57. Ancestral Human Diet & Everything Wrong with Lipid Hypothesis of Heart Disease with Dr Anthony Chaffee

Drawing on historical, anthropological and current scientific evidence, Dr Anthony Chaffee & I discuss the logical flaws of blaming red meat and animal-derived fats for modern chronic diseases. 

We also cover the true underlying causes of heart attacks (atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD)), with specific reference to thrombogenic hypothesis & the flawed approaches of plant-based influencers and centralized cardiology in reducing LDL cholesterol/ApoB with lipid lowering therapy for primary prevention. 
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TIMESTAMPS
00:16:43 Impact of Diets on Metabolic Health
00:30:21 Health Decline and Rise of Disease
00:35:31 Prehistoric Health and Human Diseases
00:50:23 Impact of Light on Health
00:55:16 Disease and Modern Lifestyle Relationship
01:06:16 Debunking Arguments Against Meat Consumption
01:10:00 Debunking Vegan Influencer's Harmful Narratives
01:20:04 Debate on Cholesterol and Heart Disease
01:30:27 Controversy Surrounding Statin Therapy
01:42:11 Live Event Announcement in Melbourne

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DISCLAIMER: The content in this podcast is purely for informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast or YouTube channel. Do not make medication changes without first consulting your treating clinician. 

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Transcript

Dr Max Gulhane: 4:12

In this episode I'm speaking again with good friend, neurosurgical registrar and carnivore educator, dr Anthony Chafee. We dive into a range of fascinating topics, including the ancestral human diet, the natural state of the health of humans based on best historical evidence, and why this is so important for medicine and health optimization. Today we end with a deep dive on the real underlying factors driving atherosclerosis and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. If you want to hear Anthony, I and a list of fantastic speakers live in person, then we are hosting an event called Regenerate Melbourne on the 21st of April in Melbourne, australia. This is going to be a fantastic day and a fantastic opportunity to connect with us. A final reminder that none of this is medical advice and to always consult with your treating clinician before making medication changes or embarking on low-carbon carnivore if you are taking medications. Thank you, and now onto the show. Dr Anthony Chafee, welcome back to the Regenerative Health podcast.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 5:20

Thank you very much for having me.

Dr Max Gulhane: 5:21

It's good to see you so maybe we could start with your just broad thoughts about where things went wrong. And if we wind the clock back, you know 100,000 years, 10,000 years, and what was the norm then that we've kind of butchered so far or got wrong to leave in part to people being so sick?

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 5:47

Well, if you go back 10, 20,000 years, 30,000 years, 100,000 years, a million years, 2 million years, the best evidence shows that humans have been apex predators for around 2 million years, maybe 2.5 million years, and before that. We were opportunistic meat eaters and eating more and more meat as we could find it, and we developed tools stone tools for this effect. We didn't have the claws and the teeth, we couldn't rip and render animals apart, so we needed to get sharpened tools to cut and dismember animals that we found or were able to opportunistically kill. And before that and so that was about 3.3 million years ago with Australopithecus, first sharpened stone tool. So this was something that our ancestors have been doing for a very, very long time before the first true human, which is often considered to be Homo habilis about 2.5 million years ago, who then became apex predators and became able to take down large prey and not have to scavenge. Before Australopithecus, there's evidence going back a few million years of our early ancestors using large stones as pound stones to crack open the skulls of animals and get the brain. There's very, very nutritious, very high in fats and nutrients fat soluble nutrients and obviously the different sorts of specific fatty acids that we need to grow and develop our brain and nervous system.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 7:19

I remember reading an article talking about how well, how could we have grown this big brain? We need all these different nutrients, we need all this thing, all this plant, and this plant and this thing and that fish and this thing and all these sorts of things. And I remember thinking at the time, well, why couldn't we just eat brains? I mean, that's going to have everything that we need by definition. And in fact that's exactly what it turns out that we were doing. For millions of years we were eating the brains of other animals. We're eating the meat of other animals later on, when it became accessible, and that continued on for about 2 million years until the end of the last ice ages, when there seems to be some sort of event, something sort of happened.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 8:00

Now people think, well, maybe we just hunted all these megafauna out to extinction. Maybe there's a cataclysm, but it's a certain point. Around 15,000 years ago or so, the megafauna died out. The woolly mammoths, the cave bears, the giant sloths, the saber toothed cats, all these massive, massive animals that used to roam the earth in North America and South America. Giant, 12 foot tall, killer birds with massive beaks and teeth and things like that. They all died out. Could we have hunted these all out at the exact same time? And maybe, but on every single continent, everywhere at the exact same time? It's less likely. It's more likely there was some sort of cataclysm, like a massive volcano or an asteroid that knocked up whole bunch of particles into the sky, blocked out the sun, killed off a lot of vegetation, killed off a massive amount of animals and the ones who weren't hardy enough to survive died out.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 9:03

So we were lucky enough to survive, but we had to change our tactics. We had to change our prey. Normally we were going after these big megafauna that had actually quite a high fat supply, and since then we had to move to other sorts of means to increase our fat intake, such as cultivating cows for dairy and getting butter and milk and things like that, and moving to agricultural crops, farm agriculture and crop agriculture, in order to meet our nutritional demands or at least sustain us when we weren't able to get our natural diet. Some people will try to say well, even though we are designed to eat meat and we've been eating meat, wild animals don't have much fat on them, so we would still have been eating lean. That's not true. The animals that we were eating for two million years were quite fatty. The larger an animal is, generally the higher body fat percentage it has compared to lean body mass. So you think of like an elephant or hippopotamus or a whale. Now think of mastodons and giant sloths. They have more fat on them, and so those are the animals that we went after. Were these high fat animals? And then they died out, and so that was the first step in the wrong direction.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 10:23

There were a lot of populations that could still eat just large animals, like the plains Indians in North America. They would largely eat bison up until the end of the 1800s when the bison population were wiped out systematically by the US government in order to win the American Indian wars, because that was their food supply. And so that was war tactics 101, you cut off the food supply to an army and you're going to do much better against them. So in certain areas where they didn't have 100 million plus bison roaming around and coming by yearly that they could stampede and get meat for the year. People had to go to different sorts of means. They had to go to agriculture crop agriculture, but also animal husbandry and herding livestock and horses and so on, and that worked quite well. I mean, look at the Mongol horde, genghis Khan and his progeny that carved out the largest contiguous empire that's ever existed, and they did that largely on horse meat, horse blood and fermented mares milk, but largely from the meat and blood of their horses, but again, dairy right, because you needed more fat as well. And so we know that you can have a large, massive empire running just on meat, even from a herder standpoint, but also the hunter mentality of, or culture, civilization of the plains Indians.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 12:00

There was huge populations. There was estimated that there was 100 million Native Americans in what is now America and North America up until the early 1600s when some sort of plague wiped out 95% of them. And then you go even further north, where people were still living in the same ways or very similar to the same ways that we, our ancestors, had been living throughout previous ice ages, which is the Inuit, then called the Eskimo population, that were just living up in the ice and the frozen tundra, is in the Arctic Circle, where there wasn't anything growing to speak of, and they're eating very fatty marine mammals such as seals, polar bear, whales, things like that. So again, very high fat. And that was sort of the beginning of the end.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 12:50

You see this, this clear line in the fossil record between pre-agriculture and post-agriculture People, height and health declining. So the average height of the population dropped by five inches directly after the advent of agriculture in every area around the world. It's sort of come up independently around seven times independently in different areas around the world and at every time, in every instance, regardless of the type of crop, regardless of the time, regardless of the people, the same things occurred the height and health of the population decline. The height dropped by an average of four or five inches. Average brain capacity for adult males dropped by 11%. Adult female brain capacity dropped by 17%. Femurs were shorter, which is a sign of malnutrition. Signs of poor wound healing. Smaller jaws, crowded teeth, so crooked cavities, other signs of infections such as tuberculosis in the spines.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 13:51

And we saw this in real time with the Native Americans, the Plains Indians, switching from bison to more agrarian sorts of means because their food was wiped out and so they had to shift to other food sources. And same with the Inuit in the north, same with the Maasai in Africa, as they became more westernized and involved in eating more and more western food. The height and health of this population declined and you can see studies throughout the 20th century of these populations showing this slow but steady decline in their health throughout the 20th century. They knew it a bit more slow. The Maasai a bit more slow because they were a bit more separate. But the Native Americans it was much more quick, like the United States Americans. In the continental US that was a much quicker decline because when we wiped out the bison they had to switch quickly into a new mode of eating and survival and so there's a much higher, much higher level of illness and chronic disease in the Native American population versus the rest of America, like the European descent Americans. Same as true in Australia. So the Australians were we call these things hunter-gatherers, but really they were only gathering if they weren't able to hunt, if they weren't able to get a kill, then they would go around and get some roots and tubers or honey or whatever they would be able to find. But the records from the missionaries, the records from the European explorers going back to the 1600s, were very clear. There's always I read a couple of these and of the early explorers' works. There's always a chapter on the food of the Native Australians and they were just marveled. They just only eat meat, they don't want anything else. Sometimes in Tasmania they only ate mollusks like abalone. They'd go diving for abalone and the Europeans actually offered them fish, just normal fish, and they just said, no, no, that's not what we want, this is what we eat. Now, it could be that they were just nervous about taking food from strangers and worried about being poisoned, but either way, they declined and this wasn't saying that. Well, yeah, they had this mixed, omnivorous diet. They were like no, they just eat meat, they only eat meat. And these people were very healthy, very hail and hardy, very slim, slender, muscular and very healthy. They lived pretty much untouched lives from major modern diseases. And this is something you see in anthropological works that when these hunter-gatherer populations get more westernized and more developed, they start getting the degeneration in their health that we see in developed populations. And it's funny to me that people don't wake up and think about why that is. And it's not just they're sitting down and watching television. It's because they're eating things that they never would have otherwise. And so we saw this in real time the Native Americans in the Plains. There was a study in 2001 that showed that at the time they were the tallest population of humans on Earth. That is not the case now. They have shrunk since then. So that's that same disparity.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 17:25

