Recently I interviewed Dr. Sabrina Solt, and we chatted about the carnivore diet. If you would prefer to listen the interview you can access it by Clicking Here [1].
I am excited to chat with Dr. Sabrina Solt about the carnivore diet. Dr. Sabrina is a naturopathic doctor located in Scottsdale, Arizona. She practices regenerative and anti-aging medicine and uses carnivore and animal-based diets as part of her treatment protocols to heal everything from autoimmune disorders to chronic pain. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us, Sabrina.
Dr. Sabrina Solt:
Thank you so much for having me.
Dr. Eric:
Definitely one of the shorter bios. You get right to the point, just the important stuff. I appreciate that. Why don’t we start by diving into your background? How did you get into the carnivore diet? I actually did some research. I heard that you weren’t always carnivore; you loved your salads. Why don’t you talk about how you made that transition?
Dr. Sabrina:
It was a really interesting journey for me. As you said, I’m a naturopathic doctor. I went to naturopathic medical school, which is all about how plants are the greatest thing in the entire world, everything from putting your patients on plant-based/vegan diets, getting enough fiber. Then there is the botanical medicine aspect of it, too. All plants can technically be medicine. It was driven home in our education that there is no harm in consuming plants. I say that with quotations. We know now, and of course we know in general, that there are some plants that are harmful to human beings.
Let me backtrack a little bit. I’ve had digestive issues almost my entire life. It just became really debilitating over time. My diet became so severely limited. I had removed pretty much everything: gluten, dairy, soy, every grain. I had gotten down to basically vegetables and meat and some other fats. I would do nut butters. I still never got better.
As an MD, I had access to every gut-healing protocol you can imagine. I did all the bio hacking. I did the stem cell stuff. I did it all, over the course of my career. I still never got better. In fact, a lot of things were worsening as far as my symptoms went.
Fast forward to about a year ago. My husband came across another physician named Dr. Anthony Chaffee on YouTube. He is a neurosurgeon based in Australia who has been carnivore for about a decade, if not longer. He is a huge wealth of information on the subject and is one of the most strict. He preaches the meat, salt, and water variation.
My husband had some stuff he was going through at that time, and he dove in headfirst. He is crazy like that. I thought he was completely insane. “You’re going to make yourself sick! You need fiber and vegetables. You will die, and I will pick up the pieces.” Then he didn’t. He got better. His skin texture improved. It was brighter. The whites of his eyes were brighter. He had more energy. His mood was more even. He didn’t lose his temper at the kids anymore. It was pretty wild to see. Ok, there’s something to this. Maybe I need to be more open-minded about what the possibilities could be.
I started first by eliminating my salads I ate for lunch every single day. I literally ate a salad every single day for lunch. After lunch, I would not feel good. My pain in my upper back and neck would light up. I would get some brain fog. It was no good. Cut that out. Those things started to go away. That little bit of lower belly fat that I used to have just went away on its own, too. Maybe there is something to this.
It took me a few months, but I eventually got rid of the grains in my diet. I was still consuming oats and white rice. Those all went away as well. I started to improve. My digestion that had been a problem for so many years, I went through a period of time where I was using some digestive enzymes because the high fat I was eating wasn’t digesting as well as it should have been.
Of course, the other aspect was prior to that, what set everything off really terribly was back in May 2021, we went on a trip to Mexico. I picked up a parasite there. That parasite had really destroyed my gut over the year I had it after that.
Carnivore did save me, I feel. It saved me from what I was going through. Healed the gut stuff. Got rid of my anxiety. My sleep improved. I take almost no supplements now. We used to have two big cupboards of supplement stuff, full of things I have taken in my life. I have become the most low maintenance in my health I have ever been. It’s been amazing.
Dr. Eric:
Great story. Just to be transparent, and I mentioned this prior to recording, I don’t follow carnivore. I recommend vegetables. I have my morning smoothies. I am obviously not opposed to carnivore, or else I wouldn’t be interviewing you. I am very open-minded.
