose and lactose just stuck together, and that gets broken down into glucose and lactose as you can imagine.  So that raises your blood sugar.  It's not as bad as fructose like from fruit and honey I certainly wouldn't touch those but it is bad for your body and your metabolism and pumps up your insulin as well.  So high blood sugar is damaging, and this kills you.  It's part of what kills diabetics by glycation, glucose molecules physically fusing to various molecules.  But then in response to that, your body raises insulin, which is protective against this higher blood sugar but it also causes a myriad of problems that you really don't want and causes huge harm.  It's definitely best to be avoided.  Every now and then, fine.  But there's this idea that you need to be carbohydrates and go back and forth because you want to be metabolically flexible that has absolutely no basis in reality, science, or evidence.  I was just talking to Professor Ben Bikman at BYU, who is a biochemist and professor of bioenergetics at BYU.  He has been studying insulin on the body for over 15 years, and I asked him that very specifically.  I asked him what are the hard facts on this, and he said absolutely not, it doesn't matter.  And he went through the exact biochemistry of it, what happens, how this stuff looks, and how it can seem like that.  If you haven't eaten carbohydrates, if you've been out of that state for a while, you're just not storing insulin in your pancreas because you're not just ready.  Your body is not in protective mode and building up this tolerance because it's anticipating a big jolt of glucose.  And so it's not anticipating that and so that breaks it down because your body is very efficient.  And then all of a sudden you do a glucose tolerance test and all of a sudden your insulin spikes . . . sorry, your blood sugar spikes.  Oh, you're not tolerant to this.  No, actually if you prime the pump and you have a bit of glucose before a bit of sugar before, the next time you eat it it'll be primed up.  And you'll actually have a much better response.  So it's sort of a false, false picture and I think that's leading people astray.  So the idea that you need to scrap in order to eat this crap in order to keep some metabolic flexibility is absolutely not based in science or reality.  You do not have to eat any carbohydrates.

4:56.  Just to go back to the pump analogy so the misconception is that you need to prime the pump by eating carbohydrates so that it's ready if you do it some to then absorb, but then the reality is what's the reality like of the analogy?  I'm just not getting it.

5:13.  Yeah, so when you're eating a lot of glucose and carbohydrates, your body makes more insulin.  It's not just producing insulin when you're eating it, it makes a lot of insulin and stores it in the pancreas and gets it ready.  It's just like you have bile in your gallbladder and you eat a fatty meal, it can just squirt out a whole bunch of bile at once; whereas if you don't have a gallbladder, it just slowly drips out.  It's a little different than that because you don't have insulin slowly dripping out; it will come out in a very controlled manner.  But when you eat carbohydrates, if you've been eating a lot of carbohydrates, you will have pre-made a lot of insulin and store that in your pancreas, anticipating a carbohydrate-driven meal.  And then as soon as that comes in, boom! it dumps in a big load of insulin.  However, when you're not eating a bunch of carbohydrates, it doesn't do that.  Your body is very efficient. 

Dr. Chaffee explained that our blood pH is normally kept between 7.35 and 7.45. He said if it drops to around 7.25, it can become a dangerous medical condition called metabolic acidosis. If it rises to around 7.55, it can become metabolic alkalosis. His point was that the body regulates blood pH extremely tightly because even small changes can be life-threatening.

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: If your B-12 is at a level so low that you're getting demyelination, how the hell do you expect to remyelinate your nerves from MS?

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: black beans block out up to 75% of zinc absorption, and that corn tortillas can block out 100% of zinc absorption.

toxic levels of vitamin A can reduce your thyroid function as well, so this is a potential issue if someone is eating liver in high enough quantities.  --Dr. Anthony Chaffee

 

There's 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, and people are saying, "Oh my, God, T3 is going down."  Okay, well what about your zinc.  People know about selenium but they never they never think about zinc. 

Thyroid issues with Carnivore?

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I regularly see influential Carnivore advocates (former, maybe?) stating that a pure carnivore diet without fructose from honey or fruit will cause hypothyroidism. To combat this they recommend eating fruit or honey, and one advises people to get 40% of their calories from things like orange juice and to "sun their genitals" to help their thyroid...

