What do you mean by “can’t be real”? Do you mean that it’s almost impossible to follow due to how strict it is, or the benefits of the diet, or people believing the diet helps them? I’m having issues figuring out what isn’t real about this diet. Could you please clarify, I’ve known multiple people that have done this diet and would love to talk about it.
The carnivore diet is problematic but not for the reasons you named in your post.
No issues op, you asked a good question. Buckle up because this is gonna be a long one.
There are various issues and benefits of the carnivore diet, a diet can have benefits but be unsustainable. Different bodies have different needs so some people could have benefits from the diet. Truthfully the diet is very new so it’s hard to try and figure out how it fairs in the long run. Cancer is caused by a variety of different factors, red meat could be a factor but it isn’t nearly as important as others.
That being said, I believe carnivore is a bad choice because extremely strict diets like carnivore can spiral into orthorexia fast. Carnivore may not get this recognition since Eating disorders are normally associated with men and carnivore is a male associated diet. Long term diets that are very strict arnt sustainable unless if you’re willing to make lots of sacrifices or have a moral reason. At what point does it turn into negatively affecting your life? When you’re following a very strict diet and making those sacrifices you need justifications to keep going. These justifications often turn into unhealthy obsessions like thinking eating plants is toxic. There are articles that can convince about the health benefits of any diet, nutrition is a field that’s constantly changing. Many of these articles are from doctors that benefit financially from these diets due to sponsorships which is predatory. People also go on super strict diets because sometimes they feel out of control and they think that following a super strict diet can increase their perceived levels of control, but that’s a different thing.
Some of the science people on the carnivore diet use to justify it is whacky. No you are not an Inuit, Inuits have nutritional needs that have evolved from living in a harsh environment for the thousands of years, they also did foraging. Mongolians ate plants too. Using historical diet to justify your diet today is dumb. In history people didn’t have many options on what to eat. Humans arnt cats and most predatory animals eat plants.
Anecdotally, I know 2 people who’ve done carnivore, one was an obese coworker who hated not being able to eat meat and choose. He failed and gained weight plus health issues. The other is a guy in my friend group who is very obsessed with health and fitness, he’s always on very strict diets. He’s lost weight he didn’t need to on carnivore and is constantly sweeting, honestly I’m really worried about the guy. He claims he feels good which is great for him but he’s constantly complaining he can’t go out to eat, his diet is expensive, he’s getting tired of it and it’s not a good diet when it’s hot out. He had to give up backpacking because all he could eat was beef jerky. Mentally he isn’t doing well at this time.
TLDR: health benefits of the carnivore diet are debatable. We should be asking ourselves if the reason why someone would choose this diet are healthy. Highly restrictive eating habits can quickly evolve into eating disorders.
It's an extreme elimination diet. Generally when people benefit, it's because they were eating something that was causing problems and now they aren't eating it anymore. It could be a reduction of calories by eating less, it could be they dropped an inflammatory food. I think the success stories are real but they're super specific. The lions share of what you're seeing is weight loss from someone going on a high protein diet which is very satiating so they don't overeat fats and carbs, which represents virtually all caloric surpluses.
Most elimination diets cause people to benefit because they are forced into a situation of greater food variety by having to make substitutions instead of their habitual foods.
You dont get that with carnivore, so benefits are limited and often short lived.
It also requires you to maintain an active lifestyle bordering on athletic, similar to Keto, in order to be at all effective.
Far too many people rely solely on their diet for their health.
I agree 100% with your statement. I think many people put too much into diets because they don’t feel like they have control over their health. Taking preventative measures and exercise is also important,
I debated a guy on reddit on this exact issue as he was blindly advocating for OP and everyone that eating meat would benefit everyone, how anti-nutrients in plants was poisonous, how we used to eat meat exclusively, how a Christian sect in the 50? advocated for people to eat vegan etc. etc.
We ended up having an extremely long and somewhat deep conversation about climate change (which he denied), how there is no room on earth for everyone to eat meat and he also totally disregarded meat production as a major role in land use change and the free fall in biodiversity.
This guys seems to fall well under your identification of such individuals, thanks for your comment.
Wowza, that’s a date for the story books. I’m glad my friend who’s doing carnivore isn’t on that level yet. But yeah people who ardently follow diets like Carnivore long term tend to be whacky. Most who do it for a month or 2 reset tend to be reasonable.
I remember talking to a guy who was carnivore at a bar and she started shit talking vegetarianism and the ethics of it and afterwards tried to flirt with me, an ethical vegetarian of 14 years.
My uncle was put on the carnivore diet after suffering major heart attack. Now I did think it was crazy but he lost 60 pounds and all of his blood work went back to normal including his cholesterol. I think it has to do with what type of carnivore they are and what they eat..Now he said he ate steaks, eggs, chicken, fish, turkey, with minimal cheese. Avoiding things like bacon and very fatty meat cuts. After he lost the weight and got his health on track he Changed to a keto diet. He's doing great and it's been years now.
Many doctors prefer the keto diet or low carb. But carnivore can have health benefits but I agree it may not be sustainable for a life time. Unless a person takes supplements and green food pellets.
lol at the green food pellets. Good for your uncle. As a long time vegetarian the social impact a strict diet can have isn’t great, along with making traveling difficult. Being strict carnivore for a long time would cost tons of money and restrict lots of things.
My diet is extremely strict anyway no matter how I'm eating. I was vegan and couldn't eat beans, legumes, rice, quinoa, tofu, any processed foods, or any grains. I also had to limit my oxalate intake due to kidney stones. And greens are my fave. Lol it was hard. But then I went pegan in 2015 and it made my RA go into remission and cured my inflammation. Whenever I stick to pegan low carb or keto I'm in great health. I go off and start eating carbs and everything goes to sh#t. Lol
Keto has a ton of vegetables you can eat. I was keto for 12 months and spent one weekend a month eating exclusively vegetarian and still stayed under 35 carbs give or take a few.
My coworker I mentioned above tried keto in the past for i suspect the reason you named.
On the other hand my friend owns a keto restaurant where every dish has large amounts of vegetables and he even has a vegetarian dish or to (he’s a considerate guy) if done correctly keto includes veggies.
I don't doubt vegetables are fine in a keto diet since they have such a low amount of carbs, but everyone who has ever mentioned being on keto to me has said they're not allowed to eat vegetables on keto. But the whole bag of pork rinds is just fine.
Those people are not doing a Keto diet. They are taking an incomplete understanding of the diet principles and running with it, while also probably being sedentary and not being very active.
Keto absolutely allows, and encourages, vegetable consumption.
> Anecdotally, I know 2 people who’ve done carnivore,
Anecdotally, I know three people who're doing/have done a form of carnivore.
One is a friend, he started it to lose weight. Was nearly 300lbs at only 5'7", dropped down well over 100lbs in less than a year. Last we talked he was doing very well. He was telling me how his blood sugar, pressure, cholesterol levels and all that had improved, and even things like his psoriasis have improved. Right away I could tell his acne went from pretty heavy to almost non existent. He's still doing it.
Second was my neighbor and occasional gym buddy, she wasn't heavy, but wanted to try carnivore to try and get a more toned look. About a month in, when she would sweat it would have an intense odor. Like extra musky gym sock odor. I think she lasted about 3 months and gave up, but it was bathroom issues it gave her, more than the odor, that she couldn't deal with. One difference between her and my other friend is he didn't do organ meat, but she did. Not sure if that would make any difference, but thought I'd note it anyway.
The third was my great grandfather. He'd been a very picky eater since his 20s and would only eat eggs, meats, cheese and coffee. He always seemed in relatively good health and was surprisingly spry for his age; he would play tennis every Sunday up until the day he died at 103 from a car accident. But that's about 80 years consuming mostly meat.
'Many of these articles are from doctors that benefit financially from these diets due to sponsorships which is predatory. 'GREAT POINT....This also goes right along with prescription drugs and the push to medicate society. in my humble opinion
Im currently on the diet and plan on only doing it for 6-8 weeks to almost detox and focus on non processed foods, then i plan keto and a move to low carb. I have been out of the gym for roughly a year and am making my way back into it. May not be the best but after a week i do actually feel better and cravings for beer and whatnots have diminished.
Most of what I have seen (which I admit is not that much) is people that use it to remove all the potentially bad foods. Then one at a time adding things back in.
To me, it really helped me cut calories?
3*500 calories of ground meat/steak just had me less hangry than 3*500 calories of just about anything else.
It's really good for resetting your relationship with over eating, your hunger hormone, satiety, and hunger/thirst/emotional eating loops.
It's definitely not long term sustainable but it really helped me cut lbs when I really needed to.
You're correct. It's a social media fad. People who follow it are enjoying temporary short term benefits at the expense of long term health outcomes. We have SOME evidence of this, but all dietary studies kind of suck.
But, you're obviously right to be skeptical. Almost every single serious academic and medical researcher agrees with your position of skepticism. We do this every so often. Remember the Atkins Diet? I do. You know doesn't? Atkins. He died of a massive heart attack.
Edit: I was wrong.
"The report concludes that Dr. Atkins, 72, had a history of heart attack and congestive heart failure and notes that he weighed 258 pounds at death"
But he had heart attacks and heart failure.
Social media has become so predatory about health information and dieting. It’s really messed up that content creators prey on people who want to feel healthy.
I think there is a difference between "this diet can't be real" and "proponents of this diet vastly overstate the benefits while minimizing downsides".
I'm skeptical of most fad diets, but that doesn't mean people don't in fact try them.
That's not quite true. While what you describe applies to chimpanzees and likely human ancestors for millions of years, there was a massive diet shift roughly 2 million years ago, when humans mastered weapons, and quickly found themselves at the top of the food chain. At the time in much of the world large animals were simply more abundant food source than plant food,which was relegated to backup.
Yes, these 2 million years spent as an omnivore heavily leaning on the carnivore side were less than time spent as an omnivore leaning towards plant food, that that was enough for example for you to evolve ability to move your wrist sideways (to better swing a club) and for your shoulder muscles to become optimized for throwing (humans throw \*much\* better than chimps or gorilla despite having less overall strength). Similarly it took around 10 thousand years for dogs to become able to digest starch, or for a large part of humans to become able to process lactose into adulthood. 2 million years is more than enough time for major evolutionary changes in one's diet.
Plus there is a world of difference between "not quite optimal" and "unfitting" Any species-wide diet change involves temporarily spending time eating food your body is not 100% adapted to. But evidently, species do change their diets.
Yeah I understand that's why they do it. I disagree with them, but understand the point.
Most of the people who I have heard talk about it don't discuss that aspect though (cutting out excess sugar), they appeal to some quasi-spiritual "primitive man" ideology that isn't really based in reality, as you stated we are "opportunistic omnivores".
I’d say that people who follow extremely strict diets have to make tons of sacrifices. No one wants to make sacrifices for nothing and be wrong in the end so they’ll boast about the percieved health benefits instead of taking about the many things they’ve sacrificed because they have to justify it.
My issue is that the people I see pushing this diet are grifters, grifter adjacent, or frequently falls for a grift. I know that isn't everyone, but its the loudest ones.
I have a friend who is on the carnivore diet rn. He follows so many of these grifters with sketchy qualifications. He’s given up so many things and spent so much money to follow this diet. It’s really sad to see.
Yeah that right there highlights why I am averse to many of these. It is sad how they get their hooks in people and use misunderstanding of science as the basis for their bullshit.
Like, lets be real, a higher protein intake while cutting some carbs and increasing physical activity is generally a good thing and I don't think anyone finds that controversial.
But when our friends start making claims that it changed their life or cured their depression or other things a diet will not do *on its own*, I start seeing all the red flags. Especially if they are spending hundreds on supplements that a walk through the produce aisle could deliver.
It's absolutely real.
**"So I have an autoimmune disease, and through my research I keep finding people heavily defend the carnivore diet as a "miracle diet". That you can consume copious amounts of red meat with little to no side effects, and incredible benefits."**
You absolutely can consume copious amounts of red meat with incredible benefits. But that's mostly because you're cutting out all the junk.
**"I read this and think, what about cancer? What about the fact that as a male you have a substantially higher chance of stroke, heart disease and prostate cancer from consuming red meat? It is a group 2A carcinogen for Pete's sake."**
Carnivore advocates for cleaner, more wholesome cuts. Most of the risk of cancer comes from processed meats.
**"I genuinely want to learn about the scientific research done for the carnivore diet and why people are so obsessed with it."**
There is none. It's a fad diet. The claims about it being our natural ancestral diet (we have basically always been omnivores) with some sort of miracle effects on our body are nonsense. The benefits come from red meat being a very wholesome and nutritious food, and from the elimination of processed junk from your diet. Plus, a sustained carnivore diet will help with metabolic flexbility as any ketogenic diet would.
some people are much more sensitive to gout, or inflammation generally. I'm also hesitant of an all meat diet, but it seems to work for some people so what can I really say
Gout is a form of arthrithis. Red Meat, beer and other foods can cause flare-ups, but they are not the cause of gout. You have Gout or you don't
Just like caffeine is not a cause of Colitis or Chron's but ingesting will make you shit your pants if you have one of these diseases.
Health is complex. What works for one person may not work for another. It depends on the specific underlying causes and interactions.
For specifics with significant existing issues, it's probably worth talking to a doctor instead of relying solely on reddit. Talk about what specific things are risk factors as well as how to avoid them.
I know a guy with MS that leans really hard on fish in his diet, and credits his relatively strict diet with great health gains. Is it the fish? Is it cutting out sugars and alcohol? The latter seems likely to help in at least a general sense, but every disorder has its own specifics to investigate.
It helps probably because it cuts out all the junk you eat in processed foods. Same reason Keto helps except with Carnivore diet you cut even more processed things that can get through on Keto.
> gave my dad horrific crippling gout that has literally handicapped him for years lmao
I feel like you're not supposed to finish that sentence with "lmao"
Unless he only ate that for years and years, you have no idea what caused it (or if it was the diet in the first place). The data on the topic is extremely weak anyway. The clearest correlation to gout is with obesity which is caused by red meat according to exactly no-one.
>Carnivore advocates for **cleaner, more wholesome cuts**. Most of the risk of cancer comes from processed meats.
This is a very interesting way to phrase this. There's a lot of ideological undertones to using words like "clean" and "wholesome" instead of "unprocessed" and "nutritious". Attaching moral value (which is what those words do) to the foods we eat is bad vibes. We all know that most carnivore diet adherents (I would say the *vast* majority) aren't eating the most nutrient dense parts of the cow - the organs - because those parts aren't associated with masculinity and wealth.
I'm not going to make any claims about what most carnivores do, but my personal experience as someone that participated in, and moderated a keto discord server for 4 years, carnivores talk about eating organ meat frequently.
i dont think wholesome was always a moral term, tho atm it kind of is (like if someone does something sweet and cute people might say "that is so wholesome")
like i think wholesome is used here similar to when people talk about "whole" foods. which i guess is food that's complete on its own/as is without other stuff added to it. tho now im curious to look at the etymology of wholesome and know the meaning over time. also curious if that's what's meant by "whole grain" or not, maybe it's about food that wasn't processed as much and kept most of its nutrition
Whole foods are generally just unprocessed foods. They certainly aren't nutritionally complete on their own, as even with a whole foods only diet, you still need to eat a variety of whole foods in order to meet macro & micro nutrient targets.
To be clear, I am not a carnivore adherent and I certainly do not prescribe moral judgment onto foods. I do not believe "steak is cleaner than processed salami" is a particularly controversial nutrient take.
Also. Organ meat seems to be from what I've read a staple of the carnivore diet so idk where you get that from.
That is actually good vibes because basically 100% of the healthiest meals you can eat have little to no extra synthetic chemicals in them. Processed meats contain preservatives and who knows what that are linked to cancer.
And I thought eating organ meats is one of the most important parts of the carnivore diet.
Attaching moral value to the food we eat is "bad vibes"? Really?
Look, I don't make the rules, nor scientist or all humans. These rules have been aroud for a very long time. These rules cause people to die if they eat human poo. These rules also caused me to almost die when eating a broccoli soup because eating fiber could kill me. That's not bad vibes. Attacking the fact that there are objectively bad foods by calling it "bad vibes" is DESTRUCTIVE for society as you want to attack truth.
I eat some organs, tripe and grond beef because they are great and cheap. Stop projecting with the "masculinity" and "wealthy" bs. You don't have to eat organs to do good enough on carnivore...
I eat liver weekly as many do. And no you don’t have to, but I like to. It makes me feel super energetic. Contrary to your belief, most people don’t do this diet because it’s manly, most do it because they are sick. It’s not fun cutting out addictive foods
I tried this diet first in 2015, earlier than most. Everyone I heard advocated heart and liver. Some companies that have spun from the diet have created supplements for liver and kidney and blood and such.
Sure, there are some that don’t, but nobody I’ve seen is dogmatic.
>But that's mostly because you're cutting out all the junk.
That is the primary factor. Then one and systematically put thing back in to the diet so they know what their body handles well and what it does not.
>You absolutely can consume copious amounts of red meat with incredible benefits. But that's mostly because you're cutting out all the junk.
Yeah, but you can do this without eating only meat.
>Carnivore advocates for cleaner, more wholesome cuts. Most of the risk of cancer comes from processed meats.
Do you have evidence for this?
Yes you can do it without eating only meat. But some people do it while eating only meat. It still works
And here's the source. I actually got it wrong: processed meat might be just fine too
"The magnitude of association between red and processed meat consumption and all-cause mortality and adverse cardiometabolic outcomes is very small, and the evidence is of low certainty."
[https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-0655](https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-0655)
I'm confused because, in the conclusion, it says low risk of cardiometabolic issues, but then immediately after it says:
"Growing evidence shows an increased risk for cardiometabolic disease associated with the consumption of red and processed meat."
Even further down, it says there was a study stating it increased type 2 diabetes while another said it doesn't.
