 Dr. Garth Davis, a fairly outspoken person in the vegan community, recently did a video touching on essentially every single negative thing you could bring up in regards to meat. We're going to take a look at what he has to say and explain why he didn't do his research, how he's misinterpreting data, and that Dr. Garth Davis doesn't actually understand what makes a study credible. Okay, so let's talk about what is actually bad in meat. I mean, what is the harmful effect of meat? I see these guys online, they say that a meat diet is perfect. It gives you all the vitamins. Obviously, that's not true. I mean, you can't get vitamin C. That's where scurvy came from when people were eating nothing but meat. You can't get a lot of the fiber that you need. You don't get phytonutrients. In fact, without that fiber, you don't get the prebiotic. So you do change your bowel bacteria. And there's been studies about this, that you change your bowel bacteria and you actually get a bowel bacteria that's more prone to producing TMAO from carnitine. TMAO is a substance that's very bad for the heart and has been associated with congestive heart failure and heart disease. And you also get a microbiome that doesn't produce butyrate, which is protective to the colon and anti-inflammatory. This is where he didn't really do his research. And I can't blame him because most people don't know that meat actually has vitamin C. Even Sean Baker, who was on the carnivore diet for like a year, didn't know that meat had vitamin C on the Joe Rogan podcast. All meat has small amounts of it. And there are foods like liver, spleen, certain organs, as well as parts of fish that have pretty high amounts of vitamin C. What causes scurvy isn't exactly the lack of vitamin C in the diet. It's the lack of fresh foods. The reason that Arctic Explorers would get scurvy or people get scurvy in general is because the lack of fresh food in the diet. Even when these Arctic Explorers had access to fresh meat, if they had cooked it for too long or boiled it for too long, they would still suffer from scurvy. So if you guys want to look more into the vitamin C content of meat or scurvy, some great resources are a German nutrition database that I will provide in the comments below, as well as a book called The Fat of the Land. But besides what you're missing, what are you getting? What's bad in the meat? Well, there's several things. First of all, advanced glycated end products or AGEs. AGEs are caused by the browning that you see with meat. You can't get it with any kind of browning. It's called the Maillard Reaction. So you can get it with toast too. You just don't get it to quite the effect that you get it with meat. Meat has a very high AGE content. I suggest you look it up because AGEs have been tied with multiple different diseases. That's basically because AGEs create free radicals, and we know that free radicals create disease and aging, etc. Now, keep in mind if you're on a meat diet and you're getting a lot of AGEs, you're also not getting the antioxidants that could fight the AGEs. For instance, I had toast today. My toast probably had some AGEs with it, but I also had blueberries. So my blueberries would act as an antioxidant towards that effect. Advanced glycation end products are not just specific to meat, as he said. It can be any cooked food. And it's mostly a concern in processed foods, but there's a couple points that we have to touch on. Meat does contain vitamin C and E, which are the most powerful antioxidants. So to say that people aren't getting antioxidants on a carnivore diet is misleading. And there's also nothing stopping people from consuming these antioxidant foods on a carnivore diet. But it's very clear that this idea of antioxidants and free radicals is just a drop of water in the bucket compared to overall metabolic processes like cell differentiation and gene expression. These metabolic processes are regulated by vitamins A and D3. Both are which very low on a vegan diet. And this is something that kind of goes under the radar here. These vitamins are such important precursors to every cell being made in the body that vegans don't really want to talk about them. If you notice, there is no vegan that has moderate to high levels of vitamin D3 in their blood work on YouTube. They don't really touch on vitamin A and the conversion of carotene to retinol because people can have gene polymorphisms that inhibit the conversion rates. And if you guys want to know more about this, I do have a bunch of other videos talking on the importance of these fat soluble vitamins. Also in that browning, not only do you get AGEs, you also get heterocyclic amines which we know are in fact carcinogenic. Heterocyclic amines as well as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are claimed to be carcinogenic on the basis that they were injected into rats at thousands of times the normal dosage outside of the context of the meat. What we have to understand here is not only the dosage is wrong, but the method of the study is incorrect. If you fed these rats smoked brisket every day, I'm sure they would be happy as hell. This is something that we are going to see throughout the rest of this video in regards to