The Maasai in Africa. There was a multi-year study done by the British in the late 1920s, published in 1931, which was 170 pages long, and they looked at the nutrition of the Maasai and they compared it with the Akkukuyu, which were their neighboring tribe that lived at the same time in the same area and the same environment, in the same circumstances and similar genetic population, because they interbred and intermarried. And the Maasai were largely animal based. They drank milk from their cattle, which was actually high fat. It was about 8% milk fat. They ate meat. They drank blood as well, and mostly the men, the warrior caste men, would have more of the meat and more of the blood because it was more nutritious and they needed it.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 18:14

And people will say, well, we're not apex predators, go and try and fight a lion. Well, these guys did. These guys fight lions with sticks and they win and it's pretty impressive because that's the thing. That was one of the coming of age sort of things If you're a man, you go out and you kill a lion and that's how you proved yourself to be a man. And so, yeah, that's exactly what they did. And in fact there was a Smithsonian article in the Smithsonian magazine that I saw that said that our early ancestors probably hunted cave lions into extinction for throw rugs. They just liked the pelts, they just wanted rugs. It's sort of funny.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 19:02

So then you look at that and you look at the Aki Kuu, who are largely plant based, largely vegetarian, and you look at the disparities. It's almost identical to what you'd see pre and post agriculture. The average adult male height of the Aki Kuu was five inches shorter than the Maasai. The Maasai were 50% stronger, on average 23 pounds of more lean body mass, are all very slender, very slim, and they were much more healthy. So they looked at the health records available at the hospitals and then, because that isn't always complete they went from village to village to village to village to village and did their own medical assessments of the Aki Kuu and the Maasai. And there were quite a lot. It was a big study At the time. Aki Kuu numbered about 750,000.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 19:51

Obviously they didn't look at all of them, but they had quite a large patient sample size and they found that the Aki Kuu men were the unhealthiest of all. Aki Kuu women were second unhealthiest, but they had a bit more of a diverse diet instead of just eating a whole bunch of grains eight grains as well as veggies and greens and things like that. Then it was the Maasai women, then it was the Maasai men. The Maasai men had almost no health issues to speak of. They found that the Aki Kuu men and women had a number of nutritional deficiencies, but when they just supplemented those deficiencies, their health issues didn't improve. It was only until they replaced the plants they were eating with meat that their health improved, which goes to show you that there are other nutrients that we don't necessarily know about, or certainly didn't at the time, that are required and essential, but also that the plants that they were eating can hold low-grade toxins and give low-grade toxicity and other sorts of problems, even just eating a lot of grains.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 20:55

We know this to be detrimental to our metabolic health, and ketogenic diets have been the most studied diet on earth, the most rigorously studied, has the most high-level evidence to support it, as opposed to just epidemiological studies saying, oh, just backtrack, and how much vegetables have you eaten the last two years? Like, okay, oh yeah, people that ate more vegetables, they do better. Well, very rigorous, right. But ketogenic diets have been tested with randomized controlled trials, interventional trials by the thousands. I mean there are thousands and thousands and thousands of studies for this. So even just that, I mean, it can make a difference. So that's that disparity. You see that clear disparity.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 21:42

We see that clear disparity here with the Australian aboriginals, where, when I first got here and I'm sure this is something you're well aware of, being a doctor here in Australia what I was told pretty much day one when I got here was that if you have a Native Australian patient that, whatever their age says on their folder, just add 20 years to that because they just age so much faster than everybody else. So if you have someone in their 30s, you have to consider them in elderly population. You have to consider the diseases that you would normally see in the elderly population. Why is that? Why are they aging so much quicker? Because they haven't had 10,000 years to adapt to agrarian food and it's not suited to them, even more so than it's not suited to us.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 22:29

The height and health decline. So we know about the health. What about the height? Well, there were far more taller Native Australians.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 22:39

Previously there was a war in Western Australia sort of Northern Western Australia in the mid-1800s, I think, the 1850s, 40s or 50s, and with the British it was pretty one-sided. So there were a lot of casualties on the Indigenous side. A couple years later, you know, people are coming back. The British soldiers are coming back and looking at the you know at that battle site and they found, just you know, a lot of skeletons around and they were pretty taken aback because they looked at the, they found the forearm bones of the native Australians. They found just the radius and all the just sitting there and they said that it was longer than the British soldiers entire outstretched arm. Just their forearm was longer than their entire arm. I mean, you just imagine that, like that, if someone's coming up and their whole outstretched arm is just going up to your wrist, you know that's like it's like a child, you know so that there's there's quite a massive disparity in height. That that we saw directly after that as well.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 23:43

So this is just, this is just typical where we're animals just like every other animal. We have a, we have a specific set of nutrients and requirements for life and for optimal development in health and there are certain things that will harm us. There are certain things that will harm us. They won't harm other things, and so if we don't eat what we're designed to eat, we aren't going to be as healthy as we can be, and that's the same for every other animal. There was a massive decrease in decline in the height and health of these population, of the native Australian population as as well as the native Americans.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 24:21

And you look at the Messiah to to sort of jump back a bit. They were extremely healthy in the late 1920s and 30s, when they were mostly eating meat and dairy and but even then they had started eating in some grains and milletsies, they had started including this in their diet and yet they were still very healthy. Then you look over in the 1970s and you know there's someone, someone tried to say like oh, the Messiah aren't that healthy. Look at this, these reports of heart disease in the Messiah in the 1970s is like great, thank you for proving my point. It didn't exist in the 1920s and 30s. Now it exists in the 1970s.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 24:59

And what are they eating now? They're eating more grains or eating more plants or more more agrarian plant plant agrarian than they were in the 1920s and 30s, so that that fits perfectly with that paradigm. And then now the health is much worse. And so, you know, I spoke with someone said oh well, look, I have a house over in the Messiah Mara and I see it, and I see them. You know, they're actually eating all these other things. Great, thank you for proving my point.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 25:25

They're not as healthy as they were even in the 1970s. They're much more sick now and their diabetes rates are way higher. Their teeth are getting problematic and decayed and smaller jaws and crooked teeth and other sort of metabolic issues that they've never had before, never had before. Now that's becoming a problem. Well, one thing that they have is they eat a lot more corn, they eat a lot more grain, they eat a lot more plants. But most notably is that in many of these villages they have Coca-Cola trucks drive in every single day and sell out within minutes, and they have no idea how bad this stuff is for them, which is very predatory by Coca-Cola and these other companies, because they're going into these areas. They have no idea how bad this is for them, and you at least, in America and Australia and the rest of the world, we at least know like ah, you probably should limit it. You don't really want to have all that much sugar. They have no idea.

Dr Max Gulhane: 26:29

And so, dr Mark Hyman, it's like a heroin dealer going into a high school.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 26:35

Well, that's it, yeah, they have no idea. And or, like the opium trade, back before it was illegal it was just like, oh, hey, look, yeah, you can do this, this is fun, this is great, and it's not as profound a response as opium or heroin, but it's the same idea. You're getting them addicted and they don't realize that this is causing harm and it is causing harm. It is addictive. It's addictive in the same way as cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. There's studies in mice showing that, if you, you know, there was the classic study of you, a mouse gives, given two options they can hit a button for food, or they can hit a button and get hit of cocaine, but they can't get both. So they have to choose one or the other, and the mice will keep choosing cocaine until they die, right. Well, in more recent studies, they added in a third button, which was sugar, and so they could get food, they could get cocaine or they could get sugar, and most of the mice just kept hitting sugar until they died and they didn't even go for the cocaine They'll, let alone the food. And so you know, this stuff is terribly addictive and it's sort of you know, sort of thinking of it as an evolutionary trap.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 27:37

There's things called evolutionary traps, where something is designed to seek out a certain something right, or at least they recognize it as safe, they recognize it as good. There's. An example of this would be there are hummingbirds in America that go after red flowers, right, and for a while in cattle country they had these red sort of fixers for the electric wires, electric fencing, and so there was sort of twisty thing together. I was hold those wires together and these hummingbirds would come in, think this is a flower to see that red and that around the right size, around the right shape and red, and they just go in, get the nectar, hit the hot wire and die Right. So this was killing a lot of hummingbirds and so that's called an evolutionary trap. They're designed to say this is where I need to go.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 28:27

So fructose is thought to be the sweetest of the sugars because it's because we don't know of anything containing fructose that's acutely poisonous will kill us on that day. And so we have that sweetness and it is addictive and it gives a dopamine response to the addiction centers of the brain, the reward centers of your brain, just like cocaine, heroin and meth and their MRI studies showing that it kills the same areas of the brain as meth, to the same extent as meth, and it damages the body similar to alcohol, because it gets broken down at the same byproducts as alcohol. And so we get fatty liver disease, cirrhosis, diabetes, heart disease, even implicated in cancer and Alzheimer's. And so we take this taste. Normally we get in very small quantities from some sort of fruit or something. If we were starving we see them. Okay, this is safe, I can eat this and survive. And now we're getting fruit with hundreds of times the amount of fructose in it and we're getting candies with refined, concentrated sugar in it.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 29:26

They're putting sugar in absolutely every food stuff. You're getting Coca-Cola that has a ton of sugar in it, but it has even more sugar than you would think because they add salt to it. In the culinary world, salt offsets the flavor of sugar, and so if something's too sweet, you add salt to it. It diminishes the sweet flavor that you experience. And vice versa, if something's too salty, you add a bit of sugar to it and it'll diminish that salty taste. So Coca-Cola does this on purpose. They know what they're doing. So they add a whole bunch of salt in so they can add even more sugar and get this more addictive. So you have more in. The salt has the added benefit of dehydrating you, so you want to drink more as well. So it's just a win-win for them.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 30:09

