Why Humans Are Carnivores

hello and welcome to the how to carnivore podcast i'm your host simon lewis and you're tuning in to the plant-free md series with dr anthony chafee dr chafee is a surgeon nutritional researcher and former pro-rugby player he's been strict carnivore for three years and an on and off carnival for more than 20. dr chafee looks and feels like a real-life superhero if losing fat building muscle finding focus and getting the most out of life is important to you you're going to love the plant-free md series hey everybody simon here again with the how-to carnival podcast and we're joined with dr chaffee the plant free md and today's topic is why humans are carnivores so i think the uh the best place to start dr chafee is um something that we've talked about before in that you can find you can't find any nutrients in plants there is back to front uh there are nutrients in meat that you cannot find in plants but there are no nutrients in plants that cannot be found in meat um that's right yeah that you that are essential for life yeah so you know there are things found in meat that you have to have to live that you know that are not found in plants or fungus and but there is nothing in the planet or fungi kingdom that you have to have that you cannot get out of meat which so to me that that means that we're obligate carnivores we have to eat meat yeah we cannot survive without the nutrients found in meat now you can take a supplement but you know we're talking real life here we're talking you know uh how we evolve we're talking natural so you know no one is a supplement of ore okay this is something that we've just made up recently and um and so you know historically you had to eat meat in order to get these nutrients now we can give some supplements and so forth and that's all well and good but plants also have a lot of toxins obviously and that those cause harm so it's it's not as simple as just nutrients yeah for sure so it's it's a hell of a lot simpler to just start with meat and use that as a foundation uh and then if you want to add plants in sure you can um yeah yeah exactly another thing that we've spoken about or sort of touched on before is fiber now we get hammered into us in media and by food companies that we need fiber for a healthy gut and also um for bowel movements i mean even like those there's products like metamucil and supplements that you take which is supplemental fiber if you're jammed up and you can't go to the bathroom um but you and i have spoken before about the damage that fiber can cause to our gut um so be curious to hear your thoughts on fiber in the context of the human gut yeah so the human gut is not is not designed to deal with fiber we've lost that ability we had it millions of years ago as as can be seen by the fact that we have an appendix a little tiny guy that is a vestigial organ you know people grow up learning about this as kids i certainly did that an appendix is a vestigial organ meaning that millions of years ago it did something but we stopped using it and so that ability has gone away and it's just sort of shriveled down well what it used to be is a four foot long cecum and that's where fiber would pack into and break down into short chain fatty acids through the specific bacteria that would be cultured there that's what happens in chimpanzees and gorillas and other hindgut digesters and so we don't have that ability anymore we've lost that so we cannot break this stuff down and in fact fiber can cause harm in a number of ways first of all it causes microabrasions to your gut lining can increase permeability leaky gut it can also cause inflammatory reaction increased mucus secretion and even autoimmune dysregulation so big harm there another thing that it does is it blocks the absorption and breakdown of the nutrients that you actually want so it actually gets in the way so when you are eating a steak or even you know a vegetable that has some nutrients that fiber gets in the way your body can't break it down it can't get it out of the way so the enzymes can't get to every single um nutrient and break that down and also now that's being blocked from the villi in your small intestine from being absorbed so you don't break it down and you don't absorb it as well and this was an argument on why fiber is so good is because it it blocks your body from getting nutrition and this will help you lose weight i don't think there's any evolutionary model that exists or ever has existed that runs on the basis of limiting the amount of nutrients that you need most animals are starving to death and fighting for survival so the idea of like oh my god no it's just always going to be just such an abundance of energy and food source and and so obviously you need to have developed a way to like block that out and get rid of these harmful nutrients that doesn't make any sense to me we don't have the ability to break down fiber we lost that millions of years ago because we stopped eating fiber millions of years ago this is another piece of evidence to show that we are carnivores because we stopped eating we were eating meat for millions of years but we fully stopped about two and a half three million years ago when the ice ages hit and you know this killed off a lot of the plants and killed off a lot of animals that ate the plants only the big wooly mammoths and bison and so forth their their predecessors were able to dig under the permafrost and get grasses and so forth these things were able to survive and then the big predators that hunted them including our ancestors and if our ancestors weren't adapted to hunting these megafauna because they had been doing it already and they had developed tools and tactics to allow them to take down a woolly mammoth which outclassed us by every physical metric then we wouldn't have survived we wouldn't be here um so there's a lot of evidence for that and fiber is a very good clue the simple fact that we cannot break it down we cannot absorb it um is a very good clue as to the fact that we're not herbivores because all our herbivorous animals that eat fibrous plants can break down fiber to a certain extent that is their main nutrition source we can't do it and so that that's very good information there's also a study with thousands of people showing the only association with different sorts of things and colon disease so you know they always say that fiber is good for your bowels it's good for your colon because it just moves things through uh no actually this causes your bowel to work overtime you're constantly pushing things through is constantly having to work and having to work and having to work and having to work and eventually it fails just like heart failure when you when your blood's pumping against a gradient a high pressure gradient and it eventually after decades it just wears out the same thing happens with your colon if you're just eating so much fiber it can do this as well so the only things associated with an increased with an increased correlation with diverticulosis which is out pouching of your distal colon the last part of your colon right before your rectum were increased fiber intake increased number of bowel motions a day those are the only two things i think association if we can just rewind a little bit so the um what's what's the condition that you're talking about that's caused by the fiber uh diverticulosis so diverticulosis is a is an out pouching of your distal colon and that's and that can cause problems because you can get bits of food and so forth stuck in that and it can get infected and you have quite a big problem you can fix that with just antibiotics sometimes people need surgery to resect that it's a very serious condition out pouching do you mean that it's come outside your body or what's actually happening there you know just just on the tube itself so you have this tube here and they just basically blow bubbles on the surface and so it outpatches on on the colon itself and so uh they called diverticulate so it's just like a it's it's sort of like you think like a hernia where like tissue's sort of pushing through your abdominal wall same idea this thing's just sort of this bubble sort of erupted thing erupted off the top of that and so now food can go through the the um you know the lumen of the intestine and sort of sit in that little pouch and you know rot there and become a problem and and can cause damage and and become infected so and and this is another thing whenever you get diverticulosis or you have about you know bowel surgery or something like that you know bowel surgeons put people on a low residue diet to rest the bowel so they put them on a very low fiber