This interview episode explores the profound connection between carnivore diet and mental health, with Dr. Anthony Chaffee sharing a striking personal account. After eating herb-seasoned lamb, he experienced severe, unexpected suicidal ideation within hours, a reaction he traced directly to the plant compounds. Repeating the experiment the next day confirmed the connection, and similar episodes occurred when plant ingredients were unknowingly mixed into his meals while traveling. The key insight: strict carnivore adherence eliminates tolerance to plant toxins, meaning even small exposures can trigger disproportionately severe psychological responses.
Beyond personal experience, Dr. Anthony Chaffee highlights the often-overlooked role of LDL cholesterol in mental health, citing psychiatric journal research linking low LDL to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality. Jordan Peterson's case illustrates how eliminating salads while keeping fatty meat resolved his persistent depression within weeks. Animal fats including butter, tallow, and ghee are recommended over plant-based oils, which degrade into harmful compounds when cooked. The practical guidance here is to treat diet as the first line of inquiry before medication when addressing mood disorders.
Key Takeaways
- Eliminating plant foods completely removes built-up tolerance to plant toxins, meaning even small reintroductions (such as herbs on meat or greens mixed into a dish) can trigger acute depression or suicidal thoughts within hours, as confirmed through self-experimentation.
- Higher LDL cholesterol is protective against depression and anxiety according to psychiatric journal research, and some psychiatrists now formally recommend raising LDL in depressed patients before or alongside medication.
- Cooking with plant-based seed or vegetable oils dramatically accelerates their breakdown into harmful reactive compounds: for every 10 degrees Celsius increase in temperature, the chemical degradation rate doubles, meaning high-heat cooking multiplies toxicity by tens of millions of times compared to room temperature.
- Use a strict carnivore elimination diet as a diagnostic tool for mental health issues: remove all plant foods, assess mood changes over several weeks, then reintroduce individual items one at a time to identify specific triggers before considering pharmaceutical intervention.
- Carnivore Diet and Mental Health: Dr. Chaffee's Personal Depression Experience
- Plant Toxins Triggering Depression and Anxiety: Herbs, Salads, and Jordan Peterson
- Cholesterol and Mental Health: High LDL Protects Against Depression and Suicidality
- Psychiatrists Recommending Higher Cholesterol for Depression Treatment
- Best Animal Fats to Raise Cholesterol: Butter, Tallow, Fatty Meats vs Seed Oils
- How Food Toxins Damage Mental Health Daily: The Hangover and Plant Poison Analogy
This is an auto-generated transcript from YouTube and may contain errors or inaccuracies.
hello everyone we're back with the plant free md dr anthony chafee and today's topic is all about mental health so the i suppose the stereotype of someone who eats carnivore is kind of like a big buff strong person but when you actually kind of look into the carnival community you start to notice a lot of people who talk about mental health and there's a big group of people who've recovered from depression sean banker has interviewed hundreds of them and it's a real trend so anyone who's kind of given carnivore a try probably won't surprise them that much because once you get that physiology sorted so once you get nutrition down pat the rest of your life can really flow from there and i know dr chaffee and i have both experienced the benefits in terms of our own mental health from eating carnivore and cutting out foods that might be causing us distress so welcome dr chady this is going to be a really interesting one yeah great thank you very much thank you for having me my pleasure uh dr chapi i want to start off by asking about your experience with mental health in the context of carnival um yeah for me you know i i've had bouts of of uh you know depression and things like that nothing that is you know as bad as many others have experienced but you know i've had my moments and i've had my issues and um you know sometimes are better than worse mostly i'm a pretty happy guy but you have issues um i definitely did notice when i was carnivore that i was just much much much happier just more relaxed things didn't bother me as much then when i rediscovered carnivore you know the last sort of several years i was talking to my parents about this and they were getting interested in it and so they wanted to try it and so i was over at my parents house for dinner and my mother was making a lamb roast and she was just putting every single herb that existed onto this thing because that was her sort of work around for eating plants you know was to just put it on the meat and you know i pointed out that you know these are plants you don't want to eat plants and so no no no it's just on the meat that you know it's fine somehow that makes it okay and it's like yeah well you know you know tipping cocaine into your coffee you know it's just coffee like well no there's there's other stuff in there and so she made this and i was contemplating sort of scraping off the herbs and so forth but i you know didn't for various reasons i didn't want to you know seem rude this was early on like now i just i don't care i'll scrape anything off and so i just left it on there and i also wanted to sort of experiment so okay what is this what is this doing to