What you’re getting yourself into
Why mitochondrial dysfunction drives chronic disease and ill health, and how a carnivore diet can be the perfect solution.
Way back in the 19th century, there was a battle of huge consequences being waged between Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp as they fought to be the first to find the origins of disease. One of them, you should be familiar with if you’ve ever wondered why we nuke milk to get rid of pathogens.
Pasteur introduced the germ theory, where he argued that bacteria and viruses were the origins of disease. The solution was therefore simple. Eliminate those little critters, and the disease goes away.
This worked a treat with infectious diseases like tuberculosis and cholera that were lethal in Pasteur’s era, with many of them killing hundreds of millions across history. With the creation of vaccines and antibiotics, infectious disease became a whole lot easier to manage. For his role in putting forth the germ theory, Pasteur became known by many as the father of immunology.
Then there’s the other guy.
Antoine Bechamp has been forgotten by most, but remembered by the anti-vaccers and holistic healers who have posthumously raised him up to become their daddy. Bechamp countered Pasteur’s germ theory with the argument that these bacteria weren’t inherently dangerous, and were simply monopolising vulnerabilities in a dysfunctional host.
This was known as the host theory.
He advocated for natural immunity, while Pasteur opted for vaccines to provide that immunity. As such, his ideas have since been taken up by people who distrust the pharmaceutical industry and want to pursue alternative strategies to those provided by mainstream medicine.
I’m not delving into either camp, because this article isn’t about conspiracy.
It’s about the mechanism that drives chronic disease. And Bechamp was frightfully close to stumbling into it.
The issue Bechamp had, and part of the reason why he was relegated to the backwaters of medical science, was that he didn’t have the equipment needed to locate the source of the dysfunction. So it remained a hypothesis.
But nearly 200 years later, we have a prime suspect that fits perfectly into the host theory.
What Is Mitochondrial Dysfunction?
A long time ago, around 1.5 billion years to be precise, our ancestral eukaryotic cells swallowed up foreign mitochondrial cells in a mutually beneficial alliance. The eukaryotic cells provided the fragile proto-mitochondria with a stable environment and a steady supply of nutrients, and in return, the mitochondria gave back a superior source of energy.
This union allowed life to exist as we know it. So, just like with the agricultural revolution, I’m not actually saying it was a terrible partnership that we now need to revoke. We wouldn’t be here to debate the pros and cons of the eukaryotic-mitochondrial alliance, if it never happened.
But we should accept that it came with a drawback. And that would be the simple fact that the mitochondria are particularly vulnerable to getting damaged. Since they act as the motherboard of the metabolism, we don’t want them becoming dysfunctional. When they start misfiring, or stop firing altogether, vital organs and cellular functions stop working the way they should.
The mitochondria are both the catalyst for life and the chink in our armour that leads to ageing and disease. When subjected to excessive levels of reactive oxygen species, whatever the source, they tend to break.
Why The Mitochondria Are The Key To Reversing Aging
They do have the ability to heal, replenish, and fortify themselves against future stressors. But the respite and the means that they need, is in short supply in the modern diet. When insulin is constantly being triggered by the influx of carbs, the growth switch stays on.
Insulin is anti-catabolic, which may seem like a good thing when it comes to bodybuilding, but it also puts the brakes on lipolysis, ketosis, and autophagy. When insulin isn’t allowed to subside, your body can’t perform its usual house-cleaning.
If you eat a meal that’s loaded with generous amounts of pasta, that’s an insulin spike. If your body has become insulin resistant after decades of abuse, that’s a much bigger insulin spike. When you’re absentmindedly grabbing snacks in between meals, that insulin simply isn’t coming down.
The imbalance of insulin signalling, also known as MTOR, against catabolic signalling, also known as AMPK, puts the mitochondria in a precarious spot where they can’t deal with excessive levels of oxidative stress.
Fasting And Feasting
And the modern diet provides plenty of that. Rancid seed oils in particular, can raise oxidative stress in multiple ways. One, by flooding the body with fats that have already been oxidised. And two, by lining your fat stores and cellular membranes with brittle Omega 6 that is liable to setting off chain reactions in response to oxidative stress.
Why Seed Oils Are Biological Poison
Sugar can also induce oxidative stress through the formation of Advanced Glycation End Products during blood sugar swings. Crops that have been slathered in pesticides like glyphosate also cause oxidative stress. Plant ‘antioxidants’ are actually proxidants that stimulate and drain your body’s own antioxidant reserves, making your mitochondria more vulnerable to attack.
To put it plainly, the modern diet is inherently problematic for the fortunes of your symbiotic mitochondria. And when they get put to the sword, the entire metabolism gets put under pressure, and is forced to compensate for broken pathways.
