0:00 – Introduction & Jordan Peterson’s experience with food intolerances

0:38 – The carnivore diet’s popularity and the overlooked downsides

1:17 – How lack of fiber leads to gut issues and food sensitivities

2:04 – The importance of short-chain fatty acids like butyrate for colon health

5:30 – Impact of mucus degradation on gut integrity

7:13 – How bile acids damage the gut lining without adequate fiber

10:05 – Why some people feel better on carnivore intially

12:52 – Solutions for reintroducing fiber and rebuilding gut health

15:02 – Key takeaways: How to prevent food intolerances with proper gut care

Cider. What’s it doing there? It produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom. You lay in bed, frozen in something approximating terror for eight hours, and then you get up. And this is some cider from what we thought. Yeah. All right, so Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan and also Jordan Peterson’s daughter, Mikayla Peterson, popularizing the carnivore diet. The diet has gained quite a bit of traction.

And there’s quite a bit of doctors and influencers at this point who are promoting this diet online, like Doctor Sean Baker, Doctor Ken Barrie, etc. now, a lot of people are actually improving quite a few symptoms when they go on the carnivore diet related to autoimmunity, losing weight, metabolic function, etc.. But what’s not being talked about, at least as heavily is that a lot of people are also developing new symptoms on the carnivore diet, especially as they’re on it for a longer period of time.

Now, not everybody develops these symptoms, but I have worked with many clients at this point who are having similar symptoms to Jordan Peterson, as we saw in this clip. So in this video, what I want to do is talk about one of the major reasons I think that people are experiencing these symptoms. And dive into the specific mechanisms.

And the major piece, the most major piece here is the lack of fiber in the diet and how that makes a person sensitive and susceptible to extreme food intolerances. Like Jordan Peterson’s experience here with apple cider vinegar. So there are three main problems with a lack of fiber of the diet. Now there’s other problems, but the three major ones that we’re going to talk about here are that there’s a lack of short chain fatty acid production by bacteria in the gut, which feed the cells of the colon and allow the cells of the colon to maintain the barrier function of the colon, which if you don’t have that barrier function, you start to run into

problems where you start having bacteria and food components interacting and being able to cross the intestinal lining and create extreme symptoms. The next one is decreased. Fiber in the gut leaves less food for the bacteria, and they start to feed on the mucous lining, another protective layer of the intestine. And the last piece is the lack of fiber binding the bile acids, which further makes the gut leaky.

So I want to dive into these three key points here. And then from there we’ll talk about why people initially feel better and what the solutions are. The first piece here is if you don’t have enough fiber, going into the colon for winds up happening is you don’t have enough short chain fatty acid production. Now it’s short chain fatty acids like butyrate are the major fuel for the cells of the colon called melanocytes.

And when the cells of the colon don’t have this fuel source, when they don’t have butyrate, they’re forced to use carbohydrate coming in from the blood supply. And then they will run glycolysis. Now this creates a problem because when they’re running glycolysis the colon cells are not taking the oxygen out of the gut. So you leave more oxygen present in the gut.

And that oxygen presence actually changes the microbiome. Pretty significantly. So the metabolism of the colon cells is directly related to what’s going on with the microbiome. Because if you have oxygen left in the gut, you can start to increase the growth of pathogenic bacteria that can exist in an oxygen rich environment. Whereas some of the more commensal bacteria, some of the more beneficial bacteria, are bacteria that actually live in anaerobic or environments that do not have oxygen.

So we have a quote here from a paper called butyrate and the fine tuning of colonic Homeostasis implications for inflammatory bowel disease. And what they say is they say butyrate is mainly produced by bacteria from the Fermi cuties phylum. It stimulates mature monocytes and inhibits undifferentiated malignant and stem cells. Butyrate oxidation. In mature colonies sites, the colon cells produces 70 to 80% of their energetic requirements.

Prevent stem cell inhibition by limiting butyrate access to crypts, and consumes oxygen, generating hypoxia inside the gut lumen and maintaining luminal and biases favorable to the microbiota. So basically allowing for an anaerobic environment that allows for beneficial microbiome IBD patients exhibit a lower abundance of butyrate producing bacteria and butyrate content. Additionally, monocyte butyrate oxidation is depressed in these subjects, lowering luminal and anaerobic Osis and facilitating the expansion of Enterobacteriaceae that contribute to inflammation.

Accordingly, gut dysbiosis and decrease barrier function in IBD seems to be secondary to the impaired. Mitochondrial disturbances in colonic epithelial cells. So if you don’t have fiber, you don’t produce butyrate. And then what happens is a colonic cells are forced to use, anaerobic or anaerobic glycolysis. So they’re not using the oxygen. And then that leaves more oxygen in the gut.

So I have a graphic here that we can look at. And basically what we see is we have the microbiome here. We have dietary fiber here. And the microbiome takes the dietary fibers produces butyrate. And in the colon cells which we can see here, we’ll use that butyrate metabolically. And then they will suck out oxygen of the gut to to basically oxidize or use this butyrate as a fuel source.

