Animals fed with food they don't eat in the wild get sick. The same thing happens to humans. We get sick with obesity, diabetes & autoimmune diseases.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee dives into the medical literature & current studies to learn what applies in real life. His personal practice as a carnivore combined with his research makes him uniquely qualified to counter arguments against the carnivore lifestyle.
As a medical doctor currently training in neurosurgery, he witnesses the benefits of carnivore in patients. The carnivore diet helps people in chronic pain; that made him eager to go beyond surgery to recommend dietary changes for his patients.
Learn the origins of his interest in neurosurgery, and why a carnivore diet is optimal for humans.
Quick Guide:
02:08 - Anthony Chaffee’s background
09:31 - How people accepted the message of humans being carnivores
13:00 - Humans don’t have a defense against every plant poisons
14:42 - The history of our omnivorous past and our carnivorous adaptations
24:02 - Interest in neurosurgery
28:43 - The effects of carnivore lifestyle on patients
35:31 - A Harvard study opened doors for people to look at the effects of a carnivore diet strongly
39:12 - Practicing carnivore and workouts
45:27 - Ketones as the primary source of energy
Get to know our guest:
Dr. Anthony Chaffee started his carnivore journey back in his early 20s as a professional athlete. He is a medical doctor and has always been interested in diet and nutrition. He is currently doing his neurosurgery training in Australia.
"I like being able to get a call, see a patient, make a decision right then just do something for them right there. And be able to save their life and so that sit well with me and my personality and how I like to approach medicine, and then the chronic stuff as well, chronic pain, back pain, a lot of people don't like that. I don't like it either, in a sense, but since coming around to the carnivore thing and seeing people's health and chronic pain be just drastically improved by removing certain things from their diet, I find that I can help more people than otherwise thought possible just by recommending some dietary changes." - Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Connect with him:
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/DrChaffeeMD
Episode snippets:
03:26 - 04:13 - Naturally occurring poisons can cause cancer than pesticides
06:02 - 06:44 - The tox
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Animals fed with food they don't eat in the wild get sick. The same thing happens to humans. We get sick with obesity, diabetes & autoimmune diseases.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee dives into the medical literature & current studies to learn what applies in real life. His personal practice as a carnivore combined with his research makes him uniquely qualified to counter arguments against the carnivore lifestyle.
As a medical doctor currently training in neurosurgery, he witnesses the benefits of carnivore in patients. The carnivore diet helps people in chronic pain; that made him eager to go beyond surgery to recommend dietary changes for his patients.
Learn the origins of his interest in neurosurgery, and why a carnivore diet is optimal for humans.
Quick Guide:
02:08 - Anthony Chaffee’s background
09:31 - How people accepted the message of humans being carnivores
13:00 - Humans don’t have a defense against every plant poisons
14:42 - The history of our omnivorous past and our carnivorous adaptations
24:02 - Interest in neurosurgery
28:43 - The effects of carnivore lifestyle on patients
35:31 - A Harvard study opened doors for people to look at the effects of a carnivore diet strongly
39:12 - Practicing carnivore and workouts
45:27 - Ketones as the primary source of energy
Get to know our guest:
Dr. Anthony Chaffee started his carnivore journey back in his early 20s as a professional athlete. He is a medical doctor and has always been interested in diet and nutrition. He is currently doing his neurosurgery training in Australia.
"I like being able to get a call, see a patient, make a decision right then just do something for them right there. And be able to save their life and so that sit well with me and my personality and how I like to approach medicine, and then the chronic stuff as well, chronic pain, back pain, a lot of people don't like that. I don't like it either, in a sense, but since coming around to the carnivore thing and seeing people's health and chronic pain be just drastically improved by removing certain things from their diet, I find that I can help more people than otherwise thought possible just by recommending some dietary changes." - Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Connect with him:
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/DrChaffeeMD
Episode snippets:
03:26 - 04:13 - Naturally occurring poisons can cause cancer than pesticides
06:02 - 06:44 - The tox
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
S3E08: Dr Anthony Chaffee
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
carnivore, eat, people, plants, gbm, cancer, sore, meat, thought, ketones, squats, diet, studies, question, glucose, big, sets, pain, brain, years
SPEAKERS
Announcer, Jack Heald, Dr. Anthony Chaffee, Dr. Philip Ovadia
Announcer 00:10
He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table and an early death. Now he's a rebel MD who is Fabulously Fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia.
Jack Heald 00:37
We are live. All right. Well, Phil, we got Dr. Anthony Chafee with us today. I didn't introduce the show because I figure anybody who's listened to us for any length of time has heard me do that intro. How many times? This is like show number 65 or something? I don't know. So, we got Dr. Anthony Chafee here with us today. I've done a little research on this dude. And I have questions. But I would like to ask you. Why is he here?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 01:09
Yeah, definitely. I've been excited to talk with Anthony for quite a bit now. We've had a number of other physicians on, we've had family doctors, we've had cardiologists, orthopedic surgeon, but I figured it was time for us to finally bring out the big guns and get the brain surgeon on. So, but Anthony's got a fascinating background. And has been involved, personally, I know, and all I can tell his story with metabolic health for quite a while, and now professionally as well. And he's halfway around the world, three quarters around the world, in Australia, doing his training in neurosurgery now. So, Anthony, why don't you go in a little bit more of your background for our audience, and tell us how you got interested in metabolic health and what's brought you to where you are today?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 02:08
Well, thank you both very much for having me on. I really do appreciate the opportunity. As you say, I'm American, an American medical doctor, but I'm currently in Australia, and previously lived in Europe as well, played rugby at high level in the US and in Europe and Canada. Boss since I was 18, really, and I've always been very interested in diet, nutrition, and how that has affected our health, specifically for athletic performance sort of thing early on, but also because I was always interested in medicine. Becoming a doctor, it just, it made a lot of sense, that I would that I would look into that. I was always very interested in biology. And so, I just wanted to know+ what was optimal for me as an athlete. And when I was taking cancer biology at the University of Washington in Seattle 22 years ago, I had a professor that just walked us through just the fact that
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 03:14
