Let's End This Beef! 8 Nuanced Truths About the Carnivore Diet

The carnivore diet. It's a polarizing trend that's rapidly on the rise, and one that's sparking debates from dinner tables to social media spaces to the halls of academia. So is it a path to better health, or is it dangerously misguided? From fiber myths to vitamin C, in this video you will meet 8 myths about this diet. And why they may not be as clear-cut as you think. And this video will be unique, one might call it rare, but at the same time be well done. It will be provocatively reasonable and will give you basic truths about what the carnivore diet is and what it is not. Finally, I'll conclude by directing you to a resource that will empower you to stay up to date on this topic if after this video you remain carnivore curious. So let's dig into the myths. Number 1 myth: there isn't any evidence supporting a carnivore diet. There are actually several research articles on the carnivore diet, including a study out of Harvard that included 2,029 participants, and it found, now quoting, participants reported high levels of satisfaction and improvements in overall health. Well-being, and various medical conditions. There were also two recent case series on a carnivore diet for inflammatory bowel disease and restrictive eating disorders. I'm pretty familiar with these, I wrote both of them. This is evidence, let's be clear, and the results, they're rather impressive. It's true, that said, these are not randomized controlled trials, on a carnivore diet, nor have such trials been conducted. And these randomized controlled trials will need to be completed before conventional medicine can recommend a carnivore diet as a metabolic health intervention for any specific disorder like autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, inflammatory bowel disease as just one example. All this is to say the research is in a very early stage because the carnivore diet and carnivore diet movement and yes, I think I can call it that, is relatively young from a research perspective. But, and this is really important, that does not detract from the fact that thousands of people are having positive results with a carnivore diet and for a broad range of disorders, including mental health conditions and inflammatory conditions. These are real people with real stories of suffering and recovery. The next step will be to leverage these powerful human stories and early data to inspire and fund randomized controlled trials on a carnivore diet to potentially make it a mainstream option. Now, as a clinical researcher, I can tell you this is easier said than done, particularly given the stigma around the carnivore diet, the research bias, and even more so the fact that Big Pharma isn't going to toss $10 million at a diet trial when it won't make them, or the medical system, money in the current business model. That's just a reality. Anyway, moving on. Myth 2: You'll get scurvy on a carnivore diet because of a vitamin C deficiency. Now, while it's true it's difficult to meet the RDA daily dose of 75 to 90 milligrams of vitamin C eating only meat, there is about 25 micrograms per gram of vitamin C in fresh grass-fed beef, so eating about 2 pounds of meat daily should give you about 18mg of vitamin C. This is still well below the RDA. However, that doesn't necessarily mean one will develop a vitamin C deficiency or the associated medical condition, which is scurvy, eating meat, even just muscle meat. In fact, back in 1906, the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson lived in the Arctic with Inuits and consumed an almost entirely carnivore diet for many months, and he was surprised to find that he and the Inuit were in excellent health overall and were scurvy-free. In fact, Stefansson then did an experiment in 1928 when he and a colleague ate nothing but meat for an entire year and ended in good physical condition with no subjective or objective evidence of any loss of physical or mental vigor. And to my own surprise, when I did a 6-month carnivore diet experiment and then tested my intracellular vitamin C levels, they were normal and on the border of actually being high. So what gives? Well, generally the rules of nutrition change when you change metabolic states. Here I can give two potential mechanisms. First, the intake of sugar and carbohydrates can reduce the uptake of vitamin C. So when you're on a very low-carb, sugar-free diet, like a ketogenic or carnivore diet, your vitamin C requirements might actually be reduced as compared to the general public. And second, and this is even more interesting, the antioxidant systems of the body, including endogenous systems like glutathione and exogenous antioxidants like vitamin C, they rely on a molecule called NADPH to renew them. All antioxidants rely on NADPH, and carbohydrate restriction to the point of ketosis can boost NADPH, providing a way by which vitamin C and other antioxidants can effectively be recycled. And this vitamin C example is just one example of how specific nutrient requirements