Intro

Welcome to the Meat Medic Podcast. I'm your host Dr Suresh Khirwadkar.

I'm a GP a lifestyle physician and I'm a practicing carnivore. I've had great success myself personally and with patients by following a carnivore diet and I want to spread the word about the many benefits of eating meat.

My Health Journey

I guess a good place to start is why I made this podcast. Now I've recently converted to a carnivore diet and when I say I converted I really mean converted. I'd always eaten quite a lot of meat, always drawn to it. Whilst like anyone of course I enjoyed sugary foods I was never really that drawn to them. I would usually prefer savory rather than sweet foods.

I'd usually prefer a steak than a chocolate cake for example but like many I just struggle to not eat sugar. ow it's hard it's everywhere but as a doctor I know the importance of diet and nutrition and so I was determined to live a healthy life, after all not many patients really want to see or take advice from an unhealthy overweight doctor. Now I cover my own personal health yourney in a little more detail in my other podcast quest for health (I never made this podcast) but briefly - I've almost always been overweight and unhealthy it pains me to say it but it's true. My issue started when I was maybe around 10 to 11 years old and feeling overweight. I remember my parents telling me back then it was just puppy fat and it would go away - and it did - but it came back with a vengeance. I remember always being conscious of my body and my fat, but thankfully though I never developed any Eating Disorders at least that I know of but I was always unhappy with my body. Over the years I did almost every type of diet going and whilst I got some success, I was never really happy. If I was fat I wanted to lose weight. When I was skinny I wanted to bulk up and gain muscle, but nothing ever really worked.

I was never really happy and I wonder if I was even that healthy or simply just getting away with it because I was younger.

I remember being in my 20s spending hours in the gym every day. I used to get up at like 5 a.m to go to the gym before work. I was pounding food and supplements because of course that's what it took to build muscle. Whilst I did get stronger, I never really built any muscle and I did everything I was meant to. I tried getting up at 5am to go to the gym every day for an hour. I tried eating all the time seven times a day didn't work. I tried eating three times a day that didn't work. I tried carbs. I tried no carbs tried cars before working out during after nothing seemed to really work. I did the exact amount of you know dextrose maltodextrose glucose bananas everything after the workout mixing it with all sorts of stuff the list was endless. But nothing ever worked. It was just so demoralizing and I just I just wanted to give up, and of course life happened you know responsibility, marriage, kids you just don't have the time to spend hours in the gym anymore and honestly I didn't really want to anyway because I wasn't seeing any results.

I'd resigned myself to being overweight and actually sadly became okay with that. Thinking back as much as we celebrate body positivity - and rightly so - we are in danger of in society of normalizing and almost celebrating obesity and being unhealthy, and to be honest I was guilty of that. I accepted and normalized me being unhealthy.

I just didn't know any better.

Now over the next few years I bounced around with my health yo-yo dieting. Losing and gaining weight all the time.

I'd finished medical school, done my GP training and had moved to Australia to escape England and the NHS - but anybody that knows the NHS will understand why.

Intermittent fasting

My own personal medical Journey continued and whilst I was a doctor and looked okay, I was still unhappy and unhealthy. In this time I tried almost everything except intermittent fasting. I remember thinking intermittent fasting was just a fad and nothing good would come from it, but a patient actually got me to try it.

I will forever be grateful to him for starting me down on this path and just as a side note here, I do think as doctors we should listen to our patients much much more than we actually do.

I've learned a lot from my patients over the years and I really wish more doctors would actually listen to their patients and try and learn.

Anyway I remember him talking to me about intermittent fasting, and fasting in general but specifically about prolonged fasting. Now he wanted to do a seven day fast.

Now of course I just couldn't correlate this at all with my medical training, and so you know dutifully of course I told him

You are insane and you'll probably die. I can't support it and I'd have nothing to do with it - and you should probably go and see a different doctor who specialized in this work.

Now I wasn't rude about it of course, I said all of this nicely and professionally but the message was kind of still the same.