me um is let's see what sort of effect this has well i became extraordinarily depressed i was very upset there was nothing going on in in my day or at that dinner that really should have you know justified me feeling the way i did but i did feel that way i remember going to bed that night being extremely upset being extremely depressed and actually contemplating suicide literally i was i was thinking about it i was thinking about how to do it and all of a sudden i just sort of woke up and thought myself like i shouldn't feel like this you know nothing happened today that should have made me feel like this but i do feel like this and so i said okay this is pathological you know something something has happened this isn't you know this isn't a response to events this is something else and so i recognize that in myself and so i said okay i'll go to bed i'll sleep and then i'll see how i feel in the morning and if i still feel this way you know we'll take it from there i woke up in the morning and just sort of felt emotionally numb and certainly didn't feel the same way i did the night before and i thought okay what was that about why was i just completely overreacting to the situation or was it something else was this you know i you know my thought was possibly the the plants you know the the herbs that got put on it but there weren't that many but um was that it so you know i figured okay well let's experiment try some more of the lamb and so i ate a couple more pieces of the lamb and i was horribly depressed for the rest of the day and i was like right get these things the hell away from me and it's just you know another piece of evidence you know in my life that you know reaffirmed you know my my stance of just not eating plants unless i was starving to death and had no other choice i've since then noticed i'd be occasionally like something will get mixed in or if i'm traveling or something like that and i had some meat that had like maybe you know i was in i was in vietnam and had some some meat that had some greens of some description mixed in with it and i was i was really i got hit with depression again and so for me it's it's very important to stay away from those sorts of things as well and you know when you when you eat these things all the time and you have these poisons in your body your body can build up a tolerance towards them and then when you go away from these things you don't have the tolerance that you had for them and then all of a sudden you hit them and they hit you full in the face you know so the same with you alcohol and other sorts of you know drugs and so forth you know you you'll lose your tolerance and it will affect you much more severely and i think that's what's going on here as well with other plants is that you know we have built up bits of resistances to them and now this is going to hit us harder so so for me it just i you know i really want to stay away from these things that's certainly something i've seen in patients as well absolutely yeah that's a really tough thing to go through um i mean if only for 24 hours but it's uh that's confronting for anyone to feel like that yeah i mean you make an interesting point that it's likely that you're more susceptible to the negative side effects of plants because you're so strict and you know your body doesn't need to have any tolerance built in because you're not feeding any of those seeds or plants or any plant product but it does kind of make you think that people who are getting that even low level plant toxicity or um gut disturbance from processed foods every single day what's that doing to their underlying kind of happiness or mental health and maybe they don't even realize how much it's affecting them yeah and that's the thing and this builds up as well and you know we have this what i described you know when we're eating normal diet we have this baseline level of crap that we feel and we consider that normal because it's normal for us and then we judge well i feel good today or bad today based on that baseline level of crap that we feel but we don't we don't realize we feel like crap until we get out of it and so since i stopped eating all that stuff i've realized like you know i just feel so much better than i've ever felt before and i can look down back at myself go yeah yeah no i've actually felt like crap most of my life and that's why i also have no inclination to go back i don't want to feel that crap anymore there are other other factors as well you know a lot of people so vilified something we've spoken about at length but cholesterol is very very important it's important for our brain and our body our hormones and it's also important for our mental health there are several studies that come out in the psychiatric in journals and so forth that show that higher ldl cholesterol is actually protective against depression and anxiety and that people with lower ldl cholesterol the so-called bad cholesterol have much higher rates of depression and anxiety and they found that their patients that had low ldl cholesterol and depression had a much higher rate of suicidality so there's there's more to it than that as well and so you know you look at people such as like jordan peterson's a famous example he was having a lot of health issues that he doesn't really talk about but you know he had had these significant issues um because of his daughter he started you know using diet to change modify his life and hadn't you know from the sounds of it very very good success was losing weight was uh feeling much better and so forth was just eating like big salads and a lot of