You just drink more of their nasty, disgusting product and so we hit that and that is an evolutionary trap for us. We say our body says that's safe, you can do this, this gives you energy. Go for it, because we're never experiencing an encounter in this magnitude. Mangoes people say, well, mangoes are very sweet, yeah, but they didn't used to be. The original mangoes were barely sweet at all. That a lot of fibrous tissue, the seed was massive, it had very little pulp to it and so, yeah, so this is just an evolutionary trap for us. We recognize this is safe and our body go more and it's addictive. So we really go more. And so you know it's just very, very harmful, you know.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 30:52

And so the Maasai are now being caught with that evolutionary trap for the profit of these absolutely diabolical companies, and so they have these Coca-Cola trucks that are going in. Dr Mark Hyman from the Cleveland Clinic did a trip out there, sort of a research trip out to the Maasai, and he saw this and he was horrified and he sort of made a video about it and published it, about how these Coca-Cola trucks were coming in every day and they were selling out very quickly. And he went to the chief of the little village that he was staying in and he just let him know hey, you know that stuff's really not good for you. You can cause diabetes and cause obesity, you can cause tooth decay and all these problems. And the chief was taken aback and said well, really, like we actually have a huge problem with diabetes and we have no idea why. Well, that's part of the reason anyway.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 31:41

So we are seeing this decline in degradation in the health of people right now. For European ancestors, middle Eastern ancestors and parts of Asia and North Africa and things like that. That disparity happened eight to 10,000 years ago, but we're seeing that. We see this in the fossil record then and we see this in real time right now. We're seeing the degradation of the health of these populations.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 32:08

The cancer rates in the Inuit were extremely low, if infantescentally small, in the early 1900s and there are studies that look at 20-year chunks in the literature and it's just slowly but surely increasing the cancer rate. Inclusion of cancer rate increasing the cancer rate. Well, what's happening throughout the 20th century? They're becoming more and more incorporated into Western society, and so some of the studies differentiate between the native Inuits that are still eating a native diet and they have next to no chronic disease, heart disease or cancer.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 32:46

And then you have the ones that look at just the entire population of the Inuit and they say, well, maybe there's something to do with them, maybe there's something genetic and all these sorts of things. No, it's what they're eating. When they're eating their traditional diet they don't get these diseases. When they're in the cities, they're actually quite prone to getting these diseases because they're actually genetically susceptible to getting heart disease. That was a study in the 1990s I think 1996 or 97, where they said, hey look, these guys are just eating a whole bunch of fat and obviously that's going to kill you. They start smoking very young and that's obviously not good for heart disease. And yet they as a total population not even just the ones living in their traditional way as a total population they were still much lower rates of heart disease than the rest of Canada. And so they said, okay, well, maybe there's genetic protections that they have. So they looked at the different genetic markers that would protect or predispose them from getting heart disease, and they found they basically had all of them. They had all the bad ones. They were just very much genetically susceptible to developing heart disease and yet they weren't.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 33:47

And then you look in the 2000s and the 2010s and then you start seeing, as a population, higher rates of heart disease. And so you know dishonest actors such as our vegan friends not really the vegans, but the vegan influencers that are trying to make a name for themselves in a dime, trying to push this ideology will try to confound that. They'll try to say well, look at this study that was done in the last five years and they have higher rates of these chronic diseases as a population of Inuit, not as people only eating the traditional diet, and that's the crux there. And so they know that they're just trying to confuse people and trying to mislead people. But that's what it is.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 34:33

We're seeing the health of our people and our civilizations decline, reading more and more things that aren't designed for us. We're getting more and more processed, but in the last hundred years we've had a massive increase in chronic disease, more than we've ever seen in history, and in the last 40 years it's continued to increase decade after decade after decade. We're not eating more meat, reading less red meat. Certainly, total meat has been about the same because it's been replaced with chicken. These are US numbers. But red meat's declined, saturated fats declined, cholesterol intake has declined. Fruits and vegetables have increased. Grains have increased. Heart-healthy grains, heart-healthy fruits and vegetables, heart-healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids have increased Tripled in fact since the 1970s. And so has sugar. Sugar's increased by over three-fold as well, in the form of high fructose corn syrup. And so since then we have gotten fatter and sicker than we've ever been in human history.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 35:34

And people try to again conflate and lie and dissemble. But that's the facts. And they said well, age-adjusted mortality rates have peaked in the 1960s and 70s and then started coming down. Well, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the rates. We're talking about the prevalence and incidence of heart disease is going up, and it is going up decade after decade. And the mortality rate around the world is going up, and it's going up higher and faster than the growth in population, and so that's not good. So the rate is going up.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 36:09

People having their first heart attacks is going up, and it's just that we have better interventions, we have better hospital systems and ambulance services. We can have the royal flying doctors fly out to Timbo, middle of nowhere, australia, and bring someone back in and get them to the cath lab where 20 years ago they would have been dead, and so that's something that we can do for people now and that's improving things. Also, the rates of smoking have gone way down and so that's going to improve things as well. But people having their first heart attack but surviving are going up and that's important. I mean we'll say, well, we're just screening techniques. Screening techniques are getting better. Dumb Screening techniques has nothing to do with a first time heart attack, unless you're calling heart attacks screening method.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 37:00

You know, wait for someone to have a heart attack and then they have. That's a good screening. It's pretty sensitive and specific, but that's a thing. People are having first time heart attacks more often. It's just that they're surviving and the rates of chronic disease, of autoimmune diseases, diabetes, is going up and up and up and is happening younger and younger and younger. And so the idea that we're just, you know, the epitome of health and just getting better and better and it's because we stopped eating meat is just ludicrous. But people make this argument. It's absolutely hilarious to me that people in their right mind are actually trying to argue this and they just look around them. Everyone's getting fatter and sicker, and it's just you know, and yet they're arguing and trying to play with the statistics to make it look as if it's not happening, which is hilarious. But as Mark Twain said, there are three kinds of lies there are lies, there are damn lies and there are statistics, and that's what we're seeing now.

Dr Max Gulhane: 38:06

It's fascinating to take this ancestral and traditional people's perspective because I think it offers so much into giving people a reference about what is normal. One of my earliest medical school lessons from a very experienced GP was know your anatomy, but know what's normal, because you don't want to be the guy who infuses four liters of normal saline into a 45 kilo little woman whose blood pressure systolic blood pressure is naturally sitting at 90. You don't want to be the guy who doesn't realize that that is normal blood pressure for that person. So I think what you've basically described so eloquently, anthony, is that collectively as a society, we have forgotten what is normal as a human diet and I think that people are incredibly surprised when they realize how much protein and how much fat and how many animal derived nutrients they truly need to thrive. And most people are eating nowhere near that. Differences in, say, your approach compared to, say, dr Paul Saladino, in terms of his advocating for fruit and honey I think it's the nuance that he's not communicating is that he's living in an equatorial latitude and it's very, very local, locally grown produce, which is the reason why he hasn't got any visceral fat and is fasting insulin still three, but I think overwhelmingly. The foundation of that diet is still very, very high in animal fat and animal meat.

Dr Max Gulhane: 39:43

I just wanted to go back to your the study that you referenced in the early 1900s in Africa with the Maasai, and I just want to emphasize the point that that is a very, very elegantly controlled study because you can imagine that those two populations have the same cultural practices, the same sun exposure, the same that they're in the same environment. The only factor that was changing was their dietary practices. So you know, people like some people will say, oh, it's because they're more sun exposed or they were outside more. Well, that study really proves that the only factor that was different between these two people was that one was eating a very high meat based diet. The Maasai and the Akungu were primarily agrarian. So that's a really excellent anthropological and observational but essentially almost like a random, very controlled type of trial.

Dr Max Gulhane: 40:36

The other point I really wanted to make, because it's important when we are kind of fighting back against this message that humans that were naturally were sick ancestrally and you hear it from vegan influencers who are very much on the same team as a lot of centralized cardiologists who are pushing pharmaceutical intervention like primary prevention that it seems to be quite excessive and not really accounting for the fact that we didn't have heart disease traditionally and ancestrally. So talk to us about this idea that prior to the development of civilization, there wasn't disease around, and I think that the records, like West Side Price's work, shows that people were actually quite healthy prior to the contact with Western civilization.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 41:31

Well, I mean yeah, I mean, there's this concept of the diseases of the West. When we met these non-Western cultures, these so-called hunter-gatherer really hunter population, that they did not get the same diseases that the Europeans did, and so they said, oh well, these are just people from the West get these diseases. These natives here, they don't get that, they don't get the diseases. So they call it the diseases of the West. And now we just call it getting older. And now it's starting to be termed human diseases, because now dogs and cats and domesticated animals of other descriptions are starting to have an increased prevalence, decade after decade, of so-called human diseases, these diseases that humans only get normally. Other animals don't get this. But then zoo animals. If you don't feed them their natural food, they will get these human diseases as well. And if you ask a zookeeper who tends to animals and feeds them in a responsible zoo, ask them what do you give them? Like dog food and kibble or bread or whatever, and they'll just look at you horrified and be like are you kidding me? If you do that, if you give animals human food, they'll get human diseases. It's like okay, what the hell is a human disease and why can you get it from eating human food.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 42:49

What does that mean? That means the food is causing the disease and this isn't food. This isn't food for us, it's not food for them. Food is species specific. Food is what you've evolved on. Food is what you're biologically adapted and suited to Seed oils that haven't existed for more than 100 years or so. That is not food. How can it be? We've never encountered it before. It certainly can't be essential, it certainly can't be important for our heart to have it, or else we'll get heart disease, or else, before its advent, we would all have been dying of heart disease, and then heart disease would have declined where in fact, heart disease wasn't even heard of, and then it started to massively increase after the advent of seed oils and refined sugars, refined grains and processed food. Processed food industry came to bear.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 43:37