change depending on metabolic state. So in my opinion, we should be mindful of this fact and not assume that just because intake of a particular nutrient doesn't hit the recommended daily allowance, we shouldn't assume that it might not be perfectly sufficient in a different metabolic state. Okay, moving on. Myth 3: You need fiber or you won't poop. This is a pretty easy myth to debunk. Just live with someone who's on a carnivore diet and ask to inspect their toilet bowl in the morning after their morning movement. A large part of the mass of your stool is actually dead bacteria. You still have dead bacteria on a carnivore diet. And while a majority of the nutrition one consumes on a carnivore diet should be absorbed in the small intestine, an overall fecal mass will decrease or should decrease. You will still poop. And on a related topic, studies suggest that fiber elimination can actually help manage the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome with constipation. Reading from one paper, constipation and its associated symptoms can be effectively reduced by stopping or even lowering the intake of dietary fiber. And also, fiber elimination can help put inflammatory bowel disease into remission where standard medications might fail. You can see this paper for more. That said, I want to be clear about this. This does not mean that fiber is bad or that long-term zero-fiber diets couldn't have negative consequences on the microbiome. At a high level, I think about it like this: ecosystems, be it a rainforest or a coral reef or your microbiome, are generally most resilient and healthy when they're diverse. And giving more food and fodder to your microbiome in the form of pre- and probiotics, fermentable fibers, polyphenols, etc., can help support diversity. So all things being equal, I'd gamble on chronic fiber elimination being a potential risk. I did say that. That said, I myself don't eat much fiber. Why? Well, because of something I alluded to earlier. Given my personal history with IBD and IBS and the symptoms I suffered through. I feel much better on a low fiber diet. That's my choice given my current circumstance and given my current goals. And there are many like me who feel better on low or no fiber diets, so it's a legitimate individual choice. I come back to this idea of all else being equal because it almost never is. And in terms of the long-term consequences of zero fiber diets, well, the truth is we simply don't know. But if the carnivore diet does remain as popular as it is today, we'll surely find out. Okay, myth 4, a carnivore diet will harm your athletic performance. This one's actually a bit funny to me because I can think of a few human carnivores who are absolute athletic beasts. But speaking to the data, as your body adapts to carbohydrate restriction, your capacity to burn fat increases. Reducing demands on muscle glycogen, stores of which in the post-exercise and pre-exercise periods will actually increase on a low-carb diet as the body adapts. Furthermore, a new study on Ironman athletes has debunked the idea that the body needs a high intake of carbohydrates during intense exercise to maintain peak performance. Now admittedly, In this study, very low doses of carbohydrates could be used to offset something called exercise-induced hypoglycemia. The short of it is fatigue and the reduced athletic performance that results from fatigue, it is not driven by depletion of muscle glycogen so much as from likely a central nervous system mechanism that can be hacked by just giving the tiny bit of carbs during very high-intensity exercise to keep the blood supply stable, to keep it from dropping. It's the carb equivalent in this study of just about half a teaspoon of honey per 20 minutes of high-intensity exercise. And it's also likely that the dose needed could be even lower or zero in long-term keto-adapted athletes since ketones can offset the need to maintain higher blood glucose, and longer-term keto adaptation periods also make the body better at rationing carb fuel. And also for this video, I asked the senior author of this new research paper, Dr. Andrew Kutnick, does a carnivore diet necessarily harm athletic performance? Before we go on to Myth 5, here's what he had to say.

We recently asked, does the carnivore diet impair performance? No, not necessarily. What relevant evidence do we actually have? Low carbohydrate, high fat, ketogenic diets. These diets model the key metabolic physiology. What does the evidence show? Our lab has repeatedly shown across comparative crossover randomized controlled trials, including in short duration max effort, very high-intense exercise, as well as prolonged strenuous exercise to exhaustion, including in Ironman competitors, that low carbohydrate, high fat diets do not impair performance. So what's the key take-home for athletes? You can choose your diet for health reasons without being concerned about impaired performance, so long as you adapt to the diet for long enough, and our evidence shows 4 weeks seems sufficient.