diet say oh you got to get rid of that fiber don't eat seeds don't eat nuts don't eat anything like that because this stuff can get caught in there to make it worse and this will be a problem and as soon as it's done like whoa better eat a high fiber diet to take care of that you know bad colon of yours it's like wait where were you yesterday when you were telling me to do the exact opposite oh you have these hard stools and that's going to make it harder for you to pass and then that will will cause that organ to fail need more fibers push it through and it won't be a problem no actually it's the opposite so these were all guesses there's a lot of things in medicine that were just guesses or based on you know pretty faulty information or even fraudulent information which years later we look back on and go like nope that's wrong and i can get changed that gets changed all the time um nothing's set in stone really i mean there are some things that are just like we have just a ton of evidence to show this but you know everything's up for grabs you know and and especially these sorts of things where we've just made a guess we just made an educated guess based on limited information and we haven't really done the studies so studies were done for this and it's showing that no that's exactly the opposite and so increased meat increased fat increased protein constipation did not contribute were not even associated as risk factors didn't had no correlation no with an increased level of diverticulosis only fiber only increase bowel motion so fibers are not good for you this causes problems in your gut as opposed to being good for your gut it's funny that the that fiber is causing constipation yet there's all those products out there like metamucil that basically like you take that it completely expands in your system and then yeah you do need to go to the bathroom but it's it's kind of like you know if you're adding more poison to to sort of get this result that releases it yeah well you're also adding bulk you're adding bulk to your system yeah you know so so the problem with constipation you know you have to dry this stuff out so they said if you eat fiber it'll move it'll increase the motility of your gut and will your gut will be able to move this stuff faster which has never been proven that's just something that they say and so this will move it through your gut you know before it can dry out in your colon why are you fighting your colon here your colon is supposed to draw water out that's it that's its job it's conserving moisture so you you think that you have to micromanage that and actually do something that counteracts your that organs entire job you might be on the wrong side uh here and so in fact it's you know as i've discussed before uh with you and on other other uh videos it's actually fat that drives your digestion it's actually fat that keeps your bowels uh bowel motions soft and so it's that excessive we can only absorb a certain amount of fat until we run out of bile that's very difficult for us to absorb fat and that excess fat that we don't absorb gets into your stool and that's what keeps it soft because oil repels water so your stool is already going to be as dry as it's going to get because it's it's completely desiccated anyway or nearly as such and you know it can sit in your colon until christmas it's never going to get you know that's never going to get drier than it already is and it's always it's already uh soft so it's going to stay soft so it doesn't matter if you get rid of all the water if you have if you're eating enough fat and you have a bit of fat excess and that's how you know how much fat you're getting on a carnivore diet if you're constipated you need to eat more fat if you're having loose stools you need to pull that back and obviously if you're eating um you know different sources of things like you know drinking coffee or having artificial sweeteners and certainly the sugar alcohols like sorbitol xylitol and those stores those absolutely cause diarrhea and loose stools assuming that you don't do any of that assuming that you only do meat and water like i do and you're having loose stools just pull back on your fat um and so uh the fiber isn't actually helping there you can actually get problems because you're increasing that bulk to such a degree that now you have this big block of wood and it gets dried out and gets stuck because a lot of elderly people have low gut motility anyway they have neurogenic colons and so it actually it's just going to slow down anyway if they were eating fat that wouldn't matter but they're eating a bunch of fiber and low fat and so they have big problems a lot of bowel obstructions and so forth they have very painful motions and they are you know get impacted and so forth and they have to uh you know get that treated and it's not it's not a pleasant treatment you sometimes you have to do it manually i do a manual disimpaction i've unfortunately had to do that my second year as a doctor in the emergency department and this poor lady was just in so much pain and i you know i did an exam and it was just like it was just rock hard it was there and i was just like okay this is what we got to do and normally you try to take off little chunk this wouldn't i i so i tried to get this out it came out in a whole one big chunk it was like that big you know so i don't know 600 ml of just rock hard stool and um and some blood definitely came out and afterwards it was like [ __ ] i i was just she was just my biggest fan ever she was oh my god thank you so much because you're in so much pain and there's so much distress when you have a tube in your body blocked like your co like your bowels or your uh bladder it is horrible perfectly painful i've never had anyone thank me more in my in my entire career than if when i've like put in a catheter yeah a urinary catheter for someone who's been acute retention or that lady that we we got unstuck or you know someone who had were able to treat them medically and give them medications to to clear that out um and yeah people are so thankful because you're in so much pain because your body's telling you like this is about to explode and if this explodes you're dead and so that's a that's a big signal to your body to stop whatever the hell it is you're doing so she was all jammed up from eating too many fibrous plants and not enough fat in her diet so it's kind of like this sort of forming like this rock of yeah exactly plant matter basically in yeah it's growing and growing yeah it's wood isn't it i mean fiber is is cellulose right so i mean that's that's what wood is and so when they're increasing the amount of fiber in in food they actually add sawdust that's a real thing all right and so there are so many there's dozens and dozens and does probably probably hundreds or even thousands of processed food products that add sawdust in order to increase fiber because now fiber has been officially recognized as an essential nutrient you have to have it or you'll die that's what essential means is it actually a nutrient can you classify it as a nutrient um well i mean they can classify anything as anything uh it doesn't mean that it's real uh no it's not a nutrient it then it's certainly not essential so but they have they have classified it as an essential nutrient an essential nutrient means that if you don't get enough of this you'll have a deficiency and you can die okay like you know you know some you know various vitamins and different deficiencies and the diseases that you get from you know berry berry scurvy all these sorts of things and so you know saying that someone that you know is an acute uh deprivation of fat i've never actually heard that i've never actually heard what what condition that would cause i certainly haven't run across it myself zero constipation maybe yeah well yeah so like yeah i don't know it's just uh it's a very strange thing that they would have done but because they've done that because it's a buzzword because it's a marketing tool everybody wants fiber you have to be eating more fiber more more fiber so they add fiber and it's and it's sawdust there was there's another thing too your mobile calls is something we use as a stool softener and and a laxative and you're actually you can get people unstuck by giving them a bunch of this stuff this stuff actually has been shown to cause leaky gut this is not good you know so you're giving this to someone to help their digestion you're actually ruining it so you get leaky gut which you have these tight binds between um the the cells in your gut as actually breaks though so now the cells are physically not touching like they would