I was astonished to read of yet another new dietary fad that seems to have attracted adherents. They call themselves ‘carnivores’ and that label alone should give you some idea about what their diet consists of. I expected a variation of the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets (such as Atkins) that were in vogue some decades back. But I was not quite prepared for how much more limited and extreme this diet was. It consists almost exclusively of beef, bacon, butter, and eggs. Just reading it made me feel queasy, even though I eat each of the items. It was the thought of eating almost only those four things that made me feel sick.
For some reason that I cannot quite fathom, there are people who are drawn to the idea that what most of us think is a good nutrition habit of eating balanced diets that avoid highly processed foods (food writer Michael Pollan memorably encapsulated the idea in just seven words: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”) is a myth foisted upon us by government and scientists and the food industry, and that they have discovered an alternative healthy way of eating that only they know about and now wish to promote. There seems to be something appealing about seeing oneself as part of a small community of people who have special knowledge that the vast majority of people are unaware of. It seems to be even more appealing if the ideas are so extreme that ordinary people would never have thought of it.
As with all such diets, its proponents claim all manner of benefits.
I discovered the diet last year when my Instagram explore page began serving me videos of women biting into sticks of butter and men chowing down on huge cuts of steak for breakfast. “Here’s what I’m eating for dinner as someone who lost 60 pounds of body fat,” says one, username animalbasedtaste, holding up a wooden chopping board featuring beef short ribs, beef marrow bones, oysters and sardines fried in leftover beef fat, and an avocado.
…According to its fans, the benefits of the diet range from rapid weight loss to the healing of long-term chronic conditions including depression, polycystic ovary syndrome, acne, eczema, diabetes and psoriasis.
According to almost everyone else – including the registered nutritionists and doctors trying to treat people who have tried the diet for prolonged periods – a diet of only meat with no vegetables or grains is, at best, a form of disordered eating, and at worst incredibly damaging for its adherents, particularly in the long term.
The so-called ‘influencers’ promoting this diet (that includes people like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson who seem to be present wherever crackpot ideas are circulated) appeal to an argument that some find appealing, that this is the way that our ancient ancestors ate and therefore it must be ‘natural’ and hence good.
[A]t the cornerstone of the diet’s dogma is the belief that human beings are not omnivores but are in fact carnivores, and are therefore “designed” to eat only “nutrient-dense, bio-available” meat in accordance with our “ancestral human diet”. Plants, on the other hand, are allegedly full of toxic chemicals, created naturally as an evolutionary defense mechanism, and from the chemical pesticides used to grow them. Videos of children not wanting to eat their broccoli are presented as evidence that we are intuitively averse to vegetables and should therefore not be eating them.
…Fueled primarily through engagement-optimized short-form content platforms like TikTok and Instagram, the carnivore movement follows in the footsteps of the dozens of other internet trends from the past few years, such as homesteading and “unschooling”. Together, they tell the story of a fallen nation corrupted by the vagaries of modernity and the complexity of life, whose salvation demands a retreat to an imaginary past – one that seemingly rejects science, rationalism and community in favor of “tradition”, suspicion and isolation.
There is in fact no unique diet that our early ancestors followed. The evidence suggests that they tended to be opportunistic because they had to eat whatever they could get in order to survive and could not afford to be too choosy. They are not like the current-day proponents who have supermarket shelves to pick food from.
“The versatility of our diet speaks to the fact that there is no single ancestral human diet,” says Dr Peter Ungar, a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist at Arkansas University. “ I doubt there is a single human ancestor, from the time of the earliest primates, that was exclusively carnivorous. Even Neanderthals, which are considered to be the ultimate hominid carnivores – they have barley grains embedded in the dental calculus on their teeth. We know they ate plants, and we know they ate cereal grains. It’s just nonsense.”
Sudden changes in diet can provide short-term benefits. It is the long-term consequences that are dangerous.
In each case, doctors have acknowledged the potential benefits of short-term dietary changes for some groups but have expressed concerns about the health impacts of restrictive diets over long periods of time. The short-term negative side effects of ketosis – the state the body enters into when it burns fat for fuel instead of carbohydrates – include dizziness, upset stomach, constipation, dehydration, headache, nausea and poor sleep. Longer term, it can lead to kidney damage, cardiovascular complications, low blood pressure, nutrient deficiencies and an increased risk of heart disease.
