Transcription
After a thousand days on a carnivore diet, this man checked his blood work. What did the results show? Let's check it out. I'm Dr. Eric Westman. Welcome to my channel where I review and debunk nutritional misinformation online.
This is a video by a young man named Max German, his YouTube handle, and he's from New Zealand, turns out, and he has not had fruit or vegetables for a thousand days. and has lived to well do videos on it into the two blood work. Now, let's see what he found.
>> For over 1,000 days, I have been on the carnival diet, which means the only foods I have consumed are meat and eggs. I haven't consumed any fruits or vegetables. Now, according to the mainstream, my blood work should be horrific. My kidney function should be non-existent. My quote bad cholesterol should be through the roof.
Now, I've done a few videos recently that were AI generated and and then how can you trust his word for things, right? You always want to trust consider the source and make sure things are trustworthy. I think he's pretty trustworthy and just that he's been like showing his life publicly, although it would be nice um I don't know to have someone validate it perhaps. Well, we'll just take his word for it. Today we're going to break down my blood work and see if any of this is actually true.
Let's start with testosterone. My testosterone remains high at 25.6 nanomles per liter, which translates to 738 nanog per deciliter. The reference ranges for testosterone where I got my blood work done are between 8.7 and 29 nanomles per liter or 251 to 836 nanogs per diliter. So, even despite having a relatively low food intake for some time, my testosterone remains high.
>> Very nice that he puts both uh units on there. I'm not always as good to put all of the scientific units up for a comparison. My perspective on this now is that I suspect the main driver as to why so many people experience these hormonal issues when getting lean isn't strictly due to this whole optimizing for survival hypothesis. But it is instead because they aren't eating enough saturated fats, which are actually the building block for hormones. The only people I know who maintain high testosterone levels even when at a low body fat are the other carnival guys online. And I've also heard many examples of women who talk about how they have lost their periods in the past and they thought it was because they were very lean. However, now that they're on carnivore, they're the same body fat percentage and have no issues. So, if you want to preserve hormonal function whilst looking good, in my experience, the carnivore diet is the best way to do this.
>> So, how you lose the weight matters. I've seen that a lot with the GLP1 shots these days that are massively popular and people don't pay attention to the food they're eating when they're taking it, the shots. So they're they can be having terrible metabolic results even though they're losing fat off their body and losing weight. And also for those of you accusing me on steroids, here is my FSH. And FSH is a follicule stimulating hormone. This is actually what stimulates sperm production in males. And LH is a luteinizing hormone, which is what stimulates the testes to produce testosterone in males. Now what happens when you take testosterone exogenously and inject yourself with it is your brain detects these high levels and it stops telling your testes to produce their own. So your pituitary shuts down FSH and LH production through this negative feedback and these numbers they crashed to near zero. Now the reference range for FSH is between 2 and 12 and mine came back at 8.9 and for LH it's between 2 and 9 and mine is 4.1. There was a um influencer for a while, Liver King. I think that that's what his name was. And then he finally years into it confessed that he was using anabolic steroids. Nice that he went out and got this done.
Next up, we have liver function. You know, this is another area where people say that the carnivore diet causes problems. Now, the theory behind this is that a low carbohydrate intake results in your body having to produce a larger amount of glucose. This is supposedly stressful to the liver as the liver is where this glucose is created. It creates this glucose from fats and proteins. But this claim is very unsupported and again that is what we see reflected in my blood results. The four liver markers I had tested were bilerubin. This measures how well your liver clears waste from red blood cell breakdown. The reference range is less than 25us 8. Also alkaline phosphate. This is an enzyme that removes phosphate groups from molecules which is an essential process for liver function. The reference range for this is between 40 and 110 minus 75. There's also a GGGT or gamma glutamile transferase. This is a liver enzyme that assists in breaking down toxins. The reference range for this is less than 60 minus 13. There's also elanine amot transansferase. Now, this is actually more of a short-term marker that reflects liver health over the past days to weeks. It's not a long-term marker like these other three liver markers that we've just looked at. The reference range for this is less than 45. Mine is 41. So overall, everything looks good. The only marker here on the higher end is ALT, which like I just explained is a short-term marker.