now you're talking nanometers here wide but normally they're they're stuck by these tight junctions and they're just then they're stuck there and so molecules past a certain uh certain size can't pass through them generally you know you have to there's different charges and different sorts of ways of of keeping this barrier protection in your gut but once you unstick those and you break those tight bindings now it's flapping loops and things can literally just penetrate into your body and they do and this is this is why you get you know lectins are a big problem here gluten weak gluten even people that aren't celiac the gluten can cause leaky gut and can break these these junctions between the cells and now you can get these things sucking into your body like lectins which then cause havoc in your body there's a ton of different different kinds of lectins but quite a lot to go into for this episode but they can cause a a myriad of problems they can emulate insulin that hit on your insulin response receptors they can increase uh peripheral insulin resistance which increases adiposity and and fat deposition uh it can cause autoimmune disorders and can cause all sorts of different problems so uh nasty nasty stuff and we're giving people move a call which actually exacerbates these problems in the first place is that generally we're doing things very backwards here yeah is that generally like a hospital treatment like extreme cases or is that something that a lot of people are taking a lot a lot of people are taking this you can get this over the counter but we do use it in hospital all the time we'll put people on mobile call when we're putting them on opiates or something like that or they just haven't you know been opening their bowels or something like that and yeah so it's very very common it's one of the most common uh stool softeners that we use in the hospital um i always think you know because we we do surgery on people and quite often you know we can't especially doing spinal surgery we can't let them go until they open their bowels and you know i was just thinking i was like you know if i if i ever have to get this kind of surgery they're not going to let me out for a week because i just i just don't go so it's not gonna be like anything's wrong but because you know i eat a corn a carnivorous diet i don't have all this excess waste that my body's trying to get rid of and so i absorb 98 99 of the food that i eat so i just i don't have waste that accumulates to such a degree and so it's like you know once a week maybe have to do this and they'll just they'll they won't let me move they'll probably try to stuff down a bunch of laxatives down my throat which i won't take and we're just going to have it have a standoff but uh yeah to be a fly on the wall if that ever happens yeah it'd be funny they they would get a a few lectures yeah medicine in general how the body works yeah um but yeah i mean it's when you're on strict carnivore not needing to to do a number two is a is a pretty weird experience i remember um going through that and thinking i haven't taken a crap for two or three days and then when i when i it it was like a it was like a rabbit yeah yeah which is the opposite to you imagine a vegan going like three or four times a day um and doing you know really often really hard i imagine um all right probably probably enough stool and number two chat um what about the acidity level in our stomachs um how does that kind of suggest that we're carnivores yeah so you know you can look at the whole digestion from you know teeth all the way down um and then we have these carnivorous adaptations always remember we are we are primates and so we have a lot of things to do with our primate heritage and so we're not going to have four stomachs like a cow we're not going to have big teeth like a like like a feline which is not so um or different also you know for different reasons as well but you know we have we are primates first and foremost with carnivorous adaptation so you know to do with our our stomach as you mentioned our ph is extremely low it's one of the lowest in nature so it's like you know like one 1.5 1.8 ph which is extremely acidic okay you know seven is about neutral right and then like 14 is super basic and then you know zero is you know as absolute acidic as you can get which you can't get really um and so we're at 1.5 1.8 and that's sort of the ph that you would see in like vultures and other caring animals they're eating diseased you know toxic broken down meat that's that's rotting and so they need to be able to kill off this horrible bacteria uh in their stomach acid so we actually have that and and we we can and this is actually why you know people like dr j salisbury would say you shouldn't you shouldn't drink water for two hours before or two hours after you eat a meal because you're you're going to water down your stomach acid and it's going to make it less the the ph go up which means you're not going to be able to break down your food as readily and you won't get as much out of it say that again have you tried that i've never been as strict as that yeah and you know but i'm so used to you know we grew up like that's when we drink a lot of water is when we're at the dinner table about you know my my parents were always okay you know drink enough water to drink enough water drinking from all does everyone want water do you want more water and we're just drinking water all the time never really thought about it so when i start eating i naturally want water but i try to limit it and i do try to eat water at other times but i i end up i end up drinking uh water around that time but i i have noticed a difference when you know the more i do that i tend to excrete less waste meaning that i'm breaking down things better i'm absorbing things better and um i haven't really noticed i haven't really thought about it enough to see how it made me feel in general i think i'm still feeling pretty good but i'm you're you're likely to be able to break these things down better and absorb them better if you do that and that's certainly what salisbury pointed out and it would make sense as well given the fact that you know we're going to be raising our ph if we drink a bunch of water and it's something i want to try actually yeah i'll try that for a few weeks and just see how i go yeah i'm curious to experiment with that now that you mentioned that i've never had this before now that you mentioned that i can i'm sort of thinking of being in a restaurant and often in a restaurant your your water glass is constantly being filled up uh and then when you eat you kind of are eating and you can tell there's a lot of water and liquid in your gut so it's yeah no i'm gonna give that a go yeah yeah yeah it's worth it's worth trying out and salisbury also says well you should be drinking like either warm water or at least room temperature water as well and and that can that can help also but you know either way i think that the the timing of it i think would make a big difference just because of the ph um you know other other sort of adaptations that we have uh are that our small intestine is actually quite long in comparison to the rest of our gut and this is where most of the you know the meat and fat is getting broken down and absorbed in this area and then a bit of waste is getting into our colon and then just basically drying out we don't really absorb anything in our colon as opposed to gorillas and chimpanzees and other uh herbivorous primates they're carnivorous primates as well um you know apart from humans but the herbivorous ones are called hind gut digesters they do most of their digestion breakdown and absorption in their hindgut in their lower intestine and so that's that's the opposite with us you know we have a smaller uh large intestine colon they have a longer one and they have this long cecum so we don't have those changes anymore this is very different anatomy compared to herbivorous primates and you look at the carnivorous primates as well they have a gut more similar to ours as well they don't have the big long colon where they would be able to or seek them where they would be able to break down fiber they have a longer small intestine and so forth and you know slightly lower ph generally with herbivores you would see a much higher ph much closer to neutral in their in their stomach acid as well and you see carnivores have lower ph and you see the scavengers like vultures and things like that and have the lowest of all we had that and the idea behind that is that for millions of years like we're not hunting much with that especially when we were like three foot tall you know