Apart from anything else, the highly restricted nature of the food options would be hard to take. A friend of mine who adopted the Atkins diet to lose weight said that after a few weeks, he craved bread and other forbidden non-meat foods and simply could not face the thought of eating more meat. I find myself wanting to eat from a category (fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, and grains) that I have not been eating much of recently. I would not call those cravings because I am in a position to satisfy the early vague desires to eat such foods. But my body is definitely communicating a message to me about what I should eat for my next meal.
I cannot imagine that I am unusual in having my body signaling to me that I need to eat in a more balanced manner. I often wonder whether these influencers really stick to these highly restricted diets over the long term or whether they cheat without telling their followers.
Wasn’t that the diet that the Peterson creep was on? And Sarah Palin?
In more culty parts of the country (like Idaho) there’s the fruitarian diet (nothing but fruit) and several families lost their very-young children to it.
And the vegan diet is very difficult to actually live on because it requires lots and lots of supplements for all the things it lacks.
Hmm. I’ve been a (food-wise) vegan for about twenty years. The only “supplements” I’ve ever taken are B12 and D3. Nothing about my diet has been “very difficult” outside of finding stuff to eat on typical American restaurant menus.
The consequence thus far has been an excellent blood profile at every physical exam in recent memory. My siblings and immediate ancestors, on the other hand…
Not trying to push a vegan diet (a common refrain seems to be that vegans are “pushy”) on anyone. Just relaying my own experience.
not a vegan or even a vegetarian, but i haven’t heard of any negative effects from it, whereas i have for the carnivores, whose true adherents are falling apart at the seams. creepy exotic stuff. i don’t believe 95% of influencers are honest about how they live, certainly not rogan, who is an absolute sleazeweasel.
veganism isn’t tenable for people with certain digestive issues or allergies, where plant products are much more likely to provoke those than meat eggs and dairy. iirc an honest analysis of the china study (or not that mcdougall shit) showed going all meat all veg or mixed didn’t reduce your global odds of cancer, just shifted which part of the digestive tract the cancer happened in.
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@Dennis K:
I think the elided subtext is “the vegan diet is very difficult to live on [if you want to do it with the same absense of thought that we’re putting into our current carnivore diets].”.
It’s certainly no more difficult than an all-meat diet, healthier, and probably requires fewer supplements in the long ter: it just requires a little more up-front knowledge and everybody knows about that up-front knowledge whereas the pure-carnivore diet is something that nobody who understood nutrition would actually try so the problems with it aren’t well-known or studied yet.
Me, I just tend to go with ‘the main ingredient in my diet is variety’.
I don’t think you can separate this bullshit from the fact that meat is coded as masculine, and the people advocating it seem very anxious about their masculinity.
I imagine most of the reports of success with these strange diets is placebo or something akin to a sunk-cost fallacy.
But there may be a few people with some sort of undiagnosed allergen/sensitivity/intolerance, and taking up a very limited diet may give them some relief, especially if they are having a reaction to a common ingredient in many processed/prepared foods.
If that’s even the case, it would likely be a pretty small number of people…
Dennis K@2: I’ve heard choline and Iodine supplements recommended for a vegan diet, but there does not seem a consensus. I use iodised salt dor my cooking, that seems to be enough, though some people claim otherwise.
@7 mordred — I opt for iodized salt as well. Not sure if it has anything to do with my normal thyroid test results. But I also eat nori on occasion — also a rich source of iodine.
I think part of the problem that makes these fad diets attractive is that the government has pretended it knew what we should be eating, when in fact it never really has tried to find that out scientifically. Instead, it has let the food industry make dietary recommendations and then distributed those as if they were the carefully considered opinions of government scientists. That is why cow’s milk and cheese were recommended for so long, utterly ignoring those people who are lactose intolerant, and now it turns out that even if you do tolerate lactose, milk is not great as a staple food for humans. So, listening to the government about your diet has not been a great idea for much of the last hundred years.
I think extremes of any fad diet are bad. I also have the spouse of an adult child with a legume allergy and an adult child (not married to the one with the legume allergy) with a gluten intolerance. Myself, I’m highly reactive to carbs in general. An omnivore diet that avoids legumes, glutinous items, and heavy carbs provides nutrition and satiety for everyone. The sil with the legume allergy tried vegetarianism and ended up hospitalized several times for severe allergic reactions. I was vegetarian for a decade under the supervision a hospital nutritionist…and made myself very sick.
Good read on that, with its own links to further research: https://gizmodo.com/vegetarian-genes-dna-eating-meat-health-diet-1850897098
Only idiots think you could eat only meat and fat and be healthy. Oh, it’s Joe Rogan and Jordan Petersen?
Yup, sexist idiots.