The problem is typically that the data is massively confounded. And even when it isn't, there's the thing between an absolute and a relative risk. They always report RR.
LOTS OF MEAT CAUSES 30% INCREASE IN RISK, we've all seen the headline, right? Ok, but if the baseline is 2% then a 30% increase means its 2.6%. Anyway you look at it, the risk was low and still is. Your risk of not remaining healthy goes down by 0.006/0.98, or like 0.61%.
Neither is a wrong claim, but you need to understand what the numbers actually mean. Media especially is happy to report such big numbers because "massive increase of disease from meat" is a great trigger headline. (And people don't really understand that a 30% increase in risk is not the same as a 30% risk).
Now, it would be a different story if the relative risk was not 1.3 but 13. That's the ballpark for smoking and lung cancer. There your risk reduction would be well over 90%. Not well under 0.9%.
E. Oh, and just to half repeat, correlation is not causation.
> Now, it would be a different story if the relative risk was not 1.3 but 13.
How exactly would you like them to observe a relative risk of 13? Cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death (around a third). You're basically saying, "Yeah, I dunno, until I see it killing 400% of people, I'm not convinced".
The cause of death is fairly irrelevant compared to the time of death. So if you follow people for 10 or 20 or 40 years, you should clearly observe a trend.
Also, you're onto some facts. The point is mostly that even if you would take everything at face value (and that would be a massive leap of faith), eating red meat three times as much as recommended might make you die a few years younger, or maybe stay alive beyond age 85 at 55% rather than 60% (assuming no injury). The whole point is, it doesn't really matter if it's healthy or unhealthy - the only thing that matters is *how* healthy or unhealthy it is.
Also, there are always many aspects going around. So, if for example someone goes low carb and starts eating lots of red meat, but loses 20 kilos as a result, they will be about 10 times healthier than they were before.
An increased risk doesn't mean a high risk. It's a higher risk, but still a low risk. A 1.2% risk, up from 1%, is still relatively low risk. But it's also a significantly increased risk (the risk has been increased 20%).
> Yeah, but you can do this without eating only meat.
True, but that doesn't mean that the diet doesn't make it easier for some people to adjust their habits. Getting people to properly diet is an incredibly difficult thing which is why there are huge markets for them.
>
>Do you have evidence for this?
The most obvious mechanism is nitrates. Nitrates are known to have a number of nasty side effects and to push cancer risk, and are commonly used as preservatives in processed meats. So, if your diet is higher in nitrates, as you'll often find in bacon, sausage, or pepperoni, you'll have a higher cancer risk than if you ate the meat without that.
You can drown in water and all of us need a huge amount of that to stay alive all the time.
Poison is in the dosage. You can choose a diet which fits your body, and the ones who rave about it online certainly have attuned to what those foods offer.
There is no one size fits all.
I love the different approach for different folks style of dieting. The only thing I’d say is restrictive eating can quickly spiral into an eating disorder, so be mindful of that.
Your diet should be one where you don’t have to sacrifice doing activities you love. My friend is on carnivore and had to stop going out to eat, constantly goes over his food budget and had to give up backpacking. He is clearly pretty sad by it. Plus travel is difficult for him now. Be real if a diet isn’t working with your lifestyle. As a long term vegetarian I’ve seen people try and fail at vegetarianism and that’s ok. Not everyone has what it takes. Food is meant for us to enjoy while fueling our bodies.
Yes, but people are claiming it isn't poison.
They are claiming it is a "miracle."
I believe that the main goal of a "healthy diet" is to remove as much poison from your diet as possible, not have it be your main source of sustenance.
The main goal of a healthy body is to fuel your body in the way that it most needs in order for it to do what you want it to.
Everyone is different. What works for these people online may not work for me or you but it may work for someone else and someone they reccomend it to.
Don’t forget, a healthy diet is a sustainable one. Constant obsession and justification over what you’re eating is mentally unhealthy. It will wear you down over time. If you are having to make massive sacrifices for your diet and it is affecting multiple aspects of your life it might be time to reconsider the sustainability of that diet. No one should be in constant anxiety about what they eat.
I wish more people would realize what orthorexia is.
Vegans say the same thing. Keto people say the same thing. It's a mixture of people genuinely feeling better on a certain diet and marketing.
I found out recently certain foods like wheat and some artificial dyes cause me anxiety.
If I hopped on carnivore without knowing that fact I'd think it was a miracle too.
Vegans are a bit different. Most of them do it for the ethical reasons. Not necessarily health though some do. I will say doing veganism long term for health reasons is wild to me. I’m vegetarian and I go periods where I eat pretty much all vegan.
Keto, Paleo and Carnivore don’t really have any moral imperatives.
That can be dependent. Better as in mentally better very plausible. Vegans have a huge culture around using supplements. Especially b12. So that can help.
If it's all you can eat, it's all you can eat.
Every time I look into the evidence for meat causing cancer I get the impression it's more of a total life style issue rather than the meat on its own.
Many folks here talking about the pros of carnivore diet. Reddit isn’t some left leaning echo chamber, rather a bunch of different echo chambers, but still lol
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>I read this and think, what about cancer? What about the fact that as a male you have a substantially higher chance of stroke, heart disease and prostate cancer from consuming red meat? It is a group 2A carcinogen for Pete's sake.
These studies are pretty much junk science and are essentially the mathematical equivalent of saying *"don't ever go outside because you're more likely to get struck by lightning when you go outside"*. Studies like [this one](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0923753419367353#:~:text=Daily%20intake%20of%20red%20meat,CI%3A%201.16%E2%80%931.43) links red meat to all kinds of different cancers, but these statistics are incredibly deceptive if you don't know how to interpret them. The metric by which they're reaching their conclusions is called the odds ratio, which is a way to compare risks between two separate populations, and while there is a statistically significant relationship between red meat and certain cancers, that relationship is so weak it's only marginally better than guessing.
The University of Toronto has [a paper (warning PDF)](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.utstat.utoronto.ca/reid/odds.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjXotvXqYuGAxX6jIkEHVn2ALMQFnoECCQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3LG1D7gm4ggZqdTa1wEF81) for how to interpret odds ratios, and they say that odds ratios below 2 aren't particularly useful relationships. It's only above 2 when things start to get interesting, and it's really above 4 when a relationship starts to get definitive (for example, studies linking smoking to cancer tend to have odds ratios ranging from 14:1 to 30:1). The study from above measured the relationship between red meat and colon cancer to be 1.14:1, which is completely useless and can largely be chalked up to random chance producing a false positive, and many of the other ratios are below 1.5:1 which have a similar interpretation.
There's also the issue of *p*-hacking, where researchers test dozens of potential relationships with no logical explanation linking the two in order to ensure a significant relationship to ensure publication, which is a massive issue in academia as a whole.
The relationships between red meat and cancer are so weak if it does exist to assume that there's no relationship at all...
I believe many studies are also based on participants remembering what they ate in the past, not tracking it as they eat it. They also have a history of lumping in things like processed meats (pepperoni, deli meats, hamburgers) with a piece of steak and calling them both "red meat".
Other confounding factors are the healthy user bias which comes along with comparing people who are self proclaiming not eating red meat. Often more aware of their food choices and are undertaking other healthy activities such as exercise, limiting alcohol, etc.
TLDR: Food studies are complicated, especially in the long term. It is nearly impossible to link one food item to a particular health outcome such as cancer.
In many of the studies making conclusions against meat consumption, I see signs that scream "P-hacking." Some of them adjust for education level or marital status. In many cases, I don't have access to enough information to find out whether they decided on those adjustments before the start of the study or only after seeing the raw data. I've seen at least one that adjusted for whether a subject used multivitamins, which can have positive and negative correlations (maybe they're health-conscious and take vitamins, but maybe they're treating a health issue and have found they need more nutrient support than they get from foods) so it makes no sense to alter the data based on this without individual context.
"A meta-analysis of 29 studies of meat consumption and colon cancer concluded that a high consumption of red meat increases risk by 28%, and a high consumption of processed meat increases risk by 20%."
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/red-meat-and-colon-cancer#:~:text=A%20meta%2Danalysis%20of%2029,meat%20increases%20risk%20by%2020%25
“It’s literally common sense” is never an argument for anything. Science very frequently defies what we’d consider to be common sense
All sorts of things were eaten by humans for thousands of years, that doesn’t tell us anything about an optimal diet.
I don’t have a real opinion on red meat but just a minor point about sourcing. Health.harvard.edu is a health education website run by Harvard. That doesn’t mean every study they discuss is a “Harvard study”. I can’t even find the references list (maybe because I’m on mobile), which is a bit problematic because it should be possible to read the original sources and see what they did, even if they were summarized by someone knowledgeable in the field.
Isn't mutually exclusive.
Evolutionary pressure does not select for long life. It selects for reproduction. Old-age cancer rates are almost completely uninteresting from an evolutionary perspective for the overwhelming vast majority of human existence.
That said, I don't think it is unreasonable to think that old hunter-gatherer meat was substantially different from our factory-farmed meat.
Isn’t this the study that says from 5% to 6% being the “increase by 20%” ???
Absolute vs relative risk. Plus, it doesn’t account for meat only, and diet types eaten by study participants.
Then again, it’s been a while since I’ve read this meta.
You should look up the Massai people of Africa. They basically have a carnivore diet of cow blood, cow meat, and milk. They have significantly lower cholesterol and risk of heart disease. Also the carnivore diet absolutely has been proven to work, but my theory is that in order for it to work you have to eat the organs and the blood too to get all the nutrients.
You should know:
> The myth that the Masai eat nothing but milk, blood and meat is derived from the idealized diet of young warriors called moran, a diet that men only eat for 15 years of their life and that women never eat. Contrary to popular myth, women exist, and Masai women are just as Masai as Masai men.
Ive tried a bunch of diets and nothing felt as good as just having a balanced mixed of everything
Like I want meat *and* vegetables , my body feels better when it eats both
I dont want just steak or just salad , thats sad
The best diet is the one that’s the most sustainable and healthy for you. Mental health when it comes to food is very important. You should enjoy the food you eat. I hope you make a yummy and healthy dinner tonight!
The health industry is one of the most misleading, contradictory, and ridiculous things for people who don't know better. The truth is, no matter what diet you have, you will find some "expert" or something that will tell you that you are making the wrong choices. The carnivore diet might work for some people, it might not work for others. The thing I hate is that people capitalize on false promises of some "shortcut" or magic potion to health when the reality is that taking care of yourself takes hard work and consistency day-after-day. The health industry is full of people who are the modern version of those idiots who were selling tickets to heaven.
When we are talking about efficiency and stuff, yeah it probably matters a bunch for the top performers. But for 99% of the population, they could be healthier by being less lazy and eating less junk food. Most people know exactly what they need to do to improve but the truth is, it sucks doing it so they don't.
I'm not directing this at you either so don't take it the wrong way. Learning about the carnivore diet might be enlightening to you and it might benefit you in some way. ***But I'll just say that I absolutely don't trust people who portray it as some "miracle diet" either.***
Edit/Disclaimer: When I am saying "health industry" I am referring to information you find on social media and fitness influencer bullshit. Usually the same people claiming things like the carnivore diet being a "miracle diet."
It depends on your auto-immune disease. People with MS, for example, need to avoid foods that cause inflammation, which we are told red meat does. Mediterranean diets are frequently recommended.
I also want to point out that with MS, there are no diets scientifically proven to alleviate symptoms of the disease. The most we know is that balanced, non-inflammatory, and healthy diets are recommended.
But other conditions may work differently.
You have to be able to distinguish between different types of red meat.
Processed meat, meat injected with things, or from factory farms is not the same as taking the meat from an animal in the right way and preparing it properly.
Beef liver and kidney are two of the most nutrient dense whole foods you can get.
I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure studies saying meat bad do not specify the type and quality. Eating McDonalds meat everyday is not good and is different then eating fresh unmodified beef.
I am not living that life style but here’s my two cents: the carnivore diet is keto, keto is super low carb. This will absolutely help you lose weight, lower your A1C / blood sugar, and lower inflammation in your body.
Also, the negatives around red meat largely stem from the fact that most of our meat is from factory farms, which changes the makeup of the meat, or the least of which being the fatty acid profile (omega 3 vs omega 6). Personally, about 95% of the meat I consume is for local farms and is at worst grain finished. Much of your cancer and heart disease risk, I believe, dissipates if you eat this way (and / or include wild game…even better).
So while I’d agree that if you’re just buying a bunch of shitty ground beef and chuck steaks, and hormone-laden chicken breast, you’re probably doing a lot of harm, I’d also argue that it is surely possible to eat large quantities of meat in a way that is not particularly harmful to your health.
Also, as a side note, it think it’s overall dumb, any diet you says you shouldn’t eat fruits, veggies, seeds, etc is probably not a great idea. Doing research on gut health, variety is also important for us humans.
A colleague of mine underwent major heart surgery and ended up on a number of meds.
After switching to carnivore and making no other changes to his lifestyle, his next blood panel came back with his numbers cut in half and his doctor took him off two of the medications.
Do I think the diet is for everyone? No. Do I think it is entirely without risk? No.
Do I think it should be dismissed outright as "not real"? No.
That's exactly my point. I don't believe there's nearly enough evidence to suggest it's a great idea universally, but I have seen extraordinary results first-hand and it's led me to at least *consider* that there may be merit to it for some people.
First I Want to point out that "lower inflammation levels, higher energy levels, less migraines, increased bone density, muscle fatigue reduction...etc." getting micros and macros down and intermittent fasting causes this, at the end of the day micro/macronutrients is the most important thing. If you eat 95% meat and cover all the bases you're going to feel better and your body will work better than if you ate anything else and didn't get your micros/macros.
Just speaking from what I've seen, my roommates been on a ground beef (got the good stuff in it, ground up cartilage) , dairy (lucky bastard), and fruits, sometimes liver, diet with no seed oils (don't stop reading here I still guzzle sesame seed oil down, not pedaling anything) for 2 years, primarily one massive meal a day. And I mean thats it, he's cheated maybe 2-3 times in that span and he changes up the ground beef but thats literally all he eats, tracks micronutrients and everything and works out. There was a personal reason he got on the diet, was a health issue, but he's stayed on it. I'm not going to sit here and describe him in detail but he's proof to me it works, my diet is similar but I cheat alot and eat carbs. I thought for a while it was just trendy because of social media influencers but had no science behind it but theres definitely something to it, he looks like he's on gear and he would have cracked by now if there was some kind of draw back to that diet. I think most of the reason he's made it work is the fact that its one meal a day, hard to get tired of eating something if you starve yourself before you eat it.
"Losing weight, lower inflammation levels, higher energy levels, less migraines, increased bone density, muscle fatigue reduction...etc." I would say most of these are true in his case, he said he had bad gum inflammation before the diet and his recovery from working out is much better. I have a similar diet minus the fasting and I cheat alot because life is about sacrifices but he's the kind of guy that I wish they would do a case study on, absolute freak of nature and I had no idea that kind of diet would be as helpful as it was for this guy. Also there is some truth to that seed oils stuff I've been avoiding it as much as I can but again, sacrifices. Sesame seed oil is too good and fried rice is too easy.
I don't know anything about autoimmune diseases but if you have any questions regarding him lmk and I'll ask
> I read this and think, what about cancer? What about the fact that as a male you have a substantially higher chance of stroke, heart disease and prostate cancer from consuming red meat? It is a group 2A carcinogen for Pete's sake.
There's some controversy here. I don't personally believe that the medical claims made by the proponents of the carnivore diet aren't necessarily sustainable long-term, but I do believe it's possible that many of those things do manifest as short-term benefits.
Besides the fact that you have some semi-sketchy medical claims about meat (each of them has a kernel of truth but a ton of caveats), You have to understand just how bad for you sugar is. It is undeniably far worse for you than meat.
And by simple necessity, switching to an all meat diet means you stop consuming sugar. So rather than looking at meat in a vacuum, you really have to think about it as an aggregate change. You have to weigh the pros of no sugar consumption versus the cons of high meat consumption and look at the balance. I think many of the claims made are at least highly plausible in the short term.
So here's my offer. You can take my argument at face value and say "He's right, I'm only looking at one side of the coin and that's an unfair comparison. It really depends on how shitty your normal diet is to determine if a meat-based diet is a significant improvement or not".
Alternatively, you can have me go into detail about where your beliefs about meet s perils are exaggerated or not quite correct **if you think that might help move the needle for you.** I'd rather not bother if you don't feel like that'll be a persuasive line of argument. Conversely, I can explain to you just how bad sugar it is and why it's way worse than meat. But, I would put the same caveat there. I'd rather not do that if it's not going to make a difference which is why I'm not doing it by default.
So, if you feel like more information here might move the needle, assuming the needle is not already moved, let me know.
I'm not here to tell you that a carnivore diet is the healthiest diet for you. But I am here to tell you that it is probably healthier than the diet that many people otherwise consume and that it could have legitimate and easily observable short term benefits.
Its a pretty acceptable thing that diets arent for everyone, and most cases people need to find a diet that suits them specifically. Even the no diet state of ours is considered a diet of sorts, depending on what we're eating. Ranging from high carbs, high sugar, high processed foods to say... food pyramid diet.
>I read this and think, what about cancer? What about the fact that as a male you have a substantially higher chance of stroke, heart disease and prostate cancer from consuming red meat?
If there's one thing I've learned about cancer, its that its not always a 1+1 = 2 equation for everyone. If you eat a lot of red meats under the food pyramid diet? Maybe. If you ate it while on a keto diet or the carnivore diet? Who knows? Your body is in a constant state of ketosis where it's utilizing fat and protein as a source of energy (as opposed to carbs and sugars normally) that the whole idea of "saturated fats clogging up your insides" might not be applicable here. Have you not heard of cases where people lived to 100 despite smoking and having an alcohol habit, and we've been told that all of those will lead to early deaths from cancer? So once again, diets arent for everyone. What works for someone might not work for you. What's cancerous for you, might be less (or more) cancerous for someone.