and so we had to be carrying animals and so we were scavenging around and and eating the leavings of uh you know lions and and what have you at the time and then we developed you know figured out that we could use a rock to crack open a skull and we could get the brains super high nutrients and that was a big food source and then we started figuring out tools started using these tools more and more and more using for pound stones thought for for millions of years probably there's there's fossil records that show that i don't know why it took so many so long to figure out how to then break this thing and to give it a sharp point to then use that as a cutting implement but literally millions of years but you know evolution moves very slowly and so eventually we developed tools and and increased our intellect as well uh subsequently but we started out as scavengers and we started out having to eat the you know the sometimes rotten leavings of other more you know more adapted predators that could just take down large animals uh fairly fairly easily which we really couldn't i think i think that still happens today i saw a bit i saw a video on youtube where it was um like a lion had made a kill and then a group of massai tribesmen turned up with their spears and then they just shoot the line away and then um i think it was a zebra in the zebra stairs yeah i saw that with um with cheetahs as well same idea yeah and these guys they had they were they were fearless and they just had this stick and they just started smacking this cheetah in the face and and they were like oh well one guy's dragging it away and their cheese are freaking out one guy's just smacking in the face with this with this switch and it's like you know it's getting back and it's getting really aggressive and it's like trying to fight for its food but it gets smack in the face it doesn't know what what's happening just they just walk off with this little antelope yeah we'll take that yeah exactly so yeah that absolutely still happens but i think for a while there before we figured out tools and so forth uh we weren't enough we weren't pulling too much away from a lion yeah yeah and um uh but yeah we get we get the leaves but yeah you're right that that uh that is something uh that you see and yeah you they use other other you know more capable predators yeah for sure to take down an animal and then they just poach it away yeah yeah actually another thing that i saw today was um it was talking about these uh viking uh explorers in like the year 1200 and they have they had they'd gone from greenland and then sailed across um to north america uh i'm not 100 sure on that but i think so and they set up this camp and it was right next to a rotting whale carcass and basically they survived through the entire winter because there was a whole whale's body right there on the beach um so i know that doesn't sound very appealing but this is kind of in line with with what you're saying about the uh low ph high acidic stomach where you know we can handle uh these sorts of eating meat and fat that might be kind of close to rotting and then we can be opportunistic feeders yeah and and you know think about how many cultures have a version of rotten ass meat like um you know the no uh you know yeah norwegians have uh rope fisk just i think it just means rotten fish really and then yeah yeah and then they would pack these in in big barrels and you know and put salt and things like that big layer meat salt meat salt stuff like that or do that with beef as well and this preservative this is what they'd use in their in their long voyages they just ate meat they did not get scurvy and that's why they didn't get scurvys because they weren't eating a bunch of carbs and grains and porridge and so forth they were eating meat and so that's that's why they were they they didn't have to um worry about that um but yeah you're right no there was it was i think it was late erickson made it to north america yeah your history of knowledge is pretty yes that was the name erickson that was in the video and uh yeah and that was like 1100 and something i don't know 60 something but yeah it was right around that time i hadn't heard the whale story though uh that's interesting yeah and um you know obviously they i'm sure they'd be adapted at you know hunting and fishing and so forth as well but like if you're just eating a whale just keep eating that thing and uh yeah it's easy yeah exactly that's probably freezing cold so it's probably not really spoiling that fast and you know like the in you know that's that's another example of this i didn't even think about you know the movie alive it was based on the book about a team of rugby players from south america who crashed in uh you know the andes and they survived for like nine months close to a year by eating the bodies of the of the people that died in the crash a very harrowing story very very uh you know confronting insane sort of circumstance you'd have to be in and have to turn to cannibalism and so forth but they they lived for nine months yeah just drinking they would just say you made it would you they didn't you know they were they were up in the mountains in the snow and they they did just fine you know so and for nine months i think it was nine months so um yeah that's another another short example and also because you know it was in the snow and these people just packed in there they never they never went bad because they were just it was their own ice chest you know so that that probably was what happened with that well as well uh but yeah you're right and uh that that's a good example of that that even if this thing is slightly wrong and so forth and you know they do have you know rotten fish you know the the inuits and so forth they have they take fish heads and they sort of you know pack them in a jar and just bury them under the house and they rot they take them out six months later and apparently they just smell horrendous and you either really love them or you really really really hate them um i was watching a show on this and they were they were mentioning this and it was a husband and wife they were both of uh you know native alaskan descent and the wife loved these things just loved them and so she would always have like a jar going and when the husband would find it he would just break it and throw it away and not get rid of because he was so disgusting and but she would always have these things stashed every now and then they'd be ready to go and she'd uh she would just have them and he like wouldn't let her in the house for like several days like after she did she just reeked just rotting meat and and that's that's something we do you know that's why we have spices as well that's why the spice trade was such a was such a huge industry for so long that was to preserve and cover the taste of rotting meat because you had to eat meat was very important it was the staple diet and every and everyone knew this up until about you know 1977 when they got told otherwise and and so you put on a bunch of spices and so forth to cover this up and you think about where spices were most prevalent or generally in you know this you know the the sub asian continent like india uh southern asia and so forth where you have you know you're in this tropical weather meat's not going to last very long you're not going to have a cold shed you're not going to or a cold seller like you would in the north where you can cut a big block of ice out of the lake and just put that in your cellar and you'd have a cold room and that would actually keep that cold and cool throughout the year wouldn't be as good as refrigerator but it would it would do a good job they didn't have that and so you know they had to do other things and cover up the taste of rotting meat because you needed to eat the meat and um you know because that meat was life interesting yeah the spots trade um all right how about our teeth are our teeth made for any plants meat or both yeah so again we have we have primate teeth and but again with carnivorous adaptations you look about eight million years ago when our ancestors split off from other primates we did so because we started eating meat started eating more and more meat more more meat had more and more adaptations uh and until we hit our current iteration so then we had larger teeth and larger jaws and larger muscles of mastication you can look at skulls and the brain is actually smaller and they have this big ridge that comes over the back and that's where these big muscles attach so that you could chew because you're chewing hard tough things like leaves and sticks all day and you need these big muscles you