plants use defense chemicals in order to protect themselves from animals and insects from being eaten, and that's how they survive in the wild because nature's killer be killed for plants as well as animals. And we were doing this on a cancer, from a cancer perspective. So, we were looking at carcinogens, and we learned that brussels sprouts had 136 identified carcinogens at the time. Mushrooms had over 100, spinach, kale, lettuce, celery, cabbage, cucumber, broccoli, every vegetable you've ever come across, had 60, or 80, or over 100 known human carcinogens, and they're quite abundant. We know from the work of Dr. Bruce Ames at UC Berkeley in 1989 that there are far more, about 10,000 times more toxic elements in the plants themselves than the pesticides we sprayed on them. And that the naturally occurring poisons were far more likely to cause cancer than the pesticides we sprayed on them which is why we still have pesticides, because they were trying to ban them in the 1980s. And he just said, oh, wait, hold on a second, we've been using these things for eight years. Like why now? Why are they causing a problem now? And so, he did the research, and he showed that if you will, if you're going to eat the spinach anyway, the pesticides are actually a drop in the bucket. We were quite taken aback by that. And we found that, and I remember looking around with just like, all of us who's looking around wildly like looking for like a TA likes needles snickering in the corner, like he does this all the time. It must be a joke. And there wasn't anything like that. And it slowly dawned on us that he was actually serious. And I remember thinking in my head, like well, but vegetables are still good for you that, right? And he just must have read our minds because he looked at us and said, I don't eat salad. I don't eat vegetables. I don't let my kids eat vegetables. Plants are trying to kill you. So, I said, right screw plants and I just stopped eating him and I went to the grocery store and I just went through all the aisles, it was just like, everything is a plant, everything has plants, everything has come from a plant, or at least has plants mixed in with him. And so, I was just walking around like, well, what do I eat? And I just was like eggs, okay, eggs, that doesn't come from a plant. Walked by some meat, I was like great, meat, that doesn't come from a plant. So, I just ate eggs, meat, and sometimes milk for five years after that, specifically to not eat plants. And so, I inadvertently started eating, writing is your natural human diet. And I had massive benefits from this. From a health and athletic perspective, I was, my athletic performance just went through the roof, I stopped being able to tire myself out, I was able to have my exercise on tolerance grew tremendously the harder I push myself, my body just soared. And I got to the point where I just couldn't get tired. I couldn't run out of energy, I didn't get sore from working out, which is very strange to me. But I found that if I had any sort of plant material, especially, grains or carbs, I was sore as you would expect to be after working out. But if I didn't have any of those, I just was not sore. So, I came to the conclusion this was, these toxins in plants that were actually causing this stiffness, soreness and swelling. So, I did that for five years, and then just sort of slipped off of that. When I was living in England, it didn't have the same access to meat. Some of the meat was breaded. And I just thought like, oh, is it that big of a deal. And that was a sort of, slipped down, the path back to eating a more traditional sort of diet. I never ate like much processed foods or anything like that. It was always what Whole Foods, but I started incorporating plants again. And then about five years ago, I came across some information there's like no humans actually are carnivores, is actually the kind of animal that we are. And I was a doctor at that time taking some time off to help my folks and do humanitarian work in Bangladesh. And it just everything just clicked. It's like, okay, that's why I felt so amazing in my early 20s.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 07:34
because I stopped even as I was just living as humans have traditionally lived in eating what we were supposed to eat. And looking at medicine from that perspective, things just started slotting into place. Like if they, humans are animals, the kind of animal we are as a carnivore, but we're not living as such. And we're eating things outside of our species. And as any zookeeper will tell you, if you eat something, if you feed the animals something that it doesn't eat in the wild, something it didn't evolve on, it gets very sick. But what do they get sick with? They get obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, autoimmune diseases, and this is why you have signs of disease, they don't feed the animals, it makes them very sick. And but people forgot to put those signs up in front of our refrigerators. And so, I started approaching medicine from that perspective. And I started diving into the literature and trying to find out as much as I could about what we knew and what we could prove and then see what we could apply in practice in real life. And I've been doing that for the last several years now.
Jack Heald 08:42
Okay, so you're not on the show, we're gone push back against that, because we're all pretty much on board with the basic idea. However, you're in an industry, and I don't hesitate to call medicine industry, where that particular message, as best as I can tell from the guests we've interviewed over the last year, is not greeted with open arms. So, you're training to be a neurosurgeon. Is that correct? So, how's this I'm-a-carnivore-message play there in the neurosurgery locker room?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 09:31
Yeah. Well, it's actually been quite well received. When I started digging into the research, I spent, I had the virtue of a little free time because I was helping out with some family issues. And so, I spent months just reading papers and studying this subject. And looking at vegan websites and not the plant-based people and saying, “Okay, what am I missing?” This is what it looks like to me but maybe I don't want to be a victim of confirmation bias. So, like, what's the other side of the story? And what's the other argument? And I just found that there were quite a lot of flaws in their arguments. And this actually reinforced what I was thinking, and what you're right, a lot of people push back just in everyday life. And some people just get angry at me and say, like, you're a doctor, that's ridiculous, you can't say that. I was like, well, alright, and let's talk about it. And I was able to debate people and explain it to people, sometimes a couple times a day because people will just get really shocked. So, by the time that I was back in my department now or other departments, I was pretty well versed in the arguments on why we're carnivores and why these matters and the difference that it makes. So, people were just sort of interested, when they found out I never sort of telegraphed it, but it's quite obvious that when you're not drinking coffee with everyone, which is like really weird, and in medicine, everyone just lives on coffee. And then you go out to lunch, you guys grab breakfast, and I'm just eating bacon and eggs and never having coffee, like it comes up. And so, people would ask questions, and I had answers. And a few the people you will get very interested and we would just sit down if we had some time, and we would just talk more about it, I'd send them resources and send them links to studies. And became very interested. So actually, you have the department sort of tried it out. And there was a number of people that became, we just went full carnivore as well. One guy was a vegan, he was from India, his family were religiously vegan. And he had been vegan, just for health reasons, he was trying to find the best way to go. And Australia is very, very big, vegan movement. And it's growing in popularity. And so, I came in right at that time when it was just at its peak. So, it was just, the people look at me like I had three heads. But I was able to convince even vegetarians and vegans of this, I have a pretty good record that people who will actually engage with me and asking questions even aggressively. If they'll hang out and listen to the answers, even if they're trying to like all listen to this. And then I'll say something. I've been able to convince all of them. I have 100% kill rate on converting vegans. They're all pretty much the same. It's always well, what about cholesterol? But doesn't red meat cause bowel cancer? And I mean, these are these are very, very
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 13:00
well established. Well, but that's the thing. I think it's very well established that that those have been completely overturned, but not everyone knows that. And so that's the major thing. I mean, that's been going on for years, that’s why people started avoiding red meat in the first place was because the cholesterol and saturated fat and they're still teaching that in dietetics and nutrition schools. And it's quite surprising. I mean, I literally heard a very senior colorectal surgeon cautioning his patients don't eat red meat, it causes about bowel cancer and like, no, you should know better than that. And it's just that you repeat things so many times, people just believe that they're true. And so, they're not great questions. And well, what about the vitamins, you're missing out on vitamins all but plants are so good for you. They have all these nutrients which is true. They have nutrients. They are living things. They have things that are good for other living things. But they also come with at a price. They come with a lot of defense chemicals, all plants do to varying degrees. And it's not that they, some are more or less poisonous because they make more or less poisons. It's just they're more or less poisonous to us because we have certain defenses to certain poisons, and less defenses to others. Spinach isn't as bad for us as hemlock. But there are things that eat hemlock that can't eat spinach and because they have those defenses that we don't.