If you don't even have to go all the way back to the beginning of civilization I mean it was hard to say what cavemen if they had any sort of chronic disease, but we certainly didn't see any signs in their bones. We didn't see signs of tuberculosis eating away their spines, like we did in post-agricultural people. We didn't see signs of poor wound healing like we did in post-agricultural people, we didn't see signs of arthritis, osteoarthritis or osteoporosis or other signs of degenerative diseases. And so some people argue that, well, but people are dying in their 30s. How the hell would you know? I don't want anybody to know.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 44:14

This is something 20,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago. You weren't there. There are no records from there. There's no census data, because this is prehistoric, so this is before the written word, and so of course there aren't any records of this. Like well, but the bones, they look so young and so healthy. Okay, they're just healthy.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 44:33

The whole point is they weren't degrading and so they could live much longer in a much more healthy fashion. And so you can't find those signs of degradation. But you know what? You can't find those in an elephant either. You can't find those in an elephant that dies of old age because they don't get it. They don't get osteoporosis, they don't get osteoarthritis if they're eating their natural diet, and so you know, you don't see elephants walking down the Serengeti and then popping a hip and falling over with a broken hip because they've got osteoporosis. You don't see that at the zoo either, because they say in the wild, well, they get killed by lions or other sorts of things. So maybe they don't live long enough to get it Well, first of all, a lot of them do, actually, but in the zoo these animals are living out their natural lifespan and they're not breaking their hips and they're not shattering their bones.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 45:24

They have a lot of weight behind them and yet their bones are holding them up. They're not getting degeneration like we see in human populations, and so you know, we just don't see these problems. But either way, you don't need to go back all that you know to the prehistoric record to see what was going on. We can just go back to the 1800s, when we did have census data and we had actually quite robust census data in America and in Europe and in Australia and there was no heart disease. There were no recorded heart attacks. The first recorded death from myocardial infarction, proven on autopsy, in America, was in 1912. And no one believed them. And they said look, we've all seen thousands and thousands, thousands of autopsies. We've got medical records going back hundreds of years. You know, no one's seen this. We don't think you got this right, we think you got this wrong. And they didn't start believing them until about 10 years later, when they started seeing more of these crop up, they said, oh, okay, maybe there's a new disease popping its head out. Okay, 10 years after that, it's the number one killer in America. You know, we were doing autopsies. We were doing autopsies, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of autopsies. I mean everybody was doing thousands each.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 46:44

This was a major, major part of medicine for hundreds of years was just doing dissections. You were just dissecting, dissecting, dissecting. You were trying to find what was normal and see what was abnormal and find something different. And if you describe something different you've got your name down in the record books forever, like Alzheimer's disease. I know nothing about Dr Alzheimer's except for the fact that he presented a case in 1906 about a lady who developed this weird presentation of memory and confusion issues that was later termed Alzheimer's dementia 1906. There wasn't a single mention of any other dementia type illness that by any other name that fit the description of Alzheimer's dementia before that in the medical literature, none. And now it's one of the most common things that you'll ever see. People say you know, I had a professor in medical school that said well, if you live long enough, everyone's going to get dementia.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 47:40

Yeah it's because our brains are just designed to break down, just like we're designed to make LDL cholesterol. That is designed to kill us and give us heart disease. Makes no sense. Makes no sense. Your body would just do that. It did great. It doesn't, it doesn't? Well, if you get a past certain age and you and you've already made your reproductive criteria, then your body just disappears and dies. Well, you know it does do that, but it doesn't kill you of disease. You mean, you do break down and eventually die, but there is an advantage to having multi-generational families and homes and civilizations where you have this living memory and knowledge and helping with the young and rearing kids and raising people and educating people and things like that. There's absolutely survival advantage to that. And also, it just didn't happen. You know we don't see elephants just getting Alzheimer's and being goofy and having major problems and like that that we see in adult human populations, but, but people regularly lived a long time, it's all but just people just didn't again didn't live long enough, not true?

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 48:41

Census data in the 1850s all the way up through to the 2020s shows very clear that the average life expectancy from birth was 38 in 19, or in 1850. But then if they made it 10 years old because they were smarter than the people making these arguments they looked at every 10 years. If you made it to 20 years, you'd live to be around 60. If you made it to 20 years old, you make it past that and past that and past that. So infant mortality rates were very high. So obviously the average life expectancy from birth goes down. But if you made it into adulthood and you weren't killed in a war, you actually lived a very long time.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 49:18

My great grandfather was born in 1875. He died in 1975. He was a doctor and trained at Columbia Medical School and there was a second class ever taught sterile practice. There was the advent of anesthesia. So he was on the ground floor of modern surgery and he actually invented his own surgeries and surgical equipment. So amazing, amazing, having that living memory to be able to tell my parents and my relatives all his experiences and things like that. There was absolutely an advantage to that. His father and mother lived nearly the same amount. His brothers lived nearly the same amount of time. Their grandparents lived nearly the same amount of time, because when people died of old age they lived a much longer than these averages from birth and they did not get dementia in the numbers that we're seeing now.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 50:13

And, like I said, alzheimer's just wasn't seen at all in the literature before 1906. And the first diagnosed on autopsy MI was in 1912. We were eating more meat in the 1800s, according to the United States census data, than we were in the early 20th century. So we're eating much more meat in the early 1800s than in the early 1900s. We're eating far more meat in the early 1800s than we were in 1912 when the first heart attack showed up. And we were eating more meat in 1912 and we were in 1920, 1930 when it became the number one killer in America and that was actually the lowest point in eating meat in the 200 year period before and after sort of a U shaped curve. And so we had all sorts of other diseases. We had William Osler.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 51:03

One of the great teachers in medicine wrote this whole massive tomes on the medical conditions of the day in the late 1800s. He was the first professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins. I have one of his original textbooks who was my great grandfather's textbook that he had, and it says nothing about heart disease. You're talking about angina and he had six patients in his entire career that could have had well had angina like symptoms. We don't know exactly what it's caused by. There's an obscure reference to a conference in the late 1700s where people said they saw one case of a thrombus in the coronary coronary arteries and they said, oh hey, look, this might have been how someone died. Look at that. So people were paying attention, they could see this stuff and they saw it potentially once in the late 1700s and then never again until 1912, right, at least in America.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 52:06

So this did not exist. It just did not exist in the numbers that we're seeing. It today, and the numbers that we're seeing are getting more and more prevalent. They're just getting every decade. It's getting more common and more common and more common. More people are having first-time heart attacks. More people around the world are having heart attacks. I saw a very disturbing statistic the other week, which was that Indian men one in four Indian men will die of a heart attack.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 52:36

Are we saying that that was happening this whole time? Were we saying that that was happening for thousands of years and we just didn't realize it? I mean that makes absolutely no sense. People are a lot smarter than that, and the I mean just Leonardo da Vinci. The guy invented a helicopter 500 years ago and he did hundreds, thousands of autopsies because he was given permission by the Catholic Church. That was sort of the early onset of when you were able to do dissections and things like that, because before that it was considered sacrilege, but the artists were allowed to do that so that they could more perfectly describe in their art the human form. And so Da Vinci was doing thousands of autopsies and dissections and kept copious notes. You think that? You think he wouldn't? You think he was just too dumb to notice a massive blockage in the whole coronaries. I mean, you've never seen before and just obviously oh, yeah, whatever.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 53:35

You just have to be trying to fool yourself if you believe things like that.

Dr Max Gulhane: 53:42

The other interesting point that I think is relevant is that the disease prevalence of the familial hypercholesterolemia conditions would have been the same. That hasn't changed between today and back then. Yet there's still only 11 cases of AMI in William Osler's whole career. So I mean that in itself is pretty compelling evidence that it's an environmental change, not any kind of inherent problem, that we're spontaneously developing these coronary thromboses as part of some. That's a very good point. The other I mean you've raised so many interesting points and I think it's just so obvious from what you've talked to describe that it's obviously not the meat, it's not the red meat, it's not the cholesterol that is really driving this disease epidemic.

Dr Max Gulhane: 54:35

I've been more and more digging into the mitochondria and how a lot of these chronic diseases, alzheimer's included, is essentially mitochondrial failure and it's essentially when we get a degree of bio-angetic breakdown in individual cells and that is sufficient in one organ, then the organ starts failing, whether that's dementia, heart failure, autoimmune disease, so to speak.

Dr Max Gulhane: 54:59

So I guess my thought is that something environmental, and obviously diet, is kind of the big one that you're talking about, and the only other factor that I think has changed as significantly has been our light environment and for the listeners.

Dr Max Gulhane: 55:16

Essentially in the late 1870s was the electrification of the first electrification, with Edison and the World Fair, and they brought light at night. And prior to that there was no artificial light at night, there was only fire, it was only halogen, it was only sorry fire and moonlight. And so when I guess we're taking this mitochondrial perspective and then we're suddenly lighting up our night and obviously we need melatonin that gets produced from our pineal gland to keep that circadian rhythm regulated, the only other thing that I think provides us a compelling contributor to all the disease that you've described is the fact that people are now sitting up, exposed to a whole bunch of artificial light and therefore preventing those mitochondria from recovering as they would appropriately with that perfectly symmetrical circadian signal of daylight and completely dark night. So do you have any thoughts on the contribution of light to these chronic health issues?