need these big jaws and big teeth as well because they'll wear down and we don't regrow our teeth like a rat would or a shark would and so when you run out of teeth you're you're not really eating too much so our teeth became smaller and smaller our jaws became smaller and smaller our muscles of mastication our temporalis also became smaller and smaller because we're eating softer and softer food meat and fat are very very soft you know we're not chewing on sticks all day like a gorilla you know who needs big teeth you know people say like well we don't have fangs and canines like a canine and it's like right well we don't kill things with our mouths you know we couldn't do that we couldn't kill things physically except you know small animals and whatever and then we went after carrion and so we had to develop tools and tactics in order to take down you know mastodon and so we developed our brains our intellect came to bear and we developed tools and tactics and that's why we live in houses and lions and gorillas don't because they have the physical attributes to allow them to get their preferred an optimal diet you know people say like well you know we don't have claws that are designed to kill an antelope but we have a hand that could just pick fruit easily right and so since it's easy you don't really need much brain power to do it and so we wouldn't have developed a big powerful brain just for picking fruit that any idiot can do so that's not uh that's not going to be a an evolutionary driver to grow a big brain which takes a lot of energy it takes a lot of time and so evolution isn't going to waste its time developing a brain for nothing you know we don't develop traits and we don't lose traits unless there is a survival advantage to it and you know it doesn't take a much brain power to hunt a lettuce you know but you do need a lot of brain power to figure out how to take down a woolly mammoth when this is what you're working with you know teeth again so so teeth we don't have big fangs and so forth because that's not what we use them for not our weapon no exactly and so you know but then you look at gorillas they have big old canines big fangs they don't need any meat they don't use that to hunt so that argument's out the window that's just that's just stupid you have plenty of uh herbivores with big fangs and you have carnivores they don't have fangs okay so fangs don't equal carnivores okay yeah and people look at that do pic very simplistic arguments generally uh these these arguments saying that we're herbivores and so forth and they'll look at your teeth and like just a picture of people's teeth in front of their teeth and a picture of you know animals with their mouths open and so forth and like oh look at a hyena and a lion there's like big pointy teeth and so forth and always these fangs you look at a horse and a cow it's just flat in the front and we have flat in the front we have flat teeth no that's not what flat teeth mean flat teeth means that they're planar or three-dimensional uh on a three-dimensional surface so like the surface um where your teeth would you know like grind back in the door yeah exactly they would they would be able to just you know sweep back and forth yeah we're like yeah we're we're going like this and so you know we can move our jaws right i said oh you know only herbivores can do that but clench your teeth and try and move your jaw it doesn't go anywhere because we actually have bicuspid teeth we don't have flat teeth okay so they get stuck there so we're not able to mill down uh grain and grasses and so forth like other like other animals would um we we still have that adaptation because we used to be herbivores we used to do that we used to need to do that but again you know evolution isn't going to develop a trait or lose a trait unless there's an evolutionary advantage to it so that there obviously just wasn't any advantage to losing the ability to move our jaw side to side okay i you know i wouldn't i wouldn't think that there would be but we know that there really wasn't one because it didn't happen we can still move our jaws and that was just an ability that we already had and it didn't benefit us to lose it and so we didn't lose it but our teeth are very different they aren't flat and they can't you know process and mill fiber uh like like a cow's teeth can or horse's teeth so they have flat teeth we don't have flat teeth and so there's a number of different things you could look at to know that our teeth are adapted for a carnivorous diet and certainly not for an herbivorous high fiber diet okay interesting um i want to talk about something that we spoke about just before the chat and that was the difference between a horse's stomach and a cow stomach and i never really kind of put two and two together before but when you see a horse's crap it kind of looks like you can see the vegetation in it it looks like the compost bin or or like the grass clippings from the lawn is what it looks like whereas a cow is like brown and smooth and so processed that you can't tell that it was once grass these are two big hairy animals that both eat grass um how come you know i'm guessing this is something to do with the process that's going on inside with them actually digesting um or getting nutrients from the grass what's what's going on here yeah so um yeah cows are just much more efficient at getting energy uh out of fibrous plants and grass and then the horses i you know i'm just just from memory i think that a horse can only get about 20 percent of the nutrients out of fiber uh from the grass that they eat whereas a cow gets like 80 wow or maybe or possibly even more and that's because they you know this four-barreled stomach and they you know regurgitate that up chew the cud break it down again that is big long breakdown process that is able to break it down further and they can get more energy out of that a horse just has to eat more it just has to eat more have to eat more in order to to maintain the calories that they need um this is um this is actually another historical sort of fact you know why you know genghis khan and the mongol horde who were you know carnivores they were completely meat based they ate horse meat they drank horse blood and they were on average six foot four on average adult male was six foot four i'm six foot three so i would be i'd be below average for you know the little you know we think like you know mongolians as you know little asian dudes but no they were very large men very large men on very small horses and they just ate horse meat they sort of farming the horses like they're riding the horses and they've also got this kind of like um flock of of horses as well yeah i mean you know these things are just breeding all the time i'm sure they had had surpluses as well i'm sure that you know they had certain ones bred for you know riding and so forth that maybe you know uh uh they didn't probably didn't eat but they also did bloodletting as well so if they were on like a long journey or whatever they would they would actually you know let blood from the horse and they'd put it in a container or whatever and they would drink it and so that they would drink they would drink horse blood as well so this was why they could they could just they could go so the mongols had the largest contiguous empire that's ever existed and this is actually where russia is now that's part of the old uh mongol empire because um uh well actually when there was there was a cataclysm of some form we don't know exactly what but you know maybe a volcano maybe an asteroid something something hit blew up a big bunch of dust and plume into the atmosphere for several years this blocked out the uv this drop blocked out the sun's energy and rays and killed a lot of the vegetation killed a lot of the grasses and tons of animals died as well this is you know uh for some reason what bill gates is trying to do he just did an experiment and i think in sweden where they shot up a bunch of uh particulates to try to block out the dangerous energy from the sun it's like buddy we only exist because of the energy it needs to stop interfering and let it work that's it you know it's the it's the uh uh you know you have a complex system and you mess with it you are going to have there's a lot of unintended results you know you you mess within a complex system you have no way of predicting it's so dumb it's like it's like um you know introducing the uh the cane toads decor to kill the locusts yeah we did here in australia and now i've got this like cane toad swarm that in 2022 we can't control look yeah the sun is going to be a worse outcome than just cane toads that's