things that vegans are trying to claim in regards to studies. They like to isolate substances outside of meat, use them in unrealistic doses in rats, and then claim that meat is carcinogenic based on this isolation in a rat study. It just doesn't make any sense. You also get saturated fat. We know from saturated fat that it raises cholesterol. A lot of these people on ketosis diets we saw in the recent study in a randomized control trial increased their cholesterol by 40%. LDL cholesterol, that is a really bad result because from the Cooper study we know that increases in cholesterol are associated with heart disease irrespective of any other factors. In other words, in the Cooper study they followed for 10 years 30,000 people that were otherwise healthy. They just had a high LDL cholesterol and they saw a substantial amount of increase in mortality and morbidity because of that. That increase in cholesterol is important. We also know that saturated fat is tied with cancers. I'm not going to sit here and explain why the lipid hypothesis is a hypothesis and that cholesterol isn't actually the cause of heart disease. We did a whole live stream on this on Saturday. The basic summary is inflammation, oxidized cholesterol, and high blood pressure are what cause heart disease, not LDL cholesterol. This is clinging to old science and complete nonsense. If we actually take a look at this Cooper study that he's talking about, we see the relative risk is not high enough to adjust for confounding factors. So this is an aspect of what makes a study credible. If the relative risk of a study isn't above 2, preferably above 3, that means that it does not account for other factors in the person's diet and lifestyle. Dr. Garth Davis is not being honest with his interpretation of the study here. I find it funny how he's talking about this and then he did a video with Fully Rockerstina and he glossed over her triglyceride levels of 215 as if they didn't matter. So ridiculously good that you will never get a heart attack. That is the best news ever. And that saturated fat actually causes damage to the gap junctions of your cells in your intestine. You hear people talking about leaky gut a lot. Well that is the leaky gut, that that damage to the gap junctions allows what's in your intestine to get into your body. And so what is in your intestine, especially for eating meat, is endotoxin. So they did a great study, randomized controlled trial where they gave people either cream or orange juice or water and with the cream group they saw a dramatic increase in inflammatory mediators because what's happening is endotoxin from the intestine when combined with the saturated fat is able to get into the body and the body then creates an inflammatory reaction to it. Saturated fat causes leaky gut, is that why Crohn's disease is like the secret of the vegan community? A high fat and a high carbohydrate diet in conjunction with anti-nutrients can cause leaky gut or in the case of a vegan diet if anti-nutrients are consumed in large enough amounts, leaky gut is literally correlated directly to substances like lectins and legumes. People that go on a high fat keto diet or a carnivore diet with plenty of animal foods actually heal their gut issues, yet you are claiming the opposite. The anecdotes say otherwise. All of these people go on vegan diets and they get gut issues. All of these people go on carnivore diets and they heal their guts, but you're saying the opposite. Hmm, I wonder who I should believe. He is literally talking out his ass. On the other hand, in the context of the cream versus orange juice versus water study, he's fairly correct, but the problem with comparing cream to orange juice and water is that sugar is processed very quickly in the early parts of the small intestine and the liver, whereas the cream actually goes through a much larger portion of the intestine. This study would be very relevant in the context of someone consuming something like cream plus beans and then cream on its own. We'd actually have to see the effect of cream with certain foods and cream with other foods. That would actually be a reasonable experiment. The factors that actually determine endotoxins leaking through the intestinal barrier here could be microbiome, gut permeability, the degree of chylomicrons present, which is what the endotoxins bind to. This could also just be an immune response to endotoxins depending on the person. A lot of other factors to talk about that Dr. Garth Davis didn't really think about. The simplest explanation is the orange juice and the water literally don't even get to the stages in the small intestine. That the cream does. It's not a fair comparison. We also know that animal proteins have higher amounts of leucine. We know that leucine stimulates the mTOR aging pathway and also stimulates IGF-1, which is associated with cancers. Leucine mTOR IGF-1 associated with cancer. What he means is that if a rat has cancer and you inject a large amount of this substance into a rat, the cancer growth will progress. But this doesn't make a lot of sense because they already had cancer. It's like saying that the sun causes skin cancer, yet our ancestors were in the sun for 10 to 15 hours a