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 56:21

Well, I mean, you're certainly more well versed than I am in that, but I completely agree with you that this is. We're going outside of our biological design and we're doing that with food. We're doing that with our environmental toxins. There are about a million different chemicals, new chemicals that have been patented since the 1970s. What the hell do those do? Most of these are for the beauty and scent sort of industries or cleaning industries and things like that.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 56:53

So we're getting chronic exposure to these sorts of things. We're putting on makeups and lotions and tinctures and shampoos and cleaning with random things. It's all getting in our body. A lot of these things can soak through our skin and can damage our body. And then, exactly right, our brains tell the time on by the frequency of light that comes in, and so we're just getting inundated with this specific beam of light and our brain just doesn't know what the hell is going on. It doesn't know what time it is, it doesn't know what to release.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 57:24

You go out in the morning and you get that morning light. Your brain goes oh, it's morning time, here are your morning hormones. And then you set you up for the rest of the day afternoon Okay, it's afternoon. Here are your afternoon hormones. We're going to do this now.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 57:37

Evening same thing, and so it just sets you up for your circadian rhythm, which I was taught in grade school was extremely important, and yet we have forgotten just how important a light is to that. But this is something that they were even talking about in the 80s that these fluorescent lights and these office buildings where everyone's in these cubicles with this fake fleshy light, they're just making everyone sick and miserable and off on me. We've been talking about this for decades, but now people are actually starting to quantify it and show exactly what's damaging it, and that's something that I'm not as well-versed in, but I certainly agree with the concept, and so it's something that I think is well worth people taking note of trying to get away from this artificial light, trying to get in more natural light, you know, wearing the blue blocking glasses at night, trying to stay away from exactly what we're doing here as much as possible at this exact time.

Dr Max Gulhane: 58:41

The other interesting question, which is especially relevant for heart disease, is what do you think the factors were that were driving that peak around the time that Eisenhower had his heart attack? I read the Cloth Thickens by Malcolm Kendrick and obviously the seed oils had come on the scene in the early 1910s, and so I think that was a major unappreciated driver of heart disease. We've just talked about light. Have you thought about lead or the fact that there was a lot of lead in the petroleum and the fuel? So I mean, what factors are you really attributing that initial kind of early 1900s rise in heart disease too?

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 59:22

Well, it could certainly be things like lead and the pollutants that we were putting out. You know one thing that we have seen the wealthier that America and Western countries have gotten, the cleaner they've gotten as well. We're not like Beijing, where it's just smog all the time, or at least historically it has been very, very poor air quality. Now you go to a major city in America or Australia and it's bright blue skies and things like that. They don't have the smog and the cold smoke and things like that, that that they used to have. But these rates are still going up. So I think there's I'm sure that those sorts of things were contributory, but they don't seem to be the main driver. There are other things going on. I think. Yeah, I think it's definitely things like seed oils, things like sugars, things like refined processed foods or eating things we're not designed for. We're raising our blood sugar, which causes glycation. The glucose molecules physically fuse other molecules, permanently, damage them, cause advanced glycation end products.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:00:29

You have things like nicotine, people smoking a lot. In the early 1900s Eisenhower was a three pack a day smoker, but what's interesting to me is that in the 1920s and 30s 80% of men smoked and they did not have the lung cancer rates that they had Now they not have the heart disease rates that they had now. So it's something that's probably contributory, but not the only thing necessary. Also, we have to think about how cigarettes were made. We were smoking quite abundantly for hundreds of years before the 1900s and yet again we still don't see this prevalence of heart disease.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:01:15

Nicotine is known to cause damage, and this is something that Malcolm Kendrick talks about. Is that even if it were cholesterol building up behind the walls of our arteries, they can't physically get there unless there's a physical break in the barrier. There's some sort of damage to artery lining, and that's something that nicotine at least. When I was going through medical school, we were taught that nicotine can directly damage and cause abrasions and breaks and cuts in the artery lining of our arteries, and so that's something. But we should have seen that going on for a long time. And we do look at other sort of mummified structures and they have bits of signs of atherosclerosis. Maybe they can also, because these are mummies, they could be confused with other sorts of things such as kidney failure and osteoporosis and things like that actually can show a similar sort of picture on these mummies, but they don't actually know for sure, and so we should take that with a grain of salt as well.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:02:15

But one of the things that did change in the 1900s was that how cigarettes were cured. They actually went to a chemical flu drying cure with a bunch of formaldehyde and other sorts of horrific chemicals that are absolutely carcinogenic and damaging to the body. And I remember seeing a study when I was in high school actually, where they took cancer-prone mice and they exposed them to naturally cured tobacco and then to the modern flu dried tobacco, which is much quicker process. You can get the product to market much quicker and it's less expensive. And the cancer-prone mice, given the normal cigarettes tons of cancer, atherosclerosis, peripheral vascular disease, all the rest. But the ones exposed to the smoke from the naturally cured tobacco, they got the peripheral vascular disease and the other sorts of problems, the emphysema, but they didn't get cancer, interestingly enough, and it's certainly not in the rates that the other ones did. So I think that that's also an interesting thing too, that the nasty things we're exposing ourselves to got more nasty as well.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:03:35

But there's a very strong correlation between the advent of seed oils and increased use of seed oils and heart disease Same with sugar as it goes up. It's very closely related and that was argued for decades that it was actually sugar was the main culprit. They didn't even necessarily know that Crisco was just bloody toxic, and we understand now. We ban trans fats to a large degree in most Western countries because this has been accepted as a major driver for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. That comes from plants, that's partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, and so when you cook with these seed oils it can turn some of them into trans fats and we cook with this stuff all the time. But also they cause all sorts of other problems like mitochondrial damage. Omega-6 is like linoleic acid cause direct damage to the mitochondria. So I think that that's a large part of this.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:04:39

We introduced things into our diet that we have never seen before to this extent and we got very sick. There was something called the Eberspropyrus, which is an ancient Greek or sorry, ancient Egyptian document like 4,000 years ago or so, I don't know the exact date, and they is a medical document and they describe angina and they describe diabetes and all these other sorts of modern diseases that we didn't see for thousands of years after that. The Egyptians were eating a lot of grains and they used that to make alcohol, so they had a lot of alcohol and a lot of grains. So, and obviously people drank alcohol since then. They ate grains since then, but perhaps not to the extent that the Egyptians did in this period of time, and so I think that this is in large part due to what we're eating and the seed oils that have come in, the added sugars that have come in. You know just the rest of the exposures to our bodies that we're not used to Alcohol. We sort of always been drinking, sort of always been smoking, but the cigarettes have changed, we're adding sugar to all the drinks and you know, there's massive sort of increases in all these other things. So these are all going to be contributory, but the other things have just pushed us over the edge to this massive increase in chronic disease.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:06:10

And you know, some of these things are protective, like there was, you know, there's damn it.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:06:17

I'm forgetting what it was, it was so long ago that I saw this, but there's, there are chemicals basically in the body that have been shown to cause damage to the artery lining and basically they get sucked up by a lot of the B vitamins and so, like you know, b12 and Bole8 and things like that.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:06:38

And so you know, one researcher that my dad knew when he was talking about this, said that or maybe yeah, not talking to you, but seeing a presentation of his and he said that that you know we don't have any human models clinically proving all these sorts of stuff, but you know this is this is likely. You get this damage to artery lining and this is how this stuff builds up, and this stuff is known to damage artery lining, and these B vitamins, like B12 and so on, will just mop these suckers up, and so you know it's cheap, it's easy to get, you know, might as well, just make sure you have enough of it, it's not going to hurt. When we started replacing meat with these other sort of products and we're losing out on the B vitamins, we're getting slightly more and more malnourished. Well, it could be that that we're not able to soak up and block out these different sorts of molecules Homocysteine things like that.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:07:41

I was going to say that Homocysteine goes up if you B12, bole8, riboflavin deficient, so it makes. I'm pretty sure it was homocysteine that this guy was talking about.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:07:48

It makes complete sense that if you're, you know, chronically vitamin B deficient, you're going to increase your risk of developing atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The endothelial damage point is so important and the reason is because and Malcolm, and Malcolm Kendrick spelt that out in his book is because it's what I believe and you believe is actually behind the disease process of atherosclerosis and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, and not the fact that we just have the presence of apoB and LDL particles just kind of bouncing around in our blood vessel and suddenly, you know, forming a plaque in a healthy artery.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:08:23

It's just that that idea is which we make and which we've always made, and just now somehow is causing just a crazy. It doesn't make any sense.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:08:32

And I really want to reference a mutual guest that we both discussed on our podcast, which is Steven Hussie and Steven Hussie has made the point, and he's just obviously packaging work of other people too is that we have a very special type of water called exclusion zone or structured water, that forms inside the blood vessel even above the glycocalyx. So if you imagine, the endothelial cells are protected from the blood by this, these stalks of mucous like molecules called the glycocalyx. But even above that there is a zone of water that is potentiated by infrared light and by grounding and by other factors that you get in nature, and that exclusion zone water is so impenetrable that nothing bigger than a potassium ion can get through it. So to damage or to start forming plaque, first you have to disturb that exclusion zone water, then you have to start attacking the glycocalyx with things like particulates from smoking or from chronically high blood pressure or obviously from you know, like having high hypoglycemia for years on end, and then you get to the endothelial damage and once you start damaging those cells, the scab essentially forms and you get deposition of plaque, you know, year after year after year.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:09:52

So I want to really make that point because we're going to. I want to really make the emphasis that the way that atherosclerosis is kind of treated and prevented is really focusing on cholesterol. It's focusing on saturated fat still, even though there's a lack of evidence, that is, you know, part of the pathogenesis. Yet, when we're missing out this key aspect, that it's the endothelial health that is really the determinant of who's going to start laying down plaque or not, yeah, and you know, and you know, like we said, I mean the stuff.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:10:28

