The MEN1 Mosaic

#52 - “Patients Are Getting Worse, Not Better” – But Why? (UK Nurse & Carnivore Lifestyle Advocate)

• Lizzie Dunn • Season 2 • Episode 2

Share episode

"The realm of nutrition science is probably the last place you should look." Season 2, Episode 2

Lucy Fabbri—UK nurse and carnivore health advocate—shares how witnessing the realities of modern healthcare pushed her to rethink everything she knew about nutrition. From chasing blood sugars with insulin to being told patients with type 2 diabetes should eat more carbs, she began asking: what if everything we've been told is wrong?

In this episode:
• Why so-called 'healthy' porridge could be the worst way to start the day
• How humans evolved eating animal protein, making plant-diets non-sensical
• How a Carnivore diet provides all essential nutrients
• The biased and flawed evidence behind our food pyramid & Eat Well Plate
• How hospitals are making patients more unwell without realising it

About Our Guest
Lucy Fabbri is a UK-based registered nurse and carnivore health advocate. After personal struggles with fatigue and conventional dietary advice, she turned to a meat-based diet—and saw her health transform. She now helps others do the same through her Fuelled For Life programme, empowering people to reclaim their health through a species-appropriate, nutrient-dense way of eating.
Download Lucy’s free e-book here

Are you sure MEN1 can’t be influenced?
When I stopped just 'settling' for symptom management, I began carving a path to somewhere I believed impossible in MEN1: symptom-free, surgery-free, and medication-free. If you’re curious to see how I’m making this happen, join my community here.

Disclaimer
I share my personal experience as a MEN1 patient. Nothing in this episode, including the opinions of my guests, is intended as medical or holistic advice. Please consult a qualified professional before making changes to your care.

If you had told me 10 years ago that I was ever going to experiment on the Carnivore diet, I'd have said you were absolutely insane because it looks restrictive, unhealthy, and not something I'd wanna get into. Well, only a year ago I actually did an experiment on the carnivore diet and the health results were just fascinating, so that's why today I've invited on my guest, Lucy, a registered nurse in the UK and a carnivore health advocate to share her own experience of starting the carnivore diet, why it is that a predominantly meat-based diet is potentially so much more healthy for most people than one that is predominantly carbohydrate or plant-based, how this has worked with patients on the ward and the science behind the carnivore diet, that actually contradicts a lot of what we've been learning from the age of about five when we were this big. It's such a fascinating episode, and I am so excited to be able to share with you Lucy's work, so enjoy.

 ​ Lucy, people see the carnivore diet as an extreme diet because it's only meat and eggs. I know there's variations of a Carnivore diet. But the pure Carnivore diet is quite literally meat and eggs.

When people talk about extreme diets and look at Carnivore, they think, what? That's so restrictive. You just have to think restrictive in what way? Because what are you getting in a Carnivore diet? You are getting every single nutrient you need in the proportions that you need it. Every day and every meal. That doesn't actually seem very restrictive to me. It actually seems very abundant. For a lot of people, they have a toxicity issue. Removing the toxin and then supplying the medicine, then that can create a species appropriate environment in which your body can have a species appropriate response and be healthy. I also wouldn't call that restrictive. Being healthy is a very freeing experience. That's what Carnivore Diet could potentially do for some people.

So in that case, the eat-well plate and the food pyramid that I had in my science textbook when I was like 12 is then wrong?

