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The $46 Trillion Health Crisis No One's Talking About | Dr. Anthony Chaffee DSH #909
01:00:52
The $46 trillion health crisis is bigger than you think - and it's affecting every one of us. 🚨 In this eye-opening discussion, we uncover how our modern diet is fueling a massive healthcare catastrophe that's draining trillions from the global economy
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- [00:00]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And so people argue, well, then, you know, this is just the ketogenic diet sort of mimics the metabolism that you be in when you're fasting. And we know that fasting is really good for you. So it's just mimicking that. What I argue that fasting actually mimics the metabolic state we're supposed to be in all the time anyway, which is a ketogenic diet, which is the same metabolic pathway that most animals are in the wild.
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Host
All right, guys, Dr. Anthony Chaffee here. Today we're going to talk the carnivore and ketosis. Sounds good, baby. Any, any new studies or findings recently come across your desk?
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Well, there, there are new studies coming out all the time on ketogenic diets in general. Carnivore diet is a ketogenic diet. And typically what a ketogenic diet is, is you're eliminating out carbohydrates and you'll go into a different, completely different metabolic state. And you start running on your own body fat and you produce the carbohydrates, ketones and glycogen that, that you need. And so instead of bringing in a lot of carbohydrates and shutting down your metabolism, you actually are allowing your metabolism free a bit. And so there's more and more research coming out on ketogenic diets. A carnivore diet is a ketogenic diet and when you eliminate out carbohydrates, you have to replace it with fat and protein. Where does that fat, protein come from? It typically comes from meat. And most of the studies show that though it's a high fat meat based ketogenic diet and the carnivore diet is high fat meat based ketogenic diets, just, you're cutting out the rest of the stuff too, like vegetables. So there, there are more studies coming out on, on a pure carnivore version of a ketogenic diet. But those are, a lot of those are in the works as well.
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Host
Right.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
But there are literally thousands of randomized controlled trials in humans on a high fat meat based ketogenic diet. You know, may include vegetables or not. But the, the main thing is being ketogenic. And it is. So the ketogenic diet is the most well studied diet.
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Guest
Wow.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
In the world. There isn't a single other diet form that has the rigor of scientific testing that a ketogenic diet has. And you know, looking at specific endpoints and diseases. So things like diabetes has been shown in clinical trials to be reversible with a high fat Meat based ketogenic diet. Alzheimer's, a high fat meat based ketogenic diet has been shown in experimental data in humans to be a better treatment for Alzheimer's than every medication ever trialed.
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Guest
Whoa.
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Host
Yeah, that's crazy.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
We know we have quite a lot of studies showing the benefits of fasting. And so if you just fast for a period of time, people can reverse a lot of diseases. We see this in different traditional cultures and religions going back thousands of years that this, this can be beneficial. And we have studies showing that as well. And so people argue, well, then, you know, this is just the ketogenic diet sort of mimics the metabolism that you'd be in when you're fasting. And we know that fasting is really good for you. So it's just making that what I argue, that fasting actually mimics the metabolic state we're supposed to be in all the time anyway, which is a ketogenic diet, which is the same metabolic pathway that most animals are in the wild. So carnivores, 70% of animal species are carnivores. They eat just meat, which is protein and fat. And so they're on a ketogenic diet. Lions have been found to be in ketosis. And, and that makes sense because they're not eating carbs, but also herbivores, because herbivores that eat fibrous plants, fibrous streams of glucose. You think, okay, well, they're getting carbohydrates, but in fact, they don't eat, they don't digest the, the fiber. No vertebrate animal can break down fiber. Fiber, cellulose. I mean, this is, this is fiber. And so it's actually, they're actually feeding their microorganisms in their gut. And as a byproduct, they actually produce saturated fat and then the proteins die off and they absorb those as protein. So even cows and gorillas and, and these sorts of fibrous animals that eat fibrous plants, they're also getting the majority of their calories from protein and fat and are in ketosis. So I think that's our natural metabolic state. That's where all of our heavy machinery comes to bear. That's where a lot of health benefits come from. So some of these studies actually aren't termed ketogenic diet or low carb, because it's sort of a four letter word in some academic circles. They just don't want to hear about it.
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Host
The cardboard.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Yeah, the carb or ketogenic. They just think, oh, that's just a, that's just a weird fad or something like that. So sometimes they'll hide it and they'll say, well, since we know fasting is really good for reversing diabetes or helping this sort of health issue, well, what about. But fasting is really hard. So what about a diet that mimics the metabolic state of fasting? And so it's called a fasting mimicking diet or fmd. And so you can find a lot of papers called fasting mimicking diets, which is a ketogenic diet. And they find that they have the same benefits as fasting, if not more benefits as well. So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of studies coming out recently. There have been a number of studies, actually large randomized control trials in people over at Harvard. That's not published yet, but it's in the works for looking at, reversing and putting into remission major depression, ocd, bipolar disorder, even schizophrenia.
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Guest
Wow.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
With a professor Chris Palmer over at Harvard, and he's been in his clinical practice applying this to his patient population for years now and finding that you can reverse these major, major issues because you're fixing the metabolism. He's arguing that these mental health issues are actually metabolic issues as well. You get metabolic derangement, it damages your mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of the cell. And when those don't act properly, your cells don't work properly and your neurons are cells and so your brain doesn't work properly and you get these mental health issues. And so you fix your metabolic health, you fix your mitochondria, all of a sudden things start working better. There was a study that was done in France and it was, it was an interventional experimental trial, but it wasn't, wasn't randomized control. They just took 31 people that had treatment resistant major mental health issues. So major depression, ocd, bipolar and schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder. And these people were severely affected and they were treatment resistant. It's really unfortunate, but the standard of care that we have right now in modern medicine only, only works well for about 10% of people with these serious mental health issues. And then there's, you know, another 40% or so that get some benefit, but not complete benefit, and the rest of it really does nothing. For those are the treatment resistant populations. And so they took just the treatment resistant population. That standard of care just did nothing for, for some of these people for well over a decade, all treated by the same psychiatrist, which is important. So they're getting consistent continuity of care and they Said, okay, would you be willing to go on a ketogenic diet? Some of these people really couldn't live on their own. They had to be institutionalized, things like that. And so they put them on a high fat meat based ketogenic diet, like a carnivore diet. And they found that 28 of them were able to stay on a ketogenic diet for at least three weeks. That was the minimum cutoff. And of those 28 people, every single one improved. And I think it was about two thirds went into complete remission.
