• Ken Berry brings Anthony Chaffee on for a "state of carnivore" update and for correction of myths after recent controversy.
• Berry sees carnivore as a powerful 90-day intervention for chronic issues such as type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, acne, PCOS, menstrual problems, perimenopause, and fatty liver.
• Chaffee is an American physician in Western Australia using carnivore, ketogenic diets, and lifestyle to improve metabolic health and reduce medication reliance.

Recent carnivore reversals

• Berry sees the new "add carbs back" wave as recycled high-carbohydrate, low-fat advice, not a discovery.
• The old food-pyramid pattern is the diet Berry grew up with and the diet he links to his mother's diabetes after decades.
• Berry and Chaffee connect some reversals to views, business incentives, and fear around cortisol, thyroid, or long-term carnivore anecdotes.
• Chaffee says long-term ketogenic trials and meta-analyses do not show persistent hypercortisolism; early cortisol rises remain normal and later settle.
• Berry suspects some hidden hypercortisol syndromes surface because keto/carnivore patients and doctors check more labs.
• Berry and Chaffee reject rice, fruit, or starch as magic fixes for metabolic dysfunction; short-term feeling better does not prove long-term health benefit.

Dairy

• Chaffee says adults probably need no dairy for optimal nutrition because mammals are normally weaned onto the adult diet.
• Dairy contains valuable fats, minerals, and fat-soluble vitamins, including odd-chain fatty acids, but it also contains lactose, insulin signals, and caseomorphins.
• Berry and Chaffee see dairy as useful where it prevents malnutrition, but unnecessary and often counterproductive when meat and animal fat already supply nutrients.
• Berry thinks fermented dairy such as yogurt or kefir may be less inflammatory than milk because fermentation reduces lactose and alters proteins, but it still is not a daily adult requirement.

Plants and fermentation

• Chaffee explains "plants are trying to kill you" through plant defense chemistry, not literal intent.
• He learned this from a cancer-biology professor who taught that edible plants can still contain carcinogenic or harmful natural toxins.
• The speakers name lectins, oxalates, tannins, phytates, saponins, cyanogenic glycosides, goitrogens, and other plant compounds as possible chronic irritants.
• Beans, almonds, and kale serve as examples of plant foods whose toxic load can require soaking, boiling, fermentation, crossbreeding, or restriction.
• Berry adds that domestication, cooking, soaking, sprouting, roasting, and fermentation reduce phytotoxins but do not remove all of them.
• Fermented vegetables and dairy are less toxic versions of plant or dairy foods, not essential foods.

Microbiome and oral health

• Berry and Chaffee think microbiome science is still too immature for confident probiotic testing, supplement targeting, or species manipulation.
• Chaffee thinks a carnivore diet can change the oral microbiome and that saliva may help seed the gut microbiome during meals.
• They connect carbohydrate-fed oral bacteria with cavities, gingivitis, plaques, and glioblastoma-related findings.
• Berry says gingivitis and periodontitis often go into remission after 90 days of carnivore in the people he has seen.
• They use oral health as a proxy for overall health: a natural diet should not rot teeth.

Meat choices and daily eating

• Chaffee says all meat is beneficial, and people should eat the meat they enjoy, tolerate, and can afford.
• Ruminant meat may work better for autoimmunity, but pork, chicken, fish, and other meats are acceptable when enough fat is included.
• Chaffee usually eats beef, eggs, and fatty steaks once daily, adding a second meal when training raises appetite.
• Berry's baseline is also beef and eggs daily, with occasional pork, chicken, fish, cod liver, or sardines.

Labs, lipids, and A1C

• Berry asks about Robert Sikes's concern that some carnivores develop high triglycerides, high glucose, low HDL, inflammation, rising A1C, and cortisol issues.
• Berry sees mild A1C elevation on carnivore as often false or misleading when fructosamine is normal, possibly because red blood cells live longer.
• Chaffee has rarely seen high triglycerides, low HDL, and pattern-B LDL in strict patients, and in his examples stress and poor sleep were the shared factor.
• The speakers do not chase lab numbers alone; they focus on the patient, symptoms, context, sleep, stress, exercise, and diet creep.
• Chaffee says daily hard training can raise glucose transiently and move A1C upward without meaning pathology.

Fruit, honey, fructose, and fatty liver

• Berry worries about high-fruit and high-honey animal-based diets because A1C and fructosamine measure glucose glycation, not fructose glycation.
• Research in the exchange indicates fructose is much more glycating than glucose and may create long-term vascular damage even without high A1C.
• Chaffee warns that adding fruit and honey can slide into broader carb intake and weight regain for some people.
• Berry and Chaffee connect fructose to fatty liver through hepatic metabolism and cite Lustig's child fructose-restriction work.
• Foie gras serves as a practical example that carbohydrate overfeeding can fatten the liver rapidly.
• Berry and Chaffee reject the idea that eating fat causes fatty liver because dietary fat enters lymphatics before the bloodstream, not direct liver loading.