Jack Heald 14:42
I do have a question about... It is my understanding that our teeth indicate that we're omnivores. Can you address that from the carnivore diet standpoint?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 15:01
Well, yeah, certainly, I would first, you mentioned, what is our working definition of omnivores? Is it something that is able to eat plants, and to what degree? Because even cats and big cats, small cats, they're considered obligate carnivores but there are some plants that they can eat and this arrives in their kibble that they're fed in packaged food. Most plants will kill a feline. We can eat more plants, certainly, but they can eat some plants, does that make them an omnivore? Probably not. Same with dogs. They consider scavenger carnivores makes it eat some more plants, but they can eat much less plants than humans can. So, we come from the herbivorous past. About sort of 6, 8 million years ago, we came from herbivores and our ancestors started eating meat and we sort of split off and that's the train we went down. So, we come from a more recent herbivorous past than dogs and cats. And so, but we're also primates. So, we have primate teeth, but we have adaptations that I think are due to that turn to eating meat, at first omnivory, but then carnivory. Our teeth became smaller that they're not big, like a gorilla. We're eating softer and softer food, and we're not chewing on sticks, like a gorilla does. Gorillas have big fangs. We don't have big fangs. We don't we don't need them, though theirs can be defensive as well as offensive and they’re need-driven. We didn't kill things with our mouths, we didn't attack things with our face and our cause. Because we figured out ways of getting meat who are using pound stones to crack open the skulls of animals that are already being killed by bigger animals, bigger predators, and get it the brains and our ancestors, we have fossil records going back millions of years for that. And we started using stone tools with it with a sharp razor edge. And then we can, we could actually cut the meat off of things. So, we didn't have claws, we didn't have teeth. But that's because we didn't kill things with our mouth and our hands. So, that's how we develop tools. That's why we had to develop tools. We had to develop our brains, better figure out these sorts of things. And so, our brains became bigger, and we got more clever with tools and tactics. So, we just evolved slightly differently. Our teeth specifically became smaller, our jaws and our muscles of mastication became smaller, because again, reduce chewing on softer food. The head of a gorilla, if you take it away and look at the skull, it's just this big ridge of bone. And not as much a brain as you would think for the size of their head. Because most of that is the muscles of mastication because you're just chewing. People think that we have flat teeth, that was the audio was like oh, it looks flat in the front, just like a horse or a cow or something like that. But that's not what flat teeth are. Flat teeth are planar like a millstone. And they can slide across each other and grind down fibers plants, and then break them down and digest them easier. But we don't. We have bicuspid teeth, if you clench your jaws and try to move, your jaw doesn't go anywhere. And that's because we're just biting, clamping down like that. We're not going side to side. We can move our jaw side to side, that's usually something you see in an herbivore. But we did come from an herbivorous past and you don't lose a trait unless, evolutionarily, unless there's a specific survival advantage associated with losing that trait. Otherwise, you just keep it on, like color vision. Actually, there is an advantage, there's some advantage for hunting, for losing color vision. When you're seeing black and white, you can actually see animals and foliage better. And you can see it at low light times, like sort of dawn and dusk a little better. So, there is an advantage. And I've spoken to people that are sort of like red-green colorblind, and they're like Mako hunting, like get it's so much easier, I can see things way easier than other people. So, there is an advantage there. But there's also going to be advantages to seeing color as well. So, there's a bit of a tradeoff. I think that's why we didn't all go. But we have we have primate teeth primarily. And we have carnivorous adaptations to that.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 19:31
Okay, yeah, and that really brings up the question of there's a difference between what we can eat and what is optimal for us. Absolutely, what's always been interesting to me is that, you look at whether it's the physicians in this space, and they tend to come at this in two different directions. Some of us have been focused on fixing health problems, preventing health problems, obesity. Others, like yourself had a focus on before high-level performance. But we ended up at the same place. I mean, I think it's pretty clear what is optimal for humans is a mostly carnivorous diet with maybe a little bit of other stuff sprinkled in, but really those were survival standpoint, the only reason we really, we couldn't get any better product.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 20:43
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, and then that's sort of going back to the omnivores versus carnivores question, like, how are we defining that? I think of it slightly differently. I think a more practical definition of an omnivore is one of two things either there are things in plants that you have to have that you cannot get from meat, so you have to eat plants. And there are things in meat that you have to get, you cannot get from those plants. So, you have to eat meat as well. So, you have to eat both. Or you can get semi equal nutrition from certain plants as you can from meat. And so, it doesn't matter, you can eat these sorts of things interchangeably, but we don't we don't fall into either of those categories. There are things in meat that we have to have that we cannot get from plants, but there is nothing in plants that we have to have that we cannot get from meat. And we certainly can't eat them indiscriminately, we won't get the same nutrition from plants. They're not the bioavailability. They're the same nutrients available. And also, they cause harm. And so, meat is I think, like you said, is our is our optimal nutrition. And so, I think because we're obligated to eat meat, that we are more correctly obligate carnivores, I don't think that. I just think that that sort of those definition of terms needs to be updated.
Jack Heald 22:09
I like that. That makes a lot of sense to the layperson here in the group. Obligate carnivores because there's nothing... I want to be able to see this the way you said it. There's things we have to have that we can only get from meat. We can't drink some of the things... There's nothing we get from meat. No, no, there's nothing we get from plants that we can't get from meat that we need. And there's things that we have to get that we can only get from meat, plants, you still said it way better than I did.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 22:51
Yeah. And the other thing that I would add to that is that the meat that we are eating, that animal, oftentimes they are herbivores, and they have eaten the plants. And they are better able to process the plant than we are, especially when you look into they have worked stomachs designed to break down plant products, maximally extract nutrients from it. We have nowhere near the same level of nutrient extraction from plants that live in Danville. And then so when we eat the meat animal, we are getting those nutrients that they...