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Guest
Whoa.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And they were completely treatment resistant. Standard of care had not worked for them at all. And so that was a major finding. And now they're. And now that's not a randomized controlled trial, but now they're doing randomized controlled trials. And so that's some of the new exciting research over at Harvard. And so that's. That's. Yeah, that's.
- [07:47]
Guest
Wow.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Sort of been in the.
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Host
So you believe if every single human was on a ketogenic diet, the rate of disease would go down?
- [07:52]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Oh, my goodness, yes. Absolutely. The large burden of disease are these so called non communicable chronic diseases. So things like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, mental health issues, Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, autoimmune issues, all of these things that cannot be passed on. They just, they live in your body and you get them or you don't. And people think, well, it's just part of getting older. You just get unlucky. It's genetic. Well, if it was genetic, then why is the prevalence of these things going up decade after decade after decade? So there's more people in society that are being afflicted with this. Well, that's just, that's just screening. We're getting better at screening. Like, I'm sorry, but you have somebody with Crohn's disease and you have 30 bouts of bloody diarrhea every single day. Like, you're not going to miss that. You. So it's not a screening issue. And cancer rates have skyrocketed. They've more than tripled in the last 40 years. Now one in two people throughout the course of their life will get cancer.
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Host
Holy crap.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
One in two.
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Host
That's crazy.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Yeah, it is nuts.
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Host
It's a coin flip.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Exactly. And so then you look at places like India. I mean, they're metabolic. They're some of the most metabolically sick people in the world. They also eat some of the least amount of meat in the world. They eat about 3 kilos of meat per person per year. They have some of the highest metabolic disease and diabetes rates in the world. America. And we talk about America or we get, get painted as being the sickest country in the world and having horrible metabolic health and everyone's overweight and just eating junk food and, and evil meats that makes them all sick. And. But our diabetes rate is 9%. And we have a lot of pre diabetes, about 40% pre diabetic, but diabetes is, is, is 9%. Well, India, where they eat hardly any meat, it's 25%. That was published in the Lancet in 2018. And that was looking at rural populations as well as urban populations. They were both 25%. So it wasn't just people living in the cities that were getting a higher affliction rate. It was everybody, 25%. And that's diagnosed. And so people in India have much less access to medicine. So it could be higher than that. There could be more people that are diabetic and they just haven't, haven't discovered that. So, yes, I do think so. 90% of the things that we treat nowadays as doctors are these non communicable chronic diseases. 90% of the mortality of the deaths in Western countries come from non communicable chronic diseases. 74% of deaths around the world are from non communicable chronic diseases. And so that is the major, major burden of health care. Now you look at the animal kingdom. You know, deer don't get lupus, right. They don't, you know, typically get any of these diseases that we would see, even animals in the zoo, if they're being fed their correct diet. And there are signs at the zoo that's very clear, say, don't feed the animals. It makes them very sick if they, if they eat anything that they're not designed to eat. And so they're saying, don't feed the animals. The thing that you're eating right now, it makes them sick. What was it? What is it doing to us?
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Host
Wow.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Or, you know, don't feed bread to ducks at the park because it can make them sick. It gives them diabetes.
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Guest
Wow.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Right. And it can get diabetes and fatty liver. I mean, how do we make foie gras? You know, that's. That deliberately means fat liver.
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Host
Right?
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Right. We stuff a tube down a duck or goose's throat and we pour grains down. Right. How do we even get marbling intramuscular fat in steaks? We give them a bunch of grains. Well, in humans that's called myosteatosis. It's a pathological sign that we see on mri and that denotes very serious metabolic dysfunction. So we're, we're causing metabolic dysfunction in the animals because it increases the fat and pathological deposition of fat in the liver and in the muscle tissues because it tastes better.
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Guest
Wow.
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Host
Wagyu, right?
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Wagyu. Exactly. And it doesn't matter that they're getting sick because we're going to slaughter them anyway, but we get sick. So the exact same practices that we're doing to animals to make them sick and get this pathological fat deposition in their muscles and organs, we're doing that to ourselves as well. In the 1930s there was an article about getting the poundage up on pigs and increasing their fat content and making them, them bigger and, and bigger product. And the way they did that was giving them grains and also skim milk, which was a byproduct of the cream and butter industry. And so they just, it was just sort of a throwaway product. And they found that giving the combination of grains and skim milk actually increased their hunger and so they over ate. And when you're eating grains that can raise your insulin, that can then drop your blood blood sugar and so you feel a bit down so you want to eat more. But it also blocks a hormone called leptin, which is your satiety hormone. So you're blocking that and you tend to overeat. And then milk has casomorphins which, you know, cause a baby mammal to drink more because you're trying to encourage babies to get their, their weight up and grow. And so when you drink that as an adult, it still will trigger that hunger signal. So you have this combination of grains and skim milk and all of a sudden it says specifically in this 1930s article paper that, that, that the reason that this worked is because it, they, it caused them to overeat. So what, what is grains and skim milk? That's breakfast cereal. Right, Right. So we're doing this to ourselves and we look at these same diseases, these non communicable chronic diseases. Animals get them too, but only animals in captivity.
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Guest
Wow.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And so only animals that are being fed something outside of their typical evolved species, appropriate biological diet. And so you get dogs and cats, which are known carnivores, and yet we're giving them food and kibble that has some meat in it, so they get the nutrients that they need, but it's packed out with grains because it's cheaper. And you put something on it, you know, like put science in the name and you go, oh, this is supposed to Be. Well, science actually tells us that they're supposed to eat meat. That's what science tells us. And then, you know, marketing agencies tell us otherwise.
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Host
Right.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And, and they get sick and they get obesity and they get diabetes and they get cancer and they get autoimmune issues and arthritis and they get osteoporosis and these sorts of things. But that's, that's not typical. And those disease rates have gone up and up and up in recent decades. The average life expectancy in the US of a golden retriever in the 1970s was 17 years.
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Guest
Whoa.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Now it's nine years.