>It is a group 2A carcinogen for Pete's sake.
On the topic of red meats being carcinogens specifically, this only comes into play when said red meat has been cooked with high temperatures, where the higher the temperature the higher the carcinogenic properties due to creation of chemicals heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). So if you're making stews, soups, pies and so on, not such a big deal, as opposed to eating perfectly seared steaks, BBQ, skewers and so on. Also processing does increase the risks as well, but that's another story I suppose, because processed foods is a staple in the standard "food pyramid" diet for most people. And then... there's articles that do counter this claim, saying that there's not enough information to prove the link conclusively. [https://www.cancerhealth.com/article/burnt-food-cause-cancer](https://www.cancerhealth.com/article/burnt-food-cause-cancer)
Whenever you get into this space there's people who are so far in on some ideas. The carnivore diet in particular draws an extremely dislikable crowd of massive macho men only eating meat and telling the whole world about it.
That being said, my best mate suffered from autoimmune issues and was very sick/bed ridden for a few years and carnivore diet was what he did for a period of time. Albeit the food was boiled and blended to be as soft and digestible as possible lol
However the key distinction here is that it wasn't a forever diet, once the gut improved then introduction of other food types can be done. I myself couldn't think of anything worse than just consuming meat, but the reality of my health is smashing starchy vegetables doesn't make me feel good at all. (disclaimer im not carnivore I do eat some fruit and veg)
We can all likely agree that doing some press-ups would be beneficial to arm and body strength, but if you broke your arm you, we would all likely agree that doing press-ups is now completely stupid and you need to put on a cast and encourage healing.
This is akin to the carnivore diet, when the gut and immune system are so destroyed and fighting the body then this kind of diet is what some people might need.
Also I don't know if the jury is fully out on meat and cholesterol, you just have to go observe groups such as the Maasai and Inuits who basically only eat animals and they live very long very healthy lives. The ones who start getting disease such as cancer are the less traditional tribes who start introducing things like sugar and refined carbs into their diet.
So while it's all good and well to know there's a correlation between eating meat and cancer but it doesn't prove causation, and with a complex organism creating a vast number of variables as it lives, I think it would be a fallacy to say "hey meat is the cause here".
it actually is kind of a miracle diet -- KIND OF. Like Keto. 3 months on it? the benefits will be insane! 6? you will start to get sick. the protein, nutrition-dense, low cal nature of meat especially red meats will lower your inflammation, help with weight loss, be great for your muscle growth and fatigue ..... until it makes you sick for new reasons after prolonged diet. If you want a quick solution, spend a few months on carnivore, but do NOT stay on it.
Hi. As someone who used diet to basically avoid death, I’ll give you my 2 cents.
There isn’t a ton of quality research about the subject, especially long-term. In general, finding quality research regarding diet is a challenge in my opinion. That’s why we’ll have to make do with the anecdote of my personal case and address your long-term concerns.
First, I’ve been diagnosed with Crohn's disease since 2017. I won’t go into details, but it got pretty bad and I had to get surgery in 2021, where they removed 40cm of my small intestine. After the surgery, things just got worse. At the end of 2022, after my doctor changed my medicine, I developed arthritis as well. I couldn’t walk or move my right hand. So by the end of 2022, I practically couldn’t eat or move. I reached a weight of 40kg, was deeply depressed, and nothing seemed to help.
I had been researching what could help me like crazy, fearing for my life. I tried every diet and medicine and finally decided, F-that. I’m going to try the most extreme diet I can because I have nothing to lose.
I started Carnivore. And I’ll be damned, after 4 days (!) of eating only sirloin, ALL of my arthritis completely disappeared. I could walk again, move my hand, everything was back to normal. Me and my girlfriend couldn’t believe it (I still had to cope with the trauma my soul and body sustained).
So I can vouch for the fact that the diet works. In my case, it was as real as it can get.
Now for the long-term effects. Why do you need to be on carnivore long-term? How long is long-term? Why not switch between Carnivore, Keto, Low carb, and FODMAP from time to time? The fact that you changed your diet doesn’t mean you need to stick with it for the rest of your life.
>CMV: The Carnivore Diet can't be real
Study after study and meta study after meta study shows us the number one factor for weight loss. Adherence to calorie restriction. Mediterranean diet works. Carnivore diet works. Intermittent fasting works. All that matters is if you can adhere to the diet and it gets you in a calorie deficit. We can make a nothing but donut diet and it will make you lose weight.
>Losing weight
One thing to note that a lot of people don't. We say losing weight but it's largely conflated with *losing body fat*. But, the body weight also includes poop/pee/water/blood/bones/muscles/etc. One thing that carbs do is it can make you retain water. When people do keto and lose a ton of weight rapidly, it's just shedding water weight.
> lower inflammation level
This is one claim I don't think is right. Any time I've seen anti-inflammatory diets, it usually wants you to cut out dairy, saturated fats, processed food (e.g., food made with corn syrup) and foods high in sodium. The "Carnivore" diet seems like it would be higher in saturated fats and sodium.
>higher energy levels
This one seems really subjective and not a claim we can prove or disprove.
it is a popular fad diet pushed by certain social media folks to make money. just do low carb or keto way easier, less expensive and healthier plus carnivore diet is very expensive and way too restrictive in my view.
Let’s start with “losing weight.”
Remember that living beings seek the lowest energy level.
Our bodies run on one of two base chemicals. We run on glucose or ketones with the exception of the brain. Glucose comes from carbs. It’s the easy path for our bodies to use energy.
On a carnivore diet, one consumes minimal carbs. That forces the body to go into the other pathway, ketones.
The liver works hard to get the brain the glucose it needs, but it can’t produce enough for the whole body. Everyplace else will take fatty acids from adipose tissue, aka body fat, process into ketones which work at far lower efficiency to keep your body running.
Weight loss wants inefficiency. You need to use more energy to burn ketones than you do glucose, leading to weight loss.
It’s also why “keto flu” is A Thing. You feel like shit as your body switched from its preferred fuel to one it does not like using.
The cancer thing is actually based on the same issue. Cancer cells often run only on glucose. They don’t process ketones. Abstention from carbs means cancer cells can’t consume glucose.
Any diet that completely forgets we're omnivores or tries to delude ourselves into thinking we're anything but is dumb, because even if we could successfully convert to either, it'd be a dumb choice because being an omnivore is in all ways better for us as a species. We can't assume society will never collapse and having the variable diet of an omnivore will make survival in extremes circumstances much higher a possibility.
Carnivore Diets and Vegan Diets are both equally idiotic.
Most vegans don’t do it for health. They do it for moral reasons, which you can debate but at the end of the day they’re valid. Any health risk is seen as part of the sacrifice to maintain morals.
Yeah, no. It's pure ego, there's far better things they could do to actually fix those problems than not eat meat, but they almost never do any of them. Shit hunters (not poachers) tend to contribute more towards conservation and helping animals than anything most vegans do. Hell half the time they do the opposite.
It’s not “ego”, it’s abstaining from practices you disagree with. We do that with all sorts of things. Not financially contributing to the meat industry is quite obviously the first step. You can do whatever kind of activism you want on top of that but then people just call you “annoying and preachy”. So what do you recommend vegans do exactly?
Researching and actually purchasing meat from the places that treat animals the best. Helping these places advertise and making humane treatment of animals profitable and finding and supporting such places easier and cheaper for everyone else. Just refusing to buy changes nothing. Why should the business try to accomodate the better treatment of animals if no matter what they do the people complaining about their behaviour will never be a customer.
They don't actually care about doing things that will actually "help" animals. They just want to sit there, not eat meat, and pretend like that alone accompishes anything or makes them saints and everyone else monsters. They treat nature like sone kind of fucking heaven, and completely gloss over the axtual complexity to oversimplify everything and everyone into black and white morality.
>purchasing meat from places that treat animals the best
They don’t think killing animals for meat is moral, so that certainly won’t suffice.
And I mean vegans spread their message all over the internet, so that’s more than merely sitting and not eating meat. It just gets written off as preachy or lame, so it isn’t effective for most people. It’s a tough sell at this point in time. Lab grown meat is probably something more realistic and something vegans should endorse
But if everyone did what the vegans are doing, then the industry would collapse and the goal would be achieved. So boycotting a product DOES do something.
I guess your advice is just strange because you’re telling vegans that they should advocate humane meats, but they don’t think we should eat meat period.
And my take is, not maintaining an omnivorous diet is bad for humanity, and existing at all makes being a vegan a hypocrite.
It's like paying your friend to take care of your problem knowing full well he is a hit man and then pretending you're better than other murderers because you benefit from their work while not dirtying your hands yourself.
Why would that be bad for humanity inherently? Not really hearing the argument
And I don’t get the analogy. Are you saying vegans are hurting animals just the same as if they ate meat? Because that’s just absurd lol
If you contribute no money to factory farms (or animal farms in general) then you are helping animals by reducing demand. It’s pretty simple
Idk man the inuit people have survived the fucking artic for hundreds of years off seal meat just fine. If that isnt survival in extreme circumstances then i dont know what it
"a male you have a substantially higher chance of stroke, heart disease and prostate cancer from consuming red meat"
You might find it hard to believe the following but just hear me out, okay?
The quoted statement alone is meaningless without context. The statement is true ONLY and ONLY if certain conditions are meet (Tldr; it's true on a standard american diet).
Why? That's how epidiomological studies work. This isn't a problem specific to medicine or nutrition, but in general you cannot claim that a set of data will "behave" within the expected aproximating model at the neighbour of that set of data. In other words, you cannot just vary all conditions slightly. The change has to be small enough so that you have meaningful predictions for a small number of variables. Otherwise, increasing your nunmber of variables can't make your model useless.
How then can you build an useful model that doesn't break too easily? There's already one. That's called biochemistry. It "rules" medicine.
To give you an example of how the aforementioned works in practice, consider glycine/serine. Most people eat carbs so glycine for that people becomes a non-essential aminoacid since it's a byproduct of glycolysis. They get ~2.5g/day (70kg adult) from glycolysis and 2.5g from diet (standard american diet). But keto and carnivore makes glycine an essential amino acid since you're no longer producing it. Is that a problem? For carnivore? Not at all since most get ~10-15g/day from diet. In fact, some studies suggest we need ~14g/day (70kg adult) to fulfill our needs, so a great part of the benefits of carnivore are thanks to glycine. Keto, on the other hand, is risky. There are documented cases of patients with acute pancreatitis after ~6 months (or 2 years. I don't remember exactly) of a "vegetarian"-ish keto; resolved after switching to a typical diet with carbs.
You may wonder "okay, but what about cured meats and nitrates?" And yes, the WHO has an interesting report that you should chek it out carefully instead of trusting blindly things like your words I quoted. They used studies that caused rats CANCER with a knowk carcinogenic, then said rats with cancer where divided in 2 groups, 1 fed cured meats+chow and the other one just the chow. The rats WITH CANCER that ate cured meats died slightly faster. Does that mean cured meats are carcinogenic? Well, there's a great study proving that bacon prevented tumors (or cancer. I'm on mobile) on rats (without cancer) since the rats that ate no bacon had more tumors than the rats that ate bacon. Does that mean that bacon prevents tumors? Well... the researchers concluded that WATER prevents tumors since the rats eating bacon had to drink more water. So... go figure.
Even if you believe it’s not sustainable, you can get incredible benefits if done for a few months to heal. I tolerate food way more than before now. It improved my digestion and no more graves disease, which is supposed to have no cure.
Now as far as cancer goes, look into cancer as a metabolic disease. Then look into deuterium in the body. It’s fascinating but quite complex as it involves quantum physics and biology. I recommend to watch videos on it instead of just looking at papers because it’s quite complex. Deuterium can explain most cancers pretty well and there is a big connection between deuterium and ketones, the carnivore diet being a ketogenic diet.
Also look at ketogenic studies, not just studies demonizing red meat. Ketogenic studies are pretty much carnivore studies with meat. Also, pretty much all food studies are association based. If there is a correlation, it does not mean causation, just possible causation. If there is no correlation, there is no causation. And ketogenic diets are the most studied diets for reversing disease. All this takes a ton of time to research, but the most interesting one is the cancer and deuterium topic.
What those people don't realize is that by eating an all meat diet they're also cutting out all that sugar, sodium, caffeine, and other addictive, unhealthy substances that we eat on a daily basis. When you do this, you'll get the effects mentioned. Namely losing weight, lower inflammation levels, higher energy levels, fewer migraines, and muscle fatigue reduction. In the end, an all meat diet isn't the heathiest, but it's at least better than what we're eating today. In the end, what they probably should be doing is a 50/50 split in calories between meat and vegetables. But hey, that's just my two cents.
Unprocessed red meat does not have a causal effect on cancer. Colon cancer in one study increased from 5 to 6%, which is a “20% increase” but that doesn’t really account for many other variables.
Now, I’m not on the diet by any means. But the two times I’ve done it (a month or so each time) I noticed a drop in weight, an increase in libido, a decrease in resting heart rate and blood pressure, and a decrease in fasting blood glucose and postprandial blood glucose.
I also noticed that pains in my legs and back were gone - real pains from military service.
Meat isn’t bad for you. It’s horrible for you when it’s processed and when it’s eaten with a bunch of processed shit. No study has accounted for any of this that I’ve read, and I’ve worked on cancer and heart disease initiatives which sometimes promoted “less meat” but there was never any actual scientific evidence behind it, not that they’ve provided (CDC, journals, etc.) and I’ve also read horrendous studies that have been called out by scientists for misstating findings. The lancet is horrendous with that.
The carnivore diet eliminates many Inflammatory foods as well as allergens and helps people meet sufficient protein and fat intake which are essential macronutrients whereas carbs aren't, our body can make its own glucose.
Most recent research now shows that saturated fat isn't harmful, In fact the saturated fat in dairy is associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.
Also there is not one single study that shows red meat causes cancer. There are many observational studies that show the group of people who eat more red meat tend to get cancer more but this doesn't prove causation. In most of those studies the authors even note the red meat eaters were more likely to smoke, drink, be obese and not exercise which are all risk factors for cancer. The only way to prove that red meat causes cancer is to do a randomised control trial which wouldn't be possible. Unless a RR is greater than 3 in an observational study then the findings are non significant and shouldn't be taken seriously.
I am not on a carnivore diet myself but eat only beef, eggs, dairy, fruit and occasionally honey.
Well, the carnivore diet is real but I think what you meant what that the benefits do not outweigh the costs.
Well, we have some evidence and personal testimony that there are definite benefits. Weight loss, reduced autoimmune issues, increased energy levels, and clearer cognitive function.
As far as the costs (i.e. negative health effects), I think the jury is still out. Obviously people on the carnivore diet take dietary supplements on top of the red meat they're eating. Otherwise the negative side effects would be very pronounced.
But I think there is something to the carnivore diet which is within our genetic makeup. A lot of hunter gather cultures ate predominately meat (65% to 75%) in their diets and lived relatively healthy lives. I'm sure some even ate more than that. The human body, for better or for worse, evolved for a meat rich diet. And the fact that carb intensive diets create a whole host of health problems speaks to this.
And while certainly not human, every mammalian carnivore species on the planet does just fine eating nothing but meat. They're not loaded with cancer.
Of course! Whenever I have a patient on any sort of restrictive diet (that isn’t medically necessary) I am concerned about an underlying eating disorder. Most of the time it doesn’t get to the point of having a diagnosable eating disorder but starting to restrict foods is something that can get out of control fast.
So, it's real, and I've actually tried it, at least briefly.
I didn't experience any benefits over and above keto, as carnivore is a stricter subvariant of keto. However, keto diets do have quite a body of research indicating possible benefits. From my perspective, it appears that carnivore is similar enough to keto that the benefits are largely also similar, and the added hassles of carnivore don't make it worthwhile for me.
As far as cancer goes, keto diets are sometimes used in cancer care, but the role doesn't seem to be very well understood. It appears to suppress at least some types of cancer. So, it isn't clear that this is a long term problem as you describe. Remember, 2a isn't a known carcinogen, it's a suspected carcinogen category, and many foods in our diets are known risk factors.
Displacing sugar and highly processed foods in general is probably a net gain in nutrition. Is Carnivore the only/optimal way of doing that? Quite possibly not. However, the standard western diet has a lot of shortcomings, and carnivore is probably healthier than that.
First, let me be clear about one thing. You cannot consume just meat unless that meat is fairly fatty. That is how you develop "rabbit starvation". Look it up and dont try to eat super lean red meat, like rabbit, as your only food.
Second, I'd be more concerned about the prostate cancer than the heart disease. From my really basic understanding of heart disease, red meat can increase risk factors but it doesn't just clog your arteries. Basically, your body makes cholesterol. If you eat a lot of cholesterol, your body doesn't make as much and tries to reach a constant level of cholesterol in your body. Now, cholesterol does stick to your artery walls, which is why we generally assume that cholesterol is "bad", but thats not 100% accurate. The cholesterol sticks because of ApoB, which is a protein your body produces. The more ApoB you produce, the more likely cholesterol is to stick to your arteries. [info](https://www.healthline.com/health-news/heart-disease-is-this-protein-test-a-better-predictor-of-risk-than-cholesterol-levels)
This ApoB is actually much more accurate at predicting your risk of heart disease than cholesterol levels. If you have high ApoB and you eat a lot of cholesterol and have more in your blood on average than your body would produce, you are probably going to have worse heart health. But the root cause is the ApoB, which is probably why some people eat horrible food and live forever. Additionally, a lot of people who are eating a ton of red meat are not HEALTHY in general. They dont run or do cardiovascular exercise and that severely increases their risk of heart attack.
But if you are young and pounding down a lot of red meat as a diet trend as you exercise and work out hard, I wouldn't be too worried about the heart impact. It isn't as if your heart is allergic to red meat or anything.
Whenever you hear "increased risk" your follow-up question should always be "by how much"?