And then that leaves the gut environment to have very little oxygen tension. And then this shifts this eventually shifts the microbiome. So how does this relate to people on a carnivore diet? Well, if you’re on a carnivore diet and you don’t have enough fiber coming in, then you are unable to produce adequate amounts of butyrate, and you start leaving oxygen in the gut.

And can you can start to shift the microbiome towards bacteria that can thrive in that aerobic environment, that oxygen rich environment. And those bacteria tend to be inflammatory. Bacteria tend to be bacteria that cause issues, plus the change in metabolism at the colon cells with the lack of butyrate in the shift towards glycolysis can actually be problematic for the colon cells function.

The next thing to know an important piece here is that when you don’t have enough fiber, the bacteria in the gut start to feed on the mucous lining instead. So we have a paper here. The paper is titled A dietary fiber deprived gut microbiota degrades the colonic mucus barrier and enhances pathogen susceptibility. And so what the the researchers say here, they say we show that during chronic or intermittent dietary fiber deficiency, the gut microbiota resorts to host secreted mucus glycoproteins as a nutrient source.

So they basically the microbiota starts to feed on the mucus in our gut. This leads to erosion of the chronic mucosal barrier. Dietary fiber deprivation, together with a fiber deprived mucus eroding microbiota, promotes greater epithelial access and lethal colitis by mucosal pathogen. Citro back to rodent. Yeah. So basically if you don’t have the fiber present, the bacteria degrade the mucus.

And then the bacteria are able to get access to the actual colonic cells which triggers an inflammatory response. And if you have a pathogen present like in this the road and study, you switch back to rodent yam. It actually increases the lethality of that pathogen. Cause you don’t have that barrier. You don’t have that wall present of mucus.

And so I have an image here to show. And basically what you can see is this green layer. Here is the mucus. This blue layer here is the intestinal tract. And so on the left side here we have intestinal lining with mucus production on a higher fiber diet. But over here on the low fiber diet you see here is the intestinal cells.

And then you say, here’s the mucus lining. It’s extremely small. It’s very thin compared to what we see on the left side. And this is related to the lack of fiber in the diet, because the bacteria start to degrade this mucus lining. On top of the fact that the microbiome shifting because of the presence of oxygen now in the gut.

Now, the third major piece here is bile acids. And this is something very specific to the carnivore die because it tends to be a higher fat, higher protein diet. And so what we can see is that if you don’t have fiber present inside the diet, then you can get bile acids that will be dropped into the large intestine and convert it into what’s called secondary bile acids.

Now the secondary bile acids are carcinogenic and directly damaging to the clonic epithelium. So it even worsens the leakiness of the colonic epithelium. And then eventually what ends up happening is it also shifts the microbiome in a negative way, because certain types of bacteria will feed on the bile acid or sac for the growth of pathogenic bacteria as well.

So over time on this carnivore diet, when you don’t have the fiber ends up happening as you leave more bile acid to go to the colon, you have a circumstance where you degrade the mucosal lining in the colon, and you also have a circumstance where you leave more oxygen in the gut, which creates dysbiosis. And so in terms of the bile acids, we have a study here.

It’s subtle use of dietary fibers in reducing the risk of several types of several cancer types. An umbrella review. And what the authors say is a dietary fiber can increase stool volume and decrease stool transit time, thus diluting the concentration of carcinogens in the colon and reducing the time of intestinal exposure to carcinogens. Indeed, dietary fiber binds bile acids and alters the central Paddick axis.

In contrast, secondary bile acids produced by bile acid metabolism are thought to be a promoter of colorectal cancer, which can cause significant damage to the colonic mucosa, such as oxidative stress and inflammation. Dietary fiber is broken down by intestinal flora into short chain fatty acid, acetate, propionate, and butyrate, which can decrease intestinal lumen, which helps reduce the conversion of the proto bile acids to carcinogenic secondary bile acids.

So another thing that we see here is that when you have the fibers present, you produce the short chain fatty acids which acidify the contents of the in the colon. And then that helps to shift the metabolism away from of primary bile acids in the secondary bile acid, which are the carcinogenic bile acids, and also dilute those bile acids so that they can’t access the colonic epithelium.

So if you have a circumstance where you have secondary bile acids, this biotic bacteria lack of a mucus barrier and the colon cells are struggling energy wise. You create a circumstance where now you have very leaky gut. And when you start to have certain foods, maybe vinegar, maybe you start to try to reintroduce fibers again, you have pretty serious digestive issues and symptoms, like what you see with Jordan Peterson.

And I do have a graphic here. You can basically see you have a control group and you have deoxy click acid, which is a secondary bile acid. And you can see in the control group there’s not really much intestinal inflammation is that this is the intestinal lining the colonic lining. And then over here what you actually see is the lining.

The cells are starting to become inflamed and irritated from the secondary bile acids present in this study. There’s a big question here. And that question is why do people feel better initially when they drop fiber from their diet and go on to a carnivore diet? So as an example, McKayla Peterson, she had severe autoimmune disease. And then what winds up happening is she drops all the fibers from her diet.

She just eats steak and boom, she’s in remission, at least according to her. I’m not doubting that. I’m just I don’t have, like, specific evidence to say that she went to remission, but she’s she’s telling us she’s in remission. And so why is why is this happening? Why are we actually seeing benefits if we have all this research is saying, well, not having fiber creates these problems.