As an example, big spikes in blood sugar levels generates reactive oxygen species (ROS), and the body responds by raising increasing insulin resistance to protect the mitochondria in the muscle and liver cells, which act as the primary glucose sinks.
With those glucose sinks resisting entry, blood sugar stays elevated, which leads to the pancreas pumping out more insulin to override the insulin resistance.
These compensatory reactions keep kicking the can further down the road until you end up with full-blown diabetes. Which is really just an arbitrary stage of insulin resistance. At some point, the doctor decides you’ve gone from almost-pregnant to fully pregnant.
If you’ve been hammering the seed oils at the same time, then this road to diabetes gets put on the fast-track, because the mitochondria are already oxidised and incompetent, while Omega 6 actively suppresses glycolysis. So the glucose-burning pathway is ripe for hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance.
And it’s not just insulin resistance that comes as a direct consequence of dysfunctional mitochondria. Depression and anxiety disorders are inextricably tied to it, due to the fact that the mitochondria are an essential part of the production line for neurotransmitters, and regulate the energy levels and excitability of those neurotransmitters in the brain.
If the energy supply to the brain is being periodically cut off, if the neurotransmitters are imbalanced, and if said neurotransmitters are hyper or hypo-excitable, that shows up as symptoms that we term anxiety and depression.
I’m not by any means saying that excessive psychosocial stress and genetics don’t play out their respective roles in the manifestation of mood disorders. The former adds to the allostatic load alongside dietary stressors, and the latter can increase susceptibility to those stressors. But nutrition is nevertheless the largest and most persistent source of mitochondrial stress, as well as the most impactful solution to a besieged metabolism.
A healthy lifestyle is multifaceted, and the additional angles likely need to be pursued for real metabolic healing.
Nevertheless, the diet is the tip of the proverbial spear and the key to fighting metabolic disease and achieving peak mental and physical condition.
And there’s one diet that conquers all when it comes to resurrecting the mitochondria.
Carnivore’s Mitochondrial Healing
‘Carnivore’ and ‘ketogenic’ are typically used to describe separate diets, but in truth, carnivore very much is a ketogenic diet. Protein might be insulinogenic, but the effect on raising blood sugar is canceled out by the corresponding spike in glucagon, which acts to clear out blood sugar. As long as carbs are exempt, and there is plenty in raw milk, and as long as there’s an abundant supply of fats, carnivore will induce ketosis.
For many reasons, that’s a good thing. Ketones suppress the appetite, provide a direct uninterrupted source of energy to the brain, and help feed the microbiome. But it’s in the context of the mitochondria that ketosis works its real magic.
Think back to the susceptibility of the mitochondria to oxidative stress, and the respite they need to be able to heal, replenish, and fortify to deal with future assaults. Ketosis exerts beneficial effects on each of these steps.
This may seem a little too good to be true, until you accept that the state of ketosis was the default fuel mode for 99.996% of human evolution. With that much time, and the unmitigated success of the human species, it would be fair to assume that we have been built to thrive through ketones.
And so it pans out.
- Ketones lower oxidative stress by increasing antioxidant expression and scavenging free radicals.
- They improve mitochondrial function by upregulating fat oxidation and AMPK pathways
- Ketones increase mitochondrial biogenesis, which basically means more mitochondria.
- They increase the antioxidative capacity of the mitochondria by subjecting the mitochondria to a mild level of stress, also known as mitohormesis.
From every angle, ketosis has the capacity to improve mitochondrial function. Could you continue to get those benefits while including a few berries, vegetables and nuts that don’t take you over the carb threshold? Potentially, you could. But there are advantages to taking the puritanical carnivore route.
The Oxidative Storm Of Plants
Carnivore is a plant-free diet, and that lets you skip the minefield of dealing with the innumerable toxins that accompany a plant’s will to survive.
99.99% of pesticides are natural. This might be difficult for many to wrestle with, but it just reflects a principle of life. Every living thing is invested in continuing to live, and ensuring the propagation of its species.
Humans are desperately obsessed with survival. As are other animals, as are plants. Unlike animals, plants don’t possess the ability to flee the scene when proposed with death. So they deal in toxins instead, a tool that is only practiced by a handful of animals like certain frogs and salamanders.
The vast majority of animals can be eaten safely. The vast chunk of plant species will incapacitate or outright kill you. For example, there are thousands of plants with the precursor to cyanide, a popular tool in the belt of a soldier with no interest in being captured alive.
