Sometimes, I hear about other people’s diets, and I’m left somewhat nauseous. I think this one needs to be called the FAFO diet.
The Fuck Around
This guy, in his 40s, decided to try what he called a “carnivore” diet. He was eating between 6–9 pounds of cheese, sticks of butter, and burgers daily—adding extra fat to the burgers for good measure. He claimed to have dropped weight, gained energy, and experienced improved mental clarity.The Find Out
Our dear Florida Man went to the doctor for painless yellow nodules that had developed on his elbows, palms, and the soles of his feet. He was diagnosed with a condition called xanthelasma, which basically means you have so much cholesterol in your body that excess lipids leak from your blood vessels and form deposits. While the rest of his body worked overtime to keep him alive, his total cholesterol level was over 1,000 mg/dL. For context, the “at-risk” threshold for cholesterol is 240 mg/dL.
He could just swipe his hand across a piece of toast to butter it, I guess.
My cholesterol levels are well under control, but then we don’t eat any red meat, except for an occasional Impossible Burger, and most of my protein comes from fish. Moderation in all things, you know.
I’ve long had queasy feelings about those all meat diets, anyway.
What? Was gout too hoity-toity and “elitist” for the MAGA crowd?
What “carnivore”, besides humans, eats cheese and butter as part of their natural diet?
I inherited my great-grandmother’s recipe collection and it’s nothing but red meat, cheese, eggs, and other high fat food, with a lot of high carb foods added to the mix. The difference is that she cooked for people who were up at the crack of dawn to work in the fields all day before returning to inadequately heated houses at night, so they needed a heavier diet than we do now. And they mostly lived to their 90s and more.
The problem is with sedentary adults who don’t burn as many calories living on the same diet. Go back to living the lifestyle of a 1900 farmer and you, too, can eat as much animal protein as you like without doing any real damage to yourself.
freeline,
The work is damaging. I have the pain to prove it.
I am thin, though. Yeah!
Sometimes, stupidity is strangely impressive.
I have a sister in law who swears by the carnivore diet. Her cholesterol is very high but she claims that she knows more than her doctor… (Also voted for Trump because ‘abortion is murder’.)
Human beings evolved to eat what they could get. As a result, we can eat everything from leaves to raw fish.
And we need that variety. Like Heinlein said, specialization is for insects.
There is no creature in this world that evolved to eat sticks of butter.
I can only imagine the smell in the toilet after a dump.
Not to mention the lack of fiber in meat…
—
I myself eat meat almost every day (but actual meat rather than processed and preserved meat), and when I do, I don’t eat the fat. Were I to eat a hot dog, say, then at least 25% of it would be fat.
(I’m not fat)
feralboy12, heh.
No. 7, that’s probably because sticks of butter do not occur in nature, and no animal other than humans has evolved the necessary brain capacity to know how to make them. I will occasionally give my cat a pat of butter as a treat and she loves it. There probably are animals that would eat hot fudge sundaes if they knew where to get one.
I don’t think there’s that much dietary difference between a stick of butter and a prey animal’s visceral fat or brain, from a fat perspective, and lots of predators will eat those right up.
[Anyone else remember Rev. BigDumbChimp?]
Human beings evolved to eat what they could but the primary value of that was to avoid starvation. The selection criteria operating on our ancestors largely excluded living past their 60s because so many died so much younger. No one cares if eating steak may kill you in your 60s if it keeps you from starving to death as a child or young adult.
I’m following a largely WFPB Vegan diet now and it does seem to have reduced some risk factors (LDL, blood-pressure) for me for heart disease (and perhaps other diseases).
I also exercise a fair amount as I became aware of risks early in life. My maternal grandfather was a farmer and died of a sudden heart attack at age 71.
I worked with a nurse in a community hospital in the ICU. His diet was terrible, and he didn’t take care of himself. We would draw each other’s blood back then. When we drew his, the tube of blood would have a yellow tinge, actually more like a yellow glow. His tube of blood would sit for a few minutes waiting to be sent to the lab. In that short time yellow streaks could be seen forming throughout his specimen. He was proud of this. Last I knew he was still alive around the age of 45. Just did a google search and apparently, he is still alive at 73 y/o.
stuffin, my wife tells me about a maternal grandfather who’d get cartons of cigarettes at Xmas as gifts in his 70s, too.