it you know you know the the cure is worse than the disease um but this one i mean this one's not too hard to figure out i mean the guy's smart enough you know bill gates is not a dumb man and we we literally made i think highlander 2 was actually about this it was like in the future and they they there was like all the danger from the sun and we had to block it out to block out the uv light and then it was just like it was horrible it was just all dark and it was raining it was hair terrible it was this horrible landscape they're like oh we really messed up like uh you know you know the matrix is like that they scorch the sun they scorch the sky so that the sun's energy couldn't come in and then you know they had to farm people and so forth so this is this is bad this comes out bad you know all the major extinctions uh that we know about are generally from one of these cataclysmic events where the sun's energy gets blocked out it just destroys life on earth just completely destroys it you have these mass extinctions every single one of these things causes a mass extinction and he's literally trying to do this intentionally which is crazy to me and i mean yes that's like bond villain level crazy yeah and so something like that happened uh in to the mongol horde um and so something hit about that time kicked up a bunch of dust and for years it killed off a lot of the grasses and a lot of the vegetation and because horses were much less efficient at getting the energy from grasses they need a lot more grasses they weren't able to survive so they weren't able to maintain their herds and their empire died out or at least regressed significantly into what is now modern-day mongolia [Music] this is where russia came from because they had basically their slave population there uh or at least underclass population were you know herding uh cows and they were cow-based uh society and so they actually were able to survive and thrive because of the cows and because the cows were much more efficient at it and so they ended up taking over that that's where russia is now because that's a big chunk of the mongol empire the mongol empire stretched from nearly the atlantic ocean in france and to nearly all of asia is absolutely massive you look at it on a map sometime it is massive it's the largest con it's the largest uh empire that has ever existed pure carnivores people says like you can't have a civilization without without agriculture without farming and so forth largest civilization that's ever existed on earth was purely carnivorous and it was 900 years ago and you look at the native americans in north america they were just eating meat they were just eating you know predominantly buffalo they had cities uh in saint louis what is now st louis they found you know obviously abandoned because there was some plague that killed off like 95 of the native americans uh in the sort of early to mid 1600s just before the pilgrims landed on plymouth rock and i think was that 1642 or 1646 or something like that anyway there was there was some sort of mass extinction of the native americans just before that and all of a sudden people started kind of going west a bit like what's going on what's going on there's no one here what's going on and they started going on exploring and they found settlements they found cities they were just gone there was no one there in st louis they found buildings and structures and all these sorts of things they estimated could house a million full-time residents in st louis and they had you know five different massive trade routes that were just beaten into the ground because there's so much traffic going up and down up to the great lakes out you know out west down uh you know south and east and all these sorts of things major major trade routes and they all came here and even even years even decades after no one had used these things they were still beaten into the ground because they're so so highly trafficked but a million people full-time residents in what is now st louis fully carnivore so the um yeah so the you know get back to horses they they just aren't as efficient but you know that's uh some some interesting tie-ins uh with you know historical carnivores as well it is a good reminder about how efficient and amazing cows are because they can survive in really hardy environments you know you could have a cow living on a nature strip in like you know between a highway i think that's something that's totally been forgotten that you know in in an ideal society you really could have cows everywhere and the cows are providing you with meat and they're providing you with milk and they're living off what you know we might consider scrub or weeds or whatever and then they're producing something that's highly highly nutritious perfect food for humans um and i mean yeah so you don't have to store it when it's on their body they're just walking around doing their thing yeah and you know and and the thing is too they can things probably more than that when i was in when i was in bangladesh uh you know doing humanitarian work involved in the refugee camps there i we saw cows that were sort of all over the place because you know they did eat eat meat there um it wasn't like india where most most people are vegetarian um they ate a lot of meat there and um when they could get it they were very very poor but there were cows you see cows around these things did not eat grass these things i called them trash cows because they were literally eating trash i thought because they didn't have any any trash removal services in bangladesh so they just throw trash on the sidewalk they just throw trash on the ground and and a lot of the stuff was you know processed still processed food you have like ruffles chips and things like that which is crazy i mean these people are dirt poor and yet these predatory food companies are coming in and saying oh here you know buy our chips like you know the food that they can just get locally is going to be a hell of a lot less expensive and help a lot more nutritious that you guys are are are really taking advantage of people who are really really really not well off and i think that that's a pretty nasty um uh you know practice but in any case they do buy this and they have a lot of this stuff there and so they have a lot of plastic bags you know you go through places they're just jungles it's just jungles jungles jungles and these little villages and this road that goes through a central market and there's everyone's just milling around and these little stores that are built out of like bamboo and so forth and they just have stacks and of hanging plastic bags and treats and things like that in the middle of the jungle it's surreal and so they throw this stuff out because they don't have anywhere to to to dispose of it properly because they never used this stuff before everything that they had before would biodegrade or they'd you know they'd use for fuel to burn and this stuff they couldn't so they just throw it on the ground and i thought that the cows were sort of eating in the trash i thought they were sort of moving it out of the way to get to the like little nubbins of grass that were underneath it so i'm like okay but it didn't really look around like okay then we were going through this little area there was a there was a bin sort of a large concrete container there were 20 cows all in this thing just eating the trash there was no grass it was concrete floor and this is where people would throw all their trash there's you know 15 20 cows all in there just eating the trash and trying to get this hyper palatable food and little leavings and i i was like that is crazy so we call them trash cows took a ton of pictures of these things they probably should probably put them up on instagram yeah yeah and i might put some of them on instagram some of my bangladesh pictures are that's why i started instagram was just people kept asking me about my trip to bangladesh so i put some of the pictures up some of the more um easily digestible ones because some of these things are really really tragic that you just wouldn't want to see but um i think i would have put the trash cans up if not i will and uh yeah so they can they can eat trash and do just fine and then um but yeah but you're right you know they can they don't have to be in a field they don't have to you don't have to clear and feel and just grow grass you know they they evolved in these big grassy fields and that's actually what made them very uh you know fertile and so forth these big grassy plains that came through you know north america and so forth but you don't need to you can run them through rangeland you can