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 23:38
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
Jack Heald 23:41
I'm going to let our listeners know. Phil is coming to us from the airport. He's going to get on an airplane here in just a little bit. So, he's got a little... We're having to deal with airport level connections here. And the miracle is that it sounds as good as it does. So.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 24:02
So, tell us a little bit what got you interested in neurosurgery? The training that Mike for that so far?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 24:10
Yeah. Well, I've been interested in sort of every aspect of medicine, I was... Everything I came across, I'm like, wow, that's fantastic. And it was difficult for me to choose. Overall, what I wanted to do, but I knew I really liked surgery. That was definitely something that I preferred. The thought of being able to fix someone physically with my hands that go inside their body and fix them physically with my hands, I just thought was just the most incredible thing in the world. And so that was something that really appealed to me. Neurosurgery, in particular, just because I came across it early on in my medical school training and was just quite blown away by it. I went into a surgery where a lady had gotten kicked in the face by a horse and they had to open her up from ear to ear and pull down her scalp and try to recreate and reconstruct the frontal sinuses and all these big fractures. And I was really awestruck by that, just thinking I saw her skull, I was like, wow, her brain is just right under there. Like, that's what makes her who she is, the kind of person she is, that's all encapsulated in that one organ. And I was quite taken aback by that thought. And so, the next day, I was like, okay, I want to go see more neurosurgery cases. And I went in and just started, just scrubbing into any neurosurgery cases that they'd let me into. And saw the skull come off and saw the brain and saw pulsating sort of out of the skull. And I remember thinking it was like that, that is everything that that person is. That’s who they are as a person, their entire humanity, memories, feelings. The memory they have of their dog on their seventh birthday exists somewhere in there, and you can touch it with your finger. And I just thought that was just such an amazing thing. And I just wanted to learn a lot more about it. I might have been just as taken aback if I saw cardiothoracic surgery, an open-heart surgery at that time. I didn't even see it actually, my first open heart case until I was a doctor few years in and I saw my, that's amazing, which is actually see like, the heart moving, the lungs moving, and it's real time. It was like, that doesn't even look real, it looks like a machine or something like that. It looks like it's just somebody can't be real. And so, but I was exposed to that early on, and I was very impressed by it. And I was just like, okay, I just want to see as many of these as I can. And so, I wasn't even, assigned to neurosurgery, I just like skip my rotation, it just went to all these neurosurgery cases, I just tried to go see as many of them as I could. And so, that interest just was planted early on, and it's just always stuck with me. And I just think it's an incredible thing, I like being able to work in a very, well, high stress, but in an environment where you can help people in a very acute setting. Obviously, there's so many injuries that people can sustain. And in neurosurgery, you have sort of minutes or hours to do something or else that's it, which is same for anything, but I like that sort of life and death sort of medicine. I like being able to get a call, see a patient, make a decision right then just do something for them right there. And be able to save their life and so that sit well with me and my personality and how I like to approach medicine, and then the chronic stuff as well, chronic pain, back pain, a lot of people don't like that. I don't like it either, in a sense, but since coming around to the carnivore thing and seeing people's health and chronic pain be just drastically improved by removing certain things from their diet, I find that I can help more people than otherwise thought possible just by recommending some dietary changes. And just the surgery as well. I just I just find it very interesting. So, it's been a good fit for me. From that that early interest.
Jack Heald 28:43
Have you seen enough crossover between, I need to frame this question carefully... So, you're working on people's brains in your work. And you've also got this other thing that you do, which is carnivore, the carnivore lifestyle. Have you seen crossover in those two things? And can you talk about that? And specifically, I'm thinking of compare and contrast. I had a patient who was standard American diet and then another patient who was a carnivore and blah, blah, blah. I'm just wondering where you see the effects of carnivore in the patients that you work on?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 29:29
Yeah, I've definitely seen benefits to everyone who's able to try this and put it into practice. Specifically, with neurosurgery, we have a lot of chronic pain patients. We have people with entrap nerves or canals, spinal canal stenosis, where it's impacting the functionality of their nerves and they have the shooting pain down their bodies. And sometimes you do surgery, you decompress those nerves, and they don't make any substantive recovery because the nerves have been just damaged and upset and inflamed for so long that they don't end up calming down. And that's very difficult. And because they go down the chronic pain pathway of medications, counseling, and just trying to figure out ways of dealing with this pain. And, through my work online, then being able to suggest this to people that are in that situation. I found that people in those situations with this bad you have radiculopathy, and it's like sciatica sort of pain, that they can alleviate much of those symptoms.
Jack Heald 30:40
That’s a real thing, radiculopathy?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 30:43
Right. Yeah, that's what it's called. When you compress one of the spinal nerves.
Jack Heald 30:47
That’s a real thing. Radiculopathy. Ridiculous. And apathy. Am I hearing that, right?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 30:55
Yes, but radicular apathy.
Jack Heald 31:01
Oh, radicular. All right. Yeah, and I'm gonna win. I'm gonna win the next round of Scrabble. Okay. Yeah.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 31:12
Yeah, yeah. So, it's, yeah, it's very specific to this sort of issue. Yeah.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 31:18
it does tend to cause a ridiculous amount of pain.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 31:22
It does. Yeah, that's true.
Jack Heald 31:24
You're seeing patients with this pain problem that isn't alleviated by surgery get relief?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 31:34
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, just by removing the different toxic elements that cause increased inflammation and increased pain response, just like I noticed with working out and not getting sore, those same toxic elements that would normally latch on this inflammation is going on in your body, this normal healthy inflammation is trying to heal something, and causing pain and distress. I sort of think of it as that sort of latching on to any sort of point of healing or disturbance and increasing that pain experience. And that seems to be what is happening. And when you remove those elements from people's diet, they do much better. I can't say that it's going to help everyone because I mean, nothing ever does, but it is going to help people in certain ways, it may not fix all of their problems, but it will help you get better, it will help your health improve, because it's just, that was in my view, the optimal diet for people. And so, your body's going to start being optimized, and you can have damage done, you can have permanent issues that aren't going to get better even with diet, and you have things that aren't caused by diet. And so, diet’s not going to change the fundamental reality of that, but it can improve your experience with it. And I find that it does that with pain as well. There's a diagnosis called Fibromyalgia which is sort of a diagnosis of exclusion, they go down all the different paths, we say, we can't really figure this out. You're just pain everywhere. We'll call it fibromyalgia. A lot of people I've spoken to really don't think it exists, they think it's in people's heads, or they think that they're just sort of putting it on and just being a bit weak. And yet people are absolutely debilitated. And this affects their lives for years and decades. And I've had a number of people reach out to me online, or over email, or in comments of my videos talking about how they've had radiculopathy, or sciatica, chronic pain and fibromyalgia for years or over a decade. And then after a few months on carnivore, it's gone, and they're off their pain meds, and they're so happy about that you'll be with things like oh, they're just trying to get painkillers. And yet this one gentleman was on these painkillers and opiates for 12 years. And all of a sudden, he's like, well, I'm off painkillers for the first time in 12 years, that couldn't be happier. Some people are drug seeking, obviously. But mostly people aren't, I would say, and a lot of these people are really just trying to figure out how they can live with such a great deal of pain. And I find that this is something that really works to at least improve their situation, and then at least improve their experience of that pain. Other than that, oh, sorry, you're gonna ask me?