The reason I am chatting with you is because I heard stories about carnivore helping people with chronic health conditions, including autoimmunity. I work with people with Graves’ and Hashimoto’s. To be transparent, I’ve had patients who don’t seem to tolerate vegetables. I would say a lot of them on the surface seem to, but there are those that obviously they will try to increase their vegetable intake, which is what I have been recommending for years. They experience some bloating and gas. We may need to heal the gut, get rid of potential SIBO or other things like that. But hearing success stories from people who are in similar situations, they just changed their diet, and that seemed to resolve things. I decided to get someone who is an advocate and more of an expert on the carnivore diet, and that’s why we’re chatting.
Can you explain how this differs from the more popular diets like ketogenic? There is overlap with carnivore and ketogenic. And paleo is popular. AIP. Like you said, there are different levels of carnivore, where you could be strictly eating meat, but there are variations where you can add eggs and dairy. Is that correct?
Dr. Sabrina:
Yeah. There is some variation on this. Carnivore diet in general can exist on a spectrum. The actual term “hypercarnivore” refers to an animal or person who consumes about 70% of their food intake from an animal source. That can include eggs and dairy as long as the person tolerates it. Preferably, we like to get most of our nutrition from things like fatty ruminant meats. Some people do pork, fish variations, seafood. Some people do chicken.
The biggest variation between carnivore and keto, although there is some overlap, is keto emphasizes doing the high fat. You want to make sure you are existing in ketosis. That is not so much the focus of carnivore as it is just getting in the fatty meats and food from animal sources.
For a lot of people, carnivore is actually preferential over keto. I talk about something called the doctor bias, meaning most doctors are biased to what walks in their office as far as pathology goes. Many years ago, when keto first became popular, my bias became that I was seeing a lot of women who were middle-aged who started to do keto in order to lose weight. After about three months, yes, they lost weight initially, but then they plateaued, and their hormones tanked. I was left cleaning up the mess from that. I was jaded on the keto thing because of what I saw walking into my office.
What I came to realize is these women were undernourishing themselves in regard to protein. They were eating so much fat and not getting enough protein to support all of the needs their body has for it. Protein is a super essential nutrient. I would argue the majority of people walking around are severely under proteined. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon has a wealth of information in this area for ensuring people get adequate amounts.
The general recommendation for most people is 1g per pound of body weight, which seems like a lot. I am 110 pounds or so; that is 110g of protein. That is a pound of meat or more per day. I have no problem consuming that, and I feel so much better for it. A lot of people have difficulty because they are also eating other things, which is where the other diets come in.
Paleo still allows room for certain plant matters. Anything that would grow in the Paleolithic era is okay to eat in that diet. A lot of the plants we have today likely didn’t exist back then, due to the simple hybridization that we do in our current agriculture industry.
A lot of people compare carnivore to Atkins diet because it’s a high protein diet and severely limits carbs. That would probably be the closet comparison to a popular diet that still mainly is avoiding vegetables. Ultimately, a lot of people on this diet are avoiding pretty much all plant matter in general. That includes nuts, seeds, and vegetation, of course.
Some people will still consume fruit because arguably, when we are talking about avoiding plants, we are discussing the fact that plants contain antinutrients that can be more harmful to somebody’s health than the benefits you might get from consuming that item. When it comes to fruit, we can argue that technically, the plant wants you to eat its fruit so you will go poop out the seeds and start a new plant so it can reproduce a lot better. That’s why fruit is very sweet and appetizing to humans. It makes you want to continue to eat that. Ultimately, we want to make sure we are staying away from all the other antinutrients.
Like you were saying, there are some people who can definitely tolerate eating vegetables. There are a lot of us who have just been sick for so long and have done so much damage to our gut and our body that we have completely lost that ability.
Do I think this diet is for everybody? You can argue that we are all carnivores, and this is how we should be eating. There is a lot of complexity to the human being. We have this ability to be creative with our food sources as they come to us in the environment and to ferment things. We have learned how to cook things. We are not just relegated to eating animals in the raw and in the wild. I think there is something to be said for that, too.
Dr. Eric:
You mentioned protein. I have had other guests talk about protein. Cynthia Thurlow agreed as far as the 1g of protein per pound. One thing though when it comes to spacing out the protein, do you personally have breakfast, lunch, dinner, and then have 30-40g per protein per meal? Do you incorporate intermittent fasting, like Cynthia does? Try to have two meals per day.