run them through forest which is the predominant uh type of land that we that we have on earth there's only four percent of the earth's surface including the oceans obviously are is arable land where you can have a farm uh or a city because that's the thing farms and cities compete for space and only four percent of the world's surface is arable land um but i think i think forest is like 10 or 15 and then rangeland is like 10 or 15 percent um one of them is 10 one of them is 15 i forget which ones which but these are things so that's 25 of the earth's surface roughly that is not suitable for cities not suitable for farms is suitable for cows it is suitable for goats is suitable for cheating well i think i think the biggest biggest farm in the world is in australia i think it's like owned by the kidman family um and it's you know it's like as big as a state it is like millions of kilometers square kilometers and the cows roam and you see footage of them and they're in the desert and yeah well what are they eating but they're crossing big they're crossing a lot of land and they're finding little shrubs and all sorts of things to eat and the you know and when you see the massage with their cows in in um you know uh in africa in tanzania in kenya there's not that there's not like open plains of just perfect green grass it's a you know it's an arduous environment yet these cows are still able to to find the nutrients they need yeah exactly and that's what people like alan savory has been doing he's taking large herds of animal after zimbabwe and around the world because he's been doing this for 40 years and i saw some clown um vegan activist doctor guy who i think is just very very misinformed um of his own volition i think he works very very hard to be as misinformed as possible to fit his ideology but he was talking about alan savory and you know this guy makes these these big claims and then doesn't back them up he just states the statement like it's irrefutable proof but he was basically making a statement that savory was doing that and saying that you know people that have you know galileo syndrome where they just think they they just know everything and no one else does they've got the answer to everything they compare themselves to galileo and so forth they make these grandiose uh proclamations such as um you know that uh appropriate you know livestock uh farming and management can can reverse global warming and so he says that that alan savory has you know galileo syndrome um well i mean first of all you have to show me where exactly he said those words specifically chief and second of all show me why he's wrong okay because first of all i've never heard alan savory say that but he's been doing this for 40 years and he's been getting reproducible results from himself and from other people who learn his techniques they do the exact same things you have the exact same things happen when you have that reproducibility in a study or a trial or more in practice you know that you're onto something okay so what savory's doing is he's taking uh large herds of animal like you would see in the wild bunched and moving so they're not just sitting there just eating down the grass to nothing you know they're just eating it down most of the way and then they move on because they're defecating and urinating on their food source and so they have to keep moving have to keep moving have to keep moving and to find you know palatable bits of of grass and so forth so they have to keep moving how to keep moving this is very beneficial to the soil this is very beneficial to the to the grasses and the plants as it turns out and there's a lot of reasons for that people i think people should i'd be encourage them to go watch alan savory's work and peter ballerstad's work that guy's brilliant he's a phd in forest agronomy he does a lot of work in this in this area there's a lot of very interesting hard science fact-based uh talks on this on this exact subject but you know so alan savory is uh is reversing deserts he's getting these things through deserts that he just said he said to people you know they drive through some desert area he said you know i'll give i'll give you 10 pounds if you find one piece of one blade of grass in the next hundred miles or so you know and so they would just run these cows through and just find a little bit find a little bit but they do a lot of different things their hooves dig in and it sort of changes the ground so instead when it rains the water doesn't just run off it actually pools and settles and soaks in as opposed to just running off and washing off all the seeds and washing off the the topsoil okay it settles in now it and now it increases the amount of groundwater that there are that there is um they're eating down a bit they're defecating they're urinating they're fertilizing the soil they're moving seeds around all of a sudden plants start growing again it's more fertile environments more habitable environment for plants and then when plants come back animals come back and it's the symbiosis and gets better and better and better so he has these areas where you look at this farm this farm next to this farm there's a little fence in the middle both just barren deserts and then after a number of years of doing this all of a sudden one is just green full of grass and trees and bushes the other side is still a barren iceland incredible and this is tightening up the uh the water supply like he has he has a property in zimbabwe and he's been doing this around there it's just it's just this verdant paradise now and other places aren't and so the waterways that go through there this starts binding you know bounding the the streams and so forth makes it uh better so it doesn't just evaporate and dissolve away so yeah these other places there that aren't year-round water supplies it's sort of you know that's there's water there in the rainy season and then it goes away because it's not it's not able to maintain that his are so he has he has year-round water going through his property specifically because he does this and then it goes off his property goes and just dissipates and goes away and so you know this is something we saw in in yosemite when they reintroduced wolves all of a sudden now the deer had to act very differently they couldn't just sit out just chewing down um you know the the grass and so forth uh beyond recognitions this this made them like have to be careful be in sort of wooded areas only come out and do certain things because they were they were being hunted that's why the bunched and moving thing that savory does this is emulating how animals would move in the wild if they had to worry about predators and so when you reintroduce predators like wolves to yosemite all of a sudden everything had to run differently and it wasn't they just completely wiped out you know the deer population they brought it down a bit but they made them act differently and this made the the rivers uh banks uh tight enough so they weren't more flooding they weren't breaking and so forth it was much more uh normal for a good healthy environment beavers came back all their animals came back you know birds it all these things came back it changed the entire ecology of yosemite for the better just by introducing these predators again and so that's what savory is doing he's trying to reintroduce animals to these areas that have you know had them driven away or they've died off or whatever whatever's happening and these things that just turned more and more into deserts because the animals are gone now now he's reversing that so he's been doing this for 40 years he tells people and shows people in his regenerative agriculture sort of settings that they want to do on their farms he just tells them how to do it and they do it and they get reproducible results every single time so uh you know this guy who made these claims these grandiose uh you know galileic sort of claims about alan savory really didn't have anything to back it up and um you know and and so yeah that guy just um uh sort of just pissed me off last week that's why i'm thinking about it but uh i'm glad he got you going on that rant because that was fantastic yeah yeah we should do we'll dig into a bit more of the regenerative regenerative agriculture topic um in the future that'd be a really good one um yeah well it's very important too you know because people talk about you know what we eat meatball but it's not sustainable for everyone to do this because it's so bad for the environment the environment includes animals yeah and if you only have plants it's going to wipe out you need everything everything works it's an eco it's