 All right, what happens if you only eat meat for 30 days? Now, you know, I don't condone a carnivore diet. Not long term at least. However, I have had patients do the carnivore diet who are profoundly sensitive to plant proteins. And when done right, it can be life-changing for some. Let me give you a very recent example. A very dear friend of mine who's been a lifelong vegan and get this, a gluten intolerant vegan. Talk about difficult. And I've traveled around the world with him and his partner, and I've watched how he struggled with health issues and, of course, struggled with finding things to eat. And it really came to a head this fall when we met up in Morocco to visit our olive oil farm. And he related that ever since he had been to Hong Kong a couple of months earlier. He had gotten some gastric disease of whatever. Massive diarrhea, never really subsided. Things kept getting worse. And the conversation came up, you know, have you ever considered just doing a carnivore diet for a month? That's all I ask. Because he didn't have an ethical reason to be a vegan. And he said, you know, I'm so desperate now. I'm so miserable. I will try anything. So we prepared him in January 1st of this year, he embarked on a carnivore diet. Now this was great news to his partner who actually enjoyed animal protein. So he did the carnivore diet for 30 days. And let me tell you, it was life changing for him. His GI issues went away. His strength and energy returned. He noticed that he actually was developing a six pack for the first time in many years. And this is a devout athlete, works out every day with a personal trainer, and he noticed tons of positive changes. Now, should he continue on this course? And that's actually where we are with his progression right now. So using it as a tool to stop the assault of the gut wall by plant proteins like lectins and other plant defense proteins is one thing. But whether the benefits long term is another. Now, what do we know so far about the effects of a carnivore diet? Well, we know one thing is that the gut microbiome changes dramatically with a carnivore diet. The gut microbiome, in a way, is location, location, location. If you eat a primarily plant based diet, your gut microbiome evolves to have bacteria that can take advantage of the different sugars that are in plants. On the other hand, if you eat only animal protein, your gut microbiome evolves so that only those gut bacteria that can eat amino acids, ferment amino acids and other products, predominant and the gut microbiome that can eat simple sugars or complex sugars, leaves. So you completely change what sort of bacteria you have in your gut. Now, one of the really important postbiotic gasotransmitters that I've written about in my last two books is hydrogen sulfide gas. Hydrogen sulfide gas is the rotten egg smell. And believe it or not, hydrogen sulfide has got a very interesting slippery slope that some hydrogen sulfide gas is really good for you. But too much hydrogen sulfide gas is very damaging to the colon wall. And we know that a carnivore meat based diet produces excessive amounts of hydrogen sulfide. You need some, but not too much. And from what we can tell so far, that too much is what you get from a carnivore diet. Now, is that going to cause problems for a month or so? No, I'm not saying it is. But long term, we need to assess whether or not that's something we want to look into in terms of heart health, vascular health, and even colon health. Are there long term studies of a carnivore diet? And the answer is no. First of all, there is no human society that's been studied that has great long term health that follows a carnivore diet. Now, the close example that people use is the Maasai of Africa and the Inuits, the Eskimos of the Arctic. Unfortunately, neither of those societies have superb long term health. And we can argue about why that may be the horrible conditions that both of them live under. But the fact is, we don't have a living or ancient example of a long term success carnivore diet. Now, there is overwhelming evidence from the blue zones, areas of the world where people live longer, healthier lives. The one thing that all blue zones share in common is that they have very little animal protein in their diet. Do they all have some? Yes, they absolutely do. Now, why might that be? Well, getting back to the carnivore diet. The carnivore diet deprives the gut microbiome of soluble fiber that gut bacteria need to eat to produce one of my favorite compounds, a short chain fatty acid called butyrate or butyric acid. Butyrate may be the most important signaling compound to protect against disease there is. Butyrate is the sole source of nourishment for the cells that line the colon. I'm going to say that again. Your colon cells don't get their nourishment from what we eat from our bloodstream. They get it directly from butyrate produced by the microbiome. And they have to have soluble fiber to produce butyrate. If you don't have it, then your colon cells begin to die, not thrive or begin to look funny, which leads to serious illness. Now, this is thought to be one of the reasons that a high red meat diet is associated with colon cancer. Now, that's number one. So the lack of butyrate is incredibly important. Butyrate in its own is actually a very potent anti-cancer compound. It's an HDAC inhibitor and I won't bore you with the details. Now, the other reason that cancer might be of concern with the carnivore diet is this funny sugar molecule that I've written about extensively called Nu5GC. Nu5GC is present in beef, lamb, and pork. It's a sugar molecule that lines the blood vessels of these animals. Now, you and I have a sugar molecule that lines our blood vessels called Nu5AC. They differ by only one molecule. And because they differ by just one molecule, Nu5GC is abnormal. Nu5AC is normal. We can make an antibody to Nu5GC by eating beef, lamb, or pork. And in susceptible people, that antibody, when it sees the lining of our blood vessels, says, whoa, there's a sugar molecule that looks very similar to what I'm worried about, Nu5GC. It's not quite the same, but it looks very similar. I'm going to attack. And one of the theories that I like