In my opinion yes, it is absolutely wrong and the history behind it is fascinating and very disturbing. I dunno if you're aware of how these guidelines came about, but to sum it up, they are the product of extremely flawed and biased science released by Ancel Keys and the American Heart Association. They are based off the causative claim that increasing dietary saturated fat intake increases cholesterol in the body, and this cholesterol is then the cause of atherosclerosis, of plaque buildup within arteries and thus heart attacks. But the very important mistake made here is that it's near impossible to determine causation from nutritional research and nutritional science to make a causative claim that a specific food is causing a specific outcome. We would have to get two genetically identical people to control the genetic variation and the confounding variables within genetics, lock them in a metabolic lab from birth their entire lives, treat them exactly the same, every single aspect of their lives except the one causative variable that you're trying to measure. So give one saturated fat and the other one not, and then test them over their entire lives. If you can, by some unethical miracle, manage to do that, you'll have a sample size of two people, so then you'd have to repeat that many times to get enough data to then make a claim that you can generalize to a wider population. Hopefully you could see that is impossible and unethical and never gonna happen, and it didn't happen when these claims came out about saturated fat and why they then decided that we should be eating a low fat, high carbohydrate plant-based diet, 'cause that's what the food pyramid is. To your question, no, I do not think these are correct, and if I was the right one it would look a little bit different. 

It's quite dangerous in a way and it is holding us back. Personally, if you are coming up with a question of, okay, what shall I eat? What's the most appropriate food for humans? Looking in the realm of nutrition science is probably the last place you should look.

When I first found you on Instagram you were titled as That Carnivore Nurse. I wanted to find out how you found that helps you in your own health, but also in your community and the patients that you work with.

I went through a very restrictive period of eating as a teenager. I'd just gone to uni, I was eating anything I wanted. Lots of junk, lots of ultra-processed food, lots of alcohol. I noticed that I gained a small amount of weight and that really stressed me out. My teenage, insecure mind just was like that's it. I need to make sure this doesn't happen and it became very toxic, very restricted relationship with food. It was about a five month period, but it left me very malnourished, very underweight. I lost a lot of fat and a lot of muscle. I was in a bad way. I realized that something needed to change. I had the question, okay, what should I feed myself? How do I feel better? What's the healthiest thing I can put in my body? That sent me down the nutrition rabbit hole. Of course, naturally I went to plants, whole foods, vegetables. I thought these were the most important things and the healthiest things I could put in my body because that's what we were told. So I was eating the rainbow and I felt slightly better because I was just eating more food. I just needed more of anything. But it wasn't long until I was realizing that my morning porridge, an apple, flax seeds, chia seeds, almonds, world's healthiest breakfast that I thought I was very proud of myself. But I would eat this and I would be falling asleep about an hour later my eyes would be heavy, and I'd be nodding off at my desk. I was just thinking, why is this happening? This doesn't make sense. I'm having world healthiest breakfast. Whilst this was all going on, I was training to be a nurse and I was seeing a lot of chronic disease. I was seeing a lot of very unwell patients, but I wasn't seeing anyone getting better. Everyone was just being managed with medications, so that left me confused. I couldn't help but wonder, why is no one getting better and why are they even ill in the first place? From a personal point of view as well, I was also thinking that all these diseases I was seeing, the heart attacks, the strokes, the type two diabetes, I thought these must be inevitable. Like we're all gonna get ill. They're gonna come for everyone. So when I get type two diabetes, I need to know how to not have type two diabetes so I can get better. That's where my head was at the moment. I thought these things were inevitable. I had the questions again. What is causing these illnesses and how can they actually recover? At that time, I then had a placement with the diabetes nurse specialists, predominantly type two patients, and that placement left me very confused. I sat in on a lot of one-on-one consultations with the diabetes nurse specialists and the patient and the message I got was, you have type two diabetes, but that's okay. Don't worry about what you eat. Eat the carbohydrate, eat the potatoes, eat the rice, the bread, the pasta, just cover it with insulin. This is what the patients were being told. I left that very confused because in my mind, all I could think about was these patients have a body that cannot tolerate carbohydrate. Why are we not just removing the carbohydrate? Why are we trying to force this carbohydrate into a body that doesn't want it? I could not get that out of my head. What I was seeing in healthcare and then my own experience of my porridge falling to sleep, I was realizing that we are in a carbohydrate overload, our diets were potentially causing a lot of our health problems and we weren't realizing it. So that brought me to ketogenic diets, to low carbohydrate diets. I personally started eating lower carb. I got rid of the porridge and the apples, and I started eating more beef, butter, bacon, eggs, and I was feeling better, but I was still eating a lot of vegetables. I was very hung up on my vegetables. I thought they were essential and in the ketogenic world, they do involve more vegetables. That's what I was listening to and learning from. I kept going through uni, by the last year I was obsessed with this idea that diet is causing a lot of the problems we are having. I was just shocked and blown away how no one else was talking about it. It was really my baffling to me. The problem seems so apparent in my head. So I wrote my dissertation on what are the barriers and facilitators to implementing low carbohydrate diets for the treatment of adults with type two diabetes? I understood from my own personal research that people were healing from chronic diseases. Type two diabetes is a very clear example. But why had I never seen that? Why have I gone through a whole nursing degree, four years in healthcare, and I've never heard the word low carb, let alone see someone implement it and actually get some benefit from it. I wanted to research that, put it into a dissertation, send that to the uni. It was during the research that I stumbled across Dr. Paul Mason's video on fibre, which is an amazing video. He brought the idea to me that what if fibre isn't essential? What if it's not even a nutrient? What if it's an anti nutrient and we do not need it? And maybe we'd feel better without having it? That just made so much sense to me. It made so much sense. Then he introduced the Carnivore diet and this was the first time that I understood really what Carnivore diet meant. I'd heard the words before and I thought, that's crazy. Who's not eating their vegetables? We need to eat our vegetables. I was very hung up. So I ignored it, but then this video really made me understand. So I was like fine, no problem. I'll get rid of the vegetables and just eat more of the eggs, more of the beef, more of the bacon. That was always the favorite part of my meal anyway. I tried it for 30 days in my head I was gonna just commit and see what happens. I'm still doing it a year and a half later and now I'm talking about it online, on Instagram and on YouTube.