Okay, moving on. Myth 5: A carnivore diet will give you a heart attack. Now, this myth is a whole kettle of fish unto itself, so I'll be brief and link to more content below. It's true that a diet rich in red meat and saturated fat can increase LDL cholesterol and the associated marker ApoB, which are independent risk factors for heart disease. I am not denying that. However, the extent to which a carnivore diet increases LDL or ApoB or does not is highly individual. In fact, on these markers alone, some people even see LDL cholesterol and ApoB decrease, and many don't see any change. And those that see the decrease are typically those who start from a place of obesity and insulin resistance. And for those generally lean insulin-sensitive people who do see increases in LDL cholesterol and ApoB when they go keto or carnivore, we are actively studying their risk in a prospective study using coronary CT angiography to see how rapidly, or if, any plaque develops. The early data suggests the risk might not be as great as many would have you believe. That said, these early data do not dismiss risk entirely. However, neither can one claim, with evidence on this population, that it's a very high-risk population. Again, for more nuances, see the resources below, and the associated newsletter, and keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming publications on this topic. And it bears reinforcing, there are many risk factors for heart disease, not just cholesterol. Things like visceral fat, insulin resistance, inflammation, triglycerides, and HDL, they can be improved on very low carbohydrate diets, including on carnivore diets. So a carnivore diet does not implicitly increase heart disease risk. But the bottom line here is different people respond differently. No doubt, right? So it's worth tracking your biomarkers and considering your individual case rather than making assumptions. I'm not saying dismiss risk. I'm saying get informed about your personal risk. Pretty reasonable, right? And on that note, if you want your data in your hands, I'm co-running a promotion on at-home lab testing kits. For 50% off. This will give you your cholesterol and ApoB levels, along with over a dozen other biomarkers. I'm really big about personalized nutrition, and to do that, you really should have your own data. This is how you get it. Anyway, moving on. Myth 6: A carnivore diet is an eating disorder. You hear this a lot, and it's super easy to debunk. Eating disorders are defined as restrictive eating patterns that impaired physical or mental health. So if a person cures or goes into remission from a debilitating chronic disease, be that obesity, diabetes, depression, schizophrenia, inflammatory bowel disease, what have you, using a carnivore diet, then the diet clearly had a positive impact on physical or mental health and is not an eating disorder by definition, but an adaptive eating pattern for that individual, provided it's formulated in a sustainable way. And yes, carnivore diets can be sustainable. So not eating normally is not an eating disorder. In fact, what normal is nowadays, well, I'd say normal eating patterns, standard American diet eating patterns, could themselves reflect a form of eating disorder. And to put the cherry on top of this Debunk Sunday, we published a case report using a carnivore diet in 3 remarkable cases of anorexia nervosa. I'll place a trigger warning on this paper given some graphic images, but you should really give it a read if you want to open your mind. Carnivore diets can actually treat eating disorders. Okay, Myth 7: A carnivore diet is bad for the brain. This myth really started doing the rounds earlier this week as I record this, following on a paper published in the journal Neurology and a waterfall of media headlines that followed claiming red meat intake is linked to dementia. I'll quickly debunk this major study and give you a flavor of how misleading this sort of "science" can be. Sorry for all the heavy air quotes, they're kind of necessary here, or I feel they are. Anyway, the study in question, it used food frequency questionnaires that lump foods together, like lasagna and cheeseburgers with steak and lamb. So first, there was a lot of food lumping. But more importantly, there was tremendous healthy user bias. Quoting from the paper, "Participants who consumed more red meat had higher prevalence of current smoking, hypertension, which is high blood pressure, and diabetes, and lower levels of dietary quality, education, socioeconomic status, and physical activity." So yeah, the data were kind of biased, and these things cannot be fully corrected for. And in fact, unprocessed red meat intake was not linked to dementia or cognitive decline in the study, just processed red meat intake. But this was somewhat overlooked in the study itself when they attempted to discuss their biological rationales for how red meat intake could potentially harm the brain, mostly citing topics like saturated fat and TMAO that are not specific to processed red meat. And if you really want to put Sugar in the wound. If you delve into their own citations for statements like "diets rich in saturated fat can reduce brain-derived neurotrophic factor," you'll find the referenced studies literally specify things like a high-fat sucrose diet. Sucrose is sugar. So TL;DR, a milkshake is not steak. Kind of obvious, right? Okay, moving on. Myth 8: A carnivore diet means... One of the reasons a carnivore diet or red meat intake in general gets so much flack is because this pattern of eating is conflated with other distinct topics or beliefs. So let me be clear on what a carnivore diet does not mean. Eating a carnivore diet for therapeutic purposes does not mean it's best for all humans. It does not mean it's good for longevity. It does not mean it's good for the microbiome or long-term for the average person. It doesn't mean that fiber or fruit is bad. It doesn't mean that carbs are evil. It doesn't mean that greenhouse gases are pixie dust or that animal welfare doesn't matter. And it doesn't mean someone else can't succeed on a plant-based or even vegan diet. A carnivore diet is a potent metabolic intervention with particular use cases that deserve further scientific exploration. It is due further rigorous scientific investigation, and the patients who are using a carnivore diet to treat debilitating illnesses do deserve good health, even if their meat-heavy diets counter the dogma and status quo on what is healthy. So please stop beefing with the carnivore diet just for the sake of it. It's helping people to heal. In closing, I'm not even for or against the carnivore diet per se. Context and nuance are essential. However, I do feel the carnivore diet is misunderstood and that red meat and animal-based foods often get unfairly scapegoated and thrown under the Big Food bus. So the carnivore diet, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. There is no one-size-fits-all dietary solution. But a carnivore diet does challenge conventional nutritional wisdom in powerful ways. So whether you're curious or critical, I hope this video offered a clearer view of the carnivore diet's myths and its potential. For more insights, check out my playlist on animal-based diets, which I'll be keeping updated. And let's meet in the middle and recognize the carnivore diet deserves more study. And together, let's stay curious and non-dogmatic.