A detail not mentioned in the paragraph on ketosis is the fact that people in ketosis stink like something inside them is dead and rotting. It’s a very nasty body odor.
Tethys @ 11
Ketosis involves burning fat for fuel, so it cannot be the cause of Trump’s horrible odor.
My wife eventually inspired me to join her in dieting. She’s lost 15kg, me 7kg (last time I checked, I only weigh myself once around the start of each month, keeps me from obsessing about numbers). I’ve been doing it for two months.
Our diet is simple: eat a healthy diet of sensible portions with low-calorie snacks if required and no treats until “feast day” Saturday, at which point we can go wild. She counts calories, I don’t, but we mostly eat the same things (eg. she detests fresh coriander, I loathe brussels sprouts).
It works for me because it’s easier to wait if I know I’ll be able to satisfy my desires on the weekend. And I’m not inflexible; if I need something small during the week I’ll have it, I just always make myself drink a glass of water first. I probably don’t drink enough water generally, as often cravings disappear after that.
@5 Dunc
Such diets under strict supervision of a dietician is sometimes used to treat otherwise intractable epilepsy.
OTOH I believe Peterson nearly killed himself. Some specialized clinic in the Russian Caucasus apparently pulled him through after the diet and drug misuse.
“Videos of children not wanting to eat their broccoli are presented as evidence that we are intuitively averse to vegetables”
The only problem with that “evidence” is that I can’t be the only one who could *literally* show you a video of my kids (aged 4 and 6) helping me prep the broccoli for their dinner and sneakily eating bits of it raw like it’s a forbidden treat. They bloody love the stuff.
sonof @15: That brings us to what I suspect may be another motivating factor for these meat-only diets: simple unwillingness or inability to get kids to eat their vegetables.
lochaber@6:
That’s likely happening. The more restrictive the diet, the higher the probability that it cuts out the item that’s been unknowingly causing a problem. Unfortunately, it’s also more likely to lack something essential. I wonder how many of the idiots pursuing this carnivore fad have come down with scurvy so far?
sonofrojblake@15:
There must be some weird genetic variation going on here. Most kids don’t like those kinds of vegetables, to the point that it’s a cliche. They are invariably told that they’ll grow out of it, which turns out to be a lie, at least sometimes. Not everyone who dislikes those as a kid develops a taste for them as an adult. I know I didn’t. The only veggies I eat are bland-ish ones: potatoes, variations on the theme of bread/pastry/etc., and, infrequently, corn, rice, or carrots. Fake “meat” made with (usually) soy-based stuff is tolerable but usually inferior to the real thing (for me). Tree nuts and peanuts are fine, as are many fruits if converted to jam or juice (I find I dislike the textures of most otherwise, even though not the tastes; save that grapefruit is too sour). Everything else (that I ever tried) is not just bad, it’s gag-inducingly bad, and that includes basically everything green plus cauliflower.
Canada, fortunately, mandates that bread products be fortified with a variety of vitamins and minerals that are among the more common causes of deficiencies. This includes, I think, at least B12, folate, and iron.
I very much doubt I could tolerate for long any non-deficient vegan diet, unless it resembled my current diet save for replacing every animal-derived product with a soy-derived substitute. That would probably be somewhat taste-deficient but perhaps not nutritionally. It would also likely be significantly more expensive.
I worry a bit. I’ve started in recent years to develop random weird food sensitivities — first was black licorice causing cramps if I had very much in one sitting, followed by noticing that a period of unavailability of an almond-containing snack coincided with a boost to my stamina. If I develop more of these I might run out of maneuvering room fairly quickly.
Thing is, people who claim a “balanced” diet seem to mean “balancing” wholly artificial extremely processed foods like tofu or bread, with “natural” foods like meat or vegetables.
And I’m sorry but Neanderthals had grains stuck in their teeth is not a compelling argument. Humans haven’t put massive resources into milling grains, toiling for hours prior to mechanization, for no reason. It’s because they’re completely indigestible in their natural state. No human can live on unprocessed grains. We don’t have the four stomachs of animals that can. We have digestive organs optimised around mostly meat supplemented with roots, shoots, nuts, berries, leafy greens.
It doesn’t mean we have to eat like cave men. It means our metabolism works efficiently with some foods, and responds badly to others.
Simple carbohydrates like sugar or bread have indisputably been a blight on human health. They’re what nutritionists call “empty calories”. Your body can burn them for energy, but they lack nutrition -- that is the vitamins and minerals required to sustain a healthy body.