I spent a little bit of time in hospital with MEN1.  A diabetes nurse came to see me. I'm gonna state here that MEN1 and diabetes are not the same thing, however, there is some similarity in terms of having to manage blood sugar from either too much insulin or too little insulin. There was not one single mention of the diet that I was following, of the food that I was eating from day to day. I had the same experience when I saw an NHS dietician a few years later to talk about IBS symptoms. There was no mention of diet. In your opinion, how can a patient be in hospital with a pancreas related condition and not be asked about the one thing that is gonna be affecting their pancreas? 

In my opinion, I don't know. That's the thing we're coming up against. We are not addressing root causes in healthcare, and it's a huge problem because we aren't really going to be able to properly help someone until we start looking at the overall picture of what's actually going on. The real understanding that it's what we do every day that's going to affect our body the most. I see this in my practice all the time. I've given so many patients with type two diabetes ice cream and macaroni cheese for dinner, and their breakfast options are toast and cereal, roll and jam. Then I'm spend that whole day chasing their blood sugar levels with insulin. To your question, I don't even know. We're not managing patients until we are going to address the root cause. 

Do you find that you are able to help patients in the way that you actually see they need it or do you think that the structures in place are so rigid that anyone who's gonna come in with anything slightly anti-conventional is just not gonna be able to survive in that setting. 