Dr. Sabrina:
Honestly, I just go by my hunger cues. That was one thing that became interesting, was learning when I am actually hungry. A lot of people miss out on that. They never got a chance to learn what it feels like to wait for their body to simply want to eat something.
Some days, I will start my day with bacon and eggs in the morning. Most days though, I eat my first meal sometime between 11am and 2pm. It depends when I am actually hungry. My first meal is usually a one-pound ribeye with a bunch of butter and salt on it. It’s delicious. Dinnertime, sometimes I will eat burgers or ribs. I might do bacon and eggs again. Then a dessert for me is usually a small cup of some full-fat, sugar-free yogurt. Interestingly, I think I mentioned earlier that I used to be dairy-free. Carnivore got me back my ability toeat dairy. I can now eat cheese, yogurt, heavy cream. It’s pretty spectacular. I no longer react to dairy.
Dr. Eric:
You eat certain types of dairy, like raw dairy. Do you just make sure it’s organic?
Dr. Sabrina:
The yogurt I like is a conventional dairy. I just love the texture of it. It’s like ice cream. Most of the time, we have gotten raw dairy. We get organic stuff whenever we get it. None of it bothers me anymore at all. It’s phenomenal.
Dr. Eric:
There is no threshold. A lot of people are lactose-intolerant, so they might be able to tolerate smaller amounts of dairy, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference with you.
Dr. Sabrina:
Nope. Oh my gosh, I went through this phase when I was going into carnivore. I think my body was just trying to do a bunch of repletion from years of me being so deficient in stuff. Looking back, I never had a great source of calcium in my diet. I entered this phase of carnivore where my body was just craving yogurt. It was the only thing I wanted. I went through probably a month where I ate one of those big containers of yogurt almost every single day. It felt so good. It gave me so much energy. There is no sugar added to it. It was completely plain as day. I just devoured them. It was my body trying to catch up from all of the deficit.
In addition to the gut stuff, there was the adrenal stuff and stress stuff and thyroid stuff. You just set your body up for mineral deficiencies existing in that state for so long, especially consuming the vegetables I was consuming. Regardless of if a person tolerates vegetables or not, they are still going to contain oxalates and lectins and phytic acid. All of those things are not only going to be a mineral tax on your body, meaning your body needs minerals to break those things down and metabolize them, but they are going to block and blunt mineral absorption from the foods you are currently eating, too.
One thing I work on with my patients and myself is rampant mineral repletion for a lot of people.
Dr. Eric:
Can you talk more about that? You recommend for them to supplement with minerals separately.
Dr. Sabrina:
Yeah. The ones I really like to use are the Quinton ones. They come in glass. They are sourced from a plankton bloom that has been around for hundreds of years. This product has been around for a very long time. They used to use it to restore blood volume loss in soldiers. It has a wide spectrum of pretty much all the micro and trace minerals we need in addition to the macro ones like magnesium. It’s a great product.
Dr. Eric:
I think you mentioned fiber earlier. That is one of the concerns when it comes to carnivore and ketogenic. If you’re not eating your veggies, where are you going to get your fiber from? I’m sure you have a response to that.
Dr. Sabrina:
The short version is we actually don’t need fiber for our digestive system to run smoothly. There is another doctor who wrote an excellent blog post that debunks all of the reasons why we actually don’t need fiber.
The way I simplistically break this down in my reasoning for the carnivore diet is a couple of things. What we are made of is technically muscle meat and saturated fat. Our fat is solid at room temperature; it’s saturated. If we are going to consume food to repair things in our body that break down, it’s the whole you are what you eat thing, or you should eat what you are. The consuming of the animal proteins and animal fats is what is actually going to replete any of the damages in our animal proteins and animal fat.
Additionally, no part of us is made of cellulose. We don’t actually need that fiber in our diet to bulk up our stool. I joke that I am going to start a subscription page where I just post pictures of my daily poops to prove they are perfect. There are no issues with that whatsoever.