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Host
So it got cut in half.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Got cut in half. And that, I think that's directly because of the, of the food that we're feeding them. There's a big shift. That was when we started switching over to kibble was in the 80s. And now the vets are talking about how there's a massive increased prevalence in so called human diseases in domesticated pets. So these human diseases, these non communicable chronic diseases such as metabolic disorder, diabetes and all these other sorts of things. And those are human diseases. Okay, well what the hell is a human disease? Right? Well, it's non communicable. So we know we're not passing it to anybody. And yet they catch it. When they eat this other diet. And you talk to zookeepers and they know you feed any animal outside of what they're supposed to eat, they get sick. And what do they get sick with? They get all the same things we get. They get the so called human diseases. And I've spoken to some people and I sort of knew the answer ahead of time. But I asked him, I was like, do you ever give them like, you know, like grains or dog food or anything like that? And the guy says, like, are you out of your mind? Like, you know, if you give animals that garbage, they'll get human diseases. Right? So if you feed the animal human food, they get human diseases. When you don't feed them that food, they don't get human diseases. That means directly that the food is causing the disease. And we see this in pre agricultural populations. So the Native Americans, and especially in the Great Plains when they had a lot of access to meat, bison, they would do a buffalo drop, knock over a bunch of bison and, and just eat those throughout the year. Other places they didn't have as much animals available to them. So they had to sort of flesh out their meals with, you know, plants that they grew locally. But they also had specific ways of preparing them. They maize Was corn was prepared with a process called niche tomalization, which is a complex process to lower the toxic load and increase the bioavailability of the nutrients of corn. They had, you know, fermentation, all these other sorts of processes that, that we use to lower the toxic load of plants. Plants defend themselves by being toxic. All plants are toxic. They make about a million different defense chemicals in order to protect themselves from animals and insects. Animals are hard to catch, they're hard to kill because they'll fight back, they'll run away, Those are their defenses. But once you get them and you take them down, it's the most bioavailable and nutritious food that exists on this earth. Plants are easy to catch. They're just sitting there, right? So they, they can't just be straight up nutritious. Their major defense is by being physically poisonous. And so their traditional ways of eating plants are, are, you know, it was never raw food, vegan or anything like that. Is very specific ways of preparing these plants to make them more nutritious, but also lower the toxic load. And so when you look at these pre, pre agricultural societies and anthropologists talk about this in these sort of hunter gatherer populations that the, the health issues that afflict them are very different than what we have. It's basically infections and injuries. Childbirth, you know, mothers can die in childbirth, infant mortality rates, things like that are pretty high. But they don't get these chronic diseases. And people say, well it's because they don't, they only live 30 years. That's not true. You know, right now, you know, pre agricultural hunter gatherer populations, when they've been studied, as long as you're not killed by something. So there's a difference between average life expectancy from birth and how long you live if you die of old age. And so since the infant mortality rate is much higher and you're, you know, fighting off panthers and maybe, you know, polar bears and things like that up in the Arctic north with the Inuit, that that's obviously, you know, gonna lower your average life expectancy from birth. When they look at the people, how long they live, it's old age actually. People are living just as long, if not longer than people today.
- [18:19]
Guest
Wow.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And they don't get these chronic diseases. And anthropologists talk about this shift in the health issues and they look at just infections, chronic disease, infant mortality, things like that, and you know, injuries, being attacked by lions, things like that. And then when they go to post agricultural sort of civilized sort of society, they then have a shift and they get more of the diseases of civilization which are also called human diseases, which are also called chronic diseases. And 100 years ago, 150 years ago, they were called Western diseases because we only see, saw these diseases in western populations. We didn't see them in the Native Americans and the Native Australians and the native Canadians and Alaskans and, and so on. So they're, or the Maasai or the Nanette or these, these populations that are still alive today and some of them are still living in a traditional way. They don't get these diseases in Australia. When I first went down to practice there, I was told that basically day one, that if you, if you got an Australian Aboriginal patient, whatever age, it said on their sticker, basically add 20 years to that. Because they just age so much more quickly and they develop diseases more quickly. And so you had someone in their 30s and 40s, you had to consider them in a geriatric population and start thinking about the heart diseases and the cancers and the afflictions that affected 60 year olds, 70 year olds and things like that.
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Host
Why is that?
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Because they, well, because they, they age more quickly. But I think it's because they haven't been, had been exposed to agricultural food for very long. You know, our ancestors would have had thousands of years to acclimatize and be accustomed and try to build up some sort of resistances to the toxins in plants. But the Australian natives and the American natives, especially in you know, certain parts, it's really only last 150 years that they've been exposed to this. You know, some, some areas that did have agriculture, but the large majority of their diet was, was meat, especially in the Great Plains with like the bison, like they had access to meat. All the, all the historical records I found to be very consistent that when they had access to meat they would just eat meat and they'd sort of fill in the gaps with plants if they had to. But then there's places like in the Arctic north where you know, the Inuit are, you know, the first nation people of Canada. Now there's no plants growing up in the Arctic Circle. You know, you're not cultivating any crops, you're not growing potatoes or anything like that. And so they just ate meat and they have, when eating a western diet, they get more sick. Native American, I heard this when I was a kid that, that Native Americans when eating Western diet had four times the burden of disease, chronic disease, obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, all these things than the rest of Americans.
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Guest
Wow.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And I remember thinking at the time that. Well, doesn't that mean the food is causing the disease? Because if they don't eat the food, they don't get the disease. We get the food and we get the disease just at a lower rate. And what's a non western diet? Whether they're eating that we're not and vice versa. And you know, no one told me at the time, but they were, they were carnivores, they were predominantly eating meat. And, and then, you know, the, the plants that they grew and prepared in, in specific traditional ways, you know, on top of that as well. But they weren't having any of the, the highly processed garbage. They were eating a lot of meat whenever they could. And it was just a very different, different diet and lifestyle. And when you switch away from that, you start seeing a massive increase in disease. And it, and I, I think that is the true healthcare crisis. And we argue about what healthcare system we want. Do we want a public system or a private system or something new that we haven't thought of yet? It doesn't matter because any system is going to collapse and crumble under the weight of the, the growing burden of the chronic disease epidemic. Harvard University School of Public Health published a massive study looking at the economic burden of chronic disease. Just five chronic diseases, heart disease or cardiovascular disease, copd, diabetes, cancer and mental health disorders. Just those five. So obviously a lot of other ones as well. They're very expensive and costly. Just those five. They found that in 2010, I'm going to give rough numbers here, so forgive me, but around, worldwide, we spent about $8 trillion in treating that, in the direct and indirect costs of treating those diseases. By 2030, it's estimated to be up around $14 trillion. Trillion with a T. Right. And so that, that's worldwide. So it's, it's nearly doubled in that period of 26 years or 20 years. Yeah. So 2010 to 2030. And so, but then they looked at more than that. They looked at the cost to the lost opportunity cost of people not being able to work, not being able to take care of their family, not being involved in the economy, getting on disability, these other sorts of things. And they found that, that between 2010 and 2030, we're basically going to spend around $46 trillion in lost opportunity costs. So that's $46 trillion out of the economy that we don't have access to. And the biggest one was premature deaths. So people dying young, someone having a heart attack in their 30s and not being productive for the next 50 years or 40 years, however long you're productive, and that they found in 2010 to be around $23 trillion a year lost to the world. And by 2030 they're expecting that to be up around $43 trillion trillion dollars a year that we're losing. So the burden of the healthcare crisis is not just the 14, 15 trillion dollars a year that we're spending, it's the 43, 45, 50 trillion dollars in lost opportunity and early deaths that we're losing from the economy as well. So we're realistically thinking about 50, 60 trillion dollars a year that we're losing out of the economy that could be going towards very useful things and just being more productive as well. So any, any healthcare system is going to collapse and crumble under that and it's not going to be able to survive. And so we, we need to fix that first and then, you know, then we can argue about, you know, what, what system would be best.