day without having any problems. I did a video on mTOR several days ago as well as IGF-1 a few months ago and you guys can take a look at the studies that I provided in that. I don't really want to touch too much on this specifically as I've elaborated on it extensively in the past. Of course, meat also has more sulfur-containing amino acids and those sulfur-containing amino acids actually create acidosis. You don't get acidosis by eating acid. So don't go and drink alkaline water. That's not going to make an effect. Your body will acidify it as it gets into your stomach. What creates acidosis and it's not acidemia. That's a different thing. Acidosis is the absorption of the sulfur-containing amino acids. It is buffered by electrolytes. And so if you're not getting a good electrolyte and we know that people that eat a very high meat diet often have very poor electrolyte intake. I don't know where he's getting the idea of acidosis. It's usually caused by high alcohol consumption, drug overdoses, or respiratory problems. This is almost as bad as those doctors that don't know the difference between ketosis and ketoacidosis. And so there's a lot of bad things and I could go on and on, new 5G, viruses, different things that are associated with meat intake. So apparently being a doctor gives him enough credibility to just claim that meat gives viruses off the top of his head without mentioning what viruses or what studies he mentioned. In regards to the NEU5GC that he mentioned, this is a very interesting substance. It used to be present in most human mammals and humans had a mutation that caused us to lose it. The thing is the studies here done on rats have been mutated to not have the gene and then they inject unrealistic amounts of this new 5GC outside of the context of the food itself. It's the same with the heterocyclic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. I'm sick of these vegans isolating specific substances and trying to associate them with meat being bad for you. I can show more convincing studies on things like fructose consumption having strong correlations with cancer. NEU5GC is a very, very small component of meat. There's so many more substances in meat, vitamins, minerals, fats, fatty acids that are beneficial. But if I take a study on something like fructose which is a much larger component of fruit and show it in studies how it's negative, people are just going to disregard it. Like if I say fructose and fruit is associated with cancer and these are very strong correlations. These are not the correlations that we're looking at for NEU5GC. And then you say, oh well, fructose isn't bad if it's in the context of a fruit, huh? Again, it's like saying that we shouldn't go to the beach because the sun can cause skin cancer when there are clearly other factors to account for, like your skin color. The key is, is this actually affecting your health? So we know from the recent World Health Organization that processed meat is a Class 1 carcinogen, meaning they definitely think it is a carcinogen. We also know that red meat is a Class 2A. Now you've got to understand for them to come up with those, we need very, very clear evidence and they're using epidemiologic evidence. Now I see this a lot from the meat advocacy base that they criticize epidemiology until they actually have an epidemiologic study that favors them. Then they love epidemiology. But here's the thing about epidemiology. We are never, ever, ever going to have a randomized control trial where one group is doing a plant-based diet, one group is doing a meat diet, and this goes on for 20 years. That's what you got to do in order to really get an answer, but you're not going to have that possibility. It's just not going to happen. You can't do that kind of a randomized control trial. So we have to depend on epidemiology. Oh look, another appeal to authority, the World Health Organization. Please guys, this drives me crazy. Listen, if any of you vegans want to listen to the World Health Organization, go ahead. We'll see what each of us look like five years from now. But even Dr. Garth Davis admits that there is no clear epidemiological evidence for nutrition. Exactly. So start looking at mechanisms as opposed to these bullshit studies and stop wasting my time. If you don't have a correct answer, don't try to make one out of bullshit. This is like drinking rat poison just because there's nothing else to eat and you're hungry. It doesn't make any sense. The strange thing to me about these guys that are advocating like a carnivore diet is there's no epidemiologic evidence that they have any leg to stand on. I mean, there is no evidence that a high meat diet is in any way beneficial. There is plenty of evidence showing the importance of the nutrition of animal products being beneficial in large amounts, specifically in regards to how vegetarians and plant-based dieters develop iron and B12 deficiencies, as well as the sheer variance of vitamin levels in breast milk. And this is all the vitamins A, D, E, K2, DHA. If I showed you that a mother's breast milk can vary from 0.06% DHA to 1.7%, how are you going to discount the importance of consuming fatty fish after considering the bioavailability of