The structures are very rigid. For good reason too, because It's for the safety of the patients.  there's a lot of people working in healthcare and we wouldn't want everyone to be unregulated going off what they think their opinions are. We need to protect the patients. But I think how I got around this is I work in orthopedic trauma, so I purposely took a job away from the medical wards. You get medical patients with type two diabetes that have fallen, have a broken hip, and they come in and you have to manage them. I've had patients with blood sugars 21 before a meal, that's very high, and I know that their next meal is going to be an ice cream, some sort of dessert, cake, custard, and some sandwich or a potato based meal. I've spoken to the kitchen staff before directly about specific patients, and I've said to them, this patient has a blood sugar of so and so. It is extremely high. It would be very inappropriate to give them a carbohydrate meal. Is there anything else? The first time I asked this to someone, he looked at me like, what? That he'd never been asked that before. No one's ever requested a low carbohydrate menu or meal option. He said, no, there's nothing. So I had to write on this patient's sheet of paper, this person has very high blood sugar. Can they please get scrambled eggs only for the next day. That's the best I could do.  That day they still had, on the menu a beef pie. So I asked 'em to scoop the beef out the pie and then just gave them the broccoli and then obviously didn't give the ice cream. The patient seemed relatively happy with that. But it's not easy. I have a very specific interest in dietary interventions for these sort of conditions, so I'm almost certain that if it was any other nurse with that situation, they do not have the appropriate understanding or training to recognize the importance of carbohydrate restriction. unfortunately, it's highly likely that patient would've then been served and ice cream and a pie and the mashed potatoes on the side. It's an uphill battle. 

It sounds very difficult because that knowledge should be not just at the forefront of the medical system, but at the forefront of patient knowledge as well.

That's a very good point as well. Why their blood sugar was so high is ' 'cause the patient was eating, their table was full of grapes which are in a situation like diabetes, definitely not a health food. Sweetened yogurts, biscuits, the Ensure drinks that dieticians prescribe to these patients, they were halfway through drinking one of those. The second ingredient in that is sugar. It's unfortunate that the miseducation and the misunderstanding is coming from every aspect of this situation, from the hospital and then also from the patient.

It is obviously a paradox as well because a hospital is somewhere that you think you would go to get better, and that's the opposite of what's happening.

All across the hospital and it's worse in other medical wards where it's very important that these patients are eating the correct foods. That's how I love to direct my information. I'm really talking to the patient and empowering them with the information that they need to help themselves. They don't need to wait on someone else to come and help them, because the most powerful things that you could do to change your life are the things that you do every day. That's not in the hands of anyone else, that's not in the hands of your doctor or in your hospital, it's what you choose to do every day. That's what makes the biggest impact.

You mentioned blood sugar shooting as high as, was it 21 or 22? 21, yeah, 21. For anyone who's not familiar with blood sugar readings or what their blood sugar should be, how does that sit in terms of a healthy reading? 

If this is someone without any health conditions, no diabetes, around four to seven, depending if you've eaten or not, or maybe you've done a lot of exercise that can increase it. But within that range is the generally considered to be the optimal. 21 is obviously three times above the higher end of optimal, so not where you want to be. 

What happens when a patient's blood sugar shoots that high? What would be the standard advice given to them? 

If you have a patient with high blood sugar, the first thing you would need to do is check their ketone levels because they are at risk of developing something called diabetic ketoacidosis, where your blood sugar is so high, it's meaning the sugar is staying in the blood and it's not entering your cells. To your cells, the energy source has stopped. So in a way, your body thinks it's starving, so it will start breaking down fat and producing ketones to account for this loss in energy, almost like a fasted state, but you're actually full of energy. Your body just can't see it. Then you are in this situation where you have high blood sugar with uncontrollably high ketones, and these can keep rising and rising and can make your blood acidotic. Ketoacidosis is a pH imbalance and that's a medical emergency. That's very serious. And that would need some, a quick intervention. You would check their ketone levels. This patient had no ketones, so she wasn't in this situation. From that point, it's very patient dependent on what their diabetic treatment plan is. This particular patient was a diet controlled diabetic but obviously even with a diet controlled diabetic, that's a very high blood sugar. So I took it to the medical team because this is my responsibility to escalate. I just told them the situation. I said, do you want me to do anything? And they said, Nope. She's diet controlled, so just leave it. And that was it. So I'm like, okay, challenge accepted, diet controlled type two diabetes with a blood sugar of 21. They don't realize who the nurse is, but I am getting this blood sugar down. So that was my job. That's when I spoke to the catering and I tried to see what else there was and gave her beef pie without the crust pie. The next time I went to check it, come down to 16, so it was working and I took all the grapes away from her table. Of course. I took the Ensure away, took all the chocolate away made sure I spoke to her directly and told her what was going on. Told her the situation. Told her that we needed to stop consuming the sugar because her blood sugar was very high and that was the best I could do in that situation. In a way, it was the optimal thing to do because she wasn't gonna eat any more sugar. But then my shift ends and I dunno what happens afterwards.