The reply basically back was

"nope you're my doctor so you're gonna help me"

Now after a lot of back and forth eventually I agreed to monitor him because I wanted to make sure he was being safe, and of course he was fine. But not just fine - his results were actually astounding.

Almost all of the issues that he had disappeared within a week or so. My mind was absolutely blown.

How could not eating be healthy how could not eating be helpful to the body. This just made no sense to me. I was absolutely intrigued. Sadly though of course my medical training just stopped me from accepting this, though I did eventually agree to reading a couple of the books on fasting that he wanted me to.

Now I'm glad I did this because I still couldn't accept not eating for a week was going to be healthy, but I started to realize that there was more to this fasting business than just not eating calories like I thought.

So eventually I started actually doing intermittent fasting myself - after all it was the only thing that I hadn't really tried before and I have to say my results were amazing.

For the first time in my life I actually really felt in control of my food and my eating more so than when I've been doing Keto, Lifestyle Medicine and plant based nutrition, and I was losing weight and mostly keeping it off.

My biomarkers for health were all improving as well which was great.

Lifestyle Medicine

Now this all started me on this journey and almost instantly I actually undertook my board certification in Lifestyle Medicine.

Now people say you should spend years studying that but I was so fascinated I was just spending hours every day researching and learning and I just jumped into the exam.

I actually passed my exam and became board certified. I was truly fascinated that diet and nutrition could play such a huge role in people's health and was truly now able to help my patients by preventing their disease not just managing it.

Now of course some out there will know that the lifestyle medicine heavily pushes plant-based nutrition but this is a carnivore podcast.

Okay yes I don't agree with plant-based nutrition I've done it before myself and I felt terrible.

I see a lot of people who feel terrible on plant-based diets. Interestingly I've never seen a patient on carnivore feel terrible.

I don't agree with plant-based nutrition. I didn't agree with it then and I remember you know having to do the exam and unfortunately, like a lot of things like in medical school (this is definitely a problem as well) you kind of just have to learn the exam, not the truth.

I didn't Advocate Advocate plant-based diets but I did used to advocate plant heavy diets, just not entirely plant-based. I think it's okay to not agree with everything that you're taught and I do believe that an inquisitive mind is a healthy mind. We're actually taught this in medical school. We're not taught a great deal at medical school but some things we are taught are really good and I remember being taught very early on to question what we were being taught, to question research, to question studies and not just take them on Blind Faith.

Introduction To Carnivore

fast forward a year or so and this patient basically tells me he's doing a hyper carnivore diet. Now obviously again my medical brain just could not accept this.

It was like a AI and a logic trap just spinning in circles unable to find the solution

At least though at this point I was a little bit more open-minded and agreed to monitor him like before. Now of course all of his biomarkers improved, but not just that his medical issues just completely melted away.

I was absolutely fascinated but again I just I couldn't accept that this was good.

I mean fruit and veg are good. Aren't

they?

It's drummed into us from birth that we must eat our vegetables - we must just grit our teeth and think of England whilst we swallow these foul-tasting things. Indeed I just spent all of this time learning about all these extra things about plant-based nutrition and how the this diet plant-based diet can fix the world and all these studies that show benefit.

You know through all this time I actually never stopped believing that meat was good for us, just that perhaps it should coexist with plant nutrition.

I'd always eaten a lot of meat and to be honest never really been a massive fan of vegetables.

So I actually started researching more and I found that, yeah, like maybe there's something in it, but I couldn't bring myself to cut out all vegetables and fruit. You know after all these these were good for me and these were just people on the internet talking about it.

#My Awakening

So then I went to low carb Down Under 2022. and that was amazing and if there's anyone that ever gets a chance to go I imagine KetoCon in the states is very similar you should definitely go.

Anyway I listened to a talk by the amazing Dr Anthony Chaffee the plant free MD - and definitely check out his podcast it is is truly amazing I've learned a lot from him- but suddenly my mind was blown not that meat was good - I knew that - but that plants could be bad.

