 We are going to go over the reasons I became very sick after nearly eight years of following a carnivore diet. Now, these are obviously things I realized after the fact, otherwise I wouldn't have stuck to the diet so long. And if I had adhered to these principles, I should have been okay for a much longer period of time. Certainly not feeling like I was on death's door. I do still have my carnivore meal plan available on frank-defano.com if you sign up. And that is pretty close to correct and far better than anything else I've seen. If that's not enough, you can check out the carnivore diet course as well. But all of this information is available freely on my channel. Overall, I think a carnivore diet can be done if you were using indigenous cooking methods with the entire animal. And I don't mean a bite of liver once per day, having a couple of organ pills. The consumption of the entrails, especially intestines, and organs that aren't typically accessible is what is key to nutrient balance. Those are much higher in copper, antagonistic to zinc, which tends to be way too high on most carnivore muscle-meat diets. So unless you're gutting a sheep in your backyard, you'll have to do a few things differently. And these are in order of typical occurrence on a carnivore diet journey, such as this will show up first, then this, then that, and finally, nutrient imbalances. So number one is low vitamin C. Although the carnivore diet does contain some vitamin C and you certainly won't develop scurvy following it, the amount is nowhere near ideal. Without enough vitamin C, you won't be able to optimize your antioxidant capacity. Imagine you're getting all of these B vitamins from steak for glutathione. Your vitamin E is good and not oxidized because you're consuming high-quality pasture-raised eggs, grass-fed dairy, grass-fed beef. But you're falling short on the vitamin C cycle, especially considering we're in a high inflammatory environment compared to our ancestors. There's a reason I wear a silver shirt all day. It's not because I want to sweat my guts out. Without higher amounts of vitamin C, your body will have a difficult time regulating certain nutrients, especially copper, iron, magnesium, and vitamin A, which we will touch on later. Even initially on a carnivore diet, people do feel energized when supplementing or consuming high vitamin C foods. One of the things you can generally look at for low vitamin C is low energy and poor collagen metabolism, as well as stretched skin. Someone's looking older, wrinkled, gaunt, not as good as they should. That's related to antioxidant cycles as a whole, not specifically vitamin C. If the person wasn't sleeping enough, didn't exercise, was in a super high-wifi environment, maybe they drink a lot of alcohol. That can inhibit the antioxidant cycles, which vitamin C may or may not help with. Number two, we have dysbiosis, which is simply an imbalanced gut microbiome. Too much of certain bacteria, not enough of others. And I've heard many carnivores say, oh my God, it's perfectly healthy. Yet they're pooping out of rock every three days. And anytime they eat something that's not carnivore, that's not a ribeye steak, they feel like they're going to die. It can't even have a bite of bread, typically occurring just a few months into the diet. And there's a reason all of our ancestors had certain dietary habits. In the past, all of us consumed a variety of cooked, raw, and fermented foods to feed different types of gut bacteria, as well as nourish our bodies. I've referred to this several times as a triple presence, raw, cooked, and fermented. Most also had carbohydrates in the diet. The few exceptions that weren't consuming carbohydrates consumed much larger amounts of fermented foods. And this is key because only carbohydrates can feed your gut bacteria. In that natural indigenous diet, which I wrote a book on, The Ancestral Indigenous Diet, you can check that out on my website as well. We have the consumption of fermented foods to repopulate the gut, such as high meat, beer, wine, yogurt kefir, various natural fermentations to keep the microbiome balanced, as well as the presence of carbohydrates to feed that gut bacteria. The probiotics and the prebiotics, the actual bacteria itself and something to feed the bacteria. That rare exception of the First Nation Alaskans in Udescomos consumed much larger amounts of fermented meat, rotten fish, on a consistent basis to make up for their diet's lack of carbohydrates. Instead of physically feeding the gut bacteria with starch, sugar, whatever it may be, they consume the bacteria itself to keep the gut consistently populated. Now, each of those things can cause dysbiosis on their own. Too much cooked food in the diet, stressing the organ systems, no consumption of fermented foods, which means you're not getting good bacteria in the gut frequently enough, and a lack of carbohydrates. So the gut bacteria that consumes carbohydrates dies off, and the other becomes dominant. Incorporating