I'm sure when you started putting out content that you've had a bit of backlash. How have you stuck at what you are doing in the moments where you're like, oh my goodness, me, people are coming at me. 

Actually, it has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been totally blown away by the response I've had when I started making content. I had no goal at all about where it was gonna go. Obviously I was like, I want people to hear about Carnivore, but it wasn't much deeper than that and the response has been mind blowing. It's appears that a lot of people are desperate to have someone speak up about what's going on in healthcare to their own personal health or to the health of people that they love, that they think isn't getting appropriately treated in modern healthcare. It's been a lot of thank you for doing this, keep going, which has been very motivational. To your question, that's probably what keeps me going when I'm like, oh my God, am I gonna lose my job or something? Because I really see a necessity for a voice that's direct, clear and straightforwards. I'm gonna keep going and see what happens.

 What are the tips that you would give to someone listening back, who's like, actually this sounds like it's got, something behind it and I want to give it a go. 

If you're approaching a Carnivore diet, low carbohydrate diet or a ketogenic diet, what's important to understand is the principle of a species appropriate diet. All animals have evolved within a dietary niche. Pandas eat bamboo, koalas eat eucalyptus, cows eat grass. We understand it in these animals. We would never not give a panda bamboo. It's gonna get ill. Humans are no different. We have evolved within a very specific dietary niche that has allowed us to survive, thrive, and pass on our genes to this point. Not only have we done that, we are the apex predators. We have gone to the top of the food chain and there's no other apex predator at the top of the food chain that got there eating broccoli. I'll just say that now. So what is our dietary niche? I'm not going to go into the reasons to explain how we can infer that it's meat but it is meat. We have evolved eating meat. It is the most species appropriate food for us to have. When an animal eats its species appropriate diet, its body can have the best chance of having a species appropriate response, which is a response of health. The body wants to be healthy. It's striving all the time to be as healthy as it's able to be given the situation that it's in. The level of health that someone's able to obtain is of course, very dependent on them, their geneticsand the environment that they're placing their genetics in. Supporting that environment to be as species appropriate as possible is only gonna help you. The diet aspect of that is so pertinent because we are eating all day, every day, has such a huge impact on how we feel day to day, but also then in our long term outcomes. That's why the principles of species appropriate diet is very important when you're coming to understand why you should maybe want to eat this way. You don't have to eat this way, you don't have to do anything. We all have choice. That's what's amazing. But we can choose to eat this way.

 The fundamentals of a species appropriate diet for humans is the fatty red meat. Whether you adapt that to be ketogenic, you add things to it, you include some vegetables you include some other plant materials. What's really important for us to understand that at the base of it all, the fundamentals to a proper human diet is the animal fats and the animal proteins. It's not the starchy carbohydrate vegetables that the food pyramid have told us to do. It's the animal fats and the animal proteins because these are what provide all the essential nutrients, the fats, the amino acids, the vitamins and minerals that a human body requires to survive, that we have to consume via our diet else we can't make them ourselves and our bodies won't be able to function as optimally as it potentially could.

There're gonna be people listening back to this who are, I suppose a bit like I was when I first heard of the carnivore diet, a little bit skeptical because there's no vegetables and there's no fruit. And what about the color? We're told, eat the rainbow, a bit like you said at the beginning. If you had those doubts yourself, how did you manage them? And when other people come to you and they say, this seems so illogical to me, how do you explain that to them?