- [24:54]
Host
Yeah. Do you think that's fixable with the average salary in America right now? Because this diet might be kind of expensive, right?
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
It's, it's surprisingly less expensive. And you think about it, you processed food, junk food, I mean, potato chips cost more per pound than steak does. But also spinach does too. Spinach per pound costs more than meat. And you get a pound of meat or two pounds of meat. That's every nutrient that you need in the proportion that you need it for 24 hours. That's perfect nutrition for 24 hours.
- [25:22]
Host
Just one pound of meat?
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Well, depending on the size of the person. So for me it would probably be 63230. So I generally eat around 2 pounds of very fatty meat. So like fatty rib eye quality sort of fat, get that sort of amount of fat and so two, two and a half pounds I would have a day. And if I'm working out and I'm exercising, my body wants to put on muscle, which I found to be far more easy to put on muscle on a carnivore diet than anything else I've ever done, even as a, as a high level athlete and rugby player in the US and Ukraine. And then I'll need more. So if I'm, if I'm working out, I'm pushing myself, then I just need more. So I could eat up to four pounds, but four pounds of ground beef is still only about $20, $24. And usually the higher fat ground beef is less expensive. So you're actually saving money there and you want the fat. The fat's actually an essential nutrient. It's not just a calorie source. There are essential fatty acids that you have to have or you can get sick and die. They're essential fat soluble vitamins that you have to have or you can get sick and die. Your brain is made out of fat. 60, 70% of your brain is made out of fat and a large portion made out of cholesterol as well. Cholesterol is really important, so important that your brain makes cholesterol. And there are countless studies talking about how if you disrupt your brain's metabolism for cholesterol, you get very serious neurocognitive disabilities and problems. And yet we're doing everything we can to disrupt our normal cholesterol modulation and metabolism, taking medications that will cross into the brain and suppress your brain's ability to make cholesterol, changing our diet so we have less cholesterol, these sorts of things. And we're doing this to children too, which is, I think, is honestly a crime against humanity. Because you have to have fat and cholesterol, high amounts of fat and cholesterol in your diet. You need to be in ketosis to properly develop your brain and nervous system. Because ketones cross the blood brain barrier. Ketones are from fat oxidization. They're just basically a fuel based on fat. And they cross freely into the brain. They cross the blood brain barrier and they act as fuel. And 2/3 of your brain optimally run on ketones. So if you have enough ketones and you have enough glucose, 2/3 of your brain will only run on those ketones. So it's actually a preference. It's only when you start getting less ketones or not enough ketones that you start filling in the gaps with glucose. And so some will still run on glucose, but the majority, including the cortex is what we do our thinking with is optimally fueled on ketones. But the ketones also can reconstitute into fatty acids and make up the physical structures of your brain. So when a baby's brain is growing and a child's brain is growing, it's really important for them to get ketones, a lot of ketones, a lot of fat. So a baby in the womb is in ketosis.
- [28:24]
Guest
Wow.
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Even though there are carbohydrates in breast milk, when a baby is breastfeeding, they're in ketosis because it's a lot easier for them to be in ketosis because they need to be in ketosis for their brain. And then we get them onto really high sugar, baby food and formula and actually suppresses the Ketones and, and the ketosis. And you're not giving the proper fat.
- [28:44]
Host
Dang. So you're not a fan of baby formula?
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
No, no, no.
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Host
A lot of parents use that, right?
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Dr. Anthony Chaffee
They do. And sometimes their circumstances require that they do. And that's unfortunate because they, they don't have the same, they don't have the same makeup as, as, as breast milk, and they have sort of different fats. They say, well, you have to have omega 6s, so, you know, you need seed oils, like vegetable oils and things like that. Well, vegetable oils do have omega 6s, but they have the wrong omega 6s. We don't need omega 6s. We need arachidonic acid, which is an omega 6. We don't need random omega 3s. We need specific omega 3s. DHA, EPA for our brain. 20% of your brain is DHA. Massive proportion of your brain and your body is made out of fat. And so breast milk is actually the highest concentration of saturated fat and cholesterol of any food in nature. And, and so why are we scared of this? Why are we saying that this is bad for us? And first of all, that's, that's been completely discredited, that whole cholesterol heart hypothesis. But, you know, just looking at what kids need to eat, they need fat and cholesterol. Getting back to your point about, about cost, it actually ends up being cheaper. So a pound of spinach costs way more than a pound of ground beef, certainly. And it can cost more than, than many steaks do per pound. And, and you're not going to get all the nutrition you need from spinach. You will get all the nutrition you need from steak. With that spinach, you're going to need to buy 30 other things that half of them are going to go bad and spoil before the other ones get used. And so you end up having a lot of waste meat. I've really never had to throw out meat. The worst case scenario, give it to my dogs. They're on a raw meat diet as well. They're healthy as hell.
- [30:28]
Host
I just switched my dogs over to that and they're skipping. Skin is way better already and they look healthier.
- [30:33]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Yeah, yeah, and they will be. They absolutely will be. And they'll live longer, too, and much more health healthfully. And so, you know, I don't have any waste. I have actually saved a lot of money. I'm not buying coffees and snacks and this is, and that's. Or whatever. I, I eat, you know, two pounds of meat and I'm good for 24 hours. It's really convenient, too, you know, for, for people with a busy schedule. Because I'm just not hungry. You know, I eat a big meal. I eat until it stops. I eat fatty meat until it stops tasting good. I can listen to my body signals. I don't have to figure out with a calculator how much to eat. You know, you're never going to see a koala pull out a calculator to figure out what to eat. Right. And so if you need a calculator to figure out your macros, you're probably eating the wrong thing.
- [31:14]
Host
I was never a fan of that trend. There's apps that do it now. You got to input everything you eat.