The other side of that is there is no essential nutrients that humans require that have to be consumed in plant form. All the nutrients that we need are actually the most bioavailable in animal protein. In fact, there are a great deal of nutrients that are only available in animal protein, meaning you can’t get them from plant sources, things like B12, carnitine, certain fatty acids.
Dr. Eric:
I’m glad you brought up pooping. I was going to ask you about bowel movements. Do you find that people making the transition, let’s say from a standard American diet or even they are eating a healthy Paleo diet and make a transition to carnivore, is there a transition period where they may be constipated initially?
Dr. Sabrina:
There is a transition period where you don’t want to trust a fart. Your stools get looser because there is simply no fiber blocking the transit. The fiber bulks up your stool, slows down the transit. When you remove that out of the way, it cures constipation. There was a study done that said a low or no fiber diet actually cures irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
Dr. Eric:
Interesting. How about meat preparation? Is there a certain way you recommend preparing meat? More rare or medium well.
Dr. Sabrina:
You’re going to get the most bioavailability out of the nutrients, especially with iron, if you cook it on the medium rare to rare side. Then again, it’s up to the person. Whatever they like, whatever they enjoy.
We have something called an Otto grill. It’s a type of grill they use in restaurants where it’s a burner on the top, and you cook steak underneath, and you lift it up as a gradient. We also use a pellet grill. Arguably, pellet grills burn really clean versus using something with coals or gasoline. We try to reduce any risk that could come from the idea of charring your meat.
Dr. Eric:
Those are called Otto grills and pellet grills?
Dr. Sabrina:
Yeah, that’s a brand. I have no affiliation with them. It’s just the one we have. There are other companies that make similar types of grills. A pellet grill uses wood pellets to create a heat source that cooks your meat. They burn really clean, so you are very dramatically reducing any sort of risk of things like carcinogenic material.
Dr. Eric:
A lot of people follow ketogenic because when you get into ketosis, they do it for weight loss. I imagine with carnivore, a lot of people will lose weight because you’re not eating carbohydrates.
Dr. Sabrina:
Yeah, you’re completely changing your response to insulin by switching to a diet that really contains almost no carbohydrates, which is good for most people. My husband and I were having this discussion with somebody not too long ago. When humans are born, we are born into ketosis. As long as we are nursing from our mothers, from being breast fed, we maintain ketosis. You could argue it’s the preferred state for humans because of all the things it allows the body to heal. We see so much research on keto is this cure for this disease, and it treats this disease. Well, is keto the cure for those diseases? Or is ketosis the natural state humans should be existing in, and those diseases are a result of us leaving that state? It can go both ways.
I would argue that being in ketosis is simply a favorable state. You can get to that without doing a keto diet, but by simply doing a variation of intermittent fasting. I definitely do like intermittent fasting personally. I don’t actively practice it because I know I will be in it no matter what simply because of how I plan my meals and how I eat my meals. I usually only eat a couple of times a day at most. I ultimately end up fasting by default.
I really think there is something to be said with making sure that you are in ketosis. If you think about it, the wide majority of Americans or people likely haven’t been in ketosis since they were born. They are missing out on all the benefits that are going to come with that.
Dr. Eric:
I mentioned earlier a lot of the listeners have either Graves’ or Hashimoto’s. With Hashimoto’s, a lot of those people will want to lose weight. With hyperthyroidism, it varies. When I dealt with Graves’, I lost 42 pounds. A lot of people lose weight. There are people with hyperthyroidism who gain weight.
Let’s bring up the situation of someone with hyperthyroidism who is losing a lot of weight. They are concerned with getting enough calories from eating meat. Before getting into this, of course you want to lower the thyroid hormone levels. That’s the reason why the person is losing weight. No matter how much meat you eat, you might not gain weight; you might maintain or still lose weight. Is there a concern about eating too much meat?
Dr. Sabrina:
I haven’t seen it, honestly. It’s so interesting. People will say, “You eat so much meat. It will hurt your kidneys.” I had a patient not too long ago who had multiple things that came up, one of them being low thyroid function, low hormone levels, high stress levels. I believe she actually has an underlying autoimmune disorder. I say all that to set the stage with the recommendations I gave her.
