The Carnivore Code by Dr. Paul Saladino is probably the best source for information on carnivorous dietary consumption.
Lately he has moved into including honey and fruit into his daily food choices as we. He's got a fantastic podcast and YouTube channel.
Dr. Berry is a huge proponent of a ketogenic diet. He does a great Q&A with his wife on his podcast regarding health and nutrition. Of course both Dr. Berry and Dr.Saladino are ruffling the feathers of the big food companies and their paradigms. So there has been quite a campaign by big food to discredit their wisdom.
This is more silly bullshit. Aren't you one of the people who cliamed that "Big Science" had fabricated the COVID pandemic?
en.wikipedia.org
In 2018, the carnivore diet was promoted by former orthopaedic surgeon Shawn Baker on social media and received significant media attention due to its vocal adherents
Jordan Peterson and his daughter Mikhaila Peterson.
[1][8][9] Peterson and his daughter follow a strict type of carnivore diet termed the lion diet, in which only
beef, salt and water is consumed.
[9][10][11]
Diet
People following a carnivore diet consume
animal-based products, such as beef, pork, poultry, and seafood.
[1][12] Some may eat
dairy products and eggs.
[12] All fruits, legumes, vegetables, grains, nuts and seeds are strictly excluded.
[12]
Health and environmental concerns
There is no
clinical evidence that the carnivore diet provides any health benefits.
[1][11][10] Dietitians dismiss the carnivore diet as an extreme fad diet,
[1][2] which has attracted criticism from dietitians and
physicians as being potentially dangerous to health (see
Meat § Health).
[8][11][10][13] It also raises levels of
LDL cholesterol, which increases risk of
cardiovascular disease.
[2] Carnivore diets exclude essential micronutrients and antioxidants found in fruits and vegetables, they are also low in
dietary fiber which can cause
constipation.
[2][4][12] A carnivore diet high in
red meat increases risk of
colon cancer and
gout.
[4]
Beef for lunch, beef for dinner and perhaps a little bone broth for breakfast? It sounds like a doctor's nightmare, but the so-called "carnivore diet" is gaining traction — if social media is anything to go by.
www.abc.net.au
The famous psychologist and his daughter swear by a regimen of eating only beef. Restriction can provide a sense of order in a world of chaos—but at what point does restriction become a disorder?
www.theatlantic.com
There is so much evidence—abundant, copious evidence acquired over decades of work from scientists around the world—that most people benefit from eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and seeds. This appears to be largely because fiber in plants is important to the flourishing of the gut microbiome. I ran this by some experts, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything that might suggest a beef-salt diet is potentially something other than a bad idea. I learned that it was worse than I thought.
“Physiologically, it would just be an immensely bad idea,” Jack Gilbert, the faculty director at the University of Chicago’s Microbiome Center and a professor of surgery, told me during a recent visit to his lab. “A terribly, terribly bad idea.”
Gilbert has done extensive research on how the trillions of microbes in our guts digest food, and the look on his face when I told him about the all-beef diet was unamused. He began rattling off the expected ramifications: “Your body would start to have severe dysregulation, within six months, of the majority of the processes that deal with metabolism; you would have no short-chain fatty acids in your cells; most of the by-products of gastrointestinal polysaccharide fermentation would shut down, so you wouldn’t be able to regulate your hormone levels; you’d enter into cardiac issues due to alterations in cell receptors; your microbiota would just be devastated.”
While much of the internet has been following this story in a somewhat snide way, Gilbert appeared genuinely concerned and saddened: “If she does not die of colon cancer or some other severe cardiometabolic disease, the life—I can’t imagine.”
There are few accounts of people having tried all-beef diets, though all-meat—known as carnivory—is slightly more common. Earlier this month, inspired by the media conversation about the Peterson approach, Alan Levinovitz, the author of
The Gluten Lie,
tried carnivory, eating only meat for two weeks. He did lose seven pounds, which he attributes to eating fewer calories overall, because he eventually got tired of eating only meat. He missed snacking at coffee shops and browsing the local farmer’s market and trying out new restaurants around town, cooking with his family, and just generally enjoying food.
“I was psychologically exhausted,” Levinovitz told me. When he returned to omnivory, he regained the lost weight in four days.