(Probability distributions)
Probability distributions and life quality. I had a work colleague years ago who continued to smoke after throat cancer. Inhaled through his permanent breathing tube. COPD finally took him in his late 60s.
OK, so just one pound of butter per day? I can manage that I think.
larpar:
Pigs, housecats, and dogs eat those as part of their “natural” diet. They’re all fed scraps.
[freeline, BTW, ‘sticks of butter’ is purely USAnical. Elsewhere, it’s sold by weight.
I just checked: “A “stick of butter” refers to a standardized portion of butter, typically weighing 113 grams (or 1/2 cup) in the U.S., conveniently wrapped for easy measuring.” quoth the AI.]
numerobis @ 18
Yeah, there are wild herds of cheese and butter running all over the place.
numerobis @18, righto.
Here’s some nightmare fuel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet
John Morales #12
I do.
I must admit to liking the BK Melts. They got McDonald’s beat with that one. I don’t eat like that more than once or twice a week if that.
I eat a slice or so of sharp cheddar a day. 6-9 pounds??? I have my slice on an egg white sandwich topped with kalamata olive slices and half a Florida avocado on the side for breakfast 1. Breakfast 2 is oatmeal in soymilk cooked with blueberries and an apple and banana on the side followed by V-8 for my several herbs and vitamins. Morning snack is banana, Cape Cod chips, and salmon packet. The rest of the day is whatever.
I do add a scoop of Smart Balance to stuff to enhance palatability. Sticks of butter?
My fiber consumption is through the roof:
No carnivore diet for me.
I eat some slop later in the day sometimes, but my morning food routine is solid.
By rough estimate I consume around 25g of fiber before lunch each day. Someone my age is recommended to consume 30g in an entire day.
The lunch I ate today totaled 10g of fiber. A typical dinner might add another 10g or more. I eat roughly 45g of fiber a day. I wonder how many days it would take a “carnivore” to equal that.
I eat around 55g of protein in the morning. Today lunch was 13g. Dinner might be another 20-25g. That’s around 88g. I might want to increase that though it’s a rough estimate. I should maybe consume 110g-150g: https://longevity.stanford.edu/lifestyle/2024/01/23/protein-needs-for-adults-50/
My fat intake probably varies quite a bit, especially at dinner time. I’m not eating slabs of cheese and butter.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/should-i-be-eating-more-fiber-2019022115927
Egads the average is 10-15 grams per day? I’m eating 3-4 times that.
@25: Yeah, there’s little to no fiber in all the pre-packaged frozen foods people buy at the dollar stores or in fast foof. And way too many people live almost exclusively on it.
This “all-meat (plus lots of fat and butter) diet” shtick sounds to me like a fake-macho overreaction to all the vegetarian and vegan diets we’re hearing about. It really sounds like a lot of guys saying “we’re old-school men, we eat what we raise or hunt, we clean out plates, and we’re not weak or picky like all those vegetarians and vegans and everyone else with their aversions and restrictions and new-agey health regimens and over-civilized practices!” Which I do sorta get, being someone who’s always liked meat and would never go 100% vegetarian — but no, there’s no rational or medical basis for an all-meat diet, and I still also like bread, beans, veggies, pasta, rice, dessert, and other things to go with whatever meat I eat. And beer…
Somebody please tell the current president a ‘carnivore’ diet is what alphas need. Then lean back and wait.
@28 — We’re still waiting on the results of a “Big Mac” diet…
Dennis, are hardly worth calling carniferous.
https://www.everviz.com/chart-examples/column-and-bar-charts/big-mac-ingredients-by-weight-column-chart/
“The chart represents the weight and relative percentage of all the ingredients that make up a single Big Mac – namely a bread bun, lettuce, onions, pickles, cheese, sauce, and beef patty.
The first ingredient listed is sesame bread bun with a weight of 74 g and taking up 30.83 percent of the total 240 g ingredient mass. The second most significant ingredient listed is a slice of American cheese with a weight of 14 g and taking up 6 percent; followed by beef patty with 90 g and 38.62 percent respectively; then shredded lettuce with 28 g at 12.01 percent; onions with 7 g at 2.91 percent; pickles with 7 g at 2.91 percent and finally sauce at 20g weighing 8.33 percent – of total mass composition for one single Big Mac hamburger sandwich.”