It doesn't make sense in any other sort of way. You know, we say that, that this is cholesterol, like you said. You know, the percentage of population that is familial has familial hypercholesterolemia is the same now as it was 100 years ago, 200 years ago or you know, even 50 years ago, when the rates were different. 100 years before that it was very different and and yet we had all these people with familial hypercholesterolemia that would have had very high levels of LDL. Why would we make LDL if LDL was just toxic to us? That doesn't make sense. You know that would have been bred out of this species long ago unless it conferred more benefit than harm. But if it's just causing us to just get sick and die, that doesn't make any sense. And if we're eating our natural die for two million years and that somehow is making this worse and we're getting sick and we're dying because of that, that we would have A adapted to this, because the people that would have survived better and lived longer would have been the ones surviving, just like the European. You know, ancestors of the Europeans who had, and Samarians who had early agriculture. They've built up slow but steady, small defenses towards plant toxins and this inappropriate food. So that's exactly what would have happened if we were eating meat for millions of years and this were harmful to us, we would have started developing these adaptations. And that's the people that are just they're just flat out science deniers. They're just facts deniers that this is how biology works, that you know it's. The immutable law of biology is that of adaptation. Life adapts to pressures in the system or they die. That is what happens. And so we were more than adapted to eating meat, because that's what we've always been eating.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:12:12

And then I remember Simon Hill made the sort of insane argument that that, you know, just because people have been eating meat for millions of years doesn't mean that it's good for us, and it's like well, it does. Actually, that's exactly what it means. And so he was saying, oh well, you don't know, these people have been, you know, could have been dying in their 30s. All they had to do is reproduce. They just, you know, have kids at 14, and they just die off as, like someone has to raise the kid, jackass, have to actually get that kid up to adulthood, they're just going to die of exposure. And and then it actually does confer benefit to have multi generational families, and in fact, that's what we see in these hunter gatherer populations, these multi generational families.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:12:52

And and also, you know, the idea that everyone was just dying of heart disease and cancer and diabetes. There's no evidence of that. There's no evidence. And so I point that out.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:13:03

And you know, instead of actually, you know, trying to discuss it with me, he tries to make a slam video about this and saying, oh, I never said that I mean they're dying of, you know, getting killed by tigers and dying of his famines and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I never said that they, they died of chronic disease. Like, no, that that's literally exactly what you said, because you said that that meat eating that way causes chronic disease. It causes heart disease, cancer, diabetes, auto immunity.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:13:32

You said that and we're saying, okay, but these people have been doing that for two million years, nearly exclusively, especially during the ice ages. And what about that? Oh well, they didn't have to be healthy, they could have just made it to reproduction age, okay, and then they were dying of these chronic diseases. That is what you are saying, that is the argument that you're saying, and there was zero evidence of that. In fact, there was evidence to the contrary of that. We don't see any signs of degradation and degeneration in the fossil record. These things, bastards, were healthy as hell. They're much taller, much healthier, much bigger brains, much better teeth, certainly much bigger brain than the people making that argument against it.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:14:07

So it's, I mean it is just denial at this point. Yeah, and I'm really glad you brought up and Simon Hill, because for my listeners he's a vegan diet influencer who is really pushing, who's not even vegan by the way.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:14:22

Okay, he's a vegan influencer who is not vegan. He eats eggs and he talks about how he likes eating shellfish and seafood and things like that. Okay, and who knows what else. I mean he could be completely full of it and just eat meat all the time.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:14:35

The reason why this is relevant is because he's got such a large platform and a very, very large audience and he's advocating for and pushing narratives that I believe are harmful, and one of them that he talked about recently was that and he said, don't, the dietary guidelines aren't correct, the dietary guidelines are appropriate, it's just that people are not following them.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:14:59

And he's quoting some, you know, low quality studies that essentially are trying to gaslight people and gaslight the population into and believing or thinking that, you know, you just haven't dieted hard enough, you haven't eaten enough serves of whole grains, you haven't eaten, you know your Mediterranean diet enough. But really it's a very, very disingenuous position and, having treated patients with type two diabetes in my clinic as a general practice doctor and they are people do exactly what they tell you, especially the older people that, and you'd know the same in your functional medicine practice People have listened to these low fat, high carb, cetol dietary message for the past 50 years and they have developed type two diabetes, obesity, metabolic disease, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease as, in part, a large part, because of their follow these dietary guidelines. So to blame people that they haven't followed them and that's why you know disease is still prevalent, is completely disingenuous.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:16:03

It's essentially victim blaming, and what I mean you just add it to the list of narratives that Simon is pushing.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:16:12

That is simply not correct, and it's it's not leading us to a healthier position at all, collectively as society, yeah well, it's also pretty room temperature IQ sort of thought, because the thing is is that, even if, even if only 9% of people are following the guidelines, the society at large has been influenced by the guidelines and has moved towards the guidelines, and that's what the consumption data shows. We've been eating less red meat, less fat, less cholesterol, more fruits and vegetables, more heart healthy grains, more polyunsaturated heart healthy fats and more sugar as well, because everything tastes disgusting now and so you have to add sugar to everything. And so, whether or not they're doing exactly what Simon Hill wants, they are moving in that direction. More people are eating more plant based, more people are eating less meat, less red meat Again, chicken has replaced a lot of the red meat that has come out, but less fat, less cholesterol. So they're moving towards the guidelines. They have been influenced by the guidelines for eating less of these so called heart unhealthy things and more of the so called heart healthy things, and our hearts have gotten worse and we're taking stands and we're taking drugs, all to lower cholesterol, and yet first time heart attacks are still going up. So you know that it's not. It's not very intelligent, and I think the thing is it's not honest, because these are the same tired sayings, it's the same arguments by the same people.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:17:41

I even got into it with Stan Efferding, who was just I mean guys, I'm mouth breather, I mean the guys though I was only accomplished anything through rampant steroid abuse, and you know. And then he admits it, you know. And the thing is, the guy was like 19, went to college, couldn't put on a muscle, couldn't do anything, found that he had, you know, that he wasn't making much testosterone. So we went on TRT as a 19 year old and then said, hey, this is fun if I take 20 times as much as I should. And so his body was not geared up to actually be successful in any physical endeavor and so any, any sort of physical accomplishment the man has made are not his own. I'm sorry, but they're not. And but he's been saying the same thing. This guy has something called a vertical diet where he's been telling people eat steak and eggs, steak and eggs, steak and eggs, steak and eggs, which is a major bodybuilder diet, a lot of steak and eggs.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:18:33

And this guy's been saying that for years, he's been doing that himself, and now he's using the exact same arguments that that that you have quoted from Simon Hill. He literally said that same thing to me the other day. And you know, exact same things. Exact same things about well, the age adjusted, mortality rates and blah, blah, blah. Like, first of all, anytime you adjust anything, you're not using the true data. You've changed and altered the data. So anytime someone says, oh, I'd use this age adjusted, instantly you know it's, it's, it's not accurate, but you know he's using these exact same arguments. So I don't know if stands maybe got, maybe got a game changer or something like that, and it's now going going crazy vegan, I don't know.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:19:18

But you know people are listening and they are following the guidelines and they're or at least they're, they're going towards that. The problem is you go, you eat the guidelines and you get sick and you feel like crap, all right. So let's see the people. Okay, it's only 9% of people are following the guidelines. What's their health like? Right? Has anyone looked at that? Because 9% of Americans have type 2 diabetes. Is it that 9%, you know? And that accounts for 75% of the Medicare costs. So you know, maybe that's not a good thing, that that as much as 9% of people are following the guidelines is probably a very bad thing. But everyone else has has moved towards that, and that's, that's a very bad thing.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:20:02

You know, like you say, you know, when I have patients like they, they, they come to me and say like I've tried this, I've tried this, I've tried this, I've tried this and nothing works. And you get the you know the victim blamers like you say like no, dahlsky and Lane Norton, they just say like, oh, well, if you're, if you're, if you're in a calorie deficit, then you're just going to lose weight. And they're like well, I'm not eating and I'm just, I'm still gaining weight, I'm almost not eating anything. And I had a guy who was basically eating nothing and he was still putting on weight. And he lost weight initially and then it plateaued off and then he was like, started putting on weight.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:20:37

Anything the guy ate, you just put on weight. Like what the hell is going on? Because you kill your metabolism. Your body thinks you're in a famine, and and fast, and and starving, and so it slows down your metabolism less coming in, less going out, that's all there is to it. And so you know, and so Nahlsky and and Lane Norton will say like, oh, if you're saying you're in a calorie deficit but you're not losing weight. You're just a liar.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:20:58

No you're just an idiot and you haven't actually haven't had treated real patients, like a doctor.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:21:03

He's obviously very leptin resistant and and if he he could, he would exactly because he has no understanding of the the fact that these are profound hormonal shifts that are occurring in the that are causing weight loss resistance.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:21:17

Yeah Well, but also I mean, I mean, this is this is this is very hormonal. It's very wrapped up in hormones such as leptin, but also insulin. Insulin is the fat storage hormone. It does other things too, but it does store fat. We have type one diabetics who don't produce any insulin. They can't put on any fat, they waste away until they die.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:21:35

And then you have people that have insulin, omas that secrete massive amounts of insulin and it doesn't matter what they eat, get enormously obese very quick, and so you know that is what insulin does. And so if you're eating 2000 calories a day worth of high carbohydrate, high insulinogenic food, you are going to get a different response than you eat 2000 calories of meat and fat. Right, it's just two different things. You have completely different hormonal responses. But you know you, you and I see these patients and you know I put them on a high fat, meat based diet, and I'm sure you've done the same thing too. Diabetes goes away, autoimmune diseases go away, blood pressure issues go away, weight goes away, leptin comes down, insulin comes down, blood sugar comes down and normalizes, and then the weight starts dropping off and they start healing themselves from the inside out. Thyroid starts improving, testosterone levels increased and a 72 year old man tripled his testosterone and got to the level of a 25 year old and he said you're just bouncing off the walls. He just says like, oh, I just, I just feel so good, I feel like a teenager again. So you know, these are major, major major recoveries that people are having.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:22:45