omega-3 fatty acids from flax seeds? These vegans are blind to anything that contradicts their viewpoint. In the case of the studies I'm talking about here, I'm sorry, you might need an IQ of about 95 to interpret this. I know it's a bit difficult for some of these vegan doctors to open their minds and do a little bit of research, but it's not too hard to figure out. They just don't want to figure it out. And there's quite the opposite. And there's quite the opposite in multiple different studies. So it's not like one study showed this. So you could look at the Adventist Health Study. You could look at the NIH AARP study. You could look at the Epic Data Study. All these studies from different places and different scientists show that increased meat consumption is associated with aging, with diabetes, with heart disease, with cancer. Another thing to consider in the context of a study being credible or not is whether it's a randomized control trial or a clinical trial. Especially that a lot of these studies are questionnaires. They're not too reliable. So if we take a look at the NIH AARP study, it has the issue of the relative risk being so low it does not account for the confounding factors in lifestyle. What we touched on earlier. Also, what's funny to mention is that white meat actually improved mortality. I'm sure the vegans don't want you to know that. It's funny that they quote this study that literally says eating chicken is better for you than a vegan diet. Then we take a look at the epic trial and the relative risk in the epic trial is even lower. The fact that they are using a 1.1 to 1.2 relative risk in a study shows that they have absolutely no understanding of what makes a study credible. Now, a lot of times the correlation is not very strong. But you got to remember, if we're doing an epidemiologic study and I'm studying one group versus another and there's not a big difference in those two groups. For instance, Dr. Esselstyn always uses the analogy. If we're studying whether a car wreck kills you and one group's going 80 and one group's going 60, you're not going to see a huge difference. All right. First of all, there's a huge difference between a crash at 60 miles per hour versus 80 miles per hour, even if everything else was the same. But that is just a terrible, terrible analogy for this. What were the road conditions? Was it raining? Was it dark outside? Was the person impaired with alcohol or drugs? Did the car have new tires? Was it an older car or a newer car? Was the car four-wheel drive or all-wheel drive or two-wheel drive? These are confounding factors. These are things that in lifestyle does the person exercise. What is the quality of food that the person's consuming? Is the person on medication? Is the person happy? Is the person depressed? If the relative risk is not approximately 3.0 to 4.0, we can't even look at the study. The relative risk for cigarettes and things that are clearly carcinogenic are like 30, 40, 50. It's incredibly, incredibly high. Thousands of percentages of association. These studies are not credible. This is junk science. And they're not doing a really big comparison between a whole food, plant-based diet and a meat diet. Now, there are studies that are looking at a meat diet versus a vegan diet, but you've got to look at that vegan diet. And in most of those studies in the vegan diet, they're very low fiber, 20 grams of fiber. This is not a healthy vegan diet. A lot of them haven't been supplementing their B12, so they're low in B12, and they're low in calcium because they're not eating a really plant-based diet that should be high in calcium. And what do we see? Well, we still see that the vegans do better than the meat eaters. The other thing they do in these studies is they control for weight. So they say, well, weight is an independent factor of disease. And in the vegan group, they tend to weight less than the meat group, so that's unfair. So therefore, we're only going to look at people weighing the same. Well, what they've done is removed. One of the huge benefits of a vegan diet is that it's a high fiber diet and is associated with lower weight. So it's okay to say that these vegans weren't doing a vegan diet properly by not supplementing B12, not taking omega-3s, not consuming enough calcium, but you want to dismiss the processed sugar and the garbage and refined foods that the meat eaters were likely eating. And you also don't want to mention that these meat eaters consume 70 to 80% of their calories from plant foods. These people aren't meat eaters. They eat mostly plants and some meat, and you're comparing them to people that eat only plants. Very, very misleading. In one of the studies he referenced, it actually says something along the lines of what I just mentioned. These data directly point to the fact that it is the response to the overall dietary characteristics that drives association between red meat consumption and colorectal cancer risk, and that future studies must use experimental designs that capture the complexity of dietary patterns in our attempts to define the potential relationship between meat consumption and colon cancer and the mechanisms involved. Just to touch briefly on calcium, the