Her kidney function when she came to me, her EGFR was just below 70. I actually told her to switch her diet to carnivore. Her EGFR two months later went up to over 80. What she did was stop eating carbohydrates that she was eating. She switched to a carnivore-based diet. That allowed her kidney function to heal and repair.
Protein does not damage the kidneys. It’s carbs that damage the kidneys. You really can’t eat too much protein because your satiation signals, your hunger signals are going to start to work properly, and you can’t simply overeat it. You can put a big piece of steak in front of someone and put a potato next to it. If they are eating the steak with the potato, the carbohydrates will interfere with your proper hunger signaling and cues. If you give the person just the steak, and they only eat that, they will eat it ravenously until their hunger cues start to catch up, and then they will stop.
People actually eat less on this way of eating because their hunger cues are so on point. They actually get feedback when they are full versus eating the carbs combined with the meat. This leads to something else.
A lot of people aren’t taught this, even providers: the Randall Cycle. Professor Bart Kay has a really wonderful, detailed explanation of how the Randall Cycle works. The short version is that if you are eating carbohydrates in combination with fat or protein, you’re actually not going to get almost any energy absorption from any of those because of how it activates something called the Randall Cycle. You will almost always store those carbs as fat when you are eating them in combination. Ultimately, carbs don’t exist in nature combined with fats or protein, whereas protein and fat exist in nature very well. You can eat those together. You will get proper satiation signaling, and you will get great energy absorption.
If a person is concerned about someone getting enough calories, extra fat is going to be the thing. People on the carnivore way of eating will sometimes snack on butter, and it helps you stay full, satiated. It is an easy thing to do, upping those fat levels.
Dr. Eric:
Interesting what you said about the kidneys, the EGFR increasing when switching to carnivore. You might not know the answer to this, but if you had to guess, were oxalates damaging the kidneys, and that’s why when they switched to the carnivore diet, the kidney function improved?
Dr. Sabrina:
For this patient, I do think oxalates played a role, but I think it was mainly the carbs ultimately. This is something that will apply to pretty much every American. Your kidneys do not like having to clear excess sugar from your blood. This is why diabetics have to go on dialysis. All that excess sugar intake causes that kidney damage and sets them up for kidney failure.
Dr. Eric:
Have you seen patients of yours get into remission with autoimmunity, where they are flaring up, and they are on the Paleo or AIP diet. Then they switch to carnivore, and everything calms down? Gradually over time, or quickly, they get into remission.
Dr. Sabrina:
100%. Predominantly my rheumatoid arthritis patients seem to respond the absolute best to carnivore. I think it’s because we are finally taking away the oxalates which are going to build up to deposit in joints. If you look at an oxalate under a microscope, it’s basically a ball with spikes. You can cause an oxalate-based arthritis syndrome on top of a rheumatoid arthritis syndrome. The body is already attacking the joints, depositing more crystals in there because your immune system doesn’t know how to clear them as well as the average person from the body. That has made the biggest difference.
Dr. Eric:
For those who are concerned about saturated fat and the effects of meat on cardiovascular disease, that also has been debunked. We also should say before I forget that I assume you are recommending healthier forms of meat, like grass-fed, pasture-raised, not just eating conventional-raised meat.
Dr. Sabrina:
Yeah. I tell people even a conventionally raised piece of meat is going to be way better than the crap you are previously buying. Purchase what you can in a way that is affordable for you and things you like to eat, and it will still be good. When you are eating the meat, you bank on the animal and their ability to excrete the toxins and process them before it makes its way into its own meat and gets to you.
There have been studies done that there is a variation of things like the fatty acid composition as far as Omega-3s versus Omega 6s in grass fed versus grain fed or conventionally raised animals. For the most part, it won’t make a big difference in a person going from a standard American diet to carnivore. Again, we want this to be manageable and affordable for people to do. If all they can do is conventional burgers, for example, go for it. It will still be way better than a packaged TV dinner they might have eaten before.
As far as saturated fat and cardiac concerns go, this is so interesting. From what I have seen, the experience I have had with my patients, and what I have read in the literature, it’s not necessarily saturated fat that is the problem. It is more the polyunsaturated fats and the high sugar. The combination of these two things is what I believe is the underlying cause of most cardiovascular diseases.