Jack Heald 34:38
Well, a question that comes to mind is oftentimes when you make a lifestyle change, you will see a change in your experience as a result of making a change, regardless of what that change happens to be in and my question is, can some of the benefit be explained just by, oh, you were doing this, and you just changed it, now you're doing something different? Or are the effects long lasting enough that we can point pretty positively and say, the thing you were doing before was what was causing the problem and changing it is what made the problem go away? Does that question make sense?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 35:31
Yeah. Well, certainly, sure, maybe there's like a placebo effect, I think, well, this is going to help me, this is going to change my life. And maybe it does, maybe they look for reasons why that has, and certainly that could be the case. We don't have really many studies on specifically looking at a carnivore diet in people. We have like one study that came out of Harvard with just over 2000 people. And they found that everyone really improved in, by self-survey, for many different issues, and then had objective markers as well, they improved their HbA1c and diabetics, for instance. And that's something you can't fake. And that's not subjective. That's not just oh, I feel a bit, I think this will help my diabetes. And so, it does, that's an objective marker of oxidation and glycation in your body. And so that's it, that's a definite improvement. And we'll get more studies in the future, because I think that Harvard study, in particular, has opened the door to people to, taking a look at this seriously. But, we don't we don't have it, especially for like, chronic pain and things like that, we don't really have long term data on things, but, we certainly have the sort of the practical understanding of how these mechanisms work in our body, which makes sense. But, in practice, not even telling people, hey, this is going to help your pain, I just argue that, hey, this is optimal for people, and this is the best way to eat and have people look at me, and I mean, they think like, well, this guy is in good shape, he's doing well, maybe there's something to this, and my explanation is to their questions seems to fit. And so, then they give it a try, just for my own observation, without mentioning that this is going to help their pain, so many people have come to me, it's like, my arthritis, pain is gone, my back pain is gone. I just feel so much better in all these different ways and pain seems to be one that's comes back again and again. I'm not the only one that seems to experience just no pain after working out, everyone's it's like that. That's, that's so crazy. I was working with an orthopedic surgeon years ago, and he was sort of getting interested in it. And so, he started doing carnivore and started losing weight right away sort of feeling a lot better having a lot of energy. And we went to the gym once and he wasn't a big gym guy. But he would go every now and then. And so, I went in and said like, well, why don't you do my workout with me. And I made this guy do so many sets of different exercises and really pushed him and made him go to muscle fatigue and exhaustion. And I remember him saying is like, well, I don't like going too hard the night before surgery because I don't like being sore and surgery. I was like, yeah, but you're not gonna get sore, you’ve been eating carnivore, you're not going to get sore. And he's just like, he's very wary of this. He's like, is this really true? Like, I don't know. And so, he did it. He ended up doing like the whole workout with me. We were there for like two hours. And then he actually had to go, I would have I would have kept him there longer. And...
Jack Heald 39:07
Notice. Don't go with Anthony if you go to the gym.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 39:12
Yeah. Unless you've been carnivore because... And so, he was just like, he sort of look at me. And he's like, yeah, I'm really interested to see. I'm gonna see if this this actually works out if you're actually right about this about not being sore. And I said, I just fired back and I'm like, yeah, I'm interested to see if you're actually doing carnivore help here, you're actually doing this. And the next day, yeah, we were operating and he's just looking at me and he's kind of a little miffed. He's like, you're right, like, I'm not sore. Like, I don't know why. And I'm sort of upset about that. I kind of wanted you to be wrong. And so, I was like, look, I told you this is just a thing. We sat down around lunchtime and one of the reps came in and brought everyone coffee, I didn't have any. And then after about 10, 15, 20 minutes into that coffee break, he's sitting there and he's just like, actually, I do actually kind of feel sore xcm feeling a bit sore, across the chest and the shoulders. I just pointed at his coffee cup, and I'm like, what are you drinking? And he just like, damn it. Like, the coffee itself just started making him sore. And then within 20 minutes of drinking that coffee, he already started feeling sore. Yeah, I noticed the same thing. When I stopped eating all this, for the second time I didn't consciously notice like, why I can't get tired or run out of, or sorry, get sore. And I was like, man, it's just not working out hard enough. And I put it to the test. I just started doing sets of squats until I wanted to get to muscle failure until I was just jello leg and couldn't do another set. I ended up doing 32 sets of squats over four hours. And I couldn't even do... I was going to failure every set. And as long as I choose to. Yeah, yeah. And I was always going to failure every time.
Jack Heald 41:12
Okay, folks. This may be the most unbelievable thing I have heard so far. 32 bodyweight squats, back squats. What were you doing?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 41:25
Back squats, yeah.
Jack Heald 41:26
Oh, dear God.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 41:28
This is what, right, when I got back from Bangladesh. And so, I was doing, I hadn't worked out in months. And I did a leg day. And I did a fairly heavy leg day. I did 12 sets, including squats, but also, single leg, stepping up onto a box with like, 185 pounds on my back and stepping up one leg at a time and doing that and three sets of that and all these different sorts of things. And so, and I wasn't sore. I was like, well, why is that? Am I just not working out hard enough? I was like, well, I thought that was a pretty big workout doing 12 sets. And working pretty hard. But at the same time, I didn't walk out of there just stumbling like a baby gazelle, and so I said, okay, well, I'll really go at it next it, I sort of thought about it once it's like, but so what I did was, your volume was? Yeah, well, we probably figured out I mean, like so I did that first 12 sets, whatever. But then I started doing squats after that after that 12 sets. And I just started doing squats, squats. So, I did was 32 sets of heavy legs, but then followed up with the squats. At the end of that, I just said like, okay, I'm just going to keep doing squats until I fatigue, and I just can't do anymore. I was going to fatigue. And I was thinking like four or five minutes off in between sets, I was giving myself a full rest. And I found that as long as I did that give myself a full rest. I could just basically do the same thing I did. I was doing at the time it was like, it wasn't that much. It was like 225 and I did my first set was like 15 reps. And then on my last set still 225, was doing, I did 13 reps. And so, and that was over 2020 sets.