Hang on hang on. Plants are bad? That just can't be right? everything that we're told - plants are amazing this can't be right this was an absolute paradigm shift I just couldn't compute.

It wasn't just that I didn't have to eat that salad, but actually maybe I didn't want to eat that salad maybe it was actually bad for me to eat it.

But this kind of was just unbelievable.

Yet completely believable. Something about it just made sense. After all I mean we know that you can't just eat random plants in the forest - that'll probably kill you.

You can't just go and like eat water hemlock, it'll kill you within minutes.

You know you go and eat a couple of bitter almonds you know Peach pits you'll probably die. You go and eat a cassava plant, cassava melon and don't prepare it right you'll die.

So it's not that much of a stretch to think that plants actually have toxins in that could affect us. Now after all just look at things like caffeine, cannabis, mushrooms. All of these things these psychoactive agents they clearly have a role. They clearly have a function on our body physically and mentally, so it's not that much of a stretch.

So I pretty much just said there and then

well you know what let's try it there's this doctor who's doing this now he's been doing it for 20 odd years and he looks great and he says he feels amazing and it's someone in the flesh actually talking to me this is an Australian doctor this is not just some random on the internet that's talking to me about it.

So my mind was basically made up. You know I thought I'll try for a couple of weeks see what happens. What's the worst that happens in two weeks? I'm not gonna die in two weeks and I just figured you know what I'll go cold turkey. I'll just go off everything coffee, alcohol although I didn't really drink much anyway, but no herbs no spices no plants at all.

I wanted to really really do it if I was going to do it.

Benefits Of Carnivore Diet

I was scared, but I was motivated, but my God the difference in two barely two days, probably a day and a half.

I felt oh my God amazing I just it's hard to explain I just felt alive truly alive.

Now I'd gone from doing intermittent fasting and keto diet combination which is about as good as you can really get for health, but even compared to this, it was just night and day.

I felt just incredible. My energy just knew no bounds. My mental health was just out of this world.

Now I really kind of never really had any mental health issues maybe, but in retrospect now I felt like I kind of just had depression and anxiety all my life.

I was just stress-free.

I was euphoric.

Like nothing could touch me.

I almost felt like I was just floating on clouds.

Now we were actually going through quite stressful time at that point my wife and I are in our family, not relationship wise just you know life, but I'd gone from kind of actually worrying about it most days to just like I just had a Teflon Shield like it was just bouncing off me.

Like I wasn't dude it's not like I didn't care, it just didn't affect me. I could just deal with it. It's amazing.

I was clear-headed Clarity. Just energy, and for the first time in probably forever, I just woke up refreshed alert ready to start the day.

I didn't have to scrape myself out of bed.

From there the improvements just kept clocking up my fatigue was just gone my tiredness was gone my mood so much better my stress had just disappeared like I said I just had this Teflon Shield of just stress barrier like nothing could stress me at all.

I was motivated. Genuinely motivated to do things clean tidy fix things around the house, do the washing, do the laundry , do the ironing like the dishwasher like the house was just spotless in days and if you know me in my house, um we're not the cleanest of people, but you know I wanted to do this. Genuinely I wanted to learn, research, improve my knowledge. I wanted to just be fit and healthy. I wanted to live.

I wanted to be in nature and experience the world and care for the planet more than I've ever done before. It's just so hard to explain.

My wife definitely noticed the improvement in me immediately.

Now that was around three months ago and I haven't looked back since. In that time I've researched and I've learned a whole lot more, and I wanted to make this podcast to introduce patients to carnivore and share what I've learned.

Of course I'm still learnin and I'm not going to pretend like I know everything about Carnivore. God no. But I'm gonna try and I want to take you guys on the journey with me.

I've also introduced a few patients to carnivore diet and every single one has found great success with issues like irritable bowel syndrome you know for 20 to 30 years just being cured. Colitis, Crohn's disease, diverticulitis depression, anxiety, stress, tiredness fatigue, arthritis, you name it it's got better.