I’m not a fanatic. I sometimes order a pizza, or eat a doughnut like everyone else. But when I prepare my own food, which I try to do most of the time, and stick primarily to meat, vegies, eggs, nuts, and eschew processed unnatural crap like bread or milk, I experience vastly greater health and wellbeing -- no digestive problems, no *ahem* gaseousness, no lethargy, keenness of mind, uninterrupted sleep, greater energy and zest for life.
Silentbob #18
no “…wholly artificial extremely processed foods like tofu or bread…”
results in “…keenness of mind…”
本当ねえええ
If only humans had invented some way of heating or processing various seeds and plants to make them more readily digestible.
Milk is in no way a processed food, though plenty of people can’t eat dairy products because they don’t produce the enzymes to digest it. It is weird that any adult mammals retain the ability to digest it, but some humans have evolved that trait.
BTW, There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding -- no doubt promoted by grain growers -- as to what “fibre” means.
I’ve often seen Americans say, well wheat is nutritious because it contains “fibre”. X-D
Do you know what “fibre” means? Another word used is “roughage”.
It means “shit you can’t digest”. I’m not joking. It literally means stuff of no nutritional value that your body expels as worthless. That is what it means. It you ate a handfull of gravel and excreted it, that would count as “fibre”.
Any time in future you see someone selling some bread as “high fibre”, understand what they are saying is, “this is stuff your body will expel because it has no digestible nutritional content of any kind whatsoever”.
Be an informed consumer. X-D
The usual topic drift; meat certainly lacks fibre.
Fiber is very important for digestive health.
For USAnian-types: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7589116/
(Nutrients. 2020 Oct; 12(10): 3209.
Published online 2020 Oct 21. doi: 10.3390/nu12103209
PMCID: PMC7589116
PMID: 33096647
The Health Benefits of Dietary Fibre)
For Australian types: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5986479/
(Nutrients. 2018 May; 10(5): 599.
Published online 2018 May 11. doi: 10.3390/nu10050599
PMCID: PMC5986479
PMID: 29751656
Dietary Fibre Intake in Australia. Paper I: Associations with Demographic, Socio-Economic, and Anthropometric Factors)
#18 Silentbob:
“It’s because [grains are] completely indigestible in their natural state. No human can live on unprocessed grains. We don’t have the four stomachs of animals that can.”
Hoo boy! There is a hecka lot of misinformation to unpack there!
-Four stomached ruminants such as cattle do not primarily eat grains (i.e., the seeds of grass plants). They eat the leaves and stems of grass plants. Totally different food sources. For comparison, just because humans eat the flesh of the fruits of avocado trees and get nutrients from that does NOT imply that they would be able to get nutrients from eating the leaves of avocado trees, which are very tough and leathery and NOT nutritious for humans. Same for the difference between eating grains and eating grass.
-- “Processing” grains is a very wide topic. I would venture that some totally unprocessed grains could indeed provide some nutrients to humans. An uncooked ear of green corn could certainly be eaten. It would be less enjoyable and would probably release fewer nutrients than an ear of roasted or boiled corn, but it still would counter your argument. Then there are a myriad ways to process grains, some much less labor intensive than you described: boiling is one way, popping dried kernels of grain a la popcorn, soaking the dried kernels in an alkali solution, all these methods make easily eaten and digestible foods from grains. Another thing to do is to malt your grain: soak the seeds in water and wait for them to sprout. This makes them soft, converts some of the starches to sugars and makes other nutrients more bioavailable. Fermenting grains to make beer is another one very popular among many ancient civilizations.
My (now grown) kids also love broccoli and will happily eat it raw or cooked. Early finger-foods for them included diced peas and carrots because the oldest has always had issues with gluten, so typical finger-foods like Cheerios were not an option.
My diet is basically the Mediterranean one with a bit more meat and few grains. Meat, dairy, vegetables, some fruits. Very rarely do I have super-processed foods. I don’t have to take handfuls of supplements as I did when for the decade I was vegetarian.
This is just nonsense. You may have chosen to take a lot of supplements, but most vegetarians don’t, and don’t need to.
#24 Katydid
“My (now grown) kids also love broccoli and will happily eat it raw or cooked.”
I have two sisters, and of the three of us, I am hands down the adventurous eater. I have always enjoyed cooked broccoli, although while I used to only steam it I now find I prefer it carefully boiled in a big pot of water to leach out more of the sulfur compounds, which makes it sweeter. Some may argue that I am throwing out nutrients in the cooking water, but I don’t care because I like the broccoli better that way. I am not a fan of raw broccoli, although I will eat it dipped in a very strong blue cheese dressing. My sisters however, will not eat broccoli, even though both of them are now grandmothers.