>> Yeah. And that's typically what I see. And liver enzymes get better. Fatty liver is so common now. In fact, it's gone through an evolution of names from fatty liver to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to metabolic associated liver disease, mass. So, uh, that kind of shows if you're in the latest language, they change the name. Now, there are drugs for mass when actually diet fixes the massel fatty liver as well. Some people say, "Oh, look, you'll eating all that fat, you're going to get fatty liver." No, the excess of calories and carbs are what some people say that you're going to get fatty liver from eating fat and having the carnivore diet. No, it's really the carbs and the extra calories with the carbs that cause the fatty liver. Something like carnivore, low carb, keto can actually reverse fatty liver. This reflects what's been going on with your liver in the short term. And I must confess something here. I have a little secret that I'm going to tell to only you and you can't tell anyone else. This blood test here, I did it when I just got back from a holiday. Now, on this holiday, I may or may not on one or two nights consumed a whiskey or two. Not confirming or denying anything, but I would speculate that if I did have a whiskey or two on one or two nights, that the reason my ALT is not perfect is because of that whiskey. So, I'm going to attribute that right there to my honestic actions and not my dietary choices. Nowadays, I do drink very infrequently simply because I hate not feeling my best and there's the obvious health consequences, but from time to time on special occasions like being on holiday, I will sometimes have a couple.
Well, and if you were being taught by a carnivore or purist, no alcohol is allowed, right? Uh, lions don't drink alcohol, so you can't have any. They don't drink coffee, so you can't have any. Well, there are more relaxed versions of carnivore or even keto or low carb where you can have some alcohol and do fine. One or two drinks a day, something like that. But it depends on the person. Although the young scientists who are studying keto carnivore are talking a different language and they talk about metabolic health and I remember being kind of taught or told at a meeting we're going out for a drink and the young researcher said well but alcohol is bad for the mitochondria. I prefer not to drink. So if you want to do everything you can to reduce your fatty liver met and improve mitochondrial health, I suppose you wouldn't want to drink at all.
>> Next up, we have kidney function. Again, this is yet another area where, you know, a carnivore diet will supposedly cause issues. I think the alleged mechanism here is high protein intake is supposedly stressful. But again, this is not the case by looking at my creatinine levels. Creatinine is a waste product from muscle metabolism. This gets filtered through the kidneys and high levels mean your kidneys aren't filtering it well. The reference range is 60 to 105 micro moles per liter and mine is at 83. There's also EGFR which estimates the kidney filtration rate. This is only recorded as greater or less than 90. Now the reason you don't get a specific number for this like you do with most other markers is the equation they use is derived from studies of people with kidney disease. So, it's well calibrated for detecting reduced function, but once you hit that 90 mark, the equation becomes inaccurate. So, they can't really give you an exact number. So, labs just report it as less than 90 means you're in normal range and everything appears to be filtering well. So, good news again here. Kidneys are great. I've actually eaten a very high protein diet since about the age of 14. For most of my life, I consumed over 200 grams of protein per day. Reduced that a bit now. But even despite all of this protein intake, kidneys, they're looking good.
>> Yeah. The other test besides creatine is blood ura nitrogen or BU N. You'll often see BUN and creatinine as the kidney function blood tests. BUN can go up a little bit. I've seen that. I'm not worried about it. It might be the change in hydration. It could be the little extra protein compared to those who make up the normal range, the carb eaters who eat less protein. But uh the craftine should be rock steady.
Next up we have the iron levels. Ferotin is a measurement of stored iron. We need iron for a number of reasons. In particular, our red blood cells use it to carry oxygen to every tissue in our bodies. Now having suboptimal iron levels is certainly something you don't want. When iron levels are too low, people typically find that they're exhausted all the time. And then if you have very high iron on the high end, you can actually get organ damage. This is because it produces a very high amount of free radicals. There's actually a condition for this called hereditary hemocromattosis. So feritin levels are very important. Certainly don't want too low or too high. My ferotin is 254 micrograms per liter. Reference range is between 20 and 320. So again, right where it should be. Then complete blood count, hemoglobin, red blood cells, white blood cells, etc. They're all sitting in healthy ranges.