And this is not, these are not one-offs, these are not anecdotes. This is every single damn time that someone adopts these lifestyle changes. And so, you know, a theory is only as good as what it's able to predict. And these people are saying, oh, calorie deficit, and you'll get where you want to go. Well, they did it and it didn't work. Liars, they're just liars. No, your idea was dumb and it needs to go away. But you know, we say that, look, if you eat this exact way, these are going to be your exact results. So we'll call it on you. I can see all your bloods. This is what, this is how your bloods are going to look in three months if you stick to this. And that's what happens. So you know, it's just, it's just a simple matter of hubris and yeah.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:23:25

And let's get to another, one of kind of Simon Hill's bad takes, which essentially is also a bad take of the entire preventative cardiology establishment, which is that you've had a patient that you've just described, anthony. Everything is going in the right direction on a blood-buy marker point of view, except apoB. So apoB is, you know, a marker of it's a cholesterol, it's an LDL type, it's a lipoprotein that kind of tags these lipoproteins. So the narrative is that, for to prevent atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which we've just spent an hour talking about that, we need to lower that number to an arbitrary 70, 80 US decim, decim decimals per arbitrary, whatever the US unit is.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:24:15

In Australia we use millimole. The point is and that argument is used by both this, the centralized preventative cardiologists, and guys like Simon Hill who are saying that we should not eat any forms of animal-derived saturated fats, we should predominantly eat, you know, mono-, unsaturated and polyunsaturated plant-derived oils. So to me, again it's it doesn't make any sense if every biomarker is going in the right direction, yet in ZOM patients, total cholesterol, ldl, apob goes up. So should we treat them with a statin for primary prevention or based on one number? I mean, it just doesn't make any sense to me.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:24:58

Yeah Well, and the thing is too what does statin? How does statins treat LDL cholesterol? It stops and prevents your body from making large-point LDL molecules. It doesn't even get rid of the SDLDL and other damaged LDL molecules, which might be a benefit to some people. But this is just shifting the goalposts. They lose on every single front. This has been a losing argument since the 1950s, and so every time something comes up, there's just a fudge factor. They just say, okay, well, no, there's this other thing. Oh, there's this other thing. Now there's this other thing.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:25:35

The fact of the matter is, you go to the genesis of this. This was not brought about by any serious scientists. We say there was Ancel Keys, but it wasn't Ancel Keys. It was the sugar companies paying Ancel Keys to say this. So there wasn't someone who said hey, look, I think this is what this is and doing that honestly it was a sugar company is going shit. There's research coming out showing a direct relationship between sugar consumption and heart disease. We need to cover this up. And so they paid off multiple professors such as Ancel Keys and a number from Harvard to falsify data and publish fraudulent studies to make it appear as if cholesterol caused heart disease, when it's much more likely to be sugar, and to exonerate sugar and say that it was safe. And one of those professors was named head of the USDA. He was the one who authored and published the USDA declaration saying that cholesterol caused heart disease. That's actually, in fact, crease cholesterol. Stop eating both. This is not up for debate.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:26:27

Simon Hill even wrote about this in his book. This is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2016, the actual internal memos from the Sugar Research Foundation. So this is a fact and Simon even knows this. And then he goes on to say oh yeah, sugar companies blamed cholesterol, and I think that sugar is bad, but cholesterol is still bad too. Hold on a second. You documented out how this was founded as a scam in the first place, and now you're trying to say that yes, it was a scam and we shouldn't have taken the blame off sugar. Sugar is still bad, but cholesterol is still bad too. That makes no sense either. So the thing is, they blamed total cholesterol. That was wrong.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:27:16

The Framingham study actually showed an inverse relationship between total cholesterol and cardiovascular mortality rate. Even though the AHA reported it falsely reported it two years later, showing the opposite. And that's what I was taught in medical school. I don't know if you were taught the same, but they specifically talked about the Framingham study that more cholesterol equals more cardiovascular mortality, and that's not what the data actually showed. The data showed an inverse relationship, a protective mechanism between cholesterol or protective association between total cholesterol and cardiovascular mortality rate. And then they said, okay, well, it's not total cholesterol.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:27:49

There's multiple different kinds of cholesterol HDL is good, ldl is bad, so it's good cholesterol, bad cholesterol. So then they shifted over to LDL cholesterol. Okay, so they're doing that for a while. And then people realize, oh crap, there's over a hundred different kinds of LDL cholesterol and some of them are good, maybe some of them are bad. And so now you know, okay, sdldl, okay, how do you get SDLDL? Hyperglycemia, alcohol, seed oil, like, okay, we actually want to protect those things.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:28:15

And I was like, oh, applebee, and that now that's the problem. It's just nonsense. It was crap then, it's crap now, and they're just trying to shift and jump around. The thing is, you just have to stop engaging them. You just have to stop letting them, you know, enact these red herring arguments. This says, okay, well, this was, this was crap from beginning. It's crap now and that's the end of it. Oh, but Applebee? No, we're not doing this anymore. Stop, it's done. We had Applebee in the 1800s. We had no heart disease then. To speak of All right, it's done. This is over now.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:28:46

The Journal of the American Medical Association published in 2020, a massive literature review with randomized controlled trials, meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials and others. You know top tier level one evidence and they found that there was no association between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular disease. None, none. So you can't prove causation from association. And so you know, regardless of you know our colleague, dr Peter Atia, who says that you know it is, it is proven. Anybody who understands, you know, math and statistics, knows that this is causative. There is no single causative study between showing causation between cholesterol and heart disease. None, there are association, associative studies and that's it.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:29:34

We talked to, you know, friend of ours, nick Norwitz, whose PhD in biochemistry from Oxford, finishing his MD from Harvard and worked with Dave Feldman on the lean mass hypersponder, showing that people have massively well to their eyes, massively elevated LDL cholesterol. I think it's right where it's supposed to be. They don't develop heart disease. These people have been, you know, had very elevated LDL cholesterol for an average of 4.7 years and no progression in their atherosclerosis. In fact, the trend was to go down and reverse their atherosclerosis in comparison to the Miami Heart Study cohort, right? So it's just wrong, it's just false.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:30:20

I mentioned to Nick about, about Peter Atia and how there's no causative studies. He was saying, well, you know, sort of this cascade of causation, you need to be sufficient and necessary, right, and that's what gets causation. So, okay, it's, it's necessary, but is it? But it's not necessarily sufficient. I don't think it's both. You know we have. I don't think it's either. I don't think it has anything to do with heart disease. It was a con from the beginning. And so you know we have.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:30:55

We have studies with 160,000 patients, 140,000 patients having myocardial infarctions in America and literally half have low normal LDL cholesterol. So it's not even associated. It's not even, you know, necessary and certainly not sufficient. So you can have low LDL and still get heart disease, heart attacks, strokes. And in fact their studies that show that there's an inverse relationships, so with saturated fat, especially so that that Journal of American College of Cardiology paper showed no association, which shows that there's no causation, because you have to have an association to have causation. They showed an inverse association between saturated fat intake and stroke rate. So more saturated fat people are eating, the lower their stroke rate, and the less saturated fat they're eating, the higher their stroke rate.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:31:46

So it's not necessary or sufficient. This stuff is not related. So there's no sort of causation whatsoever. There are no studies that show causation and the fact of the matter is this is just. You know, I mean, we don't even need any of this.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:32:02

We know this was a con at the beginning. There was no evidence to support the cholesterol heart hypothesis in the beginning and there's no evidence to support it now. There's a lot of evidence to the contrary. We've all had. We've had the exact same numbers of familial hypercholesterolemia cases in the 1800s that we did today in the 17 and 16 and 15 and 14 and all the rest. We were eating more meat at the time. We had a lot of people that were eating a lot of meat, a lot of fat and presumably would have had high Applebee, high LDL. And yet again, heart disease did not become a major killer until the 20th century. It doesn't matter what anybody says.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:32:42

We have very strong medical records and data and census data. We have death records. We have extremely detailed census data going back even to the mid 20th century. They had deaths by diseases. They had deaths across the country, major killers across the country. They had it in each state, in each major city, in each state, major cities across America. They had a differentiated between gender, that differentiated between ethnicity. They had a differentiated between location in cities. I mean this is incredibly detailed census data, incredibly detailed medical data and mortality records and obituary records extremely detailed. This stuff doesn't exist in the 1800s, I'm sorry, and so you know. You can't just say, oh, we just didn't notice it. That is a cop out and is a complete and unrecognizable.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:33:36

The reason why this is so important is because people are continuing to be prescribed medications like statins for primary prevention which there is so little really good quality longevity mortality data for. And it's really hinging on these, the premises of the people that we've mentioned. You know Dr Peter Atea, and he's referencing these cardiology kind of thought leaders or professors who think it's a good idea to lower apoB to that of an infant and if we get everyone's apoBeta in the infantile level then you know heart disease disappears. But it is. It just doesn't make sense based on what we've just talked about and the fact, the complete ignorance of this endothelial damage, etiology of heart disease, which is clearly what is got, is quite obviously, if you delve into this holistically, what is going on. And I don't think any of these cardiologists can describe the thrombotic hypothesis in any coherent way. They don't understand the exclusions on water that's forming on the endothelial layer at all.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:34:39

And then to take a statin a statin is actually a mitochondrial toxin. That that is not my opinion. That is published literature that there are multiple pathways by which HMGO, co a reductase, these essentially micro toxins are interfering with mitochondrial function. And if we go back to what I said earlier, which is that these chronic diseases are diseases of mitochondrial failure. It therefore becomes obvious that if you take a long term statin therapy you might increase your risk of cognitive problems like Alzheimer's disease. And we have challenge and re challenge trials which show that cognitive outcomes worsened with when you added us out of the statin and then remove the statin in people with underlying wild cognitive impairment.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:35:25