One of my sisters is a congenital conservative in all things. She even married a man who donates money to creepy Dumb Old Trump, and her diet is so conservative that it boggles my mind: I usually see her only on holidays, but for those meals she insists that mashed potatoes always be served. To my mind, mashed potatoes are the least interesting dish on any table. I will eat them if they are served to me, but I would rather save the calories for another serving of turkey or another piece of pie. She refuses to try sushi, even the cooked ones like shrimp nigiri. I once took her to a very nice seafood restaurant that I loved: she ordered a hamburger. Once, I made a grocery run for a party our family was having with instructions to get garlic bread, but the store only had one loaf left so I added some cheddar jalapeno bread. Turns out my 50 year old sister had never even tried cheddar jalapeno bread in her entire life! But she did try it and found out she liked it.
The most extreme variant are the grifters who claim being able to live on literally just sunshine (it’s a thing).
“God Awful Movies” at Youtube dug out ‘documentaries’ about these dangerous charlatans. BTW looking at the sun for any length of time will give you permanent degradation of your vision.
99 times out of a hundred, they’re lying. I mean, why bother actually following the diet when you can just post the video and then eat whatever you like?
Perhaps the extreme end of the hyper carnivore fad is the ‘Liver King’ -- a guy claiming to have achieved a crazy physique by working out and exclusively eating raw eggs and meat, especially liver. It was long suspected, and he alter admitted, he had omitted he also took steroids.
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#2 Dennis K
By “food-wise” I take it you mean you have spent time doing some research? As an omnivore, I have done next to none and yet need two fewer supplements than you. Because it is simply easier to get a balanced intake when you include meat.
I’m sorry I don’t have the reference for this, but it’s a peer-reviewed study. Red meat, high fat diets help promote the start of colon cancer because of the chemicals that bacteria in the gut produce when the bacteria eats the food: at least one of those is a known carcinogen. High-fiber diets (the kind of fiber that can be eaten by gut bacteria) lower the risk with the chemicals the gut bacteria produce on eating them.
I read once that carnivores in nature, (like the big cats) have short digestive tracts, I guess because meat doesn’t need a lot of work to digest. Omnivores (like humans) have medium-long tracts, some of that plant stuff takes more digestive work. And all-plant eaters (cows, etc.) have very long digestive tracts because all that celluose takes a lot of work to digest.
I just wonder: *how* do these carnivore-diet people not get scurvy? Cooking destroys Vitamin C, I hope they’re not eating meat raw or undercooked. Some of them claim they don’t take Vitamin C supplements. So, how?
The sulfur-containing compounds in food of the broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, etc. family, which make the vegetables so good for you, give them a slight taste and smell of sulphur, which is an acquired taste, and, for some people, not palatable at all. Cooking helps diminish the taste and smell, but sometimes not enough for some.
Found the reference mentioned in @30, it was lurking on my hard drive:
BioMed Research International
Volume 2019, Article ID 3405278, 10 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/3405278
@Bekenstein Bound, 17
You’ve established to my satisfaction at least that you live in literally a different universe from the rest of us*, so I’d tend to look to that as an explanation before speculating on my kids having some weird genetic variation.
(*one where Star Trek:Strange New Worlds was cancelled after the cliffhanger ending to the third season, rather than, as in this universe, having already been renewed for a fourth despite the third season not being scheduled to air until next year).
garnetstar @#30,
That is a good question about scurvy. We know that balanced diets provide the range of vitamins and minerals that bodies need. I am not sure if the followers of these diets explicitly exclude taking vitamin supplements. Maybe they do not think of supplements as ‘food’ and thus do not include them when they list their food intake.
Mano, I’ve read one or two claims that they’re “perfectly healthy” not taking Vitamin C supplements. I believe, not sure, that Jordan Peterson explicitly said that (but of course, he is often not in touch with the reality stream.) Perhaps the best explanation for the other claims is lying.
Although, your theory of the majority not considering getting all your nutrients from pills instead of food, as food, may also be the case,
@29 Holms — By “food-wise” I meant vegan only in regards to diet. I should have called it “plant-based” since veganism avoids all products based on animal exploitation (tallow-based soaps, leather clothing and shoes, gelatin-capsuled medications, household cleaners, pet food, etc).
@Raging Bee, #16:
Side question: Why, in 2024, is anyone still talking about “getting kids to eat their vegetables”, as opposed to providing an alternative means to deliver essential nutrients to kids withoutforcing something onto them to which they at least seem to have an innate aversion?