Even some conditions like bipolar disorders and schizophrenia these patients are improving for the first time.

I had a patient the other day say

"for the first time in 30 years she feels alive and she wants to be alive. All from the carnivore diet"

I mean unless you've got those conditions or you're managing these with patients with these things you've got no idea what that means to these people and from just simply not eating plants.

It's just incredible. Even the patients that haven't managed to go all that way to carnivore every single patient that I've seen that I've advised them and they've agreed to eat more red meat red meat specifically, they've felt better and this actually correlates with a study in 2022 from Harvard University where they looked at just over 2 000 patients who did the carnivore diet.

It was an observational study so okay look it gets some criticism, because this is not the best quality of study it's not a randomized control trial or a meta-analysis, but about 95% of people reported only positive outcomes on Carnivore diet about 2 000 people, just over 2 000 people. That's just unheard of.

I don't know a single study that's ever come close to that yes okay it's an observational study, but it's just incredible people were curing incurable illnesses again, self-reported, but why would people lie.

They have no reason to lie they weren't being paid for this study, just curing themselves of diabetesm chronic bowel problems, I mean all of these things just incredible, so there's really been no denying that it can help people and yes maybe it's anecdote but still in the last three months or so you know I've been doing this with myself and I've learned enormous amounts and my world's been turned upside down, and I've been helping my patients with this as well. If they want to do it, but of course I'm not pushing it on them but it's really interesting because despite research showing that red meat is bad there's clearly no denying that it's caused great benefit for me and my patients.

That's really interesting because actually, I mean I'll cover this in another episode but you look at the World Health organization's own data on red me causing bowel cancer for example they use 15 studies seven less than half showed a weak association with bowel cancer eight more than half showed absolutely no association with bowel cancer. Despite this they concluded that red meat caused cancer.

Sorry but you cannot draw that conclusion because more studies said there definitely was not a link then the studies that said there might be a very weak link one might think maybe there's an agenda that they're trying to fill.

I even had a vegan and a vegetarian patient agreed to eat more meat. They instantly felt better, and now they're questioning that a whole previous life as non-meateaters and they've actually gone and told their friends and family about eating more meat because there's the difference in how they feel.

Now don't get me wrong a lot of people like to eat more meat but not everyone, and for some it's almost impossible to come to terms with, even faced with the knowledge that their diet is pretty awful and it's causing their harm.

Some people just struggle to accept that eating more meat and not plants could be good for them.

Some people sadly are addicted to just bad food and and I understand that. Sugar and carbs there is an addiction, it's very hard to break it so you know some people need a little bit more gentle coaching.

I've also had a few, um, spirited conversations let's say with some vegan patients who have accused me of misinformation and spreading lies.

Despite what you might think I actually enjoy these conversations mostly because they're useful conversations I'm always keen to learn, but unfortunately you know the research and evidence they use to justify their arguments is almost always flawed, biased or just of extremely low quality never showing causation and often barely correlation - yet presented as fact. It's actually quite ironic that those are the ones most likely spreading misinformation and unproven claims yet they actually really struggle to accept it.

I'm absolutely loving it and telling everybody to eat more red meat but others sadly are entrenched and I've had people resort to childish name calling or worse personal threats.

I think if you're having to threaten someone to get your point across, well that's pretty sad and you probably don't have a good basis for your arguments if you're having to resort to threats. not only do you lose all credibility you, just make a fool of yourself, and of course you're threatening people

Conclusion

I'm always Keen to learn and have conversations with people you know I want to learn and I'm happy to engage with anyone that wants to have a actual grown-up conversation about diet and nutrition.

In the meantime you know I continued to research and learn more and I want to share that knowledge that.

I've learned so that others can learn with me, and together we can improve our physical and mental health through a species appropriate diet the right nutrition but I believe that means eating more meat.

If you are looking for a guide on how to start a carnivore diet, check out my course and ebook pages.

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