in heart disease is that it is an autoimmune condition. And I've written about that extensively in my books. So that may explain why long-term red meat eaters have a higher incidence of coronary artery disease, but it gets better than that. We know that cancer cells, tumors, can use Nu5GC to hide from our own immune system to cloak themselves. Now, we don't manufacture Nu5GC. We manufacture Nu5AC. The point is, where the cancer cells get Nu5GC to hide from our immune system, we had to have eaten it. So that may explain the association between a red meat diet and an increased risk of cancer. Now, I'm the first to admit that association does not equate with causation, but where there's smoke, there's often fire. So there's a couple of reasons why a carnivore diet long-term may not be the best choice. Okay, you say, I'm not going to do a red meat carnivore diet. I'm going to have a chicken diet. Well, unfortunately, most chicken in the United States, even organic chicken is fed corn and soybeans, even if it's organic corn and soybeans. And I've said it over and over again, you are what you eat, but you are what the thing you're eating ate. And so numerous times we see people on an organic chicken diet who actually have autoimmune diseases. And when we take away their healthy organic chicken, their autoimmune disease resolves. Finally, the carnivore diet contains far too much animal protein. I'm sorry. Dr. Walter Longo, my friend at USC, the head of the longevity center, we both agree that we have far too much protein in our diets. Dr. Longo has an excellent equation that I use in my books to tell you the amount of protein that you really need in your diet. And quite frankly, 30 grams of protein, maximum 50 grams of protein is about all you need in your diet. Now, why is that seemingly so low? Well, most dieticians don't know that every day we recycle about 20 grams of protein. We make protein in our mucus. We make protein in the mucus lining of our gut. Our cells that line our gut are shed into our gut and we digest the protein in these cells. We're very efficient. And then it actually ends up to be about 20 grams of protein that every day we just recycle. So when we look at protein needs, we overestimate because we don't consider those recycling. Let me give you a great example about how we've just vastly overestimated our protein needs. A study in 2009 of the American Dietetic Association, they took volunteers of two age groups, young adults and senior citizens. They were given 30 grams of lean ground beef or 90 grams of lean ground beef. They looked at muscle synthesis and found that 30 grams of protein completely provided for muscle synthesis in both the young and the old. The 90 grams in both groups did absolutely nothing more. Nothing more. Sorry, folks. And even Dr. Longo, who believes that old people should eat more protein, quite frankly, I think has very little answer to this and we like to debate the subject. But for the point is animal protein. We don't need much of what happened to the extra 60 grams of protein. Well, we don't waste energy. Like I mentioned, we convert that into sugar and that sugar is converted into fat. And over and over again, like I've written about in my book, studies have shown that when people are put on a high animal protein diet, it actually increases their risk of diabetes, something that none of us want. You can do a carnivore diet for 30 days, maybe 60 days, see if, you know, you're having an effect and then start to wean yourself off. Check the credentials of someone who's giving you advice on this. Recently, I came across a information video on the internet and this person seemed to have very interesting credentials, is a nutritionist, and this nutritionist had a BA degree. That's great. Her degree was in English literature and she had a master's degree from the University of Phoenix in social communication. So this nutritionist who was giving out nutrition advice was in fact a English major. And while I would take advice from this person on what to glean from reading Chaucer, this is not the person I probably want to get advice on a carnivore diet. Just say it. Now, I'm a doc who's monitored diet changes in their patients for over 25 years. I measure what happens when we modify their diet by blood work every three months. I like to remind people that I used to have a dietitian who worked in my office. When she was first assigned to me, she almost quit because what I was teaching patients was 180 degrees wrong what she had been taught as a dietitian. But my office staff said, Hey, don't quit. Stick around for a few weeks. See what you think. Later that year, she gave me a Christmas card that said, thank you for letting me see miracles every day. She completely did a 180 on her nutrition approach as I did a 180 on how I taught nutrition. So look at people who've actually been studying patients for over 20 years, day in, day out, six days a week, asking them to make dietary changes, asking them to make supplement changes, measuring the results and publishing papers about then you might want to take their recommendation seriously. Let's say you've made it 30 days and you've done what, but you're not convinced that this is a long term solution and I want to try to convince you it's not a long term solution. How do you add things back? The first thing I like to do is have you use long cooked tubers. What are tubers? These are root vegetables, things like sweet potatoes, things like Hicama. I'm a big fan of Jerusalem artichokes, sometimes called sun chokes, cook them, cook them over and over and over again, puree them, make them into soups, add the small amounts back into your diet. When and if you're tolerating that, then take light colored vegetables, even, it sounds crazy, take butter lettuce, cook it, make it into a soup, homogenize it. The more you cook it, the more you pressure cook things, you will minimize these plant defense systems and you'll know when something really gets your attention and just eliminate that from your diet. Make sure to check out the next one here. These are inulin containing vegetables and inulin, as you've read in my books, is probably the best prebiotic fiber for our gut bacteria.