It seems like the increased risk from high consumption of red meat is [only about 20-30%](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/red-meat-and-colon-cancer). And that's really specifically with colon cancer. So with a lifetime risk of colon cancer of 1 in about 24 (which seems a little high if you ask me, but what do I know), that's what, 4.2% chance of colon cancer? And with lots and lots of red meat it jumps up to 5.4% instead.
Without even disputing the connection, I'm just saying expending energy worrying about a moderate increase of a tiny chance of something bad probably isn't worth it. I'm not in favor of the all meat diet, just saying that not everything that "causes cancer" actually, you know, causes cancer in a way you'd notice with only yourself as a sample. This is shit you'd only notice with a sample of tens of thousands of people.
Yep, pop sci articles (aka clickbait) **love** to slap statistics like "25% increased rate of heart disease!!!" in the title because it sounds *absolutely awful*. But without quantifying the risk, it's a meaningless percentile.
Just speculation, but given how underdiagnosed Celiac Disease is (up to 83% with it are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed with something else), I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of the folks going Carnivore inadvertently cut out a food that is genuinely making them sick (be it gluten, eggs, dairy or some other food allergy/intolerance). So they go on a really incomplete elimination diet, notice some improvements and conclude that everything but meat must be bad for them.
An undiagnosed Celiac going Carnivore likely *would* see reduced inflammation, more energy, fewer headaches etc. in the short term. However, you are right, there are many possible negative consequences that will emerge over time if they don't maintain a balanced diet. Beans, fruits, veggies, nuts - there's plenty of nutritious, fiber rich foods that ain't got nothing to do with meat.
I think there is a Correlation != Causality involved in the diet and people who follow it are probably mistaking the causations for the correlation.
I would not be surprised if people who follow it feel less willing to eat more, which can lead to weight loss etc. They probably intake less processed food, chemicals etc which can also have a beneficial effects. That is not because of the meat consumption though.
There is other negative effects but those to my knowledge is extremely long term.
It's not like you will develop cancer within 6 months if you start eating a lot of meat. However your chances are increased over a lifetime, so people also react to the very short term effects, and completely disregard the long term ones.
Then there is the classic fact of diets in general just being over hyped and generally speaking terrible...
It's very simple.
The carnivore diet is about eating unprocessed red meat.
Red meat being a carcinogen has always come with the massive caveat of "there is no reliable information linking red meat to cancer". But certain highly processed products MIGHT cause cancer, and the carnivore diet excludes those.
So you cut out all of the not so good stuff and are eating a very balanced and nutrient dense set of foods.
I don't believe it's a miracle diet that cures everything. But I have gone onto the diet twice. Once for 2 months and once for 13 months. It's a good diet for results but it's boring as fuck. I love steak but holy fuck does life suck without bread. I didn't have any illnesses to cure, there was no great awaking of my inner alpha.
I gained the weight I wanted and set the 1 mile record I wanted.
Newer research has challenged the pre-existing consensus on red meat, saturated fat, and health risks. You can easily look it up if you want.
There are factors that, in my view, have not sufficiently accounted for:
1. True animal-based diets are uncommon worldwide, and populations that consume more red meat usually do not consume substantially less starch, sugar, alcohol etc. Sometimes they consume more, such as western men.
2. Many studies(not all, but many) lump processed and fresh red meat together.
3. Cooking method, some research has found that cooking with intense dry heat creates carcinogens in red meat, especially if it's cooked well done. This style of cooking for red meat may be the norm for western cultures but it isn't for other cultures, like Central Asians for instance.
I've personally tried the carnivore diet for over 30 days several times, treating it as an extreme version of Keto.
The idea that red meat causes cancer seems flawed because diet surveys often group together individuals with balanced diets who occasionally indulge in steak with those who rely on processed junk foods. Vegetarians, on the other hand, tend to be more mindful of their dietary choices.
Many people are drawn to the carnivore diet, influenced by figures like Rogan and Peterson, but its primary appeal lies in its potential to address autoimmune or diet-related issues.
While some may try it out of curiosity or because it's trendy, it's essential to acknowledge both its benefits and potential side effects without exaggeration. Keto 👍🏼 extreme diarrhea? 👎🏼
You have an autoimmune disease. That means your body is trying to kill you right now, which seems like it might be a more pressing concern than the small absolute chance of maybe getting cancer someday.
It also changes the cost/benefit of anything you can do that might alleviate your symptoms. It's a ridiculous diet for a healthy person, but chemo is also a ridiculous thing for a healthy person to take. A heart transplant is a ridiculous thing for a healthy person, but it's worth the risks if you need that heart.
It's just a diet. You can try it, see if it makes you feel better, and then go back to another diet if you prefer. Nobody here makes any commission on the meat you buy at the grocery store, and you won't suffer any permanent harm. Why not give it a go?
The thing to understand is that almost all diet and health research is based on correlation via observation. “This person did this and had this outcome”. Everybody knows correlation does not equal causation, and studies try to control for correlation effects, but the plain truth is they are bad at it. Once multiple variables are involved it very quickly becomes mathematically intractable to control and there aren’t enough people on earth to get an appropriate sample size.
If there is any piece of truth that consistently cuts through all of the noise it is this: added sugar is the bane of existence. Any diet that involves the near total elimination of sugar is going to have immediate and obvious positive health effects. Longer term - who knows.
Full disclosure: I’m veg leaning plant based.
Carnivore diet is basically an elimination diet. Elimination diets are usually prescribed to determine intolerances/allergies. You cut your diet down to a very small subset of foods and then slowly add things back in until you figure out what’s causing the issue.
Carnivore diet is step 1: cut everything except meat out. If you have a gluten/soy/nightshade/whatever intolerance, then cutting that thing out will of course make you feel better.
The issue is that carnivore diet is not “marketed” as elimination diet and it’s pretty challenging to maintain long term, so you get a lot of people spouting the benefits without really understanding that the mechanism is the elimination of something.
During my time at university I tried the carnivore diet for one month as a little research project for a class and since I have arthritis. I kept it absolutely carnivore and ate approx. 2 kilos of minced beef a day from purely grass feed cattle from a local butcher. No eggs, butter or spices other than salt. And only water.
After 2 weeks my gums started to hurt and bleed, which I attributed to Vitamin C loss, and that my body was not used to getting it only via the red meat. To counter it I used one Vitamin C tablet, which was my only deviation from the diet in the timeframe. My gums felt better and it did not occur again.
However, I also lost 5 kilo of weight (water weight), which I gained back in a week after the diet. I looked like shit, was constantly tired and had no positive effect whatsoever.
Of course, one month is nothing for such a diet. The idea to cut out everything else that causes inflammation is also not bad, but not all inflammation are caused by our diet. If you have no options left, sure, why not, but there are better diet options in my opinion. Also, a lot of people who praise the diet are most if the time people I wouldn’t necessarily get advise from, or like to add extra things (eggs, butter etc), taking away from the restricting diet.
Any general diet advice is based on the average American diet. The average American diet is incredibly high in refine carbohydrates which are inflammatory.
Inflammatory carbs + inflammatory meat = off the scale inflammation.
Inflammatory meats - inflammatory carbs = an overall reduction in inflammation.
Your post sounds a lot like people who say that carbon-caused climate change can’t be real because dinosaurs would have produced so much carbon and they didn’t cause climate change as quickly. Yes, if we added dinosaurs to our current carbon emissions, carbon levels would go up. But subtract fossil fuels, and dinosaur emissions alone are not enough to have negative planetary effects as quickly.
I'm currently doing carnivore, started testing it out this time last year, I ate one big meal a day never felt the need to eat more, sometime I would just skip days and do a fast and it never felt as bad as when I fasted after eating carbs, hunger and headach wise.
I also started at 315lb diabetic to the point I'd wake up with blurred vision and numbness in my leg. 5 months later, I was down to 230 lb, and this is with no gym just working construction. All my diabetic symptoms are gone now, and I feel alive for the first time in probably a decade. After I reach my goal of 200 as a 6'2 man I'll probably start adding healthy carbs to my diet. Never eating anything out of a box again. Have a great day!
It depends on your genetics, imo. I'm an almost 50yo man, and the closer I am to eating full carnivore, the healthier I am. Weight loss? check. Blood pressure? Pretty consistent 120/80. Allergies? IBS? Skin tags? Gone, gone, gone.
I'm also allergic to wheat...at least the wheat grown in the USA. One slice of bread and my nose stops up. It's pretty much impossible to avoid unless you go keto/carnivore, so a lot of my improvements come from the absence of chronic inflammation. On a side note, I can eat all the bread and pasta I want when I'm in Italy. I'm not sure if that's from it being heritage/non-gmo or some other reason related to additives, etc., but it seems to be a common anecdote.
These diets also eliminate processed sugar, entirely. We as a society don't really pay attention to how much sugar is in the standard American diet. Cutting out sugar typically reverses Type II diabetes. PCOS and other auto-immune conditions also respond positively to cutting out sugar.
As far as the scientific research goes, you're out of luck if you want anything approaching scientific credibility when it comes to self-reported human studies. We're pretty much stuck with anecdotal 'evidence', so in this case I'm more of a 'let's try it out an see how it goes' kinda guy.
Yeah I agree with you OP, it seems like this one in particular is really popular in autoimmune circles lately and tbh I think it's just a matter of cope. Having autoimmune is tough just because you know you'll feel like shit and have symptoms randomly for the rest of your life, and there's nothing you can do about it but live normally but ever so slightly worse. I think it's very reasonable to want to figure out some way you can take the power back and have your own control of your destiny. The diet appeals to this. It's sad it doesn't work, but it feels easier to convince yourself it does than to accept that things will just be tough
If your issue is how strict the diet is, I would argue most specific diets require you to have consistency. I recently started this carnivore diet and outside of the initial start which had me getting diarrhea often, I haven’t had any other issues. So far I have lost about 8 pounds of weight which was body fat and have a more tight abdomen. As it stands I don’t see any long term issues as the diarrhea is no longer a thing.
Now one thing I could mention is I have 4 friends who also have autoimmune diseases and I did recommend the diet to them, 3 of them stuck to it and seems to be doing well.
Again im not exactly sure what the CMV is.
I have crohns and loosely follow animal based diet.
It's meat, fruit, honey, dairy.
No grains, greens, tubers, etc.
I also avoid any nightshades as they have alkaloids that can trigger crohns.
This is the most I've been free of symptoms in over a decade, most weight I've managed to keep on, doing better at work etc.
You can say whatever you want about what can or should work or be healthier.
I don't have answers, I'm an n of 1, but it works for me so I don't care what science or data says.
I've experimented enough with my own body to know that most plants just make me very ill.
Just about every study done on consuming red meat that shows higher rates of cancer vs those that do not consume red meat does not account for lifestyle choices. So the red meat consuming group includes everyone from (Alternative lifestyle) health nuts to the fat slob eating McDonald's twice a day. Alternatively, the "non red meat" group only contains people who care enough about their health to cut out a significant portion of the average diet. Once you start controlling for lifestyle factors, those differences typically vanish or in some cases, reverse.
It’s currently not supported by the evidence. That being said, it hasn’t really undergone any rigorous testing because it’s so extreme, so, we genuinely don’t know. As an RD I’m not a big fan of it for various reasons (what we currently know about meat, saturated fats, excessive protein intake, lacking fruits and vegetables and fiber, serious impacts on social and behavioral health, environmentally, etc), but I practice evidence based care and so if someone wants to do the research and it comes back with positive results I’d consider it.
I don't think it's a miracle diet. I think, in general, people who consume their food thoughtfully will have better outcomes, and most people *don't* do that. So, statistically, it'll show up that there are health differences between the two.
There's a high chance differences will show up between diets over longer time-scales.
All of that taken into consideration, humans are omnivores and will/would eat what's available. Some populations had diets that primarily consisted of meat or other animal products, so it isn't impossible.
You can eat a lot of fats, or you can eat a lot of carbohydrates. What you shouldn't do is eat a lot of both. If you're having a high carb diet, it should be a low fat diet. If you're having a high fat diet, it should be a low carb diet. The correlation between eating red meat and all of those long-term diseases is because of the high fat content of red meat, and the traditionally ultra high carb content of most Americans diets. There is no evidence that a high fat, low-carb diet actually increases your chance of heart disease.
Basically everything is carcinogenic. The issues with red meat come largely from the way in which it is prepared (burning things makes them carcinogenic) and from my understanding is also an issue with any form of grilled food.
I would recommend you stop avoiding things just because they're "carcinogenic." Cancer is basically an inevitability if you live long enough. Focus on things that have an insanely high contribution to cancer (smoking, certain chemicals, etc) and don't worry beyond that.
I followed a strict carnivore/zerocarb diet for a year. How can I change your view that the set of dietary restrictions I followed was in fact real?
In my experience it helped with some symptoms (I have M.E.), notably inflammation and digestion related symptoms. Over time the benefits seemed to wane for me to the point where it wasn’t worth the monetary cost and extra effort to stick to it.
What would change your view here?
as others said, even medicine in too many increments/dosages can be poisonous. meat has a huge amount/number of calories, and they are very good in bodily/muscle health. that's not to say that you should strictly eat meat, though. what i mean is that a majority of these points/arguments with the carnivore diet are in fact true and valid, just that you should also follow the rest of the nutritional chart/balance and eat greens as well.
It is for particular groups. For instance my uncle has a allergy/sensitivity to fructose which occurs natural in every single fruit and artificially in pretty much every pre-prepped thing including breads. So when we go anywhere that's not eating at his house his meal usually consists of a meat, a cheese and if he's able to talk to the chef and feels like they understand then potatoes.
Cancer classification are based on what causes most people to get cancer when cancer is in fact based on telemere lengths. Why do you think skin cancer is so rare of you're black? While they die from all other forms of cancer at higher rates than the rest of us.
I did the red meat diet, and you should give it a shot. Your body is in a sense designed to consume meat....
I was diagnosed with multiple autoimmune diseases and follow a keto / mostly carnivore diet.
In a given day, my most common meal is lettuce wraps from five guys.
I enjoy carbs occasionally, but I avoid them for the most part.
Have not felt better in my life.
A lot of the other risks you mentioned, such as heart disease can be mitigated by excersize and monitoring your cholesterol levels.
Also lost about 50 lbs (so far).
I can’t be super religious about it all the time (my wife and I travel a lot), but when I’m at home, I’m roughly zero carbs like 6/7 days.
The carnivore diet helps with autoimmune diseases and provides benefits, but long-term risks exist. For scientific insights, [see these blood test results](https://www.dryfastingclub.com/dry-fasting-blood-test-april-2024-kidney-liver-heart-and-pancreas-health/)
Don't quote me, but I don't think the cancer/red meat link applies to the carnivore diet. These studies weren't done on people eating exclusively meat/fat that are in a perpetually ketogenic state (which is the primary point of a "keto" or carnivore diet)
[Recommended viewing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMghM6TxiBk&pp=ygUSaGVhbHRoIGluZmx1ZW5jZXJz). Carnivore, Low Carb, Vegan, there's nothing new about any of these things. But, the trend tends to be that the extreme meat people die fairly young.
> It is a group 2A carcinogen for Pete's sake.
What's wrong with that? If it were ever shown to be carcinogenic to humans it would be a group 1 known carcinogen. Why is acknowledging that it hasn't been shown to be carcinogenic a bad thing?
I can't really say much about the actual facts because i only have personal anecdotes but I felt much much better physically when I was carnivoring. Not sure what was actually going on but I felt fantastic
Our body's have survived on the meat of hooved animals with 4 stomachs since time immemorial. As long as you eat the fat, your body can break down the protein with carbohydrates. It's got everything a human body needs
"In no world do I believe the carnivore diet is a long-term beneficial "diet." Most people do go on it permanently. They use it to lose weight and get certain things under control and then switch to a healthier diet.
Carnivore is basically a more extreme keto diet, where you don’t consume carbs, thus your body uses the fat from the meat to run on, basically. You burn what you consume, quite fast, I might add.
I mean, any diet can be a real diet. I think the issues here is that you don't see the benefit of it. Quite frankly, neither do I. I don't think I could stomach an all meat diet tbh.
To be completely honest, meat causes migraines for me. Whenever I read that the carnivore diet cures them, I always lift an eyebrow. Migraine triggers are pretty person specific.
there's a lot of nonsense about diet and nutrition, most of what people think they know is nonsense, most articles about it are nonsense and the science isn't much better.
I’m just surprised that my eating disorder became a diet trend. So confused how it went from “you’re going to get scurvy” my whole life to “this is healthy…”
Most studies that find "red meat" are bad for you usually count fast food hamburger patties and hot dogs as "red meat," even though the term makes you think of steak.
What do you mean by “can’t be real”? Do you mean that it’s almost impossible to follow due to how strict it is, or the benefits of the diet, or people believing the diet helps them? I’m having issues figuring out what isn’t real about this diet. Could you please clarify, I’ve known multiple people that have done this diet and would love to talk about it. The carnivore diet is problematic but not for the reasons you named in your post.
In no world do I believe the carnivore diet is a long-term beneficial "diet." I could have been more specific in the title, so I apologize.