Jack Heald 43:29
So, factory period is completely changed. Holy smokes. I don't, I mean, honest to God, I'm not meaning to be an ass here. But that literally is the most unbelievable thing I've ever heard. Yeah. Well, try it. Well, at least what I've heard on this show. Yeah.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 43:57
You can try.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 44:01
Yeah, no. I was gonna say it's pretty amazing when we look at how our body is supposed to function. When you start poisoning it, when you stop getting in the way of optimal function. Things that we can accomplish really do become pretty impressive. I'd love to hear your perspective on one of the things that the carnivore diet does obviously get to ketosis. And the brain is one of the organs that probably benefits most from two places. Many people argue you'll probably agree with this that ketones are the optimal human brain. But talk a little bit about your perspective on that what you've seen our rats with them. That's the plan conditions, some of the conditions that affect the brain, we'll see, we can even really touch on the cancer issue a lot of people are afraid to talk about. But again, we have more and more data showing that ketogenic states have beneficial for many types of cancer and brain cancer, brain changes are probably at the top of that list.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 45:27
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I do agree fully that ketones are our brains primary energy source and preferred energy source. People will say that it's glucose, but that's just because when you look at biochemistry, we call one a Fed state, one a fasting state in that fed state, we have its predominantly running on glucose, but it's also running on ketones. Your brain always runs on ketones. I learned that in undergrad biochemistry 22 years ago, you may learn the same thing. Your brain is always running on ketones. And when your body reaches a certain threshold of ketones, no matter how much glucose is in your system, your brain completely switches over to ketones and it just stops. It just kicks out the glucose like no, this is what we want. And so, I would think that's quite clear evidence that is our brains preferred energy source when it has an abundance of glucose, and it has, but just a minimum threshold of ketones. It goes just to ketones that seems to be a preference. And specifically, it can help certainly brain cancer, but also, we have 100 years of data on the ketogenic diet benefiting epileptics, so suppressing seizures, even curing seizures just by going in a ketogenic state. And I've just anecdotally found that people going on carnivore are further improved. One gentleman drank coffee, no carbs and it gave him the seizure when he had been seizure free for a number of years and had been multidrug epileptic still having uncontrolled seizures before he went keto that got rid of most of it and he went carnivore that get rid of all of it. And the coffee set off a seizure as well. So, he would say that just caffeine is a neurotoxin because of that. Migraines as well. We have literally 100 years of data showing that just being in a ketogenic state helps migrants significantly, there was a study that Professor Ben Bikman of BYU sent me where they found that like 90% of migraine sufferers back in like the 20s were facing cured of their migraines, and the remaining 10% were significantly improved and at a much-reduced burden of migraines and migraine severity. Specifically, with cancer of the brain, GBM, glioblastoma being the most common and the most aggressive and deadly. There's quite a lot of research, at least in animal models, from people such as Professor Thomas Seyfried from Boston College, who actually did, who was an associate professor at Yale and neuroscience for his postdoc, and studied ketones in epilepsy back then, and was told at the time, like, oh, no, we have good pharmacology for that. Don't worry about that as a as a lot of research. And that sort of, the state that we're in medicine is that here's a problem, here's a pill like, oh, there's a problem, let's find a pill for that problem. And I think we've sort of, I think it's detracted from medicine, as opposed to helping it as much as it could, because obviously, it's a benefit. It's massive benefit, being able to have these pharmaceuticals. But being completely reliant on them is not a good thing, I think. And so, for GBMs. He's done a lot of studies in animal models showing that being in a ketogenic state is significantly beneficial to all cancers and GBM as well. Even though it's a very, it's a tough nut to crack, it's very still a very aggressive and difficult disease. Very specifically. We know from cancer biology that cancer cells need about 400 times the amount of glucose as other cells in our body to function, because they're not as efficient and they can't go through aerobic respiration, the mitochondria, they go through fermentative that is sort of a fermentive respiration. So, they're much less efficient at getting ATP out of glucose molecules. So, they need a much, much, much higher load of glucose. They pull in 400 times the amount of glucose. We've known this since Otto Warburg, who won a Nobel Prize in Medicine back in the I think 1930s, and he did a lot of work on cancer and mitochondria and he showed that and Seyfried is as corroborated that they have that cancer cells have dysfunctional mitochondria that can't process and produce energy as well, so they need a ton of glucose. So just limiting the amount of glucose in your system by being in a state of ketosis is going to significantly improve that because these mitochondria, these damaged mitochondria, apparently aren't able to work on ketones, so your body can get energy from ketones and you have a low level of blood sugar, which is perfectly fine for you. But that really curtails the growth of these cancer cells.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 50:29
He's found in animal models that that's very beneficial in treating cancer in general. And, and also with GBM, and also with limiting glutamine, which was you can't really limit glutamine, it's a very, the most abundant amino acid in our body, but there are medications that have been used for other conditions that sort of block it off, and that's another major fuel source for these cancers, I found that especially the combination of those two significantly help. There are now people that have taken that on board, specifically with cancer in general and have had good improvements. And there have been some studies on like breast cancers and colon cancers and things like that. But specifically, with GBM, we don't have any, like studies with human subjects. However, there are quite a lot of people anecdotally that have just looked at this and said, Okay, I'm gonna try something else like a GBM is, for people that don't know, this is something that's considered an incurable disease, you get a diagnosis of GBM, you now have terminal cancer, right that in there, it's not that old, this has progressed to the point that this is becoming terminal, it's like, you have a diagnosis of that, it is terminal, it's just a matter of when. And so, the treatments, how we counsel people in the hospital is that this isn't something that we can cure, but we can, our treatments aren't able to cure, they're just focused on extending life as opposed to getting an actual cure. So, some people just don't like hearing that, especially if they have a very aggressive form. It was a different kind of GBM, and there can be more or less aggressive forms. And there was one gentleman I spoke to Andrew Scarborough, who's in England who heard this, and he had basically the exact type of GBM that you don't want, it’s like the most aggressive form of GBM. And so, he's looked at that, and he's just said, Okay, well, there's no point doing chemo and radiation then because my form of cancer doesn't respond to that. So, I need to look at something else. And he came across being in ketosis and ketogenic diet helping cancer and he started doing that. And then he started limiting plants, he started going carnivore, he actually started drinking like deuterium depleted water, if you guys have come across that sort of thing, it's kind of interesting just due to him being heavy hydrogen, and that seems to affect different signaling processes in our cells, and you get a certain threshold of deuterium, it triggers mitosis and the splitting of cells, just by how like the heavier hydrogens sort of manipulate the active centers in these molecules and make them more or less bioactive, somehow, I don't think anyone really understands the full mechanisms. But apparently, you hit a certain threshold of deuterium, it triggers by this cell, okay, let's split now. And so, you can get, you can promote growth and mitosis that way, which is, cancer is unregulated growth, which is going back to mitochondria, mitochondria regulate growth, and if those are dysfunctional, it can't do its job and policing the unregulated growth, which is what cancer is. And so, he was doing that for a while, he's not doing that anymore. He's just doing that for a little bit. And being in ketosis actually makes your deuterium levels reduced significantly, because for a number of different reasons, but it does. And so, the average life expectancy of someone with a GBM, any GBM, and especially his GBM, without treatment, is three months. He's now 10 years in, and he has no sign of disease on his MRI.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 54:38
That's literally unheard of, except when you're in this sort of circle and you hear Thomas Seyfried, he has someone who's been eight years, eight and a half years, and he's had a couple of recessions, it sorts of grow but it grows very slowly and so it goes big enough and they sort of resect that out. And he goes on his way. Andrew had his initial resection; He hasn't had any resections after that. And I have a friend of mine who I've sort of pointed these things out to several years ago. She's now five and a half years. At her five-year check, her MRI showed no sign of disease, and she hasn't been full on by any stretch of the imagination. She actually has had a recurrence. And as Seyfried in other states, like, this is something that you have to be well on top of because GBM is very, very aggressive. There's a Zsofia Clemens, Dr. Zsofia Clemens over in Hungary, and she has a paleo medicina. And she was speaking to her, and she has, over the last decades, she's had 30 GBM patients, and over nearly 200, just brain cancer patients in general. And she's saying that, if they're strict, if they're really, really strict on a carnivore diet and specific fat to protein ratio, that it can stop the progression of their disease, that it doesn't necessarily go away, other cancers will go away, and she's found in her practice, but GBM, it’s just able to stop it in its tracks, which is, again, unheard of this is something that's very, very, very uncommon or just not possible it's thought, because it is such an aggressive...