- [31:18]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Yeah, that's it. Like, where is that in nature? Nature is natural. It has to happen just on its own. And, and so if we have to figure out something and calculate it, it means we're probably eating the wrong thing because we should be able to eat intuitively. We should just be able to just eat our natural, biologically appropriate diet and listen to our natural instincts. We're not here from space. We're animals. Just like every other animal on this earth, we came from this planet and those same biological laws apply. No animal in the wild, you don't see a fat, big badger waddling around. Oh, that one just doesn't have any self control. They know what to eat, they know how much to eat, and they know when to stop. And we do too, if we're eating the right thing. And that's a testimony to it being the right thing. If you're just eating fatty meat and you eat until it stops tasting good, your body will perfectly regulate what's coming in and out. And so you don't need to worry about it. And I think that is a big testimony to understand that this actually is our biologically appropriate way of eating.
- [32:18]
Host
Right, yeah, that's a good point because you'll never see fat animals in the wild, but you'll see F dogs, fat cats, fat humans.
- [32:24]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Yeah, and, but only when eating inappropriate diets. You know, like dogs that are just eating meat. I mean, you put as much meat as you want in your dog's dish, it will eat a certain amount and it will stop. Really? Yeah.
- [32:35]
Host
You think they'll stop?
- [32:36]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Oh, yeah, they will.
- [32:37]
Guest
Wow.
- [32:37]
Host
I want to test that out because my dogs be pounding the food I give them.
- [32:40]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Yeah, well, maybe they need a bit more. But, but, but there is a point that they'll stop and because they, they, they know, you know, look, in the wild Again, yeah. I mean, you have, you have animals out on, on pasture, right? You have cows that just live on their own food and, and yet they stop sometimes. You know, they, they, they monitor how much they're eating, or actually they don't have to monitor, but they, they stop naturally. Koalas, they live in a tree. They have no natural predators. They're just sitting there, lazy as a lump, and they're just sitting there just eating leaves. And then they stop, right? They could just keep going, but something in them tells them to stop. Lions. You look at a pride of lions and king lion, the alpha gets to. When they make a kill, Alpha gets to eat as much as he wants of what he wants and typically goes for the belly. That's where more fat is. That's like bacon is the belly, belly meat. And, and there's a lot of fat around the organs. The omentum is nearly completely fat. It's fat around the kidneys, the mesentery, which is the blood supply to the, to the intestines. It's completely covered in fat. So there's a lot of fat in the abdomen. And I think that's why they're going for the, for the abdomen as opposed to. Oh, they're getting all the organs. Organs are great. There's a lot of nutrients in them, but they're going for the fat, I believe, because they leave, like, the haunches, the hindquarters, they're very, very lean. Lines will often leave those and eat the fattier parts of the animal first, unless they're very hungry. And then the hyenas will come in, they'll eat the hindquarters, and they'll be. Their jaws are strong enough to crack open the bones and get at the marrow, which is more fat. And so animals always go for the fat. So king lion goes for the fat, goes for the abdomen, eats as much as he wants. No other animal gets to touch that thing until king lion's done, right? And so they're all just waiting. I've seen videos of these where they're just like, impatiently waiting, like, oh, my God, I want to get in there. And, you know, daddy line is just doing his thing, and then all of a sudden it's just, he's done. He could. And then the rest of them come in and devour the thing, but he could just keep going until he just made himself sick and was just rolling on the back. Oh, my God. Yeah, exactly. But it doesn't, you know, and they don't get fat, you know, it doesn't doesn't get overweight, they're ripped, they're like on steroids. And people say, well, they're in the wild, they're really active. I mean, everyone knows that male lions are not all that active. And you know, and, but also it doesn't explain animals in the Zone Zoo. Right. And that's what most people say is that, well, animals in the wild, they're always running around. Koalas don't run around anywhere. They're basically sitting there. A lot of animals are just very sedentary, unless they have to be active. And, but again, it doesn't explain animals in the zoo that live in a box the size of this room. It's the definition of a sedentary lifestyle. They just sit in an enclosed area and don't go anywhere. And yet when fed their natural diet, they also look very strong, very muscular, very lean.
- [35:32]
Host
Right.
- [35:33]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And, and so, so that's the thing. If they fed them grains and inappropriate food, they would get fat, but they're not. So being fed the appropriate diet and even though they're getting no activity, no exercise to speak of, they're extremely muscular and lean and healthy. And so I think that's, that's because of the diet.
- [35:50]
Host
Yeah, yeah. I don't see too many healthy vegans. The only one I've seen actually is Brian Johnson.
- [35:54]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Yeah, well, he takes 160 different supplements and he has a whole team spending about $3 million a year keeping him that way. The interesting about Brian Johnson, interesting thing about Brian Johnson is he said that, well, he may have changed his opinion on this, but I did hear him say at one point that he wasn't doing the vegan diet because he thought it was the healthiest diet. That was just his choice. That's how he wanted to do it. And so he had his team figure it out. And so it's like, okay, I want to do a vegan diet. I want to do it this way. You know, you figure out how that works. And so that's why he's taking 160 different supplements a day. Because you have to, you know, there are essential nutrients that you cannot get from the entire plant kingdom, from the entire fungus kingdom. They just don't exist. B12 is the classic example, but there are more. I mean, you look at. And that's the argument too. You cannot say that humans are herbivores for a lot of reasons, but it just starts and stops at B12. There's no B12 in the plant can. Right, right. You have to get that from meat. And so we couldn't be herbivores, we couldn't have evolved as herbivores, and we didn't evolve as herbivores. I mean, that's absurd. All the best evidence shows that humans have been apex predators, top of the food chain, which by definition means carnivore, for at least 2 million years, if not longer. Yeah, Homo habilis, with the, with the onset of the ice ages, two, two and a half million years ago, there was this inflection point in early human and then human evolution where people, you know, 8 million years ago or so, we split off from our ancestors who were largely herbivorous. And because they started eating meat, they started eating more and more meat, More and more meat. They started having more genetic adaptations to closer to what we are today. Started getting taller, started getting bigger brains because we had to figure out how to get meat. We weren't just naturally predisposed to hunting like a lion taking things down. We had to scavenge. We had to figure out how we could take a rock and smash open the skull of a dead animal and eat the brains and things like that and then get sharpened tools. About 3.3 million years ago, we got the first example of a sharpened tool that we can now use to cleave and cut off meat off the bone. And we see butcher marks, very classic, clear signs of butchery on, on, you know, bones around that time and beyond, showing that this was intentional butchering and carving and ripping off meat with these stone tools that were again found in that area. And you can see the deposits in those cut marks in the bones that came from that flint ax over there. And so we have very good information about this. So our brains were growing, our jaws were getting smaller, teeth were getting smaller because we're eating softer and softer foods. We're not chewing on sticks all day like a gorilla. Right. And so we had these adaptations. Then about two, two and a half million years ago, the ice ages started. We didn't actually have polar ice caps 2 1/2 million years ago or so when the ice ages started. We're in an ice age. We're sort of in a. In an