Note: The text below is a transcription from the video above. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
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Today we’re going to talk about the carnivore diet, specifically, and Hashimoto’s. So, the carnivore diet. So, background. Okay, I’ll tell you what I share with my patients. When we’re treating them, it’s diet, it’s lifestyle changes. There’s herbs, there are botanicals. There’s a lot of triggers that can be pulled. There just can be so many things that are being flaring up your immune responses and there’s 40 something triggers and all that type of stuff. But diet’s huge. In the beginning, diet’s very, very, very important to calm down inflammation, to dampen things.
But most of my patients come in here, they have a variety of different things and one diet doesn’t fit. Sarah Ballantyne wrote the Autoimmune Paleo Diet and that was a great thing at the time because it acknowledged that there was autoimmunity and that there were certain foods that flared up autoimmunity. There’s the anti-inflammatory diet, except the problem was a lot of people had food sensitivities. And at that time there was no good way to test them. The problem was some people had small intestine bacterial overgrowth and you would get on that diet and all of a sudden your stomach would start bloating and you’d go, “What?”
So here, at Power Health Chiropractic in Reno, we use 15 different diets. But we never use one diet, never, because one diet is never appropriate for the people who are walking in here who’s got small intestine bacterial overgrowth, food sensitivities and gastritis, or ulcers. Or who’s got [inaudible 00:01:46] and who’s got ulcers and who’s got blood sugar, diabetes type II. And a lot of times what happens is functional practitioners will have a diet to help them and they’ll make that their baseline diet for everything and then they wonder why things haven’t worked. So that’s just the background about what I’m going to say.
And frankly, I was just doing a seminar on vascular diseases not long ago and interestingly enough, the presenter went over… And it was the first time I ever heard this. It was our idea here. I work with another doctor here on the nutritional aspects of it. About five years ago, he said, “Look, one diet’s not working, okay?” We have to figure out what diets to put together and we did so, and we started with putting these together based on our workups. Excuse me. And lo and behold, this gentleman, who I consider my mentor, came out and he started talking about how one diet didn’t work, and you have to do [inaudible 00:02:54]. It’s the first time I’d ever heard it. First time I’ve ever heard it in a seminar setting.
So one diet doesn’t work. So we’ll start off with that, with the carnivore diet. And a lot of people say, “Well, it made me feel so much better.” And it can make you feel better. There are people who can’t do the carnivore diet because they don’t have enough hydrochloric acid in their stomach. They can’t do it because some people that the diet is actually inflammatory to them and you’re trying to dampen inflammation. I have someone in my family right now who’s doing the carnivore diet and is losing weight like crazy and is thrilled. And I don’t know as much that it’s because he’s doing a carnivore diet, but as much as the rest of his eating wasn’t all that great and now he’s just concentrating on this and he’s probably going to go back because he’s not going to eat the carnivore diet forever.
Long term effects of the carnivore diet is probably not good. By the way, in that seminar, we went over vegetarian diets, vegan diets. We went over every diet you’ve ever heard of, the paleo diet, the Mediterranean diet, the dash diets and the diets and what they’re good for and how to combine them. And when this presenter, who is one of the top researchers literally in the world in this stuff, when he came to the carnivore diet, he goes, “I don’t know why anybody does that.” He didn’t really go on about that, but I’ll tell you why he said that. When you’re just eating meat… First of all, your digestive chain starts in your stomach and you have to have enough hydrochloric acid in your stomach. If you don’t have enough hydrochloric acid in your stomach, there’s a number of reasons for that, but you’re going to have a hard time on the carnivore diet. You’re going to start and you’re going to stop. So you probably are going to not even listen to a subject on the carnivore diet and Hashimotos because you’re not going to be able to do it.
But for those people who can do it, for example, you will… At 65 there and abouts, people start losing the ability to make hydrochloric acid in their stomach because we are living longer, we’re eating a lot more different things than we used to. And we destroy it, the ability of ourselves to make hydrochloric acid at some point in time, some earlier than 65, some later. And some people live to 80 and they’re fine. It depends on their stress. It depends on their diet previously. It depends on if they exercise, all the good things, if they don’t smoke, all those types of things. They’ll be able to make hydrochloric acid for a longer period of time. But if you start eating meat every day all day long and that’s it, you are going to annihilate. You’re going to annihilate the processes in your digestive system that make hydrochloric acid.
And here’s why that’s uber important. So it’s not just about the stomach because then what happens is when you start… Or if you’re on the diet and you start getting a sense of fullness during or after meals, that’s the point where you need to stop. “Oh, but I eat a lot of meat so that makes sense.” No, no, no, no. The acid is supposed to be breaking this stuff down. And if it’s not, it sits there. And if it sits there, it’s because it’s not getting through what’s called the pyloric valve between your stomach and your upper part of your intestines, which is called the duodenum. And in that duodenum, there’s this little mechanism that says, “Hey, I’m sending you a bolus of food that’s not digested. It’s acidic. It’s not sterilized because you are destroying the hydrochloric acid.” And it literally tells your gallbladder to stop making that bile. And it tells your pancreas to stop making enzymes. Now you want to know how you get food sensitivities? This is how you get food sensitivities. You want to get food sensitivities to meat, go on the carnivore diet.
And eventually you break down that gut and as it goes on, you’re going to get… How do I know this? Because I see it. Because I see it. When I see people come in here who have the carnivore diet, this is the exact picture that I see over and over again. And you’re not going to see a lot of this out there, but I’ve been in practice for 43 years, I think this is my 43rd year, and I will tell you that you will observe things in clinical practice long before it gets out into literature because everybody’s afraid to say anything about it. We have to have research project. We have to have 27 research projects. And 10 years later they’re going to go, “Oh, you know what? Doing that carnivore diet might not have been the greatest thing.” And you’ve probably seen that through your lifetime where they say you can do one thing and then later you can’t do another. I think that’s where this is going to go, but that’s been my observation.
So when people here are coming here on a carnivore diet, I know I’m going to have to check their gastrointestinal function. And I know I’m going to have to make sure that they have proper hydrochloric acid, that their pancreas is working, and they probably have developed leaky gut. You might lose a lot of weight on it depending on who you are. It’s very possible. You’re not eating any fruits or vegetables or anything like that. They did a five year study at Harvard called The Microbiome Project and it came down to the United States had the worst microbiome in the world and this tribe, and I can’t remember the name of the tribe, the [inaudible 00:08:24] tribe or something like that, some indigenous tribe. And I don’t even remember if it was in Australia or wherever it was, but I think it was Australia. They had the best microbiome. Why? Because they were foraging around eating 600 different vegetables a year and they had the best microbiome, because it turns out a variety of vegetables is what builds the best microbiome, not pounding it with protein every day, every day, every day, every day, but doing that. So it’s the polar opposite of what you want to be doing with your microbiome. So it will damage your microbiome. Thus, when the presenter at that seminar went, “Whoever thought of that…” In essence, what I just said, I’m pretty sure is what he was saying.
So anyway, so that’s the carnivore diet. And as far as Hashimotos go, it can temporarily calm some things down in a select group of people. But it isn’t something that should be out there as a tool for the Hashimotos patient, frankly at all. So, that’s it.
