 Today, we are going to discuss one of the biggest issues when following a carnivore diet, iron overload, which is particularly a problem when eating only muscle meat. This overload of iron on your liver can also lead to other issues, causing massive oxidative stress. Something like vitamin A toxicity, which is normally only possible when supplementing, can even manifest itself. So I've been following a carnivore diet for just over seven years now. The first six years, amazing. High energy, great skin, great sleep. But then, it all started going downhill. For those first six years on the diet, I used my own understanding of carnivore. In February of 2018, I was auditioning for the show MasterChef. I was in a hotel for two weeks, didn't sleep one night. Dude, I was sleeping next to this. The guy must have weighed 400 pounds, massive black dude, sounded like a mountain. I had ear plugs in, headphones on, I had two pillows on my head, and I could not sleep one night. I was taking painkillers, Tylenol, and Advil, eating mostly smoked fish and egg yolks. That's all they had in the supermarket. When I came back to New York, I was assuming I was going to be able to sleep, but it never restored, and this was going to be the worst few months of my life. So I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I tried everything. I even asked my viewers for help. And for months and months and months, all I was eating was rib-eye steak and water to try to rule out any factors. And over the course of the year and a half, two years, I was suffering from this, I was only eating muscle meat. My pain and insomnia getting worse and worse and worse. Shortly after I came back from MasterChef, I actually went completely raw to remove any issues eating only beef fat and beef. Very, very strict. That also didn't help. Then I started incorporating dairy, which was when all hell broke loose. Guys, this was as close to torture as it could get. I didn't sleep for weeks and weeks and weeks at a time. My only saving grace being, you know, perhaps one night, I got three to four hours. You know, went to so many doctors. Not one of them knew what was going on. By far, the most miserable time in my life. Somehow, I managed to make a YouTube video every single day. Something I'm proud of to say the least, but putting myself through all of that to further the growth of my YouTube channel took a massive toll. Definitely changed my personality. So my speculation through this whole process was initially copper toxicity or some type of heavy metal issue. Then I had Candida, which comes from heavy metal issues, turning into CFO, also known as SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Even came up into my stomach, had H. pylori in some capacity. I thought it could have been vitamin A impairing my liver from past acutin use. But that was over six, seven years ago at this point, and I had been consuming liver for years without any issues whatsoever. My viewers helped me a lot with the speculation throughout this whole process, but even when you put a lot of intelligent minds together, it's hard to figure things out. So the overall message of this video is going to be that a carnivore diet is very dangerous, specifically due to the high iron content. The Rothtards that follow a Janus von der Plein, it's offered no solution. They have no clue what they're talking about. Simply saying, oh bro, your body is detoxing. Yeah, when my heart felt like it was going to explode because it was storing iron, I'm sure my body was detoxing, eating that raw meat. Yeah, that's why I had insomnia for weeks at a time. They create this mysticism around a raw diet like it's some secret knowledge holier than thou, and they're doing something special. Yet they haven't read one research paper in their lives, resulting in no understanding of human metabolism. You know, I guess I shouldn't be insulting the Rothtards because they are certainly a step ahead of the grain fed carnivores, who simply said, oh, eat meat and drink water. Yet I had been doing that for almost two years at that point, and it wasn't working. I avoided all organ meats. In fact, the digestive issues and insomnia were worse when I was eating only meat. It's actually disgusting. If you go on any Reddit form or Facebook group, their advice to anyone having issues on the diet is, just eat more fatty meat. Like eating two more pounds of estrogenic soy-fed feedlot meat is going to help my iron overload. I mean, it sure aligns the pockets of big agriculture, uh, eat the meat you like and can afford. They also said that I might have a histamine intolerance, but I was eating freshly slaughtered meat. I literally went down to Queens, like cut open a goat, ate the meat the next day, insomnia was even worse. One of my subscribers, you know who you are, buddy. I've been emailing him back and forth, just spoke to him yesterday. You guys don't know this guy. You know, he reached out to me randomly. He speculated that I had high iron levels and to get my ferritin checked. I kind of dismissed this, but it started making sense. And although I did speculate copper toxicity, heavy metals at some point, I never actually experimented with supplementation. And zinc, which is the antagonist of copper, is very high on a carnivore diet. So that gave me