Jack Heald 56:17
We’ve been hearing a lot of things that 5, 10 years ago were thought to be impossible. We had Chris Palmer on and told us that they're curing incurable brain dysfunctions with a ketogenic diet. I don't know how many doctors we've had on who said their cure and diabetes would Up until not very long ago, diabetes was incurable. So, hey, yeah, not more.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 56:46
Well, that's it, and if you're if your body is, being given this optimal fuel, and you're not tripping it up with different sorts of weird toxins, your body's just going to work better. And so, we don't necessarily understand what that's like, because we haven't really studied it yet. We see different native populations, and we say like, that's weird, they don't get cancer. And there have been studies, in the native Canadians and Alaskans. When eating a traditional diet of just, meat and blubber, they don't get cancer, they don't get breast cancer, there was a specific study looking at breast cancer out of I think Nova Scotia, I think Nova Scotia anyway, like Eastern Canada, and they found that these people, they just weren't getting breast cancer at all. And as Thomas Seyfried points out, animals in the wild, don't get cancer. Now, we don't study every single animal in the wild. But once we come across, we don't get cancer. Animals in the zoo, when eating their natural wild diet don't get cancer. Humans do, dogs and cats do, but we're eating things that are outside of our species, and we're getting problems. And I think that that's why I sort of make the argument. And I'm trying to finish a book on this subject, basically arguing that that these so-called chronic diseases are not diseases per se, but actually toxicities and malnutrition, a toxic buildup of a species inappropriate diet, and a lack of species-specific nutrition. So, namely too many plants, not enough meat. And I think that you can prove that just with the evidence that's available now in the literature.
Jack Heald 58:34
Wow. Okay, Phil, I've got other questions that have nothing to do with this. I'm going to take as a different direction. But I don't want to do that if you've got more you want to say. And you're on mute right now.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 58:49
Yeah, no, go ahead. Let's go on a little direction to bring... Go ahead in a little different direction.
Jack Heald 58:59
Okay. All right. I want to I want to backup 20 years to when you were a rugby player. You talked about experimenting with carnivore to help you with performance and this story about 32 sets of squats. I'm tempted to call bullshit on that. But you don’t seem like the kind of guy who would lie. But you would have been in what your early 20s, then late teens, early 20s? When we would expect a high level of athletic performance anyway. So how do you know you weren't just performing well, just because you were 20 years old?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 59:47
Yeah. That's a very good point. And obviously, I was thinking that, when I was saying that, I felt amazing in my early 20s in my head. Well, I did too. I was in my early 20s. Of course, I did. But this was in comparison to myself as professional athlete, I felt night and day different. I, basically played your five years, I sort of played about 10 years of professional rugby before I went to medical school. And the first five years of that were on a carnivore diet, that's the second five years were not. And then prior to that, I was all American in high school. And so, when I was a teenager, I toured with the junior national team. We went to New Zealand, and we're playing against the the Mary's and New Zealand boys down there and did all these different trips, and amazing, and that was on a normal day where I literally ate McDonald's twice a day on that trip, it was just it just the way that you could just feed a bunch of people at a time, like, going to McDonald's, just eat, eat whatever, they'll be happy. And so, I was playing a very high level on McDonald's, and fries and sodas, and all that garbage. And so, you can do it, but then when I went on a carnivore diet, like, it was just night and day difference from when I was 19 versus 20. I was just incredibly different experience. And then when I was 25, in England, and I started eating sort of breaded meat and just sort of started slipping off of it. A couple months into it. I was like, well, why don't I feel it's just unbelievably amazing as I normally do, and I’m just not working out as hard. Am I just not, I'm just 25 now. Am I just over the hill, and I'm just dying now? And I actually thought that, I actually wondered if that was if it was an age thing. And it wasn't until I started looking, looking back from now going like, no, that was it. That was the difference. I was just eating meat then. And, when I started doing this again, it just turned 38 I'm just about to turn 43 In a couple of months. And so, it'll be five years at that point. I just looked at that. And when like, right, I knew it. I knew plants were trying to kill me, like get rid of these stupid things. And I just I got rid of them. I just started eating meat again. And exclusively meat and fatty meat in particular, because I now knew the research about saturated fat cholesterol actually being good for you. And so, I started doing that, and I felt better at 38 than I did as a 27-year-old professional athlete. Wow. So, this is in comparison to myself and those 32 sets of squats. It does sound incredible. And that was at 38. That was I was 38 years old at when I did that. And but at the end of it, like it wasn't like I did 38 sets and just went oh gosh, oh, I'm over it. It was I came to it dawned on me that I could literally just keep doing this the rest of the night. But I had been there for four hours, and I had things I needed to do. So, I'm like, Alright, let's just put a break on it. But I was listening to different books on tape. And I was listening to it like Thomas Sowell who I absolutely love, the economist if you guys haven't come across them, but I just think he's great. Yeah, great guy. And. Yes, exactly. And so, I think I was listening to wealth, poverty and politics at the time. And so, I was listening to that. And I just in the zone, I was just like, great. I'm listening to something I enjoy. I'm just doing this; I'll just keep doing sets. And I finally was just like, Okay, I could literally be doing this the whole night. And I had a friend of mine, and I've done stupid big leg workouts before, in my early or in sort of my 20s but not on carnivore. And I nearly killed myself and just been crippled for like two weeks and just like almost in tears going up and downstairs. And I was thinking I was like, oh my god, I really hope that I didn’t do that to myself.
Jack Heald 1:03:52
Everybody who lifts understand, oh, yeah, I had a heavy leg day. Yeah. And now I have to come down with a set of stairs. And I just want to go.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 1:04:03
Yeah, well, and that was a thing. And I thought about that. And I had a friend of mine called me and said, hey, you want to go hike up this big stupid mountain tomorrow, which sounded awful to me. As I was thinking about, am I even going to be walking the next day? And I said, like, let's take it easy. Let's slow down a step. I may have just done something very stupid. And I may not be walking properly for the next few weeks. So, let's just see how I feel in the morning. I just done this experiment. And I woke up in the morning. It was like nothing happened. And I started going up the stairs and it was just like, yeah, that's nothing start taking steps two at a time and I felt okay, there's something going on there. There's some there. I can tell that my hamstrings are not tight, but that they had been they had done work and it's like okay, but I felt fine. So, I said fine. Let's go hiking. And so, we went hiking was like a three hour hike up this this mountain and then it was actually fairly straightforward. I’ve done that same hike the previous year and I hate it.