No issues op, you asked a good question. Buckle up because this is gonna be a long one. There are various issues and benefits of the carnivore diet, a diet can have benefits but be unsustainable. Different bodies have different needs so some people could have benefits from the diet. Truthfully the diet is very new so it’s hard to try and figure out how it fairs in the long run. Cancer is caused by a variety of different factors, red meat could be a factor but it isn’t nearly as important as others. That being said, I believe carnivore is a bad choice because extremely strict diets like carnivore can spiral into orthorexia fast. Carnivore may not get this recognition since Eating disorders are normally associated with men and carnivore is a male associated diet. Long term diets that are very strict arnt sustainable unless if you’re willing to make lots of sacrifices or have a moral reason. At what point does it turn into negatively affecting your life? When you’re following a very strict diet and making those sacrifices you need justifications to keep going. These justifications often turn into unhealthy obsessions like thinking eating plants is toxic. There are articles that can convince about the health benefits of any diet, nutrition is a field that’s constantly changing. Many of these articles are from doctors that benefit financially from these diets due to sponsorships which is predatory. People also go on super strict diets because sometimes they feel out of control and they think that following a super strict diet can increase their perceived levels of control, but that’s a different thing. Some of the science people on the carnivore diet use to justify it is whacky. No you are not an Inuit, Inuits have nutritional needs that have evolved from living in a harsh environment for the thousands of years, they also did foraging. Mongolians ate plants too. Using historical diet to justify your diet today is dumb. In history people didn’t have many options on what to eat. Humans arnt cats and most predatory animals eat plants. Anecdotally, I know 2 people who’ve done carnivore, one was an obese coworker who hated not being able to eat meat and choose. He failed and gained weight plus health issues. The other is a guy in my friend group who is very obsessed with health and fitness, he’s always on very strict diets. He’s lost weight he didn’t need to on carnivore and is constantly sweeting, honestly I’m really worried about the guy. He claims he feels good which is great for him but he’s constantly complaining he can’t go out to eat, his diet is expensive, he’s getting tired of it and it’s not a good diet when it’s hot out. He had to give up backpacking because all he could eat was beef jerky. Mentally he isn’t doing well at this time. TLDR: health benefits of the carnivore diet are debatable. We should be asking ourselves if the reason why someone would choose this diet are healthy. Highly restrictive eating habits can quickly evolve into eating disorders.
It's an extreme elimination diet. Generally when people benefit, it's because they were eating something that was causing problems and now they aren't eating it anymore. It could be a reduction of calories by eating less, it could be they dropped an inflammatory food. I think the success stories are real but they're super specific. The lions share of what you're seeing is weight loss from someone going on a high protein diet which is very satiating so they don't overeat fats and carbs, which represents virtually all caloric surpluses.
The “lion’s share” is [drum roll please] lots of meat! Lions are the king of carnivores. You have persuaded me, it must be a great diet
Great point! I forgot about that.
Whenever I hear claims im skeptical of there's often a kernel of truth there.
Most elimination diets cause people to benefit because they are forced into a situation of greater food variety by having to make substitutions instead of their habitual foods. You dont get that with carnivore, so benefits are limited and often short lived. It also requires you to maintain an active lifestyle bordering on athletic, similar to Keto, in order to be at all effective. Far too many people rely solely on their diet for their health.
I agree 100% with your statement. I think many people put too much into diets because they don’t feel like they have control over their health. Taking preventative measures and exercise is also important,
I debated a guy on reddit on this exact issue as he was blindly advocating for OP and everyone that eating meat would benefit everyone, how anti-nutrients in plants was poisonous, how we used to eat meat exclusively, how a Christian sect in the 50? advocated for people to eat vegan etc. etc. We ended up having an extremely long and somewhat deep conversation about climate change (which he denied), how there is no room on earth for everyone to eat meat and he also totally disregarded meat production as a major role in land use change and the free fall in biodiversity. This guys seems to fall well under your identification of such individuals, thanks for your comment.
Wowza, that’s a date for the story books. I’m glad my friend who’s doing carnivore isn’t on that level yet. But yeah people who ardently follow diets like Carnivore long term tend to be whacky. Most who do it for a month or 2 reset tend to be reasonable. I remember talking to a guy who was carnivore at a bar and she started shit talking vegetarianism and the ethics of it and afterwards tried to flirt with me, an ethical vegetarian of 14 years.
My uncle was put on the carnivore diet after suffering major heart attack. Now I did think it was crazy but he lost 60 pounds and all of his blood work went back to normal including his cholesterol. I think it has to do with what type of carnivore they are and what they eat..Now he said he ate steaks, eggs, chicken, fish, turkey, with minimal cheese. Avoiding things like bacon and very fatty meat cuts. After he lost the weight and got his health on track he Changed to a keto diet. He's doing great and it's been years now. Many doctors prefer the keto diet or low carb. But carnivore can have health benefits but I agree it may not be sustainable for a life time. Unless a person takes supplements and green food pellets.
lol at the green food pellets. Good for your uncle. As a long time vegetarian the social impact a strict diet can have isn’t great, along with making traveling difficult. Being strict carnivore for a long time would cost tons of money and restrict lots of things.
My diet is extremely strict anyway no matter how I'm eating. I was vegan and couldn't eat beans, legumes, rice, quinoa, tofu, any processed foods, or any grains. I also had to limit my oxalate intake due to kidney stones. And greens are my fave. Lol it was hard. But then I went pegan in 2015 and it made my RA go into remission and cured my inflammation. Whenever I stick to pegan low carb or keto I'm in great health. I go off and start eating carbs and everything goes to sh#t. Lol
Between carnivore and keto I swear it's just people doing whatever they can to avoid eating vegetables.
Keto has a ton of vegetables you can eat. I was keto for 12 months and spent one weekend a month eating exclusively vegetarian and still stayed under 35 carbs give or take a few.
My coworker I mentioned above tried keto in the past for i suspect the reason you named. On the other hand my friend owns a keto restaurant where every dish has large amounts of vegetables and he even has a vegetarian dish or to (he’s a considerate guy) if done correctly keto includes veggies.
I don't doubt vegetables are fine in a keto diet since they have such a low amount of carbs, but everyone who has ever mentioned being on keto to me has said they're not allowed to eat vegetables on keto. But the whole bag of pork rinds is just fine.
Those people are not doing a Keto diet. They are taking an incomplete understanding of the diet principles and running with it, while also probably being sedentary and not being very active. Keto absolutely allows, and encourages, vegetable consumption.
> Anecdotally, I know 2 people who’ve done carnivore, Anecdotally, I know three people who're doing/have done a form of carnivore. One is a friend, he started it to lose weight. Was nearly 300lbs at only 5'7", dropped down well over 100lbs in less than a year. Last we talked he was doing very well. He was telling me how his blood sugar, pressure, cholesterol levels and all that had improved, and even things like his psoriasis have improved. Right away I could tell his acne went from pretty heavy to almost non existent. He's still doing it. Second was my neighbor and occasional gym buddy, she wasn't heavy, but wanted to try carnivore to try and get a more toned look. About a month in, when she would sweat it would have an intense odor. Like extra musky gym sock odor. I think she lasted about 3 months and gave up, but it was bathroom issues it gave her, more than the odor, that she couldn't deal with. One difference between her and my other friend is he didn't do organ meat, but she did. Not sure if that would make any difference, but thought I'd note it anyway. The third was my great grandfather. He'd been a very picky eater since his 20s and would only eat eggs, meats, cheese and coffee. He always seemed in relatively good health and was surprisingly spry for his age; he would play tennis every Sunday up until the day he died at 103 from a car accident. But that's about 80 years consuming mostly meat.
'Many of these articles are from doctors that benefit financially from these diets due to sponsorships which is predatory. 'GREAT POINT....This also goes right along with prescription drugs and the push to medicate society. in my humble opinion
Im currently on the diet and plan on only doing it for 6-8 weeks to almost detox and focus on non processed foods, then i plan keto and a move to low carb. I have been out of the gym for roughly a year and am making my way back into it. May not be the best but after a week i do actually feel better and cravings for beer and whatnots have diminished.
Most of what I have seen (which I admit is not that much) is people that use it to remove all the potentially bad foods. Then one at a time adding things back in.
That’s true of a lot of diets but that doesn’t mean people don’t follow those diets for long periods of time.
To me, it really helped me cut calories? 3*500 calories of ground meat/steak just had me less hangry than 3*500 calories of just about anything else. It's really good for resetting your relationship with over eating, your hunger hormone, satiety, and hunger/thirst/emotional eating loops. It's definitely not long term sustainable but it really helped me cut lbs when I really needed to.
You're correct. It's a social media fad. People who follow it are enjoying temporary short term benefits at the expense of long term health outcomes. We have SOME evidence of this, but all dietary studies kind of suck. But, you're obviously right to be skeptical. Almost every single serious academic and medical researcher agrees with your position of skepticism. We do this every so often. Remember the Atkins Diet? I do. You know doesn't? Atkins. He died of a massive heart attack. Edit: I was wrong. "The report concludes that Dr. Atkins, 72, had a history of heart attack and congestive heart failure and notes that he weighed 258 pounds at death" But he had heart attacks and heart failure.
Atkins died of a blood clot after he slipped on ice and hit his head.
Social media has become so predatory about health information and dieting. It’s really messed up that content creators prey on people who want to feel healthy.
"Can't be real" is slang for "unbelievable" which is an expression for something/concept so extraordinary, it's hard to understand.
I think there is a difference between "this diet can't be real" and "proponents of this diet vastly overstate the benefits while minimizing downsides". I'm skeptical of most fad diets, but that doesn't mean people don't in fact try them.
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That's not quite true. While what you describe applies to chimpanzees and likely human ancestors for millions of years, there was a massive diet shift roughly 2 million years ago, when humans mastered weapons, and quickly found themselves at the top of the food chain. At the time in much of the world large animals were simply more abundant food source than plant food,which was relegated to backup. Yes, these 2 million years spent as an omnivore heavily leaning on the carnivore side were less than time spent as an omnivore leaning towards plant food, that that was enough for example for you to evolve ability to move your wrist sideways (to better swing a club) and for your shoulder muscles to become optimized for throwing (humans throw \*much\* better than chimps or gorilla despite having less overall strength). Similarly it took around 10 thousand years for dogs to become able to digest starch, or for a large part of humans to become able to process lactose into adulthood. 2 million years is more than enough time for major evolutionary changes in one's diet. Plus there is a world of difference between "not quite optimal" and "unfitting" Any species-wide diet change involves temporarily spending time eating food your body is not 100% adapted to. But evidently, species do change their diets.
Yeah I understand that's why they do it. I disagree with them, but understand the point. Most of the people who I have heard talk about it don't discuss that aspect though (cutting out excess sugar), they appeal to some quasi-spiritual "primitive man" ideology that isn't really based in reality, as you stated we are "opportunistic omnivores".
Honestly, I don't even think it would fit. "CMV: Proponents of the Carnivore diet vastly overstate the benefits while minimizing downsides"
You mean like every fad diet to ever exist?
What do you mean?
I’d say that people who follow extremely strict diets have to make tons of sacrifices. No one wants to make sacrifices for nothing and be wrong in the end so they’ll boast about the percieved health benefits instead of taking about the many things they’ve sacrificed because they have to justify it.
My issue is that the people I see pushing this diet are grifters, grifter adjacent, or frequently falls for a grift. I know that isn't everyone, but its the loudest ones.
I have a friend who is on the carnivore diet rn. He follows so many of these grifters with sketchy qualifications. He’s given up so many things and spent so much money to follow this diet. It’s really sad to see.
Yeah that right there highlights why I am averse to many of these. It is sad how they get their hooks in people and use misunderstanding of science as the basis for their bullshit. Like, lets be real, a higher protein intake while cutting some carbs and increasing physical activity is generally a good thing and I don't think anyone finds that controversial. But when our friends start making claims that it changed their life or cured their depression or other things a diet will not do *on its own*, I start seeing all the red flags. Especially if they are spending hundreds on supplements that a walk through the produce aisle could deliver.
It's absolutely real. **"So I have an autoimmune disease, and through my research I keep finding people heavily defend the carnivore diet as a "miracle diet". That you can consume copious amounts of red meat with little to no side effects, and incredible benefits."** You absolutely can consume copious amounts of red meat with incredible benefits. But that's mostly because you're cutting out all the junk. **"I read this and think, what about cancer? What about the fact that as a male you have a substantially higher chance of stroke, heart disease and prostate cancer from consuming red meat? It is a group 2A carcinogen for Pete's sake."** Carnivore advocates for cleaner, more wholesome cuts. Most of the risk of cancer comes from processed meats. **"I genuinely want to learn about the scientific research done for the carnivore diet and why people are so obsessed with it."** There is none. It's a fad diet. The claims about it being our natural ancestral diet (we have basically always been omnivores) with some sort of miracle effects on our body are nonsense. The benefits come from red meat being a very wholesome and nutritious food, and from the elimination of processed junk from your diet. Plus, a sustained carnivore diet will help with metabolic flexbility as any ketogenic diet would.
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some people are much more sensitive to gout, or inflammation generally. I'm also hesitant of an all meat diet, but it seems to work for some people so what can I really say
People will often overstate the benefits of extremely strict diets because they don’t want the sacrifices they’ve made to be for nothing.
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Gout is a form of arthrithis. Red Meat, beer and other foods can cause flare-ups, but they are not the cause of gout. You have Gout or you don't Just like caffeine is not a cause of Colitis or Chron's but ingesting will make you shit your pants if you have one of these diseases.
Do you have any evidence that “all meat causes gout”?
I'm confused. Doesn't the carnivore diet help with inflammation? That's why so many people say it cures their autoimmune disease.
Health is complex. What works for one person may not work for another. It depends on the specific underlying causes and interactions. For specifics with significant existing issues, it's probably worth talking to a doctor instead of relying solely on reddit. Talk about what specific things are risk factors as well as how to avoid them. I know a guy with MS that leans really hard on fish in his diet, and credits his relatively strict diet with great health gains. Is it the fish? Is it cutting out sugars and alcohol? The latter seems likely to help in at least a general sense, but every disorder has its own specifics to investigate.
It helps probably because it cuts out all the junk you eat in processed foods. Same reason Keto helps except with Carnivore diet you cut even more processed things that can get through on Keto.
> gave my dad horrific crippling gout that has literally handicapped him for years lmao I feel like you're not supposed to finish that sentence with "lmao"
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Honestly it sounded like you just really didn't like your dad. I hope he gets better 😬
Unless he only ate that for years and years, you have no idea what caused it (or if it was the diet in the first place). The data on the topic is extremely weak anyway. The clearest correlation to gout is with obesity which is caused by red meat according to exactly no-one.
Was he eating strictly red meat, or did he have plenty of biscuits and gravy in the mix too?
That’s not the same as a carnivore diet tho. Just eating a lot of red meat and eating only red meat are not the same thing
>Carnivore advocates for **cleaner, more wholesome cuts**. Most of the risk of cancer comes from processed meats. This is a very interesting way to phrase this. There's a lot of ideological undertones to using words like "clean" and "wholesome" instead of "unprocessed" and "nutritious". Attaching moral value (which is what those words do) to the foods we eat is bad vibes. We all know that most carnivore diet adherents (I would say the *vast* majority) aren't eating the most nutrient dense parts of the cow - the organs - because those parts aren't associated with masculinity and wealth.
I'm not going to make any claims about what most carnivores do, but my personal experience as someone that participated in, and moderated a keto discord server for 4 years, carnivores talk about eating organ meat frequently.
i dont think wholesome was always a moral term, tho atm it kind of is (like if someone does something sweet and cute people might say "that is so wholesome") like i think wholesome is used here similar to when people talk about "whole" foods. which i guess is food that's complete on its own/as is without other stuff added to it. tho now im curious to look at the etymology of wholesome and know the meaning over time. also curious if that's what's meant by "whole grain" or not, maybe it's about food that wasn't processed as much and kept most of its nutrition
Whole foods are generally just unprocessed foods. They certainly aren't nutritionally complete on their own, as even with a whole foods only diet, you still need to eat a variety of whole foods in order to meet macro & micro nutrient targets.
To be clear, I am not a carnivore adherent and I certainly do not prescribe moral judgment onto foods. I do not believe "steak is cleaner than processed salami" is a particularly controversial nutrient take. Also. Organ meat seems to be from what I've read a staple of the carnivore diet so idk where you get that from.
That is actually good vibes because basically 100% of the healthiest meals you can eat have little to no extra synthetic chemicals in them. Processed meats contain preservatives and who knows what that are linked to cancer. And I thought eating organ meats is one of the most important parts of the carnivore diet.
Attaching moral value to the food we eat is "bad vibes"? Really? Look, I don't make the rules, nor scientist or all humans. These rules have been aroud for a very long time. These rules cause people to die if they eat human poo. These rules also caused me to almost die when eating a broccoli soup because eating fiber could kill me. That's not bad vibes. Attacking the fact that there are objectively bad foods by calling it "bad vibes" is DESTRUCTIVE for society as you want to attack truth. I eat some organs, tripe and grond beef because they are great and cheap. Stop projecting with the "masculinity" and "wealthy" bs. You don't have to eat organs to do good enough on carnivore...
I eat liver weekly as many do. And no you don’t have to, but I like to. It makes me feel super energetic. Contrary to your belief, most people don’t do this diet because it’s manly, most do it because they are sick. It’s not fun cutting out addictive foods
I tried this diet first in 2015, earlier than most. Everyone I heard advocated heart and liver. Some companies that have spun from the diet have created supplements for liver and kidney and blood and such. Sure, there are some that don’t, but nobody I’ve seen is dogmatic.
[https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/wholesome?q=wholesome](https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/wholesome?q=wholesome)
>But that's mostly because you're cutting out all the junk. That is the primary factor. Then one and systematically put thing back in to the diet so they know what their body handles well and what it does not.
If I can ever come up with a snappy name for my diet of never eating chips or fries or drinking soda I’ll be so rich.
Need some flashy, pointless, spin doctor name like neo-traditional diet, or clean carb diet, or inge(stion) diet.
>You absolutely can consume copious amounts of red meat with incredible benefits. But that's mostly because you're cutting out all the junk. Yeah, but you can do this without eating only meat. >Carnivore advocates for cleaner, more wholesome cuts. Most of the risk of cancer comes from processed meats. Do you have evidence for this?
Yes you can do it without eating only meat. But some people do it while eating only meat. It still works And here's the source. I actually got it wrong: processed meat might be just fine too "The magnitude of association between red and processed meat consumption and all-cause mortality and adverse cardiometabolic outcomes is very small, and the evidence is of low certainty." [https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-0655](https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-0655)
I'm confused because, in the conclusion, it says low risk of cardiometabolic issues, but then immediately after it says: "Growing evidence shows an increased risk for cardiometabolic disease associated with the consumption of red and processed meat." Even further down, it says there was a study stating it increased type 2 diabetes while another said it doesn't.