I completely understand. And I had every single one of those doubts. I went through my own like reeducation journey over a period about four years. It took me four years and a nursing degree to land myself at Carnivore. It wasn't a overnight thing at all. Trial and error. I stayed eating lots of vegetables for a long time. The vegetable thing is probably the hardest one to get over. I found the the cholesterol thing quite easy. Obviously we've been eating meat for so long. How could it be that one of the most ancient foods in our diet is now causing modern chronic disease? I never really bought into that in the first place. My family never had margarine. I always had butter as a kid. I always ate meat as a kid. I never really had that initial fear. Luckily that one was pretty easy. But that's not the case for many of, and of course, I understand, like I said with the food pyramid, we've been taught a very incorrect thing that we've taken as a scientific truth. If this is your first time hearing these sort of concepts and ideas, just a little bit of education can really go a long way. I recommend my own ebook, which is free to download. I laid out all the main, crucial bits of information that can help you understand the reasoning behind a Carnivore diet. Why you may want to experiment with it, how to understand it and realize that it's actually not as extreme as it appears. I understand it does appear extreme, but the fact that we see it as so extreme I think is quite a good representation of how far from a proper human diet we have come now that eating our most appropriate food source that's been in our human diet for longer than anything else is considered strange and dangerous. That says a lot about where we actually are currently. Other people that I recommend to look into, like we've already mentioned, Dr. Chaffee, he's got an amazing podcast, Plant Free MD. I was slightly addicted to that for a bit. I've listened to every podcast about three times. It's amazing. Paul Mason, Dr. Ken Berry, there's so many of them. That's also at the back of the ebook too.

What do you think on social media people should be aware of when it relates to food or their diet or their wellbeing, in your opinion, from what you've seen as an advocate? 

On social media, you are going to hear every single opinion from someone that really deeply believes it. If you want to hear it, if you want to find it, you're going to find it. So it's up to yourself to stay vigilant on pursuing the truth and not just pursuing maybe something that you want to hear and something that would be convenient for you to hear, because maybe in the long run that might be more damaging than good. Stay analytic, stay critical. Don't take everything at face value. It's hard because you also do want to be open. You need to be open to receiving new things and open to receiving the truth. So stay off social media as well. Stay out of what other people are trying to tell you all the time and tune into what your body is trying to tell you. Which is a hard thing to do because you're going to still have to make choices to with your body every day. Your body is talking to you. There is a degree of communication. We have completely lost that. For me, a Carnivore diet really helped me find that again, because it a species appropriate diet, a species appropriate response, it can help you really understand what your body wants, what your body needs, what it's going through, what makes you feel good and what makes you not feel good. It's a hard space to navigate. 

You give a very refreshing take on social media, which I haven't heard from many people that lands with me and I hope it lands with my listeners too.

I'm glad I can do that for you.

 Lucy, it has been such a pleasure to chat to you. For me personally, because I have followed you for a little while now and to have found a Carnivore advocate who has medical qualification but is also practicing the thing I think is so rare and it's very refreshing for me to listen to. I hope for anyone listening back to this podcast as well, you are a gold mine of wisdom. I'm gonna wish you all the best. I know you've just started a YouTube channel, which is very exciting. I'm gonna put all of Lucy's links in the description box wherever you're listening to this podcast. Definitely download her ebook because it is just fantastic and so digestible. Again, thank you very much for your time and I am already looking forward hopefully to having you back on again in the future.

It's been lovely to chat. Thank you for having me on.

 ​ What I found compelling about this episode is not necessarily the content of the carnivore diet, but the way that Lucy comes out so honestly against what is conventionally driven into society, with opinions that may well sound radical, but are helping people change their health in a way that they would never have been able to otherwise. For me, she was fascinating to listen to and I highly recommend you go and check out her ebook, Instagram page and her YouTube channel as well. If you enjoyed this episode, like, comment, hit subscribe, and if you're curious about how I've used aspects like the carnivore diet in my own healing journey with MEN1, I'm now symptom free, surgery free and medication free. Download the free guide below where I walk through the steps I'm taking in this healing process. I hope you've enjoyed the episode, and I will see you again next week with a new guest.