Protein, gluconeogenesis, creatine, and vitamin C

• Chaffee says protein does not force harmful gluconeogenesis; glucose production is demand-driven and often comes from glycerol during fat breakdown.
• Berry and Chaffee reject the fear that ketogenic or carnivore eating causes muscle loss, using old-school steak-and-eggs bodybuilding as a counterexample.
• Berry gets about 6 g creatine daily from meat and questions whether carnivore eaters need creatine powder.
• Chaffee thinks meat supplies enough creatine for ordinary muscle and brain needs, while high-dose creatine may have a role after concussion or TBI.
• Chaffee says carbohydrate intake raises vitamin C need and competes with vitamin C handling, while meat supplies hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine for collagen.
• Berry says low measured vitamin C on near-zero-carb carnivore does not necessarily equal functional scurvy when wound healing is rapid.

Deficiencies, thyroid medication, and eggs

• Berry has seen rare thiamine deficiency in narrow beef-only carnivores, resolved by adding pork.
• Chaffee usually sees vitamins and minerals rise, but he checks B12, folate, zinc, magnesium, and malabsorption patterns when progress stalls.
• Chaffee found coffee timing could block thyroid medication absorption in many patients, requiring one to two hours before coffee.
• Chaffee uses low B12 despite meat or liver intake as a clue for MTHFR issues, malabsorption, or pernicious anemia antibodies.
• Berry and Chaffee see egg sensitivity as uncommon and often linked to egg whites; Berry thinks fertilized backyard eggs may be better tolerated.

Carbohydrates, anthropology, and diabetes history

• Dietary carbohydrate is nonessential, and the National Academies/Institute of Medicine language gives zero as the lower limit with adequate protein and fat.
• Chaffee says human insulin fits protein better than carbohydrate spikes because modern rapid insulin had to be engineered for glucose excursions.
• Berry and Chaffee connect agricultural grains, sugar, and starch with dental decay, smaller bodies, smaller brains, and chronic disease after agriculture.
• Chaffee says amylase gene expansion after agriculture means mass starch eating became common only recently in human history.
• Berry and Chaffee say seed oils cannot be the only cause of metabolic disease because diabetes and carbohydrate restriction predate modern seed oils.
• Chaffee cites Osler-era diabetes texts using near-zero carbohydrate, protein, and fat before insulin.

Fasting and cancer metabolism

• Chaffee prefers intuitive feast-and-fast eating over deliberate food withholding when hungry.
• He warns that fasting can backfire when people under-eat on feeding days and suppress metabolism.
• He sees occasional 48-hour fasting as potentially useful for resetting hunger signals.
• For cancer, fasting may lower glucose, raise ketones, reduce GKI, and reduce exogenous glutamine, but the glutamine piece remains unproven.
• For most people, carnivore with hunger-based eating is enough; fasting is optional, not required.

References

• [00:06] Low-carbohydrate diets and men's cortisol and testosterone — https://doi.org/10.1177/02601060221083079
• [00:06] Nutritional Intervention in Cushing’s Disease: The Ketogenic Diet’s Effects on Metabolic Comorbidities and Adrenal Steroids — https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15214647
• [00:12] Nutrition and Physical Degeneration — https://archive.org/details/nutritionphysica0000pric
• [00:39] Formation of Fructose-Mediated Advanced Glycation End Products and Their Roles in Metabolic and Inflammatory Diseases — https://doi.org/10.3945/an.116.013912
• [00:42] Isocaloric fructose restriction and metabolic improvement in children with obesity and metabolic syndrome — https://doi.org/10.1002/oby.21371
• [00:42] Effects of Dietary Fructose Restriction on Liver Fat, De Novo Lipogenesis, and Insulin Kinetics in Children With Obesity — https://doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2017.05.043
• [00:56] Altered Intestinal Absorption of L-Thyroxine Caused by Coffee — https://doi.org/10.1089/thy.2007.0222
• [00:56] Vitamin B12 status and rate of brain volume loss in community-dwelling elderly — https://doi.org/10.1212/01.wnl.0000325581.26991.f2
• [01:04] Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids — https://doi.org/10.17226/10490
• [01:10] Diabetes Research and Care Through the Ages — https://doi.org/10.2337/dci17-0042
• [01:11] Has carbohydrate-restriction been forgotten as a treatment for diabetes mellitus? — https://doi.org/10.1186/1743-7075-5-10
• [01:12] The Principles and Practice of Medicine — https://archive.org/details/principlespracti1892osle