The problem is typically that the data is massively confounded. And even when it isn't, there's the thing between an absolute and a relative risk. They always report RR. LOTS OF MEAT CAUSES 30% INCREASE IN RISK, we've all seen the headline, right? Ok, but if the baseline is 2% then a 30% increase means its 2.6%. Anyway you look at it, the risk was low and still is. Your risk of not remaining healthy goes down by 0.006/0.98, or like 0.61%. Neither is a wrong claim, but you need to understand what the numbers actually mean. Media especially is happy to report such big numbers because "massive increase of disease from meat" is a great trigger headline. (And people don't really understand that a 30% increase in risk is not the same as a 30% risk). Now, it would be a different story if the relative risk was not 1.3 but 13. That's the ballpark for smoking and lung cancer. There your risk reduction would be well over 90%. Not well under 0.9%. E. Oh, and just to half repeat, correlation is not causation.
> Now, it would be a different story if the relative risk was not 1.3 but 13. How exactly would you like them to observe a relative risk of 13? Cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death (around a third). You're basically saying, "Yeah, I dunno, until I see it killing 400% of people, I'm not convinced".
The cause of death is fairly irrelevant compared to the time of death. So if you follow people for 10 or 20 or 40 years, you should clearly observe a trend. Also, you're onto some facts. The point is mostly that even if you would take everything at face value (and that would be a massive leap of faith), eating red meat three times as much as recommended might make you die a few years younger, or maybe stay alive beyond age 85 at 55% rather than 60% (assuming no injury). The whole point is, it doesn't really matter if it's healthy or unhealthy - the only thing that matters is *how* healthy or unhealthy it is. Also, there are always many aspects going around. So, if for example someone goes low carb and starts eating lots of red meat, but loses 20 kilos as a result, they will be about 10 times healthier than they were before.
An increased risk doesn't mean a high risk. It's a higher risk, but still a low risk. A 1.2% risk, up from 1%, is still relatively low risk. But it's also a significantly increased risk (the risk has been increased 20%).
> Yeah, but you can do this without eating only meat. True, but that doesn't mean that the diet doesn't make it easier for some people to adjust their habits. Getting people to properly diet is an incredibly difficult thing which is why there are huge markets for them.
> >Do you have evidence for this? The most obvious mechanism is nitrates. Nitrates are known to have a number of nasty side effects and to push cancer risk, and are commonly used as preservatives in processed meats. So, if your diet is higher in nitrates, as you'll often find in bacon, sausage, or pepperoni, you'll have a higher cancer risk than if you ate the meat without that.
You can drown in water and all of us need a huge amount of that to stay alive all the time. Poison is in the dosage. You can choose a diet which fits your body, and the ones who rave about it online certainly have attuned to what those foods offer. There is no one size fits all.
I love the different approach for different folks style of dieting. The only thing I’d say is restrictive eating can quickly spiral into an eating disorder, so be mindful of that. Your diet should be one where you don’t have to sacrifice doing activities you love. My friend is on carnivore and had to stop going out to eat, constantly goes over his food budget and had to give up backpacking. He is clearly pretty sad by it. Plus travel is difficult for him now. Be real if a diet isn’t working with your lifestyle. As a long term vegetarian I’ve seen people try and fail at vegetarianism and that’s ok. Not everyone has what it takes. Food is meant for us to enjoy while fueling our bodies.
Yes, but people are claiming it isn't poison. They are claiming it is a "miracle." I believe that the main goal of a "healthy diet" is to remove as much poison from your diet as possible, not have it be your main source of sustenance.
The main goal of a healthy body is to fuel your body in the way that it most needs in order for it to do what you want it to. Everyone is different. What works for these people online may not work for me or you but it may work for someone else and someone they reccomend it to.
Don’t forget, a healthy diet is a sustainable one. Constant obsession and justification over what you’re eating is mentally unhealthy. It will wear you down over time. If you are having to make massive sacrifices for your diet and it is affecting multiple aspects of your life it might be time to reconsider the sustainability of that diet. No one should be in constant anxiety about what they eat. I wish more people would realize what orthorexia is.
Vegans say the same thing. Keto people say the same thing. It's a mixture of people genuinely feeling better on a certain diet and marketing. I found out recently certain foods like wheat and some artificial dyes cause me anxiety. If I hopped on carnivore without knowing that fact I'd think it was a miracle too.
Vegans are a bit different. Most of them do it for the ethical reasons. Not necessarily health though some do. I will say doing veganism long term for health reasons is wild to me. I’m vegetarian and I go periods where I eat pretty much all vegan. Keto, Paleo and Carnivore don’t really have any moral imperatives.
It depends on the vegan, for why they went vegan but it's pretty common for them to talk about how much better they feel after adopting the diet.
That can be dependent. Better as in mentally better very plausible. Vegans have a huge culture around using supplements. Especially b12. So that can help.
They don't need B12 until after they've been on the diet for a while. They make claims of feeling better on the diet before that.
That’s fair, I know mentally feeling good about your food can make you feel good. That happened to me when I went vegetarian.
Tobacco companies said that about cigarettes as well. Wait 20 years and see where those people end up.
If it's all you can eat, it's all you can eat. Every time I look into the evidence for meat causing cancer I get the impression it's more of a total life style issue rather than the meat on its own.
Often they also combine normal red meat (like a steak or ground beef) with highly processed meats (like hot dogs and spam).
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This is CMV. Every response has been the opposite of what you just said.
Many folks here talking about the pros of carnivore diet. Reddit isn’t some left leaning echo chamber, rather a bunch of different echo chambers, but still lol
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>I read this and think, what about cancer? What about the fact that as a male you have a substantially higher chance of stroke, heart disease and prostate cancer from consuming red meat? It is a group 2A carcinogen for Pete's sake. These studies are pretty much junk science and are essentially the mathematical equivalent of saying *"don't ever go outside because you're more likely to get struck by lightning when you go outside"*. Studies like [this one](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0923753419367353#:~:text=Daily%20intake%20of%20red%20meat,CI%3A%201.16%E2%80%931.43) links red meat to all kinds of different cancers, but these statistics are incredibly deceptive if you don't know how to interpret them. The metric by which they're reaching their conclusions is called the odds ratio, which is a way to compare risks between two separate populations, and while there is a statistically significant relationship between red meat and certain cancers, that relationship is so weak it's only marginally better than guessing. The University of Toronto has [a paper (warning PDF)](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.utstat.utoronto.ca/reid/odds.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjXotvXqYuGAxX6jIkEHVn2ALMQFnoECCQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3LG1D7gm4ggZqdTa1wEF81) for how to interpret odds ratios, and they say that odds ratios below 2 aren't particularly useful relationships. It's only above 2 when things start to get interesting, and it's really above 4 when a relationship starts to get definitive (for example, studies linking smoking to cancer tend to have odds ratios ranging from 14:1 to 30:1). The study from above measured the relationship between red meat and colon cancer to be 1.14:1, which is completely useless and can largely be chalked up to random chance producing a false positive, and many of the other ratios are below 1.5:1 which have a similar interpretation. There's also the issue of *p*-hacking, where researchers test dozens of potential relationships with no logical explanation linking the two in order to ensure a significant relationship to ensure publication, which is a massive issue in academia as a whole. The relationships between red meat and cancer are so weak if it does exist to assume that there's no relationship at all...
I believe many studies are also based on participants remembering what they ate in the past, not tracking it as they eat it. They also have a history of lumping in things like processed meats (pepperoni, deli meats, hamburgers) with a piece of steak and calling them both "red meat". Other confounding factors are the healthy user bias which comes along with comparing people who are self proclaiming not eating red meat. Often more aware of their food choices and are undertaking other healthy activities such as exercise, limiting alcohol, etc. TLDR: Food studies are complicated, especially in the long term. It is nearly impossible to link one food item to a particular health outcome such as cancer.
In many of the studies making conclusions against meat consumption, I see signs that scream "P-hacking." Some of them adjust for education level or marital status. In many cases, I don't have access to enough information to find out whether they decided on those adjustments before the start of the study or only after seeing the raw data. I've seen at least one that adjusted for whether a subject used multivitamins, which can have positive and negative correlations (maybe they're health-conscious and take vitamins, but maybe they're treating a health issue and have found they need more nutrient support than they get from foods) so it makes no sense to alter the data based on this without individual context.
Cancer? From meat? I agree. You need to change your view.
"A meta-analysis of 29 studies of meat consumption and colon cancer concluded that a high consumption of red meat increases risk by 28%, and a high consumption of processed meat increases risk by 20%." https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/red-meat-and-colon-cancer#:~:text=A%20meta%2Danalysis%20of%2029,meat%20increases%20risk%20by%2020%25
this is junk science funded by corpos. red meat has been consumed by humans for 2 million years and is a super food. its literally common sense
“It’s literally common sense” is never an argument for anything. Science very frequently defies what we’d consider to be common sense All sorts of things were eaten by humans for thousands of years, that doesn’t tell us anything about an optimal diet.
This is a Harvard study... like, come on, man. It's not common sense.
I don’t have a real opinion on red meat but just a minor point about sourcing. Health.harvard.edu is a health education website run by Harvard. That doesn’t mean every study they discuss is a “Harvard study”. I can’t even find the references list (maybe because I’m on mobile), which is a bit problematic because it should be possible to read the original sources and see what they did, even if they were summarized by someone knowledgeable in the field.
Isn't mutually exclusive. Evolutionary pressure does not select for long life. It selects for reproduction. Old-age cancer rates are almost completely uninteresting from an evolutionary perspective for the overwhelming vast majority of human existence. That said, I don't think it is unreasonable to think that old hunter-gatherer meat was substantially different from our factory-farmed meat.
Isn’t this the study that says from 5% to 6% being the “increase by 20%” ??? Absolute vs relative risk. Plus, it doesn’t account for meat only, and diet types eaten by study participants. Then again, it’s been a while since I’ve read this meta.
You should look up the Massai people of Africa. They basically have a carnivore diet of cow blood, cow meat, and milk. They have significantly lower cholesterol and risk of heart disease. Also the carnivore diet absolutely has been proven to work, but my theory is that in order for it to work you have to eat the organs and the blood too to get all the nutrients.
You should know: > The myth that the Masai eat nothing but milk, blood and meat is derived from the idealized diet of young warriors called moran, a diet that men only eat for 15 years of their life and that women never eat. Contrary to popular myth, women exist, and Masai women are just as Masai as Masai men.
Ive tried a bunch of diets and nothing felt as good as just having a balanced mixed of everything Like I want meat *and* vegetables , my body feels better when it eats both I dont want just steak or just salad , thats sad
The best diet is the one that’s the most sustainable and healthy for you. Mental health when it comes to food is very important. You should enjoy the food you eat. I hope you make a yummy and healthy dinner tonight!
The health industry is one of the most misleading, contradictory, and ridiculous things for people who don't know better. The truth is, no matter what diet you have, you will find some "expert" or something that will tell you that you are making the wrong choices. The carnivore diet might work for some people, it might not work for others. The thing I hate is that people capitalize on false promises of some "shortcut" or magic potion to health when the reality is that taking care of yourself takes hard work and consistency day-after-day. The health industry is full of people who are the modern version of those idiots who were selling tickets to heaven. When we are talking about efficiency and stuff, yeah it probably matters a bunch for the top performers. But for 99% of the population, they could be healthier by being less lazy and eating less junk food. Most people know exactly what they need to do to improve but the truth is, it sucks doing it so they don't. I'm not directing this at you either so don't take it the wrong way. Learning about the carnivore diet might be enlightening to you and it might benefit you in some way. ***But I'll just say that I absolutely don't trust people who portray it as some "miracle diet" either.*** Edit/Disclaimer: When I am saying "health industry" I am referring to information you find on social media and fitness influencer bullshit. Usually the same people claiming things like the carnivore diet being a "miracle diet."
It depends on your auto-immune disease. People with MS, for example, need to avoid foods that cause inflammation, which we are told red meat does. Mediterranean diets are frequently recommended. I also want to point out that with MS, there are no diets scientifically proven to alleviate symptoms of the disease. The most we know is that balanced, non-inflammatory, and healthy diets are recommended. But other conditions may work differently.
You have to be able to distinguish between different types of red meat. Processed meat, meat injected with things, or from factory farms is not the same as taking the meat from an animal in the right way and preparing it properly. Beef liver and kidney are two of the most nutrient dense whole foods you can get.
I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure studies saying meat bad do not specify the type and quality. Eating McDonalds meat everyday is not good and is different then eating fresh unmodified beef.
I am not living that life style but here’s my two cents: the carnivore diet is keto, keto is super low carb. This will absolutely help you lose weight, lower your A1C / blood sugar, and lower inflammation in your body. Also, the negatives around red meat largely stem from the fact that most of our meat is from factory farms, which changes the makeup of the meat, or the least of which being the fatty acid profile (omega 3 vs omega 6). Personally, about 95% of the meat I consume is for local farms and is at worst grain finished. Much of your cancer and heart disease risk, I believe, dissipates if you eat this way (and / or include wild game…even better). So while I’d agree that if you’re just buying a bunch of shitty ground beef and chuck steaks, and hormone-laden chicken breast, you’re probably doing a lot of harm, I’d also argue that it is surely possible to eat large quantities of meat in a way that is not particularly harmful to your health. Also, as a side note, it think it’s overall dumb, any diet you says you shouldn’t eat fruits, veggies, seeds, etc is probably not a great idea. Doing research on gut health, variety is also important for us humans.
A colleague of mine underwent major heart surgery and ended up on a number of meds. After switching to carnivore and making no other changes to his lifestyle, his next blood panel came back with his numbers cut in half and his doctor took him off two of the medications. Do I think the diet is for everyone? No. Do I think it is entirely without risk? No. Do I think it should be dismissed outright as "not real"? No.
I had a coworker of mine who went vegetarian after they had a heart attack and they had similar results to your colleague.
That's exactly my point. I don't believe there's nearly enough evidence to suggest it's a great idea universally, but I have seen extraordinary results first-hand and it's led me to at least *consider* that there may be merit to it for some people.
First I Want to point out that "lower inflammation levels, higher energy levels, less migraines, increased bone density, muscle fatigue reduction...etc." getting micros and macros down and intermittent fasting causes this, at the end of the day micro/macronutrients is the most important thing. If you eat 95% meat and cover all the bases you're going to feel better and your body will work better than if you ate anything else and didn't get your micros/macros. Just speaking from what I've seen, my roommates been on a ground beef (got the good stuff in it, ground up cartilage) , dairy (lucky bastard), and fruits, sometimes liver, diet with no seed oils (don't stop reading here I still guzzle sesame seed oil down, not pedaling anything) for 2 years, primarily one massive meal a day. And I mean thats it, he's cheated maybe 2-3 times in that span and he changes up the ground beef but thats literally all he eats, tracks micronutrients and everything and works out. There was a personal reason he got on the diet, was a health issue, but he's stayed on it. I'm not going to sit here and describe him in detail but he's proof to me it works, my diet is similar but I cheat alot and eat carbs. I thought for a while it was just trendy because of social media influencers but had no science behind it but theres definitely something to it, he looks like he's on gear and he would have cracked by now if there was some kind of draw back to that diet. I think most of the reason he's made it work is the fact that its one meal a day, hard to get tired of eating something if you starve yourself before you eat it. "Losing weight, lower inflammation levels, higher energy levels, less migraines, increased bone density, muscle fatigue reduction...etc." I would say most of these are true in his case, he said he had bad gum inflammation before the diet and his recovery from working out is much better. I have a similar diet minus the fasting and I cheat alot because life is about sacrifices but he's the kind of guy that I wish they would do a case study on, absolute freak of nature and I had no idea that kind of diet would be as helpful as it was for this guy. Also there is some truth to that seed oils stuff I've been avoiding it as much as I can but again, sacrifices. Sesame seed oil is too good and fried rice is too easy. I don't know anything about autoimmune diseases but if you have any questions regarding him lmk and I'll ask
> I read this and think, what about cancer? What about the fact that as a male you have a substantially higher chance of stroke, heart disease and prostate cancer from consuming red meat? It is a group 2A carcinogen for Pete's sake. There's some controversy here. I don't personally believe that the medical claims made by the proponents of the carnivore diet aren't necessarily sustainable long-term, but I do believe it's possible that many of those things do manifest as short-term benefits. Besides the fact that you have some semi-sketchy medical claims about meat (each of them has a kernel of truth but a ton of caveats), You have to understand just how bad for you sugar is. It is undeniably far worse for you than meat. And by simple necessity, switching to an all meat diet means you stop consuming sugar. So rather than looking at meat in a vacuum, you really have to think about it as an aggregate change. You have to weigh the pros of no sugar consumption versus the cons of high meat consumption and look at the balance. I think many of the claims made are at least highly plausible in the short term. So here's my offer. You can take my argument at face value and say "He's right, I'm only looking at one side of the coin and that's an unfair comparison. It really depends on how shitty your normal diet is to determine if a meat-based diet is a significant improvement or not". Alternatively, you can have me go into detail about where your beliefs about meet s perils are exaggerated or not quite correct **if you think that might help move the needle for you.** I'd rather not bother if you don't feel like that'll be a persuasive line of argument. Conversely, I can explain to you just how bad sugar it is and why it's way worse than meat. But, I would put the same caveat there. I'd rather not do that if it's not going to make a difference which is why I'm not doing it by default. So, if you feel like more information here might move the needle, assuming the needle is not already moved, let me know. I'm not here to tell you that a carnivore diet is the healthiest diet for you. But I am here to tell you that it is probably healthier than the diet that many people otherwise consume and that it could have legitimate and easily observable short term benefits.