ebb of an ice age. When that ice shelf started coming down. Obviously ice kills things and it stops, you know, kills animals and plants and things like that. They were surviving in the area, and animals had to. Had to specially adapt or die out. And our ancestors in Homo habilis did. And the adaptation that they had was they were able to turn to full carnivore apex predators. So they weren't just scavenging now and then, getting a kill every now and then. Now they were able, they had the technology and the brain power and the tactics to be able to take down large animals and get the whole animal. You could get the organs, you could get the meat, you could get all the fat. You weren't just getting the scraps. And there's an inflection point in our evolution at that point. So our height and brain size was coming up steadily over millions of years since our ancestors started eating meat. And about two and a half million years ago, bam. It's just exponential increase in brain capacity and cranial capacity and height. Up until about 15,000 years ago, it's going up and up and up and up and up and bang, straight down, straight down. And anthropologists and paleonthropologists show that in the fossil record. There's a clear point right at the point of the agricultural revolution. And this isn't just in all over the world this happened, this happened when a society went from pre agriculture to post agriculture starting about 10,000 years ago. But at other points in time, people have come across agriculture, been introduced to agriculture, and you see the exact same thing. And as I'm going to butcher his name as Professor Ulajik from Oxford, I can get it spelled for you if you like, but I'm good on that. Yeah, but he said that starting about 10,000 years ago, you saw a clear, distinct line in pre and post agriculture, that the height, the same thing occurred. Regardless of the time, regardless of location and regardless of the type of crop that they moved to, the same things happened. The height, health and heightened health of the population declined. And they said there's all these signs of malnutrition, infectious disease and all these other things that came on afterwards. The jaws got smaller, started getting crooked teeth, fallen dental arches. Weston A. Price was a dentist. 100 years ago, he showed this. In these native populations, they had perfect teeth, perfect dental arches, until they started eating western food and didn't get enough fatty meat. And specifically he found that it was the fat soluble vitamins that you needed to develop your hard palate and your dental arches and jaw. And in the same families, all of a sudden Johnny starts eating this other stupid food that come from the towns and has screwed up teeth. And then they can reverse that by giving him fatty meat and whole milk and things like that. And then the next generations they could get the teeth back, things like that. But we saw that you can tell the difference between pre agriculture and post agricultural skeleton. And Teeth, especially because of that.
- [41:59]
Guest
Dang.
- [42:00]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And the brains went down. So after agriculture, the adult male brain capacity reduced by 11%, female adult brain capacity went down by 17%, and the average height went down by about 5 inches.
- [42:16]
Host
Holy crap.
- [42:16]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And so that wasn't over hundreds of years or thousands of years. That wasn't an adaptation process. That was overnight in the fossil record. So that happened immediately. And that's persisted until today. And we saw this in real time again with the Native Americans, the Native Canadians, the Native Australians, and we're seeing it in the Maasai as well, who are traditionally carnivores. They have a large portion of that carnivore diet being milk, but milk, blood and meat is their staple diet. And they started introducing some plants throughout the 20th century. And they started getting some of these human diseases throughout the 20th century as well. Now they have Coca Cola trucks going to the Masai Mara in these little villages, and they sell out very quickly because they don't know how harmful this stuff is. And now their diabetes is actually going up and their tooth decay is going up and their chronic diseases are going up, even though traditionally they're extremely healthy. So now they're seeing that inflection point that anthropologists talk about that they go from this just injuries and infectious disease and actually pretty low infectious disease rate. There's a study out of the British did in the 1920s and early 30s. They're actually extremely healthy. They have very low rates of like, almost no chronic disease and very low infectious disease rates as well. And they were much taller, stronger, healthier, had more lean body mass than their neighbors, the Akikuyu, who they interbred for who knows how many hundreds of years or thousands of years. So they're a genetically similar population. And the Akikuyu were largely vegetarian, and they were. So they were just growing their own crops. This is out in the middle of Africa. They're not in cities. They don't have pollution, they don't have commercial agriculture and, you know, pesticides and fertilizers. Just. It's just living out on a commune, you know, growing grains and things like that. They were much less healthy. The Maasai were 5 inches taller on average, 23 pounds heavier of lean body mass, stick skinny, just really svelte people and 50 stronger. And they didn't have any of these chronic disease issues that the Akikuyu had, who also had a lot of nutritional deficiencies. The British started supplementing them with the different nutrients that they were lacking. And it didn't actually make them healthier. It wasn't until they replaced the plants they were eating with meat that they got healthier. And there's no mention of heart disease anywhere in that study with the maasai in the 1920s. And yet in the 1970s, you start seeing, oh, yeah, well, there's a bit of it there. But I know people that have volunteered in Africa in the 80s, and they were like, yeah, that was never anything we treated. We never treated these chronic diseases. It was all these different, different things. Now you're seeing it. Now you're seeing it show up more. Now you're seeing diabetes, which, if you have diabetes, increases your risk of developing cardiovascular disease by a thousand percent. Right. And metabolic syndrome will increase it by 600%. And so those are major, major risk factors that those metabolic issues are major risk factors for all these chronic diseases. And now we're starting to see those in the Maasai. And we saw those, you know, and those disparities between the Maasai and the Akikuyu, exactly the same disparities that we saw pre and post agriculture in the fossil record. And the Native Americans, especially in the Great Plains. There was a study in 2001 that was just called tallest in the world. And they looked at records from the late 1800s with the Plains Indians in the Great Plains that were largely just eating buffalo and bison. And then they found that they were the tallest human beings alive on Earth at the time. They were far taller than the Europeans, you know, five, six inches or more taller on average. And there's. There's sort of an average between them. Some were, you know, ranging from like 5 foot 6 to 5 foot 10 on average. But the Cheyenne were about 5 foot 10 on average, adult male height. And now in America, we, last I checked, it was 5 foot 8. So it was still taller than people here today. But they were far taller than people at the time, which is much lower. More like 5, 3, 5, 4. And so they were much, much, much taller. And that was at the end of the 1800s, after they killed all the bison and put them on the reservations. That's a really interesting thing. So they were still taller than everybody else, even though they had started transitioning onto a more Western diet and started getting sicker and started having that their height come down. And in those original, those studies and measurements, they said that the older generations were far taller than the younger generations. And so if they just looked at the older generations or maybe looked 100 years back, the average height would have been much, much taller. And in fact, we see the fossil record of people going back tens of thousands of years who back before the megafauna died out because we were eating mammoth. That the big mammoth hunters that some of these people were on average 6 foot 2 to 6 foot 4. Average. That's crazy, right? And so, you know, I would, I'm six three, I would be average. You'd probably be, you know, slightly above, slide above that. But, you know, everyone would be, you know, it would just be, you know, population of, you know, NBA players and things like that.