form that occurs in plants is bound to oxalates, an oxalic acid molecule. Dr. Garth Davis, if you would like a lesson on calcium oxalate and how the absorption is inhibited in the context of certain plant foods, you can reach out to me via email frankatofano at gmail.com, because apparently, didn't do his research. And so these epidemiologic studies actually overcorrect and are detrimental to a true plant-based diet, and yet it still shows that a plant-based diet is beneficial. Then the other thing you'll hear these meat eaters say is that we don't have anything but epidemiology. Couldn't be further from the truth. So we've got mechanism of action studies, and we have randomized controlled trials. We have randomized controlled trial that looks at genes associated with aging and carcinogenesis, and show that a plant-based diet affects 500 different genes in that situation. We've got randomized controlled trials showing a decrease in prostate specific antigen in people with early stage prostate cancer. We've got randomized controlled trials showing a reversal of heart disease, which is unheard of. We've got randomized controlled trials showing a decrease in A1c with diabetics, and we've got quite a few trials showing randomized controlled trials saying showing that a vegan diet is superior for weight loss in diet trials. And these studies are much longer than any of the, the only thing a ketosis study has been shown to do is to lose weight and to drop sugar levels. You don't eat sugar, your sugar level drops. These are all short-term studies, so none of them have looked long-term. They're not looking at glucose tolerance tests, which means they aren't testing whether your type 2 diabetes is cured. They're just showing that your blood sugar drops, which does not, as I've stated in other videos, show that your diabetes is cured. If I then give them sugar, it will raise their sugar again. They don't have any long-term studies. This is not long-term at all. So I couldn't really find any of the studies because he didn't mention them by their name, but this ties back to earlier what we spoke about in regards to the lipid hypothesis being incorrect and LDL cholesterol contributing to heart disease. The idea is that a plant-based diet reduces your cholesterol, which in turn reduces your risk of heart disease, but we know that reducing cholesterol doesn't necessarily reduce risk of heart disease. The primary factors are the inflammation, the oxidation of cholesterol, and the high blood pressure that we mentioned earlier. What I was able to find is that the context of these studies is not correct. You're comparing health-minded vegans and vegetarians to standard American dieters. One thing I find funny though is the macronutrient ratio in a standard American diet is actually the same as blue zones. The only difference is the food quality. So American dieters consume 30% of their calories from animal foods and 70% from plant foods. So do blue zones, except they're not drinking conventional grain-fed, hormone-laden milk. They're consuming raw sheet milk straight out of the sheep that they milked that morning. They're not studying a lot of the things we study with these plant-based diets. They're not looking at what is your vascular function like on a high-meat ketosis type diet. We know with a plant-based diet that when you're on a plant-based diet, you have better vasoconstriction and vasodilation. So I could put a blood cuff on you and show that when I release that blood cuff, your blood vessels are more likely to dilate on a plant-based diet than they are on a meat diet. Vasoconstriction and vasodilation are complete opposites. So the context of what he said doesn't really make sense. You can only say one or the other. I think he meant to say that vegans had lower blood pressure, but he just wants to sound smart. And this is absolutely not true. The First Nation Inuits, most people know them as Eskimos, had very low rates of heart disease because of their incredibly low blood pressure due to consuming large amounts of omega-3 fatty acids from fish. These omega-3 fatty acids found in fish, high-quality animal products, even red meat, thin the blood almost like aspirin do. They reduce the amount of fibrin in the blood, they make the platelets more flexible, and to discount that Eskimos blood clots in eight minutes and that average person blood clots in four minutes. And to deny the importance of omega-3s in regards to blood health, to say that vegans have healthier blood is literally completely the opposite of what's true. And there's several reasons for that in the effect on the end and so we have many mechanisms of action studies that also show why our diet is working. And then we have the epidemiologic studies and the populations that are the most plant-based and especially looking at the Adventist vegans, which have been followed for many years. So the bottom line is we've got a lot of science. So he talks about mechanism of action studies, but when vegan ideas are put to the test of mechanisms in the body, there are very simple explanations as to why these things aren't practical. From the method used in the study to confounding factors, if the dosage is not correct, you can't use