a head start. Vitamin A toxicity was on my mind this whole time, but I wasn't reacting to high vitamin A foods like egg yolks and raw dairy, even liver, the same way I was reacting to large amounts of red meat. You know, one of the worst nights I slept was, you know, just a few months ago I had two local ribeye steaks from a farm. And I just was like, what is causing me to not... The only thing is iron. You know, these steaks don't have a considerable retinal content. You know, the steaks aren't too high in zinc. The steaks aren't too high in copper. The only thing that made sense was iron. Now, keep in mind, I don't have hemochromatosis. This has nothing to do with hemochromatosis. I got tested, you know, nor was my iron saturation indicative of hemochromatosis. My liver was just storing iron. And this is a problem I've observed in many, many, many of my clients. And not one of my clients have hemochromatosis. And this is really being brushed under the rug in the context of a carnivore diet. And I think the main reason for that is because it does take a long time to manifest itself. It took me maybe a year and a half, two years of doing an improper carnivore diet for it to happen. I wouldn't say the mechanism behind this is too complex to understand, but I've rarely seen this talking about in any dietary community, let alone carnivore. So the simple answer to this is that vitamin A, retinol, is needed to activate something called serilloplasmin, which manages copper and iron. And also if you're not getting enough copper, if you're consuming a carnivore diet high in zinc and you have a copper deficiency, you can't transport iron. So vitamin A activates serilloplasmin and you need copper to transport iron. This is what I believe is causing people to have a histamine issue on the carnivore diet. I think everyone with histamine problems has a copper deficiency. And since I wasn't consuming vitamin A, since I was only eating muscle meat, my zinc was out of whack, copper and iron were going unregulated. And iron and copper are heavy metals. They are extremely oxidative. One of the worst things you can consume if it becomes rogue, unregulated. And what we mean here is organ damage, liver failure, respiratory issues, heart palpitations, really, really bad severe problems. When I consumed raw dairy, which triggered all of my issues, the dairy contained vitamin A, which likely mobilized some iron and copper and the lactose in that also fed the pathogenic bacteria in the digestive tract. And the reason that I started getting pathogenic bacteria in my digestive tract is because candida and certain fungal infections are actually a preventative measure in the body against heavy metal toxicity. You know, the yeast is taking up all of those metals so they don't cause oxidative stress and damage to your tissues. So when you eat something, if your liver is overloaded with iron, in that bile that's secreted from your liver, the iron will actually come out. So even if you're not eating high iron foods anymore, there's still some iron coming out of your liver going into the digestive system, causing the overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria. Corn maker, AKA Shawn Baker, talked about hepsidin the other day claiming that high insulin increases hepsidin, which doesn't really matter. You know, hepsidin being a substance in the body that regulates iron. And consuming four pounds of grains of meat per day is not going to fix your insulin resistance. And by no means is hepsidin the only part of the picture. He is giving extremely dangerous advice saying that people have lowered their iron levels on carnivore. I've seen a number of people now with hemochromatosis that actually have improved significantly to where their iron levels come back to normal on a carnivore diet. Surprising is that because we know that red meat particularly has a lot of iron in it. Almost as cherry picking as a vegan, except he's using his medical degree and rotten research or lack of research to promote grain fed beef consumption instead of plants. You know it's funny. As soon as someone has the letters MD behind their name, there's suddenly an authority to nutrition, the appeal to authority, the fear mongering of listen to anyone that's not a doctor. How dare you? That doctor received little to no nutritional training in medical school. You absolutely better listen to him. I hate to break it to you boys and girls, but the only people with in-depth nutritional knowledge have done all of the research on their own and that's simply the truth. It so happens that there are also a lot of intelligent doctors that have done that research. These carnivore doctors likely not being any of them considering the words that come out of their mouth. Another dangerous mechanism is that consuming feedlot meat can lower your testosterone. These conventionally raised animal products contain agrochemicals such as atrazine that have estrogenic properties lowering your testosterone. Low testosterone being correlated with high ferritin levels. Even if the estrogen in the beef doesn't lower your testosterone significantly, let's say you're using steroids, you're taking HRT, and iron overload from a poorly planned carnivore diet will inhibit your liver function once that iron starts building up