- [47:26]
Host
Yeah. Eating a mammoth. Damn.
- [47:27]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Eating mammoth.
- [47:27]
Host
Why do you think Asian people are so short?
- [47:30]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Well, a lot of it's going to be because of diet as well. You know, you look at the Mongols, well, you look at more recently, there's been a lot of famines in the 20th century as well with, you know, Mao and the forced famines and poverty and things like that. And of course, if you're not getting adequate nutrition during development, you're not going to grow as tall as you possibly could. And we see that all over the place. Which is why I think it's a crime against humanity to not touch, to be putting kids on vegetarian diets or these processed food diets and formulas and things like that and vilifying meat and say, no, no, no, it's bad putting 5 year olds on statins. Are you out of your mind? I mean, but people are talking about that, that you should put kids on statins. If their cholesterol is high, it needs to be high, their brain needs it to be high, their body needs it to be high. And it's good for you. All your hormones are made out of cholesterol, or your steroid hormones are made out of cholesterol. Vitamin D is made out of cholesterol. So if you're not giving kids adequate nutrition, they're not going to develop properly. And so you've had a lot of forced famines and poverty throughout the last century in China and elsewhere. And people are going to be shorter as a result of that. Then you see people, I've known many friends that were first generation American and their parents are these wizened little old Chinese people. They're six foot four, just ripped.
- [48:50]
Host
Yeah, that happened to me. Yeah, my grandparents were super short.
- [48:52]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
There you go. Yeah. So I think a lot of that's nutritional and I think that there's a stark contrast specifically because of the malnutrition that was prevalent in the 20th century for various reasons. Look at Genghis Khan, the Mongol horde. They were carnivores they ate horse meat, they drank horse blood and fermented mare's milk. Very lactose intolerant. It had to be fermented. And still, still to this day, persistently lactose intolerant. Some of the more lactose intolerant people in the world as a population, and yet they have a lot of fermented dairy, but they can't, they can't do the lactose. And they obviously carved out the largest contiguous empire that's ever existed on earth. And you read histories about Genghis Khan and the Mongols, and a large, a large portion of that success was attributed to their diet. They're extremely well fed. Even the most base fighter in the Mongol, Mongol horde had had a lot of access to meat and high protein and nutritious food while they were fighting against these peasant armies that were just already subjugated. They're just eating a bunch of gruel. They had a lot of health issues, and they were just weaker and more frail and just malnourished. And they actually attribute a lot of their success to how healthy the, the Mongol people were because they were eating such good food.
- [50:12]
Guest
Wow.
- [50:13]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
It also was an advantage because they didn't have to cook three times a day, so they didn't have to stop their armies. And they didn't have all these cook fires going up. As you can track an army in the horizon by the smoke that's coming up, I go, okay, see how fast that those smoke clouds are moving. They're going to be here in three days. Okay, we have three days to prepare. You didn't have that with the Mongols. They just showed up out of nowhere.
- [50:31]
Host
So they were eating raw meat.
- [50:33]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
They would eat raw meat. They could, they could cook it as well. They would. You know, people always saying about, you know, how you have to. There's a thing now in Australia where they're telling, you know, parents not to put lunch meat in their kids sandwiches because, oh, we don't have refrigeration. So it could be like three hours before going. It was. You just rot and go to hell and like, you out of your mind. Like, like, no one's ever brought a sandwich to school or work before. It's like, this is the first time this has ever happened. The Mongols would take a raw piece of meat and put it under their saddle and ride on it for several days to, to, to tenderize it.
- [51:07]
Guest
Wow.
- [51:07]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And then they'd eat it and savage. And they could go five days without eating, eat 10 pounds of horse meat and then ravage the countryside for another five days and, and do it again and, and they could drink blood as well. The Maasai drink blood and you just sort of pop a little hole in a vein and drain some blood. And they drink that and it keeps you going. It's amazing nutrition and it's, and it's a renewable resource as well. They're eating grass, they're turning it into blood. You're drinking the blood and you just keep going. It's like, it's like milking them. And you do it in a rotation so you're not over overdoing it. But it works, it works very well. And they were much taller and healthier and more robust as well. And so yeah, so it's, I think you'll find that in populations, any population, you go back to eating that way the kids will be taller and smarter and have bigger brains. We saw this in cats. There's a very famous doctor named Dr. Pottinger and Dr. Price I mentioned before, there's an organization called the Price Pottinger foundation carrying on his worst. And Pottinger is This other guy, Dr. Pottinger, who randomly was my mom's doctor as a kid in California at one point and said, you need to feed me. I don't remember the health issues she was having at the time. Basically said she needs to eat raw meat or raw liver and every day, she had to have some raw liver every single day and actually sorted out her issues.
- [52:27]
Guest
Wow.