We are mainly made of saturated fat. It is our preferred source to rebuild things like joints, fatty tissues, the mild sheet that is surrounding every one of our nerves, the cushioning within our joints. It is our preferred source. The polyunsaturated fatty acids, things like canola oils, grapeseed oil, cottonseed oil, peanut oil, these are more detrimental to humans because they are not what we are made of. When a person is eating these, their body is taking them in, and it’s saying, “Ok, this is the building block that we have to do healing and repair. It is not necessarily what we prefer, but this is all we have to use. We are going to use it, and this is what we are going to use to rebuild tissue structures.” This is how we end up with cellular dysfunction. Our body used a building material it shouldn’t have used in the first place. It was making do with what it had.
This is where we will see changes to people’s cardiac pictures or cardiovascular system. We might even start to see things like cancer growth, tumor growth, the body behaving how it shouldn’t. This is actually the reason why, like you had seen in our Facebook group, the sunburn thing, why a lot of carnivores don’t actually get a sunburn. It’s because our cells have been made with that really strong saturated fat.
Every single cell has something called the lipid skin barrier. It’s two layers of fat surrounding it, and it’s supposed to be saturated. That is what makes the cell very strong. A lot of carnivores won’t get sunburned simply because our cells are made properly, and we can actually withstand the UV rays and properly handle them in our systems.
For example, over the summer, my daughter is the fairest-skinned child you have ever seen. She has blonde hair, blue eyes, super fair. Swam in the pool every single day all summer in Arizona. She did not burn once at all. We never put sunscreen on her. Same with our son. He is a little darker skinned than she is, but neither of them burned at all.
Once you’re removing those bad oils from the diet, and you’re actually focused more on saturated fat, you will see how things improve. I tell people to experiment with it. Give it 30 days. Give it 90 days. If you absolutely hate it, you can totally go back, but it might just change your life.
Dr. Eric:
That’s very interesting about not getting sunburned. I agree with everything you said about saturated fat. I also want to play devil’s advocate. If someone is working with you and following the carnivore diet, and maybe you don’t see this, but if someone were to do a lipid panel, and they have a total cholesterol of 230/240, LDL a little bit on the higher side, is there any concern with that?
Dr. Sabrina:
This is so good. We’ll talk about my husband. He won’t care we’re talking about him. He and I did a video on our YouTube channel, where I broke down all of his labs that he’s had for the last year. His cholesterol shot up over 400.
Dr. Eric:
Wow.
Dr. Sabrina:
Yeah. I don’t just do cholesterol panels. I run expanded cardiac monitors. We will look at the PLA2 enzyme, MPO, oxidative LDL, small density LDL, lipoproteins(a) and (b), CRP enzyme. It’s about as detailed as you can get as far as cardiac goes.
We ended up sending him for a CAC score as well (coronary artery calcium scan). He actually has a calcification in his left anterior descending artery. Knowing my husband’s history, which he had some really bad habits prior to carnivore- That was one of his reasons for pursuing it: How do I get rid of all the bad things in my life? He used to eat a conventional, store-bought oven pizza. A seed oil, gluten, and dairy nightmare with nightshades sprinkled on top. He was not treating his body very well.
When he switched to carnivore, all of a sudden, everything spiked. His cholesterol was over 400. His MPO was over 3,000. PLA2, which is the marker for the plaque repair, was super high as well.
What we realized after we saw this trend, and we kept checking, was that the cholesterol was increasing on purpose. We have to think about cholesterol. Cholesterol is something our body makes. Why would our body make something like that, where its only job is to do harm? It doesn’t make any sense.
Cholesterol is the starting molecule for all of our sex hormones. Cholesterol is the repair molecule in the body. If something gets damaged in the body like a blood vessel due to something like high sugar going through and causing some damage, the body is going to send cholesterol in there to patch it up. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s the whole idea of the fire truck being the cause of every fire just because it’s at a fire. Cholesterol is not the cause of the plaque in the artery; it’s there to repair. The body will then place a calcification over the top to protect it from breaking off and running into circulation and causing things like heart attacks or strokes.