it. You could say that, okay, the new 5GC mechanism of action in this specific study done in rats, that's not how it works. It needs to be a practical application. A lot of science. We know why animal protein can be bad for you. Now in moderation and small doses, it would be hard to say that is absolutely bad for you, but we do know that in the Adventist health study, the vegans are tended to be healthier than the vegetarians. And ostensibly, the vegetarians are just doing a little bit of animal protein, so maybe less is better. We know that a whole food plant-based diet gets tons of antioxidants and anti-inflammatory substances are absorbed and it's associated with long-term health. Hope that helps out for you guys, kind of deciphering some of the data that's out there. That's not true. The vegan and the lower fat consumption Adventists had lower life expectancy than the ones that consumed more fat from nuts or animal products. The Adventists in general also had lower life expectancy than other blue zones and they had about half the consumption of animal products of these other blue zones. Something to keep in mind. If you guys really want to know more about blue zones, check out the video I did a couple months ago. I'll put it in the description below. So there is certainly a lack of understanding of paper versus plant value in nutrient availability. And the main thing missing here is the context of the study and the lack of evidence and just misinterpreting the data as well as not doing his research into these studies. Nothing said in this video has any sort of credibility from an epidemiological or mechanistic standpoint. The best thing for vegans and carnivores to do is to say there's not a lot of science out here that is credible. There's not. We can deduce things from the diets our ancestors used to follow and we can use anecdotes very well. And by mechanisms what we can look at is what's in the food, what's the availability of the food, and how does it absorb in the human body. You could consume all the non-hem iron you want from legumes but when you're anemic in a year are you going to claim oh but I was consuming all this iron? No. There has to be some sort of realism to this. We need to stop playing defense against these vegans and get on the offense. Every time some vegan brings up something like New 5G C, TMAO, M-Tor, Saturated Fat, Cholesterol, people treat it as gospel. This is because of conventional wisdom, culture, everything we've been told our whole lives. Meet bad, plants good. But if I bring up that oh, carotene conversion in a plant-based diet is abysmal. You would have to poison yourself in flaxseed to get the equivalent amount of DHA of one bite of fish. Antinutrients in grains and legumes lead to leaky gut and anemia, iron deficiency, all of these issues that vegans clearly develop. B12 deficiency, there is not one vegan out there that has normal vitamin D three levels. These things are just swept under the rug. No one cares. The evidence of negative aspects of a vegan diet are factual. It's just there has not been enough discrediting of the vegan diet and the pushing of the mechanism of these things. If you look at how phytates bind to certain minerals, if you look at gene polymorphisms for carotene to vitamin A conversion, if you look at the percentage conversion rates of ALA to EPA and DHA in the body, you would be like, why am I bothering with this New 5G C bullshit? These are not epidemiological studies with insignificant relative risks. These are factual metabolic functions in the body. I would like to focus on these things more. I would like people to talk about these things more and use them to discredit a vegan diet more. It's just they don't really get a lot of traction. And I think one big thing that we're missing here is that most people in general are unhealthy and going on a vegan diet actually tends to improve the health of the average person until they get B12 deficiency and anemia. I think the real solution here is to focus on food quality, stop treating animals so poorly, raise them how they're supposed to, consume high quality animal foods, consume high quality plant foods, but who knows? Not going to happen in my lifetime. At least I don't think so. So if you guys would like to support the channel, please subscribe, like and share the video. I would force you to if I could, but you know, community guidelines, a little bit of this, that and not too easy to do. If you guys would like to check out my Amazon shop Patreon, I got a couple of products, nutrient-dense stuff on my Amazon. You guys can check out like cod liver and vitamin D3 supplements. If you guys want to go on my Patreon, I do have exclusive videos and I do answer more in-depth questions on my Patreon. I'm on Twitter, I'm on Instagram. You guys can check out my hygiene products like my lip balm on my website frank-tofano.com. I also have a deodorant, tooth powder, pomade and moisturizing cream. You guys will love this stuff. Try it out. If you guys want to reach out to me for one-on-one consultations in regards to improving your overall nutrient density, reducing inflammation in the diet, being a perfect version of yourself, you can send me an email frankatofano.com.