- [52:28]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And um, he did a, he did a, a study with cats for several years, many years, probably 14 or something years and looking at nutrition because they're studying tuberculosis. And he thought that tuberculosis had something to do with the adrenals. In fact it has to do with diet pre and post agriculture. Pre agriculture you don't see any signs of tuberculosis infections. Post agriculture immediately you saw signs of tuberculosis in, in, in the spine of the fossils and things like that. And then Dr. J. Salisbury, who was a New York doctor in the 1800s, did a 30 year research project into the optimal diet for human beings living with the Native Americans. Seeing they were just really healthy with, you know, just eating meat, they were living to be 110, 115 years old. And it's like, oh well that's, that's far fetched. I was like, actually it's not because I was taught in genetics class 20 plus years ago that we are designed based on the length of our telomeres and our chromosomes, genetically we're designed to live 120 years on average. So people actually Just living to be 115, 120 years old. That's actually normal. That should be how long we live. But we're dying in our 60s and 70s and 80s and calling that a good life because we're sickening ourselves for decades and eating these low grade poison and not getting proper nutrition, and our bodies are just failing 40 years early, 50 years early sometimes. So he was looking at. And Salisbury actually found that when you put people on just a pure red meat and water, this is long before processed foods and garbage to cut out the grains and the vegetables and just eat red meat and water, he could reverse autoimmunity like rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's reverse gout and even tuberculosis. He was actually finding that he was getting people healing from tuberculosis, which was a major killer back then, by putting them on a pure red water diet. And so Pottinger was looking at the adrenals, and so he was doing an adrenalectomy, which they took out the adrenal glands from these cats. And we're going to expose them to TB and sort of see what happened. But all the cats were dying, and so they couldn't figure out what was going on. People were sort of passing in strays before they all spayed, neutered animals back then. So there was a lot of strays. So they're getting like a lot of cats, more cats than they knew what to do with, and they sort of had more than they needed. Mostly they were cooking the meat and giving it to the cats. They're still just giving it meat, but they were cooking it. And then they sort of just sort of for time management. They're like, all right, well, we have too many cats. We'll cook as much as we can, but then we'll give just raw meat to the rest of them. The raw meat ones all survived, all the cooked meat ones died, raw meat ones left. And they're like, okay, well, what the hell is going on? And so he switched the focus of his research to, okay, what nutrients are you losing? Something when you cook meat? And they found that, yes, you do. You lose taurine, you lose glutamine, you lose other sorts of things. And taurine is essential to cats. And so they have to have raw meat. And so they looked at it and they found that the raw meat group. There's a lot to this, but I'll paraphrase and get to the high notes. The raw meat group was extremely healthy. Generation after generation after generation. Big, strong animals, perfectly formed cheekbones, big Brains for a cat and proper bone density, all that sort of stuff. And the cooked meat, cats, same meat, it's just cooked, were much less healthy. And the next generation, they were smaller, they weighed less, they had like about half the bone density. Their brains were smaller, their cheekbones weren't as developed and they weren't as interested in play, they weren't as interested in mating. The next generation, they were even sicker, even smaller, less developed facial structures, even smaller brain. And their bones were so soft because they only had about 3% bone mineralization, same amount of calcium. The calcium doesn't cook out. But because of how this changed the nutrients and how their body processed these nutrients, their bone mineralization was down around 3%. And so their bones, they said, were so soft and flexible it was like foam rubber. And so they could have dozens of fractures and they were sterile at that point. They couldn't have babies. They weren't even interested in mating really. But the ones who sort of did mate couldn't get pregnant or the few that did get pregnant had stillbirths. So they couldn't make it past the third generation on cooked meat. And then they switched them to raw meat and they got healthy again. Now they didn't grow after that because their growth plates were already closed. So it'd be like your grandparents, you know, come to, you know, an area that had more access to food. They are much more healthy, but they're done growing at that point. But their kids could, could benefit from that. And so the cats were able to reproduce and you'd think, well, the next generation, they'll just be back in normal again. No, it took four generations to breed back to where the, the raw meat cats were.
- [57:13]
Guest
Yeah.
- [57:14]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
So there's this, this multi generational epigenetic knock on effect that, that happens when you, when you aren't as healthy as you could be. So it's actually a big impact. So, you know, you're going to be a lot taller than your parents and your grandparents. And if you eat properly, your kids are going to be even bigger, taller, smarter and stronger. Their kids are going to be even better as well. And we're just going to get taller and taller and taller and better and better. You know, genetically I should be 6, 7, 6, 8. My grandfather on my father's side, he and all his brothers were pushing seven feet tall. Wow. And my dad and his brothers are all from between six four and six, seven.
- [57:52]
Host
So something happened there.
- [57:53]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Yeah, my, me and my brothers, 5 10, 63 and 6 4. So just three generations. We've just gotten a little bit shorter and a little bit shorter and a little bit shorter and so why the hell is that? Well, you know, we had this big plant based push throughout the 20th century. When my dad was, was a young man, he, and they started pushing this whole cholesterol heart hypothesis, you shouldn't eat fatty meat, all that sort of stuff. And, and so he, you know, took that very seriously. And we just, we ate meat, but we trimmed off all the fat and we had, you know, like whole grains and all that sort of, and you know, milk and skim milk and grains. We were just eating that, you know, the, you know, fatty pig diet, you know, to like fatten up pigs. In the 1930s, that's what we grew up on. You know, he was a, he read Dr. Pritikin's book, which was all about just eating basically no meat, but certainly no fat and how, how important that was. And, and so that's, that's how we grew up. And my little brother really wasn't a fan of meat. He mostly ate white rice with tempura sauce. That was all you could get him to eat as a kid. And, and he's 5 10. I'm 6 3. My brother is 6 4. And you know, and when I was 18, I was, I wrestled at 215 pound weight class. My little brother was 148 weight class.
- [59:16]
Host
Holy crap.
- [59:17]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Yeah, big difference.
- [59:18]
Host
Huge.
- [59:18]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Yeah. And I always loved meat. I always wanted to eat a lot of meat. I also didn't have braces. Neither did my brother or my sister. My oldest, one of my sisters who decided she wanted to go vegetarian as a teenager, and my younger brother who basically just didn't eat enough and just ate a bunch of rice. They were the only two people in my family that needed braces.
- [59:37]
Guest
Wow.
- [59:37]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
And now we know in the dentistry journals that crooked teeth are not genetic. It is developmental and mostly nutritional. And also if you're chewing on soft foods, you're not stimulating your hard palate and your jaw to grow properly. So you need to be chewing on, not sticks like a gorilla, but something firm enough to, to trigger that, that growth response, which is meat. Yeah. And, and get the fat soluble nutrients that you need, which is really important.
- [60:05]
Host
Absolutely. Dr. Anthony, it's been a blast. Where can people find you, your work and what you got coming up next, man.
- [60:10]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Yeah, so, yeah. Well, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure. And I have a, I have a YouTube channel and an Instagram is just my name. Anthony Chaffee md. You can find a lot more on this subject. And I have a podcast called the Plant Free md and that's available on any podcast platform. I'll be speaking at multiple. I speak at medical conferences and different, different things. The next one will be in Wyoming. We're speaking in Spain and in England. And, you know, I announce a lot of these things on social media and Instagram. So if people want to come see me talk, they can. They can do that.
- [60:42]
Host
Perfect. Link below. Thanks for coming on.
- [60:44]
Dr. Anthony Chaffee
Awesome.
- [60:44]
Host
That was awesome. Thanks for watching, guys. See you next time.