Almonds, flaxseeds, and cassava each contain levels of cyanide, with the latter actually being used by certain cultures for suicide. In the raw form, it has to be said. Cyanide weaves its witchcraft by poisoning the mitochondria with oxidative stress and disabling energy production.
Plant antioxidants that get blown up over social media as life-granting longevity-boosting compounds, actually inflict oxidative stress that incites the body to stimulate its own endogenous antioxidant, glutathione. You can argue that this is a beneficial hormetic stress, but the fact remains that you’re just depleting your body’s antioxidant reserves, with no real way to determine and manage the dose.
So when you eat a plant, you sign yourself up to varying levels of inflammation, and oxidative stress. The effect is compounded when the plant contains high amounts of sugar, especially fructose, since oxidative stress is further elevated through advanced glycation end products and excess uric acid production.
Then there are the artificial pesticides that coat your grains, fruits, and vegetables, with their own independent effect of raising oxidative stress. Finally, and most importantly, come seed oils.
I’ve long been an advocate of eliminating seed oils from the diet. It shouldn’t be difficult to see why. Across the wide 2.4 million year expanse of human evolution, and I’m not starting the clock with Homo sapiens, the chronic disease epidemic has only been around for 0.00004% of that timeline. Seed oils have strangely been in the food system for the same duration.
But somehow, we’ve managed to blame red meat.
Secondly, we know exactly how seed oils wreak their damage. They have large amounts of linoleic acid, a polyunsaturated fat that is structurally unstable due to its double bonds. Those double bonds are prone to breaking when exposed to the elements, like when the seed oils are being treated with intense amounts of heat during the extraction process. So by the time that seed oil gets bottled up, it’s already broken and oxidised.
Choosing an organic cold-pressed rapeseed oil won’t redeem the situation, since that linoleic acid will still be a powder-keg at body temperature. At some point it’s getting oxidised, and it’ll be more than happy to add to a chain reaction when you flood your body with free radicals from a serving of deep-fried chips.
So choosing a diet that’s low in linoleic acid, also known as Omega 6, is a significant win in the path to healing the mitochondria. Carnivore isn’t devoid of linoleic acid by any means, but it is the lowest one out there, significantly less than any plant-based one.
But this is a good case for being careful with your intake of pork, poultry, and avoiding fish oil supplements. The latter might be Omega 3 rather than Omega 6, but it’s still a polyunsaturated fat, and therefore unstable. In fact, it’s even more unstable than linoleic acid, and getting it in capsule form virtually guarantees that it’s going to be oxidised on arrival.
I’m not saying don’t eat fish. Just consider skipping the capsules, and keeping it as fresh as possible.
Can You Eat Fish On The Carnivore Diet?
Pork and poultry, in the meantime, generally contain relatively significant levels of linoleic acid. Both are monogastric animals, with a very limited ability to convert food into preferred forms of storage. If they’re fed grain, they’re going to contain oils from those grains, and grains are seeds. Generally, they’re going to be fed grain.
Pork fat is typically around 15-20% linoleic acid.
Poultry is 20%.
Grain-finished beef is just 3.3%.
Grass-finished beef is 1.1%.
This reflects why debating the nutritional difference between grain-finished and grass-finished beef is majoring in the minors. No matter what the cow eats, beef is king.
The Path To MEtabolic Revival
The modern healthcare system is built on top of Pasteur’s germ theory. Chronic diseases that are the result of evolutionary mismatches, are treated with pills. When I say treated, I mean slapped with a bandaid that has a faint chance of masking the symptoms, and not a prayer for treating the root cause.
At the heart of chronic disease, autoimmune conditions, and the general state of poor health, lies mitochondrial dysfunction. No diet does a more thorough job of treating this problem than a carnivore diet.
At this point, the best evidence we have for carnivore’s root cause healing aren’t in clinical trials. They’re going to be found in the legions of people that have had their lives salvaged and resurrected by this diet, the fact that there is zero signs that our carnivorous ancestors suffered from chronic disease before the introduction of agriculture, and the mechanisms by which carnivore can heal the mitochondria.
I’m not arguing that you should immediately discard any medications you’re on and commit to an ancestral diet. I’m simply pointing out that without root cause healing, the problems aren’t going away, and the carnivore diet is literally the safest diet out there. Don’t let flamboyant headlines from junk science confuse you.
If you can deal with the social restrictions, there’s no harm in finding out whether this diet can help you reclaim your health. It shouldn’t be the only component, but it is the buck with the biggest bang. Just make you compound the benefits by pairing it heavy resistance exercise, good sleep hygiene, and a stoic approach to life.
If you want to figure out the best way to set up your own metabolic revival, reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, or sign up to my coaching programme below.