>> I think the feritin might be an area for further study. Uh, and I'm thinking that the own your labs company, there actually is a company in the US where you don't need to convince your doctor to get it to get a lab test. Of course, you have to pay out of pocket for it. Ownyoulabs.com, they probably have a lot of information about these kinds of levels and people who self-escribe eating low carb or keto or carnivore diets. But the ferotin can go up a bit. I think a prominent influencer's feritin went up and that was the reason he switched from a keto diet. I'm not so concerned about it. Unless you have a history of familial hemocromattosis, then I would be worried about it.
Now, I am not even 1% concerned about having quote high LDL for a number of reasons. For one, the countries that have the highest LDL levels actually have the longest life expecties. Across all the data on LDL and heart disease, there is not even a correlation between high LDL levels and heart disease. But to me, the most compelling evidence is this study right here done in 2009. This was published in the American Heart Journal. What they did in this study is they looked at 136,000 people. Now, these people had all been hospitalized with severe heart complications, including heart disease and heart attacks. What they did with these people is they looked at their blood work within 24 hours of hospitalization. And what they found is that roughly 50% of these people had what is considered low LDL. Now, if high LDL did cause heart disease, these findings right here, they would be impossible. This whole hypothesis that high LDL is the driver of heart issues only became the leading theory because of fraudulent studies bought and paid for by the sugar industry. At the time the sugar industry conducted these studies, the rates of every disease, they were skyrocketing. So the sugar industry they came up with a plan to divert the blame from themselves and they hired a man named Anel Keys. Now what he did was conduct a massive multi-country study and he's found seven countries that showed a link between saturated fat intake and heart disease. So what he did is published these findings. However, he actually looked at 22 different countries. In 15 of them there was no link. But he decided to leave out all that data. And because saturated fat is high in cholesterol, the two became sort of synonymous with heart disease. And since then everyone's blamed them. And because at the time heart disease was this relatively new thing, there were very few people actually researching the true cause of it. So this became the accepted science and got put into every medical textbook across the entire world basically. Now since then, like we've just been looking at, there's been a ton of data that has come out in complete contrary to these original findings. Well, it's not even really in contrary to these original findings when you look at the full data across all 22 countries. What I should say is that there's been a ton of data showing this LDL hypothesis is completely wrong. However, the reason it's still in medical textbooks is for one reason. Well, actually, maybe I should say for 16 billion reasons, and that is because there is a drug called statins. Now, how statins work is they bring LDL levels down. And this drug makes over $16 billion per year.
The last segment there was kind of the other narrative that you'll hear about how the sugar industry squaltched research on sugar and carbs and made everyone go over here and you know hey look study cholesterol and also how it got started by a scientist called Ancel Keys went around on different organizations and changed the mindset without a whole lot of data and these books have been written now about that narrative that about that view of history and Gary Talabs's book good calories bad calories or Nina Tyishel's book the big fat surprise go into excruciating detail about how what we were taught about saturated fat in the food and LDL really was not solidly sound science you need to read those books they were pivotal for me and able to If you need to read those books, if you're still kind of, oh, I don't really know about saturated fat and why do the doctors still say that, it's really important to look at those books because they were helpful for me to sort of free that nagging question of why do these other people think that way? And or it might be like Max says that uh it's just the money. It'll be interesting to see now that the GLP1s are making money. There may be a shift to uh for the industry to uh consider the insulin resistance and diabetes and obesity with treatment with a different drug, the GLP1. So, I like the video here. You have an individual who's put his life basically on YouTube for public view and went out and did these tests. And I think that's pretty gutsy. seems in good health and hope that's helpful. If you like this, please like, subscribe, ring the notification bell so you don't miss out on further content. If you enjoyed this video, consider joining our YouTube membership for early access and exclusive live Q&As's with me. Just click the join button below or support us with a PayPal in the description.