In his situation, he had this issue. He was eating vegetables before. Maybe that was keeping his cholesterol low because of the fiber transit in the body. Was this beneficial in his situation? He gets on carnivore. Everything spikes up. Then everything starts to decline and improve. I am thinking to myself, Wow, did we actually just let the body make enough cholesterol to do what it wanted to do as far as healing and repair goes?
This then becomes my argument for all my patients who come in with high cholesterol. It’s usually the picture of the middle-aged person who is coming in with it. Very rarely do we see younger people. What do we know happens in middle age? Things start to break down in the body, and hormone production starts to decline. Is it not then logical that your body is going to try to make more of that initial molecule to help feed that pathway to make more hormones? Of course.
But what happens in a traditional office? The doctor prescribes a cholesterol-lowering medication. Give it three months, six months. What happens? They come back, and things are worse. Their joint pain is worse. Men get ED, and we are giving a prescription to manage the side effects. It’s not understanding this basic thing, that cholesterol was there to help in the first place.
Dr. Eric:
Has his cholesterol remained elevated over time? Has it gradually decreased?
Dr. Sabrina:
It is decreasing. His MPO was over 3,000. It’s now 50 points away from being normal. His PLA2 enzyme is completely normalized. His apo proteins have improved. His triglycerides are super low. His HGL is nice and high.
I should caveat that. LDL, total cholesterol are a problem and worth looking at in the presence of a low HDL and high triglycerides. If LDL is high and total cholesterol are high in the presence of additionally a high HDL and a low triglyceride, likely not problematic, but still worth looking at. HDL is going to be what is actually bringing cholesterol back to the liver to be eliminated by the body. Triglycerides are probably the most menacing thing on that cholesterol panel right out the gate because they are the fat bound to the sugar and the thing that’s most inflammatory. That can lead to liver disease, etc.
Dr. Eric:
Where do you like to see triglycerides? Less than 100? Less than 75?
Dr. Sabrina:
Less than 100. If I am being generous on someone in their healing journey, I might say up to 130. Definitely below 100. Mine sit at 60 currently.
Dr. Eric:
What are your thoughts on organ meat as well as drinking bone broth? When I dealt with Graves’ in 2008, there wasn’t all the bone broth powders. When you go into the grocery store now, there are a lot of brands of bone broth. There is a lot of talk about bone broth for gut healing, which I think is valid, but I’d like to get your thoughts on it.
Dr. Sabrina:
I never really ate the organ meats. I did some organ capsules at the beginning part of my carnivore journey for extra energy. I stopped those; I don’t take them anymore. I don’t think they’re necessary. I think they can be used strategically if you have a lot of nutrient deficiencies to correct, and you want to do it quickly. They are a good choice for that. But they are not necessary. If someone says they can’t do carnivore because they can’t eat nose to tail, don’t worry about it. I have never eaten a piece of organ meat in my life, and I am totally fine with that.
I love bone broth. I think it’s great. For a lot of people, it can be a really good addition to making things exciting. If you are cooking a piece of meat in a crockpot, and you want to add some bone broth to help cook that, that’s awesome. If you want to use it to drink a cup of something in the morning instead of coffee, a lot of people do that, too.
Make sure that you’re getting one that is as high quality as in the budget for you, and also make sure you’re not getting one with a lot of extra things like spices added to it, especially if you are super sensitive going into this. Those spices will be made from peppers, which are nightshades, which have those antinutrients we are trying to avoid.
Dr. Eric:
I know both you and your husband are physically fit. I’m sure carnivore plays a role in that, but I’m thinking exercise as well. Do you recommend resistance exercise? Can you briefly talk about that?
Dr. Sabrina:
The main thing I recommend for my patients is resistance training, and you don’t need a lot of it. 20 minutes, three times a week, moderate weightlifting. It will be super easy for people to put on muscle and strength eating carnivore because of the high protein you’re taking in. Your body will use it to heal and repair.
I recommend people walk. There is research that walking is the best exercise for maintaining longevity and increasing movement. I never really recommend high intensity cardio training or anything like that. You can get the biggest body composition changes in a way that is manageable for most people and doesn’t make them hate exercise by doing light walking and three days a week of resistance training.