(Last time I had one, it was back in the 1990s and with a voucher of 2 for the price of one. And I regretted it, it sat in my guts like a disgusting, heavy weight)
My point was that if an all-Big-Mac diet won’t kill you, nothing probably will. Trump is an avowed Big-Mac aficionado.
Big Macs provide ~10% of your daily value for fiber:
https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/big-mac.html#accordion-c921f9207b-item-842cb18782
That’s probably not from the meat component and no self-respecting carnivore is going to eat the fibrous components.
If you want to up the fiber just add a large fries with 6g more of fiber. So burger and fries meal gets you at 9g of fiber or 31% of your daily fiber value. Maybe Big Macs and fries won’t constipate you then?
Large fries: https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/large-french-fries.html#accordion-c921f9207b-item-842cb18782
@13 Wayne Schroeder
“The selection criteria operating on our ancestors largely excluded living past their 60s because so many died so much younger.”
Actually, not necessarily. As has been pointed out more than once by historians, even our “available data from the past” includes death of infants, so.. maybe if you go “really far back”, to when we have no data at all, this would be accurate, for known history though the rule is, “If 50% of all people die before they are 3-4, the average gets a bit seriously skewed.” Or, something along those lines. If anything, the evidence may suggest that we went to, when we lived long enough to matter, being in our 80s and 90s, to a period of excess, in which those numbers dropped a lot, and then modern medicine came along and skewed them back the other way again, despite the continued excess.
But, prior to written history we really don’t have clear information, and after… the numbers get messed up because we start counting dead kids, and averaging those numbers into the mix. Its one of those cases where statistics is likely actually lying about what the average age of “adults” (or at least those who made it as far as their teens) where when they died. We kind of see something similar with modern times, with the, “If you survive to age X, you will likely also survive to age Y, based on the numbers.”, with a fairly big gap between X and Y. The reason being that if you manage to make it to X age you are probably not doing the sort of stupid crap that would have killed you are X, so it take Y – X years for any stupid things you are doing to “catch up to you”.
Fat comes out in funny ways. I have blue eyes. Over my middle adulthood, they gradually got amber around the iris. When I dropped most carbohydrates and lost weight, the amber gradually cleared out, and my eyes got bluer.
rwiess, protein and carbohydrates provide around 4 calories per gram, fat provides around 9 (and alcohol around 7). So, to lose fat, it’s much more efficacious to avoid eating fat or drinking booze rather than to drop carbohydrates.
Yes, good points. The high number of deaths of infants in historical times does skew the statistics. And I am largely speculating about prehistorical times when our ancestors were eating meat (i.e. the last 2.5 or 3 million years or so).
So the question is, if eating a lots of meat (i.e. as is typical in wealthy countries) is unhealthy for us (for living past age 60, etc), why do we do it? Why do we like it so much?
And it seems to me that a quite plausible explanation is that it was much more important for them, evolutionary, to feast when they could. So if they could get some meat, that was great. They were very likely quite food insecure. They needed to feast when they could. Famine would often follow. The most important thing was to live long enough to have offspring (or help their fellow tribe members do so), and help them survive to maturity.
As highly social animals, us old folks (I’m 70 now), do continue to have some value to our community but we may not be able to hunt and gather was well as younger folks. So evolution doesn’t “care” very much about about how long we live past what is now considered middle-age.
I think we’re partially adapted to be omnivores. True carnivores, like wolves, get rid of excess cholesterol, no matter how much meat, fat, and cholesterol they eat. They do not develop atherosclerosis.
But for most of human evolution (i.e. the ~25 million years since we separated from our common great ape ancestor) we likely got very little cholesterol from our diet. But since we do need some cholesterol, our bodies evolved to hang onto it.
Two things:
1 – we have canines.
2 – we synthesise cholesterol.
Yes, we’re semi-carnivores. Somewhat adapted to a meat diet, but not fully like wolves.
We’re omnivores, the dentition shows it.
Wolves do eat things besides meat, like berries.