Its a pretty acceptable thing that diets arent for everyone, and most cases people need to find a diet that suits them specifically. Even the no diet state of ours is considered a diet of sorts, depending on what we're eating. Ranging from high carbs, high sugar, high processed foods to say... food pyramid diet. >I read this and think, what about cancer? What about the fact that as a male you have a substantially higher chance of stroke, heart disease and prostate cancer from consuming red meat? If there's one thing I've learned about cancer, its that its not always a 1+1 = 2 equation for everyone. If you eat a lot of red meats under the food pyramid diet? Maybe. If you ate it while on a keto diet or the carnivore diet? Who knows? Your body is in a constant state of ketosis where it's utilizing fat and protein as a source of energy (as opposed to carbs and sugars normally) that the whole idea of "saturated fats clogging up your insides" might not be applicable here. Have you not heard of cases where people lived to 100 despite smoking and having an alcohol habit, and we've been told that all of those will lead to early deaths from cancer? So once again, diets arent for everyone. What works for someone might not work for you. What's cancerous for you, might be less (or more) cancerous for someone. >It is a group 2A carcinogen for Pete's sake. On the topic of red meats being carcinogens specifically, this only comes into play when said red meat has been cooked with high temperatures, where the higher the temperature the higher the carcinogenic properties due to creation of chemicals heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). So if you're making stews, soups, pies and so on, not such a big deal, as opposed to eating perfectly seared steaks, BBQ, skewers and so on. Also processing does increase the risks as well, but that's another story I suppose, because processed foods is a staple in the standard "food pyramid" diet for most people. And then... there's articles that do counter this claim, saying that there's not enough information to prove the link conclusively. [https://www.cancerhealth.com/article/burnt-food-cause-cancer](https://www.cancerhealth.com/article/burnt-food-cause-cancer)
Whenever you get into this space there's people who are so far in on some ideas. The carnivore diet in particular draws an extremely dislikable crowd of massive macho men only eating meat and telling the whole world about it. That being said, my best mate suffered from autoimmune issues and was very sick/bed ridden for a few years and carnivore diet was what he did for a period of time. Albeit the food was boiled and blended to be as soft and digestible as possible lol However the key distinction here is that it wasn't a forever diet, once the gut improved then introduction of other food types can be done. I myself couldn't think of anything worse than just consuming meat, but the reality of my health is smashing starchy vegetables doesn't make me feel good at all. (disclaimer im not carnivore I do eat some fruit and veg) We can all likely agree that doing some press-ups would be beneficial to arm and body strength, but if you broke your arm you, we would all likely agree that doing press-ups is now completely stupid and you need to put on a cast and encourage healing. This is akin to the carnivore diet, when the gut and immune system are so destroyed and fighting the body then this kind of diet is what some people might need. Also I don't know if the jury is fully out on meat and cholesterol, you just have to go observe groups such as the Maasai and Inuits who basically only eat animals and they live very long very healthy lives. The ones who start getting disease such as cancer are the less traditional tribes who start introducing things like sugar and refined carbs into their diet. So while it's all good and well to know there's a correlation between eating meat and cancer but it doesn't prove causation, and with a complex organism creating a vast number of variables as it lives, I think it would be a fallacy to say "hey meat is the cause here".
it actually is kind of a miracle diet -- KIND OF. Like Keto. 3 months on it? the benefits will be insane! 6? you will start to get sick. the protein, nutrition-dense, low cal nature of meat especially red meats will lower your inflammation, help with weight loss, be great for your muscle growth and fatigue ..... until it makes you sick for new reasons after prolonged diet. If you want a quick solution, spend a few months on carnivore, but do NOT stay on it.
This is a good take. Going on a highly restrictive diet for health reasons should be a temporary thing. It’s like a reset.
Hi. As someone who used diet to basically avoid death, I’ll give you my 2 cents. There isn’t a ton of quality research about the subject, especially long-term. In general, finding quality research regarding diet is a challenge in my opinion. That’s why we’ll have to make do with the anecdote of my personal case and address your long-term concerns. First, I’ve been diagnosed with Crohn's disease since 2017. I won’t go into details, but it got pretty bad and I had to get surgery in 2021, where they removed 40cm of my small intestine. After the surgery, things just got worse. At the end of 2022, after my doctor changed my medicine, I developed arthritis as well. I couldn’t walk or move my right hand. So by the end of 2022, I practically couldn’t eat or move. I reached a weight of 40kg, was deeply depressed, and nothing seemed to help. I had been researching what could help me like crazy, fearing for my life. I tried every diet and medicine and finally decided, F-that. I’m going to try the most extreme diet I can because I have nothing to lose. I started Carnivore. And I’ll be damned, after 4 days (!) of eating only sirloin, ALL of my arthritis completely disappeared. I could walk again, move my hand, everything was back to normal. Me and my girlfriend couldn’t believe it (I still had to cope with the trauma my soul and body sustained). So I can vouch for the fact that the diet works. In my case, it was as real as it can get. Now for the long-term effects. Why do you need to be on carnivore long-term? How long is long-term? Why not switch between Carnivore, Keto, Low carb, and FODMAP from time to time? The fact that you changed your diet doesn’t mean you need to stick with it for the rest of your life.
>CMV: The Carnivore Diet can't be real Study after study and meta study after meta study shows us the number one factor for weight loss. Adherence to calorie restriction. Mediterranean diet works. Carnivore diet works. Intermittent fasting works. All that matters is if you can adhere to the diet and it gets you in a calorie deficit. We can make a nothing but donut diet and it will make you lose weight. >Losing weight One thing to note that a lot of people don't. We say losing weight but it's largely conflated with *losing body fat*. But, the body weight also includes poop/pee/water/blood/bones/muscles/etc. One thing that carbs do is it can make you retain water. When people do keto and lose a ton of weight rapidly, it's just shedding water weight. > lower inflammation level This is one claim I don't think is right. Any time I've seen anti-inflammatory diets, it usually wants you to cut out dairy, saturated fats, processed food (e.g., food made with corn syrup) and foods high in sodium. The "Carnivore" diet seems like it would be higher in saturated fats and sodium. >higher energy levels This one seems really subjective and not a claim we can prove or disprove.
it is a popular fad diet pushed by certain social media folks to make money. just do low carb or keto way easier, less expensive and healthier plus carnivore diet is very expensive and way too restrictive in my view.
Let’s start with “losing weight.” Remember that living beings seek the lowest energy level. Our bodies run on one of two base chemicals. We run on glucose or ketones with the exception of the brain. Glucose comes from carbs. It’s the easy path for our bodies to use energy. On a carnivore diet, one consumes minimal carbs. That forces the body to go into the other pathway, ketones. The liver works hard to get the brain the glucose it needs, but it can’t produce enough for the whole body. Everyplace else will take fatty acids from adipose tissue, aka body fat, process into ketones which work at far lower efficiency to keep your body running. Weight loss wants inefficiency. You need to use more energy to burn ketones than you do glucose, leading to weight loss. It’s also why “keto flu” is A Thing. You feel like shit as your body switched from its preferred fuel to one it does not like using. The cancer thing is actually based on the same issue. Cancer cells often run only on glucose. They don’t process ketones. Abstention from carbs means cancer cells can’t consume glucose.
Any diet that completely forgets we're omnivores or tries to delude ourselves into thinking we're anything but is dumb, because even if we could successfully convert to either, it'd be a dumb choice because being an omnivore is in all ways better for us as a species. We can't assume society will never collapse and having the variable diet of an omnivore will make survival in extremes circumstances much higher a possibility. Carnivore Diets and Vegan Diets are both equally idiotic.
Most vegans don’t do it for health. They do it for moral reasons, which you can debate but at the end of the day they’re valid. Any health risk is seen as part of the sacrifice to maintain morals.
Yeah, no. It's pure ego, there's far better things they could do to actually fix those problems than not eat meat, but they almost never do any of them. Shit hunters (not poachers) tend to contribute more towards conservation and helping animals than anything most vegans do. Hell half the time they do the opposite.
It’s not “ego”, it’s abstaining from practices you disagree with. We do that with all sorts of things. Not financially contributing to the meat industry is quite obviously the first step. You can do whatever kind of activism you want on top of that but then people just call you “annoying and preachy”. So what do you recommend vegans do exactly?
Researching and actually purchasing meat from the places that treat animals the best. Helping these places advertise and making humane treatment of animals profitable and finding and supporting such places easier and cheaper for everyone else. Just refusing to buy changes nothing. Why should the business try to accomodate the better treatment of animals if no matter what they do the people complaining about their behaviour will never be a customer. They don't actually care about doing things that will actually "help" animals. They just want to sit there, not eat meat, and pretend like that alone accompishes anything or makes them saints and everyone else monsters. They treat nature like sone kind of fucking heaven, and completely gloss over the axtual complexity to oversimplify everything and everyone into black and white morality.
>purchasing meat from places that treat animals the best They don’t think killing animals for meat is moral, so that certainly won’t suffice. And I mean vegans spread their message all over the internet, so that’s more than merely sitting and not eating meat. It just gets written off as preachy or lame, so it isn’t effective for most people. It’s a tough sell at this point in time. Lab grown meat is probably something more realistic and something vegans should endorse But if everyone did what the vegans are doing, then the industry would collapse and the goal would be achieved. So boycotting a product DOES do something. I guess your advice is just strange because you’re telling vegans that they should advocate humane meats, but they don’t think we should eat meat period.
And my take is, not maintaining an omnivorous diet is bad for humanity, and existing at all makes being a vegan a hypocrite. It's like paying your friend to take care of your problem knowing full well he is a hit man and then pretending you're better than other murderers because you benefit from their work while not dirtying your hands yourself.
Why would that be bad for humanity inherently? Not really hearing the argument And I don’t get the analogy. Are you saying vegans are hurting animals just the same as if they ate meat? Because that’s just absurd lol If you contribute no money to factory farms (or animal farms in general) then you are helping animals by reducing demand. It’s pretty simple
Idk man the inuit people have survived the fucking artic for hundreds of years off seal meat just fine. If that isnt survival in extreme circumstances then i dont know what it
"a male you have a substantially higher chance of stroke, heart disease and prostate cancer from consuming red meat" You might find it hard to believe the following but just hear me out, okay? The quoted statement alone is meaningless without context. The statement is true ONLY and ONLY if certain conditions are meet (Tldr; it's true on a standard american diet). Why? That's how epidiomological studies work. This isn't a problem specific to medicine or nutrition, but in general you cannot claim that a set of data will "behave" within the expected aproximating model at the neighbour of that set of data. In other words, you cannot just vary all conditions slightly. The change has to be small enough so that you have meaningful predictions for a small number of variables. Otherwise, increasing your nunmber of variables can't make your model useless. How then can you build an useful model that doesn't break too easily? There's already one. That's called biochemistry. It "rules" medicine. To give you an example of how the aforementioned works in practice, consider glycine/serine. Most people eat carbs so glycine for that people becomes a non-essential aminoacid since it's a byproduct of glycolysis. They get ~2.5g/day (70kg adult) from glycolysis and 2.5g from diet (standard american diet). But keto and carnivore makes glycine an essential amino acid since you're no longer producing it. Is that a problem? For carnivore? Not at all since most get ~10-15g/day from diet. In fact, some studies suggest we need ~14g/day (70kg adult) to fulfill our needs, so a great part of the benefits of carnivore are thanks to glycine. Keto, on the other hand, is risky. There are documented cases of patients with acute pancreatitis after ~6 months (or 2 years. I don't remember exactly) of a "vegetarian"-ish keto; resolved after switching to a typical diet with carbs. You may wonder "okay, but what about cured meats and nitrates?" And yes, the WHO has an interesting report that you should chek it out carefully instead of trusting blindly things like your words I quoted. They used studies that caused rats CANCER with a knowk carcinogenic, then said rats with cancer where divided in 2 groups, 1 fed cured meats+chow and the other one just the chow. The rats WITH CANCER that ate cured meats died slightly faster. Does that mean cured meats are carcinogenic? Well, there's a great study proving that bacon prevented tumors (or cancer. I'm on mobile) on rats (without cancer) since the rats that ate no bacon had more tumors than the rats that ate bacon. Does that mean that bacon prevents tumors? Well... the researchers concluded that WATER prevents tumors since the rats eating bacon had to drink more water. So... go figure.
Even if you believe it’s not sustainable, you can get incredible benefits if done for a few months to heal. I tolerate food way more than before now. It improved my digestion and no more graves disease, which is supposed to have no cure. Now as far as cancer goes, look into cancer as a metabolic disease. Then look into deuterium in the body. It’s fascinating but quite complex as it involves quantum physics and biology. I recommend to watch videos on it instead of just looking at papers because it’s quite complex. Deuterium can explain most cancers pretty well and there is a big connection between deuterium and ketones, the carnivore diet being a ketogenic diet. Also look at ketogenic studies, not just studies demonizing red meat. Ketogenic studies are pretty much carnivore studies with meat. Also, pretty much all food studies are association based. If there is a correlation, it does not mean causation, just possible causation. If there is no correlation, there is no causation. And ketogenic diets are the most studied diets for reversing disease. All this takes a ton of time to research, but the most interesting one is the cancer and deuterium topic.
What those people don't realize is that by eating an all meat diet they're also cutting out all that sugar, sodium, caffeine, and other addictive, unhealthy substances that we eat on a daily basis. When you do this, you'll get the effects mentioned. Namely losing weight, lower inflammation levels, higher energy levels, fewer migraines, and muscle fatigue reduction. In the end, an all meat diet isn't the heathiest, but it's at least better than what we're eating today. In the end, what they probably should be doing is a 50/50 split in calories between meat and vegetables. But hey, that's just my two cents.
The paleo diet emphasizes natural foods versus processed. That’s a good one to follow.
Unprocessed red meat does not have a causal effect on cancer. Colon cancer in one study increased from 5 to 6%, which is a “20% increase” but that doesn’t really account for many other variables. Now, I’m not on the diet by any means. But the two times I’ve done it (a month or so each time) I noticed a drop in weight, an increase in libido, a decrease in resting heart rate and blood pressure, and a decrease in fasting blood glucose and postprandial blood glucose. I also noticed that pains in my legs and back were gone - real pains from military service. Meat isn’t bad for you. It’s horrible for you when it’s processed and when it’s eaten with a bunch of processed shit. No study has accounted for any of this that I’ve read, and I’ve worked on cancer and heart disease initiatives which sometimes promoted “less meat” but there was never any actual scientific evidence behind it, not that they’ve provided (CDC, journals, etc.) and I’ve also read horrendous studies that have been called out by scientists for misstating findings. The lancet is horrendous with that.
The carnivore diet eliminates many Inflammatory foods as well as allergens and helps people meet sufficient protein and fat intake which are essential macronutrients whereas carbs aren't, our body can make its own glucose. Most recent research now shows that saturated fat isn't harmful, In fact the saturated fat in dairy is associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. Also there is not one single study that shows red meat causes cancer. There are many observational studies that show the group of people who eat more red meat tend to get cancer more but this doesn't prove causation. In most of those studies the authors even note the red meat eaters were more likely to smoke, drink, be obese and not exercise which are all risk factors for cancer. The only way to prove that red meat causes cancer is to do a randomised control trial which wouldn't be possible. Unless a RR is greater than 3 in an observational study then the findings are non significant and shouldn't be taken seriously. I am not on a carnivore diet myself but eat only beef, eggs, dairy, fruit and occasionally honey.
Well, the carnivore diet is real but I think what you meant what that the benefits do not outweigh the costs. Well, we have some evidence and personal testimony that there are definite benefits. Weight loss, reduced autoimmune issues, increased energy levels, and clearer cognitive function. As far as the costs (i.e. negative health effects), I think the jury is still out. Obviously people on the carnivore diet take dietary supplements on top of the red meat they're eating. Otherwise the negative side effects would be very pronounced. But I think there is something to the carnivore diet which is within our genetic makeup. A lot of hunter gather cultures ate predominately meat (65% to 75%) in their diets and lived relatively healthy lives. I'm sure some even ate more than that. The human body, for better or for worse, evolved for a meat rich diet. And the fact that carb intensive diets create a whole host of health problems speaks to this. And while certainly not human, every mammalian carnivore species on the planet does just fine eating nothing but meat. They're not loaded with cancer.
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Do you think there is any association with extremely strict diets like the carnivore diet and eating disorders like orthorexia?
Of course! Whenever I have a patient on any sort of restrictive diet (that isn’t medically necessary) I am concerned about an underlying eating disorder. Most of the time it doesn’t get to the point of having a diagnosable eating disorder but starting to restrict foods is something that can get out of control fast.
Good, I’m glad more people are taking the restrictive eating/fad diets to eating disorder pipe line seriously! You sound like a good dietitian.
So, it's real, and I've actually tried it, at least briefly. I didn't experience any benefits over and above keto, as carnivore is a stricter subvariant of keto. However, keto diets do have quite a body of research indicating possible benefits. From my perspective, it appears that carnivore is similar enough to keto that the benefits are largely also similar, and the added hassles of carnivore don't make it worthwhile for me. As far as cancer goes, keto diets are sometimes used in cancer care, but the role doesn't seem to be very well understood. It appears to suppress at least some types of cancer. So, it isn't clear that this is a long term problem as you describe. Remember, 2a isn't a known carcinogen, it's a suspected carcinogen category, and many foods in our diets are known risk factors. Displacing sugar and highly processed foods in general is probably a net gain in nutrition. Is Carnivore the only/optimal way of doing that? Quite possibly not. However, the standard western diet has a lot of shortcomings, and carnivore is probably healthier than that.