Jack Heald 1:05:05
More and more incredible.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 1:05:07
And then at that point I just realized, because I had been I just come back from Bangladesh. For more volunteering the humanitarian or in the in the refugee camps. They're helping the Rohingya refugees that came over from genocide in Burma, are escaping genocide in Burma. And so, I was I was not in shape. I was really, really out of shape. But I've done I've been on carnivore now for two weeks. And I was just, I was trying to get back in shape for rugby. And that's why I was eating some vegetables and some meat, but then I was, and I wasn't feeling great. And then I felt like well, that's its plants are trying to kill me, get rid of these stupid things. And then after about two weeks of that I was at this point now, and I felt amazing, I was still out of shape. I was not I had a lot of excess fat on me. And I had not been running or doing anything in a very long time. And I did that leg workout. The next day, I did this big hike. And I just felt amazing. I'm like, right, I'm ready. I'm going back. And I went to rugby practice that night, with my team in Seattle, which was now a professional said, the MLR, Major League Rugby, the Seawolves up in Seattle. And so, I was with them. And I was like, alright, well, let's push myself like I did when I was doing carnivore in my early 20s. Everything I did was at that maximum capacity. It was like, everything's a dead sprint, I'm just pushing myself as hard as I can go and see what happens. And I could just, I could just go again. And so, these people had been training for months that I had been away in Bangladesh, and I was keeping up with everything, just guns blazing. Again, the next day still was not sore. And two days after, still was not sore, but I could feel my legs were healing. And I was like, okay, you've done a lot of work, you could do it again. But eventually you're going to tear something that was sort of the impression that I got, but it wasn't any stiffness or soreness. And two days after that. I went to meet a friend for coffee. It was like in my head like alright, well, how does coffee because I was still in the experimental phase of carnivore still sort of testing it out. So, I'm like, okay, what about this? And what about this? And what about this, and I'm still researching looking into it. And so, it's okay, well, what about coffee, is that can I have coffee? Is that something I hadn't had in several weeks. So, let's try back in. Let's see what it does. Add one cup of black coffee. And in 20 minutes or so my hamstrings are tight, my glutes are all tight and sore. My back was getting stiff. And I was like, oh, I can actually feel it in real time. My body stiffening up. I'm like, okay, okay, what's happening? What's happening? And I was sore for the next two days. And so that's when I was like, okay, yeah, right, this is just a universal base thing is that...
Jack Heald 1:07:44
The soreness is not the buildup of lactic acid. That implies that the soreness is actually the reaction, it's either the toxin itself, or the body's reaction to the toxin. Yeah. I'm thinking clearly on that, aren't I?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 1:08:02
I would say so. Yeah. And, I mean, and the lactic acid, I mean, that's your oxygen debt for the work you're doing at the time. And when you switch into an anaerobic form of metabolism, and you run out of oxygen, so you can't go down the normal rate. So, you create lactate as a result of that, but that's called your oxygen debt and when you breathing heavily and you catch your breath, you're actually converting that lactate over again and making energy from that so you get rid of that lactic acid right then and there so you have that burn from working out and it's painful that I still get that. You're still going to get lactic acid buildup. And I don't know if I can tolerate it more or less than other people because of this, but I do experience that but once it's gone. It doesn't just show up two days later for no reason you know that that's a that's a quick turnover on that. And so, I think that's something that's again just been sort of just repeated so many times that people just oh well that's just what that is. But I don't think that it is I don't think physiologically it could possibly be and I and in my experience with this it doesn't line up with that either because I I'm not getting that soreness and stiffness it really is a product of what we're eating I find.
Jack Heald 1:09:24
Phil, we don't talk about your workouts much, but you've been carnivore for I don't know, a long time. Do you have that same, do you have that feeling of? I'm sorry, we gotta let you go because you got a plane to catch but yeah, sorry feeling like you can just keep going?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 1:09:45
Yeah, I don't work out nearly to the degree that Anthony, but you know where I noticed that is really when it comes to surgery work and where I would, be noticeable I'm tired at the end of the day long surgery, and years ago, now, I am not. And I'm just like, okay, bring on the next one, let's keep going. And that's where I noticed that most... But I can also say, when I do those extra hard workouts, and again, my extra hard workouts are going to be, Cakewalk seranthony. But when I do what I consider to be an extra hard work out, I also notice I'm not sore at all. afterwards.
Jack Heald 1:10:34
This has been one of the most encouraging. I mean, everything seems, these are all great, but holy smokes. This is really, really encouraging to me, for reasons that have nothing to do with the show. All right, well, ordinarily, Phil can hang around and chit chat, but he's got a plane to catch, and we don't want him to miss his ride back home. Anthony, I’ve got a boatload of contact information for you. We'll make sure that that is posted in the show notes. Is there one or two particular ways you'd love for people to get a hold of you you'd like to share right now?
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 1:11:13
Sure. Well, I think main ones just my YouTube channel and podcast, my YouTube channel’s just my name just Anthony Chafee, MD, and that's where I post all of my videos, and my long form interviews and shorter videos just talking about these sorts of things. And my podcast is just the Plant Free MD and that song, any available on anything, any, any plant. Yeah, well, it's just sort of tacking on to that my sort of origin story on all this is just because I just stopped eating plants, because they're trying to kill you. And then, Instagram, I’m also very, very active on Instagram. That again, is just Anthony Chafee, MD.
Jack Heald 1:12:00
All righty. Well, all of that stuff will be available in the show notes for our listeners. And wow, it's been a privilege. Thanks so much for taking the time to be with us today. I've really enjoyed the conversation.
Dr. Anthony Chaffee 1:12:15
Well, thank you both very much. I really do appreciate it. And it was absolute pleasure to meet both of you. Hopefully, you can do it again.
Jack Heald 1:12:21
All right. Well, for Dr. Philip Ovadia, who's getting on a plane, I'm Jack Heald. This is the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. We do one of these every week about this time and we'll talk to y'all next time.
Jack Heald 1:12:42
America is fat and sick and tired. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and at risk of a sudden heart attack. Are you one of them? Go to ifixhearts.co and take Dr. Ovadia's metabolic health quiz. Learn specific steps you can take to reclaim your health, reduce your risk of heart attack, and stay off Dr. Ovadia’s operating table. This has been a production of 38 atoms