fatty meat so he had the cholesterol he had the nutrients that he needed but he was still having depression and anxiety and so his daughter convinced him to go pure carnivore for a month he said fine check it out stopped eating salads within a few weeks his depression and anxiety were were essentially gone and you know he said uh you know something effective you know salad was doing this to me salad of all things were causing these issues for dr peterson yeah yeah so you know salad we're told this is really good for you this is great and uh and so we eat it and then actually in fact it's bad you know because as i was always saying that you know plants are trying to kill you they don't want to be eaten if you eat them they die and so they need to defend themselves and so you know we think of it we think one thing at a time you know cholesterol or carbohydrates or whatever being bad for us but there are thousands of things that are bad for us and they do very different things you know i've talked about different things you know some some vegetables make you sensitive to light some uh screw up your hormones some you know mimic estrogen or testosterone and screw up your cycles uh and so you know a lot of these things are causing information generally as well and so i think it's very easy to uh you know imagine that these things can also affect our mental health as well and and we see that anecdotally in practice that you know i have a lot of patients that have had serious anxiety and depression that have just gone away with like by going on a carnivore diet and uh and specifically going from you know keto to a carnivore diet getting rid of that lap those last vestiges of vegetables and so forth this cause you know help people significantly one of the challenges is it's unless you go strict carnivore or real elimination diet like how do people find out exactly what is potentially triggering these you know this anxiety depression or what have you um i suppose i don't know is this kind of all the answer and then slowly introducing things yeah i think that um yeah well yeah you never know exactly what's what's causing what all plants are going to cause some sort of harm and so if you want to live optimally you want to be the healthiest that you can be then obviously you know the full elimination of all of those things is recommended um but yeah if you you know if you if you suffer from these these issues and you have these problems you know instead of just looking at this going like oh here's this problem here's a pill for it you know why not try addressing you know what could be an underlying cause now maybe maybe something else is going on besides nutrition but nutrition is certainly going to help you know whether or not it gets rid of it completely it will help like i have no doubt in my mind and so you know by going on that full imagination taking taking off everything and just and just seeing how you feel is are you one of these people that this is going to be significantly affected by and benefited by and if you want to add some things back in you can see how it affects you for me every time something gets added back in i feel like crap and so i was just like yeah no i don't i don't want to add anything back in here yeah i think you make a good point like there are obviously things that we can't control in our lives and there are outside factors that can cause you know all sorts of mental health issues but one thing you can control is is what you put in your body right by putting good food in your body that's not causing any distress and and then also giving yourself adequate cholesterol so that your brain can function properly yeah i think you're giving yourself every chance yeah well and that's the thing you know you can't you can't affect everything but you can at least address the reversible causes and so the things that you have you know in control over you know trying to address those things and then you know whatever is left after that you know you just have to sort of learn to deal with other times there are medications that can help as well but you know i think that's a very good place to start because a it will help you know quite a lot of people and b it will get you to a position that you know maybe you do need medication to help you um you're in a much stronger position for that medication to help you um you know you know get through your depression um because you're gonna be you're gonna be much healthier and you're and you're you're taking away some of the factors that could be causing this issue and so once you've done that you're in a much better position to say okay well now maybe medication is is really beneficial and this is you know again this is something that um in or in the psychiatric journals specifically talking about cholesterol so you know psychiatrists are now recommending and even you know pushing for their depressed patients to get their cholesterol up and you know get their their l cholesterol up this is the recommendations of these uh journals and and this is something that has been incorporated into practice so this is this is you know one of the things that we have control over and that we can we can you know change about our own lives yeah absolutely well that's that's good to hear that you know doctors are prescribing high cholesterol because that certainly hasn't been attacked in in recent history yeah but you know it's it's one of those things that you know there are and and that's the bet the best part is because this is a mainstream uh discipline psychiatry obviously and so this and this is the main some becoming