raw dairy and honey might help temporarily for some people, but it tends to blanket the problem, although yogurt and kefir are definitely excellent additions to the diet and some of the best probiotic sources that exist. As carnivore dieters brag about their low bowel frequency, they also brag about not having fiber in the diet, which leads us to number three, a lack of gut motility. The volume and food balance on a normal diet allows food to pass through digestion at a certain rate. You know, the extreme ends of this spectrum we have, you know, vegans and carnivores. Too much food volume, not enough nutrition. Too low food volume, very high nutrition. When you go carnivore, the food tends to sit and be hyperabsorbed. So whatever is in that food, it's really getting sucked in by the liver, small intestine, those initial parts of digestion. When you don't have plant matter to dilute all of that concentrated meat, fat, organs, cholesterol, you could argue that anti-nutrients, especially in grains, might improve some issues. And this is even more concerning with feedlot processed conventional meats, because any chemicals, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, insecticides, things used in processing the meat are also going to get hyperabsorbed. Fatty liver, SIBO, candida, all things related to dysbiosis are common here. It seems like every single person, after following a carnivore diet for six months to two years, gets something of the sort. Iron overload can easily cause this. The high iron content of red meat being hyperabsorbed near your liver, impairing its function. And then since the food is sitting there, you know, if you consume that sugary dairy, honey with the red meat, it's a recipe for SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, CFO, fungal overgrowth, low gut motility, plus sugar, plus iron equals very happy bacteria. It's the perfect concoction to grow bacteria in a place it's not supposed to be your small intestine, at least in incredibly large amounts. And this is something that can take a little bit longer to show up, usually a year or two into the diet. For number four, we have nutrient imbalances. And yeah, you could have had some nutrient imbalances before the carnivore diet, but the ones specifically relating to carnivore happen severely in two to three years. And as I said, yes, most people do have nutrient imbalances, they're deficient in certain things, but the life-changing symptoms from nutrient imbalances on a carnivore diet take a little while. You know, lack of copper and magnesium are two big ones that you should definitely supplement. Selenium that is normally higher in seafood and some of the trace minerals that are higher in certain plants. If these mineral imbalances are out of whack, you might experience some head pain initially, mild digestive problems in the mid to long term. You have histamine intolerance, causing mast cell activation after a year and a half to two years of being copper deficient. Iron overload after that leading to liver dysfunction, headaches, especially insomnia. Dairy and honey can help a little bit here as well. Calcium kind of counters the high zinc and phosphorus content of a carnivore diet, which does help quite a bit, but in reality, you probably have to donate blood to reduce iron and supplement quite a few things to make a carnivore diet work. So we touched briefly on each of these problems, and I have very in-depth videos explaining these. So we mentioned that antioxidant video earlier. I also have a video on vitamin C. For dysbiosis, I have a video on how to fix your gut microbiome. That's also covering the low gut motility and related to nutrient imbalances. I have a three-part video series that I did on iron overload. The first one was explaining, I think, like how I almost died on carnivore. The second was how to fix iron overload on a carnivore diet. And the third was the iron pandemic, which is my belief that most people in the United States have some type of iron overload in their liver. And you could also watch a video I did, Why Steak is Good for You, where I cover the nutrient density of muscle meat and what you could potentially be missing. So definitely, you know, if you're new to the carnivore diet or you're new to any diet, really, definitely spend a couple of hours watching the educational videos on my channel to get a view of how to incorporate high-quality animal foods into your diet. So thank you guys for joining me today. As I mentioned, you can check out wi-fi-shielding.com as well as frank-de-strafano.com for all of my other businesses. Frankie Syringe Meat, Frankie Syringe Foods. We have a lot going on, and hopefully, Frankie Boy doesn't have to launch too many more businesses to make people as healthy as possible. I think it's just a matter of working with what we have now and expanding that. Thanks again for joining me, guys. If you have any questions, please let me know down in the comments below. And I'll see you guys for tomorrow's video.