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I've been strict carnivore for 10 of the last 20 years, and close to otherwise, and my thyroid function is perfectly normal, if not optimal. And I have yet to have a patient go on carnivore and not improve their thyroid function, let alone damage it. Although I don't generally eat organs, and I don't tell my patients to either, just if they want to, these same advocates of not-quite Carnivore strongly recommend them, especially liver. I don't know if that affects this, but toxic levels of vitamin A can reduce your thyroid function as well, so this is a potential issue if someone is eating liver in high enough quantities. And I definitely don't sun my balls, so that's not what's holding me together. The other thing to point out is that the Inuits and native Australians and others who traditionally don't eat anything except a carnivorous diet, and certainly don't have access to fructose up in the North Pole, don't have issues with their thyroid. If they did they would die out because congenital hypothyroidism, called cretinism, and is a serious congenital developmental disorder. And if this were the case, we never would have made it through any of the past ice ages over the course of the past 2.5 million years. Having studied biochemistry, and speaking to other biochemists on this subject, I'm not aware of any biochemical process in the body that cannot function without fructose. As far as I know, there aren't any that can only be driven by fructose. And seeing as there is more and more biochemical evidence and studies showing causation between fructose and metabolic syndrome, among other issues, for me it's best to be avoided.

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DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: The hundreds of millions, billions of people that they've affected and damaged and killed prematurely because of that terrible, terrible lie.

Here is a direct link.

The cholesterol model and theory of heart disease was put out by the sugar companies.  They paid off a number of different professors, three from Harvard at least.  Ancel Keys famously who came up with that model.  They were on the payroll for the sugar companies and they did not tell anybody.  And that's illegal.  They were bought and paid for.  And we have documentation of that. That was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2016. That's a matter of historical record.  That happened.  Clear documentation.  We even have their contracts. We know how much they got paid.  These guys got paid $6,500 back in the '60s.  That's the equivalent of $55,000 today.  So selling out your health and your parents' health and having your parents and grandparents die early and die of dementia, that's what the health of your family and your children was worth to them.  Truly, those are crimes against humanity.  The hundreds of millions, billions of people that they've affected and damaged and killed prematurely because of that terrible, terrible lie. 

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: And so when you're eating carbs, you are going to breed for and select for the bacteria that actually rot your teeth.

You eat anything that rots your teeth, that's the wrong thing.  Animals in the wild don't have dentists.  The bacteria in your mouth that should be there, your oral biome, if you're eating something that cultivates the wrong oral biome that rots your teeth, you are eating the wrong thing by definition.  Your mouth health, your oral health, is a window to your overall health and especially your cardiovascular health.  And so when you're eating carbs, you are going to breed for and select for the bacteria that actually rot your teeth. So we know that carbs are not part of our biological diet because of that fact. 

DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: it's just that high insulin suppresses autophagy and it suppresses all these other functions in your body. It suppresses the formation of ketones, forcing energy into cells; it doesn't allow them to come out of cells.

When you fast you just stop eating but you also just stop eating carbs.  And then your insulin comes down and then you start opening up your metabolism.  So the thing is that insulin doesn't just affect sugar metabolism and your blood sugar levels even though the American Diabetes Association would like you to think that because they say, "your diabetes patience oh they don't have to restrict carbs.  Just make sure they take enough insulin so they keep their blood sugar down because blood sugar being high is actually directly damaging it's to you and it's really just harmful to your body.  That's why you need your blood sugar levels down.  It's very important to your body to keep it down.  That's why it raises your insulin.  So basically it's toxic to your body over a certain point. Your body responds to this toxin, the high blood sugar being a toxin, by trying to detoxify it by raising your insulin to get it down.  But the problem is insulin affects over 100 different processes in your body, like autophagy.  So it's not the "not eating" that's doing it, it's just that high insulin suppresses autophagy and it suppresses all these other functions in your body.  It suppresses the formation of ketones, forcing energy into cells; it doesn't allow them to come out of cells.  So when your insulin level is up, you can't start using your fat as energy. 

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.