So one thing is if you have a dysbiosis inside the colon, you have toxic bacteria, you have problematic bacteria inside the colon. Then when you eliminate the fiber you are not feeding that dysbiosis or another option is you are eating certain types of fibers that are problematic for your digestive tract. So as an example, for me personally, I don’t tolerate high amounts of starch very well.

I don’t digest too well. It gives me digestive issues. So when I went low carb initially I had a lot of symptoms improve of removing all sources of carbs and heavily decreasing fiber. Although I did soft and fiber vegetables and I was fine. So I think the problem could be specific fibers. It could have been starches. There’s studies showing us this that in people with, for example, ankylosing spondylitis, if they lower their starch intake, they don’t allow for the growth of Klebsiella pneumoniae in the gut.

And then they have decreased amounts of endotoxin from Klebsiella pneumoniae, which low with the decreased amount, they have less immune activation. And then their autoimmune disease symptoms can possibly decrease and or go into remission. This is from the work of Doctor Alan Springer. So we see circumstances like this. So is it all fibers or is it just certain types of fibers.

That’s the next question. And also is there a dysbiosis present. Now the next piece is, is that you can have certain components, certain additives into the food supply that can heavily irritate the gut. And when you go on a carnivore diet, you automatically eliminate those. So you have things like gums, xanthan gum, gel and gum gum Arabic. You have carrageenan, you have silicon dioxide, you have titanium dioxide, and you have a bunch of other additives that can be quite irritating to the gut.

So when you go on a carnivore diet, you’re eliminating those. You’re eliminating the fodder for the bacteria in the gut. If you have a dysbiosis, you’re eliminating possibly problematic fibers like grains or legumes or some people or FODMAPs. So fermentable carbohydrates that we can’t digest. But the bacteria in our gut can. And in people symptoms drastically improve. And you’re also eliminating toxic foods or potentially eliminating toxic food additives on the carnivore diet.

So it may not be fiber by itself. That’s that people are getting better from as they cut all of these things out on the carnivore diet, there may have been some things in there are problematic where other things may not have been that problematic overall. Now the next thing is solution. So say you’re on a carnivore diet and say you’re struggling.

You want to come off the diet. You’re worried that it’s stressing you out. You’re having some symptoms, issues with sleep. You’re having issues with anxiety. Your digestive system is having problems dealing with the diet. Again, maybe some people are fine with it, but I have quite a few clients who are not doing well with it. Well, what would you do?

The first thing to do is to start to slowly introduce fibers so that you can start to breathe, build that mucous lining and start to shift the microbiome. But the one thing is you have to introduce specific fibers into the diet. You don’t want to just go all in and just throw everything back on board, especially if you’re in a state where you don’t have that mucous lining, where the client sites are not using the butyrate, where the bacterial population is shifted in at this biotic fashion, where you have all these bile acids, make it into the colon.

So you want to use low Fodmap fiber sources from fruits and from vegetables that you tolerate. You’re gonna have to test this out. And some options could be carrots. You could do squashes, potatoes. You could try berries, things like this and see which things you tolerate. I have a food guide on my website with the nutrition blueprints. You could check that out.

It might be TV.com and it shows some of these sources the most saturated sources. If you’re struggling with these issues. And then from there, once you start to bring the fiber sources on board, you want to start to shift that microbiome with polyphenol compounds. So these are things from those fruits and those vegetable fibers, which is why I recommend those instead of just added isolated fibers.

But you can also use extracts and things like this like pomegranate extract elderberry extract came. You can astral etc.. So you can start to try to shift the microbiome gently with some of these fruit powder extracts and things like this. Because of polyphenols, these plant compounds have a selective antimicrobial or bacterial setting, a slowing of the growth of some of the pathogenic bacteria, and can help to shift the microbiome in a beneficial way on top of adding those fibers.

And then from there, if you’re still having issues, then you can consider running a gut protocol to take down some of the this biotic bacteria. As you start to rebuild the mucous lining in the gut and rebuild your microbiome. Now, I can’t go into the full gut protocol here. It’s a whole thing. But if you’re interested in that, you can check out the revive program@mike.com where I go through the Gut protocol in detail, step by step, day by day, etc..

Now, just to recap here, a lack of fiber in the in the diet, particularly a carnivore diet, can lead to increased food intolerances by leading to a dysbiosis in the intestine. It can lead to a decrease in the mucosal lining of the intestine, and it can also lead to exposure of potential carcinogens and irritants to the colon, like bile acids that now allow food particles and different components to leak across the gut lining and create severe symptoms, like what we’re seeing with Doctor Jordan Peterson.

Overwhelming sense of impending doom. This is from cider, and the way to rectify this is to start to add in tolerated fiber sources, and then just start to add in polyphenol sources to shift the microbiome. And then the last thing is consider a gut protocol. If you are struggling with this problem after doing those differing components. Now if you liked this video, I go into more detail, breaking down the studies and talking about some of the pitfalls of the carnivore diet and a podcast that Ethan and I recently did on this channel, which you can check out right here.