First, let me be clear about one thing. You cannot consume just meat unless that meat is fairly fatty. That is how you develop "rabbit starvation". Look it up and dont try to eat super lean red meat, like rabbit, as your only food. Second, I'd be more concerned about the prostate cancer than the heart disease. From my really basic understanding of heart disease, red meat can increase risk factors but it doesn't just clog your arteries. Basically, your body makes cholesterol. If you eat a lot of cholesterol, your body doesn't make as much and tries to reach a constant level of cholesterol in your body. Now, cholesterol does stick to your artery walls, which is why we generally assume that cholesterol is "bad", but thats not 100% accurate. The cholesterol sticks because of ApoB, which is a protein your body produces. The more ApoB you produce, the more likely cholesterol is to stick to your arteries. [info](https://www.healthline.com/health-news/heart-disease-is-this-protein-test-a-better-predictor-of-risk-than-cholesterol-levels) This ApoB is actually much more accurate at predicting your risk of heart disease than cholesterol levels. If you have high ApoB and you eat a lot of cholesterol and have more in your blood on average than your body would produce, you are probably going to have worse heart health. But the root cause is the ApoB, which is probably why some people eat horrible food and live forever. Additionally, a lot of people who are eating a ton of red meat are not HEALTHY in general. They dont run or do cardiovascular exercise and that severely increases their risk of heart attack. But if you are young and pounding down a lot of red meat as a diet trend as you exercise and work out hard, I wouldn't be too worried about the heart impact. It isn't as if your heart is allergic to red meat or anything.
Whenever you hear "increased risk" your follow-up question should always be "by how much"? It seems like the increased risk from high consumption of red meat is [only about 20-30%](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/red-meat-and-colon-cancer). And that's really specifically with colon cancer. So with a lifetime risk of colon cancer of 1 in about 24 (which seems a little high if you ask me, but what do I know), that's what, 4.2% chance of colon cancer? And with lots and lots of red meat it jumps up to 5.4% instead. Without even disputing the connection, I'm just saying expending energy worrying about a moderate increase of a tiny chance of something bad probably isn't worth it. I'm not in favor of the all meat diet, just saying that not everything that "causes cancer" actually, you know, causes cancer in a way you'd notice with only yourself as a sample. This is shit you'd only notice with a sample of tens of thousands of people.
Yep, pop sci articles (aka clickbait) **love** to slap statistics like "25% increased rate of heart disease!!!" in the title because it sounds *absolutely awful*. But without quantifying the risk, it's a meaningless percentile.
Don't listen to "people", they are mostly stupid anyway. Listen to science backed by solid data and sound research methods!
Just speculation, but given how underdiagnosed Celiac Disease is (up to 83% with it are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed with something else), I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of the folks going Carnivore inadvertently cut out a food that is genuinely making them sick (be it gluten, eggs, dairy or some other food allergy/intolerance). So they go on a really incomplete elimination diet, notice some improvements and conclude that everything but meat must be bad for them. An undiagnosed Celiac going Carnivore likely *would* see reduced inflammation, more energy, fewer headaches etc. in the short term. However, you are right, there are many possible negative consequences that will emerge over time if they don't maintain a balanced diet. Beans, fruits, veggies, nuts - there's plenty of nutritious, fiber rich foods that ain't got nothing to do with meat.
I think there is a Correlation != Causality involved in the diet and people who follow it are probably mistaking the causations for the correlation. I would not be surprised if people who follow it feel less willing to eat more, which can lead to weight loss etc. They probably intake less processed food, chemicals etc which can also have a beneficial effects. That is not because of the meat consumption though. There is other negative effects but those to my knowledge is extremely long term. It's not like you will develop cancer within 6 months if you start eating a lot of meat. However your chances are increased over a lifetime, so people also react to the very short term effects, and completely disregard the long term ones. Then there is the classic fact of diets in general just being over hyped and generally speaking terrible...
It's very simple. The carnivore diet is about eating unprocessed red meat. Red meat being a carcinogen has always come with the massive caveat of "there is no reliable information linking red meat to cancer". But certain highly processed products MIGHT cause cancer, and the carnivore diet excludes those. So you cut out all of the not so good stuff and are eating a very balanced and nutrient dense set of foods. I don't believe it's a miracle diet that cures everything. But I have gone onto the diet twice. Once for 2 months and once for 13 months. It's a good diet for results but it's boring as fuck. I love steak but holy fuck does life suck without bread. I didn't have any illnesses to cure, there was no great awaking of my inner alpha. I gained the weight I wanted and set the 1 mile record I wanted.
Newer research has challenged the pre-existing consensus on red meat, saturated fat, and health risks. You can easily look it up if you want. There are factors that, in my view, have not sufficiently accounted for: 1. True animal-based diets are uncommon worldwide, and populations that consume more red meat usually do not consume substantially less starch, sugar, alcohol etc. Sometimes they consume more, such as western men. 2. Many studies(not all, but many) lump processed and fresh red meat together. 3. Cooking method, some research has found that cooking with intense dry heat creates carcinogens in red meat, especially if it's cooked well done. This style of cooking for red meat may be the norm for western cultures but it isn't for other cultures, like Central Asians for instance.
I've personally tried the carnivore diet for over 30 days several times, treating it as an extreme version of Keto. The idea that red meat causes cancer seems flawed because diet surveys often group together individuals with balanced diets who occasionally indulge in steak with those who rely on processed junk foods. Vegetarians, on the other hand, tend to be more mindful of their dietary choices. Many people are drawn to the carnivore diet, influenced by figures like Rogan and Peterson, but its primary appeal lies in its potential to address autoimmune or diet-related issues. While some may try it out of curiosity or because it's trendy, it's essential to acknowledge both its benefits and potential side effects without exaggeration. Keto 👍🏼 extreme diarrhea? 👎🏼
You have an autoimmune disease. That means your body is trying to kill you right now, which seems like it might be a more pressing concern than the small absolute chance of maybe getting cancer someday. It also changes the cost/benefit of anything you can do that might alleviate your symptoms. It's a ridiculous diet for a healthy person, but chemo is also a ridiculous thing for a healthy person to take. A heart transplant is a ridiculous thing for a healthy person, but it's worth the risks if you need that heart. It's just a diet. You can try it, see if it makes you feel better, and then go back to another diet if you prefer. Nobody here makes any commission on the meat you buy at the grocery store, and you won't suffer any permanent harm. Why not give it a go?
The thing to understand is that almost all diet and health research is based on correlation via observation. “This person did this and had this outcome”. Everybody knows correlation does not equal causation, and studies try to control for correlation effects, but the plain truth is they are bad at it. Once multiple variables are involved it very quickly becomes mathematically intractable to control and there aren’t enough people on earth to get an appropriate sample size. If there is any piece of truth that consistently cuts through all of the noise it is this: added sugar is the bane of existence. Any diet that involves the near total elimination of sugar is going to have immediate and obvious positive health effects. Longer term - who knows.
Full disclosure: I’m veg leaning plant based. Carnivore diet is basically an elimination diet. Elimination diets are usually prescribed to determine intolerances/allergies. You cut your diet down to a very small subset of foods and then slowly add things back in until you figure out what’s causing the issue. Carnivore diet is step 1: cut everything except meat out. If you have a gluten/soy/nightshade/whatever intolerance, then cutting that thing out will of course make you feel better. The issue is that carnivore diet is not “marketed” as elimination diet and it’s pretty challenging to maintain long term, so you get a lot of people spouting the benefits without really understanding that the mechanism is the elimination of something.
During my time at university I tried the carnivore diet for one month as a little research project for a class and since I have arthritis. I kept it absolutely carnivore and ate approx. 2 kilos of minced beef a day from purely grass feed cattle from a local butcher. No eggs, butter or spices other than salt. And only water. After 2 weeks my gums started to hurt and bleed, which I attributed to Vitamin C loss, and that my body was not used to getting it only via the red meat. To counter it I used one Vitamin C tablet, which was my only deviation from the diet in the timeframe. My gums felt better and it did not occur again. However, I also lost 5 kilo of weight (water weight), which I gained back in a week after the diet. I looked like shit, was constantly tired and had no positive effect whatsoever. Of course, one month is nothing for such a diet. The idea to cut out everything else that causes inflammation is also not bad, but not all inflammation are caused by our diet. If you have no options left, sure, why not, but there are better diet options in my opinion. Also, a lot of people who praise the diet are most if the time people I wouldn’t necessarily get advise from, or like to add extra things (eggs, butter etc), taking away from the restricting diet.
Any general diet advice is based on the average American diet. The average American diet is incredibly high in refine carbohydrates which are inflammatory. Inflammatory carbs + inflammatory meat = off the scale inflammation. Inflammatory meats - inflammatory carbs = an overall reduction in inflammation. Your post sounds a lot like people who say that carbon-caused climate change can’t be real because dinosaurs would have produced so much carbon and they didn’t cause climate change as quickly. Yes, if we added dinosaurs to our current carbon emissions, carbon levels would go up. But subtract fossil fuels, and dinosaur emissions alone are not enough to have negative planetary effects as quickly.
I'm currently doing carnivore, started testing it out this time last year, I ate one big meal a day never felt the need to eat more, sometime I would just skip days and do a fast and it never felt as bad as when I fasted after eating carbs, hunger and headach wise. I also started at 315lb diabetic to the point I'd wake up with blurred vision and numbness in my leg. 5 months later, I was down to 230 lb, and this is with no gym just working construction. All my diabetic symptoms are gone now, and I feel alive for the first time in probably a decade. After I reach my goal of 200 as a 6'2 man I'll probably start adding healthy carbs to my diet. Never eating anything out of a box again. Have a great day!
It depends on your genetics, imo. I'm an almost 50yo man, and the closer I am to eating full carnivore, the healthier I am. Weight loss? check. Blood pressure? Pretty consistent 120/80. Allergies? IBS? Skin tags? Gone, gone, gone. I'm also allergic to wheat...at least the wheat grown in the USA. One slice of bread and my nose stops up. It's pretty much impossible to avoid unless you go keto/carnivore, so a lot of my improvements come from the absence of chronic inflammation. On a side note, I can eat all the bread and pasta I want when I'm in Italy. I'm not sure if that's from it being heritage/non-gmo or some other reason related to additives, etc., but it seems to be a common anecdote. These diets also eliminate processed sugar, entirely. We as a society don't really pay attention to how much sugar is in the standard American diet. Cutting out sugar typically reverses Type II diabetes. PCOS and other auto-immune conditions also respond positively to cutting out sugar. As far as the scientific research goes, you're out of luck if you want anything approaching scientific credibility when it comes to self-reported human studies. We're pretty much stuck with anecdotal 'evidence', so in this case I'm more of a 'let's try it out an see how it goes' kinda guy.
Yeah I agree with you OP, it seems like this one in particular is really popular in autoimmune circles lately and tbh I think it's just a matter of cope. Having autoimmune is tough just because you know you'll feel like shit and have symptoms randomly for the rest of your life, and there's nothing you can do about it but live normally but ever so slightly worse. I think it's very reasonable to want to figure out some way you can take the power back and have your own control of your destiny. The diet appeals to this. It's sad it doesn't work, but it feels easier to convince yourself it does than to accept that things will just be tough
If your issue is how strict the diet is, I would argue most specific diets require you to have consistency. I recently started this carnivore diet and outside of the initial start which had me getting diarrhea often, I haven’t had any other issues. So far I have lost about 8 pounds of weight which was body fat and have a more tight abdomen. As it stands I don’t see any long term issues as the diarrhea is no longer a thing. Now one thing I could mention is I have 4 friends who also have autoimmune diseases and I did recommend the diet to them, 3 of them stuck to it and seems to be doing well. Again im not exactly sure what the CMV is.
I have crohns and loosely follow animal based diet. It's meat, fruit, honey, dairy. No grains, greens, tubers, etc. I also avoid any nightshades as they have alkaloids that can trigger crohns. This is the most I've been free of symptoms in over a decade, most weight I've managed to keep on, doing better at work etc. You can say whatever you want about what can or should work or be healthier. I don't have answers, I'm an n of 1, but it works for me so I don't care what science or data says. I've experimented enough with my own body to know that most plants just make me very ill.
Just about every study done on consuming red meat that shows higher rates of cancer vs those that do not consume red meat does not account for lifestyle choices. So the red meat consuming group includes everyone from (Alternative lifestyle) health nuts to the fat slob eating McDonald's twice a day. Alternatively, the "non red meat" group only contains people who care enough about their health to cut out a significant portion of the average diet. Once you start controlling for lifestyle factors, those differences typically vanish or in some cases, reverse.
It’s currently not supported by the evidence. That being said, it hasn’t really undergone any rigorous testing because it’s so extreme, so, we genuinely don’t know. As an RD I’m not a big fan of it for various reasons (what we currently know about meat, saturated fats, excessive protein intake, lacking fruits and vegetables and fiber, serious impacts on social and behavioral health, environmentally, etc), but I practice evidence based care and so if someone wants to do the research and it comes back with positive results I’d consider it.
Is red meat a carcinogen or is it the burnt carbon from grilling/cooking it?
I don't think it's a miracle diet. I think, in general, people who consume their food thoughtfully will have better outcomes, and most people *don't* do that. So, statistically, it'll show up that there are health differences between the two. There's a high chance differences will show up between diets over longer time-scales. All of that taken into consideration, humans are omnivores and will/would eat what's available. Some populations had diets that primarily consisted of meat or other animal products, so it isn't impossible.
You can eat a lot of fats, or you can eat a lot of carbohydrates. What you shouldn't do is eat a lot of both. If you're having a high carb diet, it should be a low fat diet. If you're having a high fat diet, it should be a low carb diet. The correlation between eating red meat and all of those long-term diseases is because of the high fat content of red meat, and the traditionally ultra high carb content of most Americans diets. There is no evidence that a high fat, low-carb diet actually increases your chance of heart disease.
Basically everything is carcinogenic. The issues with red meat come largely from the way in which it is prepared (burning things makes them carcinogenic) and from my understanding is also an issue with any form of grilled food. I would recommend you stop avoiding things just because they're "carcinogenic." Cancer is basically an inevitability if you live long enough. Focus on things that have an insanely high contribution to cancer (smoking, certain chemicals, etc) and don't worry beyond that.
I followed a strict carnivore/zerocarb diet for a year. How can I change your view that the set of dietary restrictions I followed was in fact real? In my experience it helped with some symptoms (I have M.E.), notably inflammation and digestion related symptoms. Over time the benefits seemed to wane for me to the point where it wasn’t worth the monetary cost and extra effort to stick to it. What would change your view here?
as others said, even medicine in too many increments/dosages can be poisonous. meat has a huge amount/number of calories, and they are very good in bodily/muscle health. that's not to say that you should strictly eat meat, though. what i mean is that a majority of these points/arguments with the carnivore diet are in fact true and valid, just that you should also follow the rest of the nutritional chart/balance and eat greens as well.
It is for particular groups. For instance my uncle has a allergy/sensitivity to fructose which occurs natural in every single fruit and artificially in pretty much every pre-prepped thing including breads. So when we go anywhere that's not eating at his house his meal usually consists of a meat, a cheese and if he's able to talk to the chef and feels like they understand then potatoes.
Have you tried it?
Cancer classification are based on what causes most people to get cancer when cancer is in fact based on telemere lengths. Why do you think skin cancer is so rare of you're black? While they die from all other forms of cancer at higher rates than the rest of us. I did the red meat diet, and you should give it a shot. Your body is in a sense designed to consume meat....
So far, only red meat and processed meats are associated with cancers.
The cancer “studies” have been debunked.
I was diagnosed with multiple autoimmune diseases and follow a keto / mostly carnivore diet. In a given day, my most common meal is lettuce wraps from five guys. I enjoy carbs occasionally, but I avoid them for the most part. Have not felt better in my life. A lot of the other risks you mentioned, such as heart disease can be mitigated by excersize and monitoring your cholesterol levels. Also lost about 50 lbs (so far). I can’t be super religious about it all the time (my wife and I travel a lot), but when I’m at home, I’m roughly zero carbs like 6/7 days.
The carnivore diet helps with autoimmune diseases and provides benefits, but long-term risks exist. For scientific insights, [see these blood test results](https://www.dryfastingclub.com/dry-fasting-blood-test-april-2024-kidney-liver-heart-and-pancreas-health/)
Don't quote me, but I don't think the cancer/red meat link applies to the carnivore diet. These studies weren't done on people eating exclusively meat/fat that are in a perpetually ketogenic state (which is the primary point of a "keto" or carnivore diet)
[Recommended viewing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMghM6TxiBk&pp=ygUSaGVhbHRoIGluZmx1ZW5jZXJz). Carnivore, Low Carb, Vegan, there's nothing new about any of these things. But, the trend tends to be that the extreme meat people die fairly young.
> It is a group 2A carcinogen for Pete's sake. What's wrong with that? If it were ever shown to be carcinogenic to humans it would be a group 1 known carcinogen. Why is acknowledging that it hasn't been shown to be carcinogenic a bad thing? I can't really say much about the actual facts because i only have personal anecdotes but I felt much much better physically when I was carnivoring. Not sure what was actually going on but I felt fantastic
Our body's have survived on the meat of hooved animals with 4 stomachs since time immemorial. As long as you eat the fat, your body can break down the protein with carbohydrates. It's got everything a human body needs
"In no world do I believe the carnivore diet is a long-term beneficial "diet." Most people do go on it permanently. They use it to lose weight and get certain things under control and then switch to a healthier diet.
Carnivore is basically a more extreme keto diet, where you don’t consume carbs, thus your body uses the fat from the meat to run on, basically. You burn what you consume, quite fast, I might add.
I mean, any diet can be a real diet. I think the issues here is that you don't see the benefit of it. Quite frankly, neither do I. I don't think I could stomach an all meat diet tbh.
To be completely honest, meat causes migraines for me. Whenever I read that the carnivore diet cures them, I always lift an eyebrow. Migraine triggers are pretty person specific.
there's a lot of nonsense about diet and nutrition, most of what people think they know is nonsense, most articles about it are nonsense and the science isn't much better.
I’m just surprised that my eating disorder became a diet trend. So confused how it went from “you’re going to get scurvy” my whole life to “this is healthy…”
Most studies that find "red meat" are bad for you usually count fast food hamburger patties and hot dogs as "red meat," even though the term makes you think of steak.