and that will result in low testosterone. If your liver isn't working, your body isn't going to be able to produce testosterone. Basically, by following an unnatural diet such as a grain fed steak diet, copper and zinc go rogue, you don't have vitamin A to regulate them, and iron destroys your organs, specifically your liver and your heart. Planned foods are copper dominant, whereas animal foods, mainly muscle meats, are zinc dominant. If you're not eating liver, which is an excellent source of copper and excellent source of vitamin A to activate ceruloplasmin, you're going to get way too much zinc. And in a matter of time, start developing iron regulation issues from a copper deficiency. This includes histamine intolerance, this includes insomnia, this includes gut microbiome issues such as candida, and dairy plays a very important role in a balanced carnivore diet, as calcium is the only substance that has been shown to inhibit iron and zinc absorption. Two things which you are getting way too much of on a carnivore diet. This would actually explain why the Masai are such a long-lived group of people, and sometimes when we see people only eating meat, they don't end up doing so well. The Masai were consuming large amounts of dairy. And if you've actually gotten yourself into this whole, if you have any of these symptoms, if you go to the doctor and get your ferritin tested and it's high, the only thing to really do is to give blood. Or you can have a hematologist schedule phlebotomies, which is them drawing out your blood more frequently. You know, you're normally only allowed to donate blood every few months. And I have given blood every single week for the past three months. My ferritin a couple months back was about 450, and now my ferritin is 18. Ideally, you want your ferritin to be below 50. Otherwise, your liver is not going to be able to de-load iron. I mean, I wish I would have had better health insurance. I could have gotten the scan of my liver to see how much iron is stored. But the second I gave blood that first time, the heart palpitation stopped. Everything is slowly getting better. And it's going to take a few months of consuming large amounts of copper, like salmon, liver. And this is difficult because the only foods that really contain copper are liver in large amounts. And if your liver is no longer tolerating vitamin A because it's overloaded with iron, you know, if your liver has iron in it, vitamin A is even harder for it to process. So now I can't even eat a lot of liver. You know, the only real natural food source of copper. So I have to start using supplements. And, you know, there aren't even that many great plant food sources of copper in a bioavailable form as, you know, copper is greatly inhibited by oxalates and phytic acid if they are in large amounts. So hopefully this helps some of you guys out. I don't want to detract people from following carnivore or meat-based diet in general. This is mainly to warn people about the dangers of this beef propaganda. You know, there's too many other animal foods. You don't have to eat beef to be healthy. You know, the last few weeks, the last few months, I've been eating mostly pork, dairy, fish, eggs, shellfish even. And I've been doing a lot better, a lot more variety, supporting, you know, people besides these cattle farmers. So it's important to have a balanced diet and it's even more important to understand nutrition, to not trust these people. You know, all these people are doing these carnivores. They're not making educational videos like I am. They're not spending hours researching every day. They're using anecdotes and cherry picking and misleading you into their agenda. So by having an agenda to push certain products, certain meat consumption, not only are they lying to you about how to be optimally healthy, you know, they're not informing you about nutrients, vitamins, minerals, elements, fatty acids. They're also hiding things like this from you that I had to figure out on my own. If you go on these Reddit forums and Facebook groups where I'm banned, these people are actively censoring negative stories about the carnivore diet and this is very bad. You know, these Facebook groups and these forums are likely going to be taken down at some point in the future because they are actively censoring people that are having problems with the carnivore diet. And we see this with a vegan diet. We see people have issues, but vegans don't usually censor that stuff. They let people talk about it and discuss it. You know, these carnivores are literally just deleting posts, banning people, prohibiting people to participate and this deep platforming, this censorship of like, almost like censorship of free speech is something we only see when there's a lot of special interest funding present and where there's an agenda to push. So thank you guys for joining me. If you'd like to learn more about this, you know, definitely check out my carnivore diet course, definitely check out my book. I will cover this more extensively in the future, but I have been working with several clients to help them resolve their issues as, you know, unfortunately, you know, the only people that know a lot about this have dealt with it firsthand. You guys enjoy the rest of your week. Drink some milk.