economic system it all works together and you know what fertilizer is made out of yeah exactly yeah so you know and so you know we we get these crops and so forth and we get the chaff and and stuff that we don't use and we give that as animal feed and then you get the maneuver from animal to then grow the crops and people say it's like oh if we weren't growing all these crops just for the the cows to eat we'd have plenty of food for everyone no numb nuts 93 93 of the plant material that livestock eat are inedible by humans okay you're talking about the stocks and the plant itself you know you have um you have like soybeans oh like soy is grown and all this stuff is is grown for a cow they don't eat the soybeans dude they're not eating edamame you know they're eating the plant that the edamame grew on right which you which i'm i'm sure that you're not eating you know and so uh it's a lie it's just it's just you know it's a it's a live omission they're not telling people the whole truth and so yes they are eating soy plants no they are not eating soy beans and so um it's uh it's very different animals are extremely important for the environment and growing crops monocropping you know strips nutrients out of the soil it causes harm you lose top soil you lose nutrients and these things can go barren and you need to use all these chemicals and fertilizers and so forth just to get anything out of the ground at all and you have to you know slash and burn uh forests and jungles and so forth 55 percent of borneo's rainforests have been cut down for palm tree oil you know you grow you know palm oil uh crops and so forth killing all the orangutans killing all the animals and the vegans will will defend this the environmental vegans will defend this and say oh well actually you know we've replaced this with trees so i mean it's like you know it's one for one like it's no different it's like no actually it's very different because that's not a habitat you know that's not an ecosystem you know maybe there's some birds in there or something like that there's no orangutans you know anything that comes in there tries to you know interrupt that crop gets shot okay so this is this is not the same thing and you know when you take down you know uh you know they talk about you know the amazon rainforest oh it's being taken down to to have more room for livestock yeah some of it you know most of it is to grow soy and and acai berries for your stupid acai bowls you know and and that's what's happening and then these four these fires in the amazon this was this was covered up quite significantly but it was it was reported that the actual fires in the amazon a few years ago when they said oh amazon rainforest is burning whatever which was was um uh you know not the case nasa actually had satellite images and actually reported that these that weren't forest fires and they certainly weren't being slashed and burned by you know evil capitalists that are trying to burn down the jungle and then just build up a farm like first of all you you burn down a jungle you don't just own it now you know you burn down this jungle and just say yeah this is my farm now like yeah there's actually there's actually more rules than that okay and the fires were actually these these uh farms that were growing wheat they were growing uh these various crops and they harvested the part of the plant that they could sell and make money on they sold whatever they could for animal feed and the rest was extra and so they burn it and that's that's a normal thing in agriculture you burn down you know the dead waste that you're not going to use in order to make room for next year's crop or next season's crop and so that's what was happening and in fact nasa looked at their satellite images and said this was actually below average for the yearly fires that we see in the amazon and they were all farm burns controlled burns and you have to do that when you don't have animals because normally the animals eat down the dead the dead plants in order to make way for the next next uh season of boiled plant we're really creative in the world all these rods for our own back aren't we by sort of interfering and uh and getting in the way i mean it's yeah it's a vicious cycle yeah well it's like these like these prescription cascades you see in medicine where you know a doctor prescribes something that has these side effects so you prescribe something else and it has different side effects and you keep prescribing all of a sudden someone's on 17 different medications and they just went in you know with high blood pressure and it's just like what the hell is going on oh man so yeah that's part of the problem you just start screwing with something and then you're going to mess it up uh complex systems are complex and you can't just go tinkering around bit like the economy yeah well that's it leave it the hell alone and left it exactly yeah yeah you know it's like i'm sorry it's just that well we need intelligent people to micromanage the environment and the ecosystem economy things like that i'm like buddy you're just not that smart no no you you can't predict the trickle-down effects of all these different decisions well yeah and and you know also just you have you have you have individual interactions going on by the billion every single day like you can't you can't you can't account for all of those things same thing with the environment there are billions of interactions between plants and animals animals and animals plants and plants and and all the way down the list all you know aspects of life and inorganic matter all interact in very very unique individual ways that you cannot predict fully you just have to let the system work on its own this is what's evolved this is what's happened and when you start screwing with that you will mess it up and it will get worse try to let nature do its thing and you're going to be a lot better and that's what alan savory is doing trying to emulate nature trying to emulate how animals work in the wild and this and this produces the you know the effects and the and the benefits um in the plant plant world as well all right let's let's wrap there that was awesome um so that's why humans are carnivores guys that's it and we could keep going as well but some of the key points that we spoke about was um there are the vital nutrients we need as humans can all be found in animals but they can't all be found in plants uh we can't digest fiber uh despite you know constantly being told to take fiber to help without digestion or you know whatever that's completely made up our stomachs are low in ph they're very acidic which means that when we were scavenger style animals uh you know we could eat semi-rotten or rotten meat and still still get nutrients we've got a long uh a small intestine and we've got a short large colon which indicates that we're not made to eat a crapload of plants and our teeth our teeth are designed for an animal us who's eating soft meat and fat uh and no we don't go out and kill other animals using our mouths we have hands and weapons for that um that's why we don't need fangs and our appendix and our appendix is a vestigial organ that used to break down fiber and now it's useless and it doesn't break down fibers and we know that we haven't you know been eating fiber for millions of years okay cool i don't i don't don't even have an appendix anymore so that's how yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly and one and that's something too that you know i theorize you know you have a you have an appendix and you have what they think they have a fecal lift there's a piece of you know feces gets stuck in there and it gets then it gets blocked and then you have this buildup of bacteria behind it and it can't get free and you get this infection uh what's that trying to do um you're probably eating a lot of fiber and this is designed normally to feed load fiber into that little blind pouch called an appendix which actually gravity will just you know feed it down because your as your um you know as your small intestine goes into uh your cecum it's sort of like the appendix is straight down from there so the gravity will just feed it down if you're standing up and so you know you can ostensibly uh imagine that you know it's the introduction of fiber that has actually increased the amount of the cases of uh of uh appendicitis is something that i'd have to look at the numbers for but i would not be surprised if i found that interesting yeah it could be our father consumption that's causing all these all this appendicitis fantastic alright dr chafee thank you so much we'll speak again no worries buddy good to see you