mainstream recommendations which is very very good obviously there are doctors like myself dr baker and you know plenty of others who recommend people getting their their cholesterol level up even cardiologists i'll be in a in a panel debate with uh two other cardiologists on on my side against three other cardiologists discussing you know uh cholesterol and you know my side of the panel is saying that hey cholesterol is not what we were told it was and and this is something that we should is actually good for us and the studies you know present that so we actually do have you know people prescribing this and and and recommending this but at the same time it's not the mainstream and so you know getting these mainstream journal articles coming around saying hey you know you should get your your patience cholesterol up this is this is making a big difference it's great to see absolutely so in terms of getting getting people's cholesterol up obviously eating fatty meat seems to be kind of the best avenue adding more butter to meals particularly rather than like seed or vegetable oils is that kind of yeah is that what you would recommend for anyone looking to kind of experiment with the infection and cholesterol uh yeah so yeah yeah exactly and use fatty meats i would obviously stay away from any plant oils in general um plant oils are very unstable once they get out of the plant and they start breaking down into reactive oxygen species and different sorts of toxic elements they have a ton of omega-6s which caused you know extreme inflammation you know past a certain point and so these are going to cause harm and you want them out of your body especially when you cook with them this dramatically increases the degradation of these products anyone who's taking chemistry would know that every 10 degrees celsius that you increase a reaction um it doubles the reaction rate and so when you're cooking with something you're increasing the temperature by you know a couple hundred degrees celsius and so you're increasing the reaction rate and the breakdown into these harmful chemicals by millions and millions and millions tens of millions of times and so avoid those also they have different you know things like you know studies showing like linoleic acid you just polyunsaturated fats you know they'll reduce you they will actually reduce your cholesterol um and they will actually increase heart disease and uh and you know death from cardiovascular disease that's actually been shown so the best ones to do are just animal fats so it's obviously best to get this from the meat that you eat but you can certainly add butter you can add lard or tallow ghee these are all good things there was a study that came out recently showing that actually sometimes there are different cholesterol levels it doesn't necessarily just go with the fat so like a sirloin steak even though it has less fat than like a ribeye it actually has more cholesterol than a ribeye and so yeah exactly so it was a bit surprising but you know so you know um but you will get cholesterol from meat and from eggs and so getting from those natural sources great adding in uh any sort of animal fats such as you know butter tallow and so forth are also great fascinating yeah i think anyone who's doubting how important physiology nutrition is when it comes to mental health think of a hangover and think of it think of the grog horrors you can get after a big night and it can last two or three days yeah directly from putting poison in your body and low-grade poison in your body every single day which you may be doing by eating plants and other toxins it's just constant and you start to get those doubts i think everyone's experienced it yes yeah you see a constant barrage on your on your mental health insanity yeah i love the um the irish have a great term for uh hangover they call it the fear and i think it's so perfectly uh descriptive you're sitting there and you're just so anxious and afraid you're just like everything i'm doing is wrong i've messed up my life i'm not doing anything you just and you just feel so um you know anxious about everything you're doing wrong in your life and you just feel wretched it's such a it's such an awful feeling and yeah you know so so we you know we don't think about it on these terms we don't think about how the things that we eat can affect our mental health so severely and we think oh well that's crazy well how could it possibly do that you know this is this is a you know chemical disturbance in our brain it's just natural we can't do anything about it but actually you can and you know and that's a perfect example you know when you're when you're coming you know down from being drunk and you're hungover you this does affect your mental health and and so you know so we know inherently intuitively that these things that we do to our body can absolutely affect our mental health and so you know why can't it be done you know by spinach certainly does for me yeah yeah i've experienced it too anything that will sort of particularly upset my gut um or anything for me like really refined or processed yeah i feel the top the next day it looks like i can you know don't have the same energy um but you know that's where that's where understanding how your body reacts can really help in a day or two as a new experience with the seed and not covered lamb and herb lamb you know you can get back to where you were awesome all right well dr chafee thank you so much that was a really interesting chat about mental health and yeah look forward to the next one yeah no problem thank you for having me