So to see what Peter Ateer and his colleagues are saying is to me, you know, grand scale yetrogenic heart, because it just doesn't, doesn't make sense. And to add another facet onto this, one of Ateer's mentors is Dr Thomas Dayspring, who is a career lipidologist and he's got a list of pharmaceutical kind of conflicts of interest and list of honor area and affiliation with pharmaceutical industry. You know, as long as, as long as you're on, and it makes sense that if someone is only looking within this narrow beam of preventative cardiology, they're not looking at all these other outcomes and they're being having, had you know, financial conflicts of interest that they're going to continue to recommend statin therapy to lower apoB, even if someone's metabolically healthy, you know, even with all these other lifestyle practices in place. So to me it's baffling, but more than anything it's harmful for people who are, you know, taking this advice and then getting sick.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:36:35

Yeah, well, it's also. It's also how? How can we trust the? You know, how well can we trust the apoB test in the first place? You know, because the apoB is, it shows up on healthy cholesterol molecules as well, and so you know we're taking the good in with the bad and we're saying it's all bad, so you can't actually do that. It's not, it's not a sufficient test. Even if it were, in certain circumstances, damaging, harmful and atherogenic, that test that we, you know we test for apoB is inaccurate because we see it on on healthy cholesterol molecules as well, and so it's simply not a reasonable test to look for.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:37:17

You know one thing that that Dr Atia said is that all if you look at the familial hypercholesterolemia data like, well, she's just clear, it's clear as day. You know, cholesterol goes up, heart disease goes up. Okay, same numbers of familial hypercholesterolemia in the 1800s and yet no right. So again. So that doesn't make sense. But also what you know some, what Dr David Diamond pointed out in some of his lectures, was that there are studies that have actually shown that people with FH familial hypercholesterolemia that they are actually genetically predisposed to have clotting disorders, which goes exactly in the clots thick inside of things. You get damaged, you get clotting, and this is why aspirin is actually protective is because you get damage, you get a clot, but it's not going to be as big of a clot if you have aspirin on board right, and so they're more likely to have clotting disorders. You have people that have clotting disorders that are more likely to have strokes and other sorts of thrombus and that sort of etiology affecting their body. And so when you look at studies that separate out the two of people that just have the cholesterol part between or, and then separate out the ones that have the clotting and the high cholesterol, it's only the group that has high cholesterol and clotting that get the increased rates of heart disease in the early decades, and then after 50, it ends up matching the normal population. And so the high cholesterol group, without the clotting disorder, they had exactly the same rates of heart disease as the rest of the population.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:39:02

This is very straightforward stuff, and so is, oh my God, this proves everything. You're just not looking close enough, and you know, and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit the observed phenomena right, which is that we weren't seeing these deaths in this numbers in the 1800s. Okay, so why are we seeing it now? Right that the, that cholesterol level was always there? Why wasn't it causing disease? Something else is happening.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:39:30

You know Einstein did this to you prove something, prove something mathematically. But then he would go and look for observations and then he sort of look and say, like Nope, that goes against what the observed phenomena must have been. Wrong. Right, because he clearly didn't know all the variables, clearly didn't know everything was going on. Okay, well, we have to observe more and try to figure things out. You can't just say, oh, here's this idea and it fits this principle, never looking again. If it doesn't fit with experiment, if it doesn't fit with the observed phenomena, it's wrong. It doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter the letters behind your name, it doesn't matter where those letters came from, it's wrong. And so you have to have some humility here. You have to have some insight and introspection and understand that you know, if these things don't agree with the world around you, the world isn't the one that's wrong, it's you.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:40:24

Yeah, there's. It's so much to say there and we've really laid it out really eloquently, anthony. So thank you, I think this has been a valuable discussion for people to try and conceptualize this idea of plus role and the causes of heart disease and and and I'll just make the you know one final point that you know if, if we really understand what what we're saying, the listener is that anything that's disrupting that blood vessel health is going to lead to clotting. So looking after endothelial health is is the prime strategy if we're trying to to maintain or prevent the development of heart disease and and, obviously, maintaining insulin sensitivity. Eating a low carb diet is is does that as well as practices that preserve that exclusion zone, water on the on the inside lining of the endothelium, and that's where the ancestral practice, like grounding, the fact that you know, ancestors were grounded, they that built the exclusion zone in that endothelium, the fact that they're exposed to sunlight they had infrared light from the sun. They're outside.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:41:27

So you know, I think that the the having high total cholesterol or high apoB, in the context of insulin resistance, in the context of visceral fat, in the context of an indoor environment where you never get out in the sun, you never get ultraviolet A light, you never build nitric oxide, you never build that exclusion zone. That is when apoB high apoB and high total cholesterol and high LDL is going to be problematic because you're doing everything wrong. You're doing everything in the way that it wasn't supposed to be done ancestrally. So I don't want people to get the wrong message. What we're saying is that if you have a high apoB, don't, don't ignore it If you're doing everything wrong. But if you're doing everything right, if you're insulin sensitive, if you're physically active, if you're getting that morning sun, if you're grounded, if you're doing everything to promote endothelial health and you're living an ancestral type practice you're doing those ancestral practices then you shouldn't be taking a statin for primary prevention because there's no evidence that's going to help you and it's probably going to harm you.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:42:26

Yeah, well, I mean, the thing is too, is that, even even if you've had a heart attack, according to the, the statin company's own literature and you know there's there's never going to, is there? No product is ever going to look rosier than in the study that the company who made it pays for. You know, so they pay for a study. It's going to look. That's as good as that product ever going to look. And so in the, in the statin company's own literature, if you've had a heart attack and you take statins every single day for the rest of your life and for at least five years, then you'll increase your life expectancy. So that's great. You'll increase your life expectancy, but only by five days, right? So that's their literature, showing that there's only increases by five days. And I've seen people try to lie and things like that and really mislead people, which I think is is is malpractice where they say, oh, statins extend life by decades. That's a flat out lie. There is zero evidence of that. In fact, the statin company's own evidence shows it's five days If you've had a heart attack. If you have not had a heart attack, it does not extend life. So really, what is the benefit that we're getting here Some people that still prescribe statins but don't believe that it's helpful because of this, of the cholesterol lowering effect. I think that there's some sort of anti-inflammatory sort of effect similar to aspirin that may be beneficial potentially in clotting right, but the the this cholesterol lowering effects is not necessarily the the benefit there. And how much benefit is there? It's not all that much unless you've had a heart attack. And then it's five days, which is still not all that much. So again, cholesterol was never the problem in the first place, and I think that it it behooves us to is to basically just throw that out and not engage anymore and say it's like well, we should take a statin because you want to lower your cholesterol. We never needed to lower our cholesterol, cholesterol was never a thing, so why would you lower it? You know, that's where I stop with that. You know. And you can then go on to say, well, you know, the statin company's own data shows that it's really not doing too much for you, especially if you haven't had a heart attack. It's not doing anything for you if you haven't had a heart attack, and so and that perfectly falls in line with the fact that cholesterol is not the problem. I mean if, if cholesterol were necessary and sufficient, if it were the cause, then if you remove that cause, the effect would go away. But it's not. We're lowering cholesterol, we're reducing saturated fat, we've reduced total cholesterol. We've reduced. We've been taking these statins and other medications to reduce our cholesterol. We're eating more fiber and grains to lower our cholesterol, more and more and more and more and more.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:44:57

And yet, first time, heart attacks are increasing in prevalence. So you know that's obviously not doing so well. So you do all these sorts of things and heart attacks continue. You have 50% of people getting heart attacks have low cholesterol, low quote unquote low LDL cholesterol, probably lower than I would say that you want to. There was one study that followed up 160,000 patients for three years the ones that, of course, because they're told to lower your cholesterol even more or lower, lower, lower it. And so the people that kept their cholesterol low or lowered it from high, they were twice as likely to have died in those three years of follow up.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:45:32

So why are we doing this again? And so there's no sort of connection. You know that's that's. There's no justification to treat that right and it was predicated on a lie. So we need to throw that out immediately in any case. And so you know, if we're reducing cholesterol, they keep saying, if you keep having heart attacks, you can keep lowering your cholesterol. There is no bottom number on your cholesterol, I bet, because you're the one selling us the drugs to do that, and so I'm sure you're more than happy for us to, you know, to take these drugs into an early grade. And so, oh, you lower your cholesterol and you have a heart attack. Okay, lower it more, have another heart attack, lower it more, have a heart attack. At what point are you going to realize it's not the damn cholesterol and that you're spinning your wheels and you're not addressing the fundamental root cause and you're likely hurting yourself?

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:46:24

Yeah, on that note, anthony, thank you for a very, very in-depth discussion on the causes of heart disease and I hope the listeners can take this away and really think about how they can best optimize their health and prevent heart disease based on what we've discussed and what we've discussed. So, and I'll make one last point, which is I'm extremely excited that we to announce that in April, we will be doing a live event in Melbourne, australia, in Victoria, on the 21st it's a Sunday. We have booked out 2075 Reed Street, which is an amazing venue in North Fitzroy. So, anthony, you're going to be speaking there, I'm going to be speaking there, dr Pran Yoganathan, dr Jalal Khan, charlie Allen at Natalie West. We're going to have an amazing lineup of speakers and we're going to be delivering this type of discourse for people live in person.

Dr Max Gulhane: 1:47:20

So just wanted to let everyone know that and to buy a ticket to see Anthony and see me and see everyone speak live in person. So, yeah, thank you, anthony, for coming on, thank you for sharing your wisdom and having this discussion. I think it's very, very valuable. So we will talk again soon. So thanks again.

Dr Anthony Chaffee: 1:47:42

Not a problem. Thank you, Matt, and looking forward to seeing you in April and looking forward to seeing everyone else who's able to make it looking. It should be a very good event. Last year was awesome and so this year will be great, I'm sure, as well.