Dr. Eric:
Okay. Three days a week, 20 minutes. Walking every day for like 30 minutes or an hour.
Dr. Sabrina:
Yeah, if you can, get 20-30 minutes a day. If you can only get in a few days a week, that’s great, too. Ultimately, the important thing is to have functional movement in our bodies, especially as we start getting older. Not every person needs to be learning how to do certain types of squats or bicep curls. Most people, it really comes down to how can I just continue to move my body in a healthy way so that I stay mobile as I get older? At least that’s what I see a lot in my practice. I get a lot of people coming to me with joint issues and whatnot.
Dr. Eric:
One important question I need to ask you: You mentioned pizza before. Your husband used to have the conventional pizza. Now, do you not eat pizza? Do you make modifications? Again, you could have dairy. You could have mozzarella cheese and the meat. Any pizza over the last year since you made this transition?
Dr. Sabrina:
I made a carnivore pizza. I have a reel on my Instagram, @DrSolts. It will say “The Viral Carnivore Pizza.” We totally made a pizza, and it was decent. The crust was made of shredded chicken and eggs and some parmesan cheese. We made an alfredo sauce. It was pretty good. It’s certainly not an everyday thing. We have only done that once.
What I actually learned with this way of eating is that I really just like eating one thing at a time. It is so much more satisfying for me just to have one thing on my menu versus all of these other different flavors. My body doesn’t like that as much.
Dr. Eric:
Thanks for sharing. Anything else? I’m sure there is a lot more you could share. Is there anything really important that I didn’t ask you that I should have asked you? Anything else you’d like to discuss before we wrap things up?
Dr. Sabrina:
Ultimately, just letting people know that this is simply an option. If you are like me, who has tried everything else and has nowhere left to go, and you have really limited your diet, and you’re still not healing. I tell people initially, I gave myself 30 days. If I don’t like it after 30 days, I can always run back into the warm embrace of kale. That didn’t happen clearly. I’m a year into this, and I’ve never felt better. Give yourself time to ease into it.
My husband and I run a Facebook group. We have 3,000 people in that group right now, and it’s only been around for about six months. In that group, we share a lot of information. We have a lot of people who will coach. My husband coaches people on the carnivore diet, too. He is a certified carnivore coach through a company called Revero, which is a company started by Shawn Baker. He is the author of the original carnivore diet book. He is a former MD, I believe. Join our group. We are Carnivore – Harder, Happier, Healthier. You can also check out our oyster supplement.
Dr. Eric:
Let’s talk about that.
Dr. Sabrina:
My husband and I, we get oysters from Whole Foods pretty much every Friday. They are only $1 an oyster. It’s our favorite thing to do because it’s the best deal ever. Every time we do this, we post about it on social media. People comment, “I don’t like oysters.” “I wish I liked oysters.” “I can’t get oysters near me.” Honestly, if you know anything about oysters, they are the most underrated superfood ever as far as their mineral concentrations. They are fantastic as a food.
“How can I get oysters to people?” I’m not sure if you use Full Script. It’s this online dispensary full of thousands of different products. There is no oyster supplement on there. I started looking on Amazon. All the ones on Amazon were gimmicky. They had low concentrations and fillers. They couldn’t guarantee they were being tested for heavy metals.
I went on a search and found this guy in Ireland who is a marine biologist who has a company. We actually source our oysters from him. We imported them directly from Ireland. They are all third-party batch tested for heavy metals and show what the nutrient levels actually are. Every serving contains roughly seven large oysters. There are about 12 pounds of oysters per bottle. It’s called Oyster Boom. You can find it on our website HarderHappierHealthier.com. If you use the code SOLT, you will get a discount on it. We have a Subscribe and Save, too.
They are amazing. People who take them, we see women’s breasts get more plump. Men’s erectile function improves. Some guys notice a change in size. Overall energy. I literally feel electric when I take them because so many minerals come in. They are the only supplement I take right now if I am being honest.
Dr. Eric:
Thank you so much, Dr. Sabrina for sharing your insights on the carnivore diet. I definitely learned a lot. I’m sure those listening will also gain a lot of value.
Dr. Sabrina:
Thank you so much for having me. This was fun. I hope your listeners enjoy it, too.