Peterson told me it took several weeks for her to get used to the beef-only approach, and that the relief of her medical symptoms overpowers any sense of missing food. If even a tiny amount of anything else finds its way into her mouth, she will be ill, she says. This happened when she tried to eat an organic olive, and again recently when she was at a restaurant that put pepper on her steak.
“I was like, whatever, it’s just pepper,” she told me. Then she had a reaction that lasted three weeks and included joint pain, acne, and anxiety.
Apart from having to exist in a world where the possibility of pepper exposure looms, the only other social downside she notices is that she hates asking people to accommodate her diet. So she will usually eat before she goes to a dinner party, she told me, “but then I’ll go drink and enjoy the party.”
“Drink, as in, water?”
“I can also, strangely enough, tolerate vodka and bourbon.”
The idea that alcohol, one of the most well-documented toxic substances, is among the few things that Peterson’s body will tolerate may be illuminating. It implies that when it comes to dieting, the inherent properties of the substances ingested can be less important than the eater’s conceptualizations of them—as either tolerable or intolerable, good or bad. What’s actually therapeutic may be the act of elimination itself.
For centuries, ascetics have found enlightenment through acts of deprivation. As Levinovitz, who is an associate professor of religion at James Madison University, explained to me, the Daoist text the
Zhuangzi describes “a spirit man” who lives in the mountains and rides dragons and subsists only on air and dew. “There’s an anti-authoritarian bent to pop-culture wisdom, and a part of that is dealing with food taboos, which are handed down by authorities,” Levinovitz said. “Those are government now, instead of religious. And because they are wrong so often—or, at least, apparently wrong—that’s a good place to go when carving out your own area of authority. If you just eat the ‘wrong’ foods and don’t die, that’s a ritual way to prove that you go against conventional wisdom.”
Peterson’s narrative fits a classic archetype of an outsider who beat the game and healed thyself despite the odds and against the recommendations of the establishment. Her story is her truth, and it can’t be explained; you have to believe. And unlike the many studies that have been done to understand the diets of the longest-lived, healthiest people in history, or the randomized trials that are used to determine which health interventions are safe and effective for whom, her story is clear and dramatic. It’s right there in her photos; it has a face and a name to prove that no odds are too long for one determined person to overcome.
The beneficial effects of a compelling personal narrative that helps explain and give order to the world can be absolutely physiologically real. It is well documented that the immune system (and, so, autoimmune diseases) are modulated by our lifestyles—from how much we sleep and move to how well we eat and how much we drink. Most importantly, the immune system is also modulated by stress, which tends to be a by-product of a perceived lack of control or order.
If strict dietary rules provide a sense of control and order, then Peterson’s approach is emblematic of the trend in elimination dieting taken to an extreme: Avoid basically everything. This verges into the realm of an eating disorder. The National Eating Disorder Association
lists among common symptoms “refusal to eat certain foods, progressing to restrictions against whole categories of food.” In the early phases of disordered eating, as with bipolar disorder or alcoholism, a person may look and feel great. They may thrive for months or even years. But this fades. What’s more, the temporary relief from anxiety may mean that the source of the anxiety goes unsought and unaddressed.
I asked Peterson about the possibility that she may be enabling people with eating disorders. She said she would draw a line if a client were underweight or inducing vomiting. Otherwise, “it’s extremely disrespectful to people with health issues caused by food to be lumped into the same category as people with eating disorders. More of the same ‘blame the patient’ stuff that doctors and health professionals already do.”
The popularity of Peterson’s narrative is explained by more than its timeless tropes; it has also been amplified by the fact that her father has occasionally cast his spotlight onto her story. Jordan Peterson’s recent book,
Twelve Rules for Life, includes the story of his daughter’s health trials. The elder Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, could at first seem an unlikely face for acceptance of personal, subjective truth, as he regularly professes the importance of acting as purely as possible according to rigorous analysis of data. He argued in a recent
video that American universities are the home to “ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective, that all sex differences are socially constructed, and that Western imperialism is the sole source of all Third World problems.” In his book, he writes that academic institutions are teaching children to be “brainwashed victims,” and that “the rigorous critical theoretician is morally obligated to set them straight.”
It is on grounds of his interpretation of income data, for example, that he has spoken out against the idea of a wage gap between men and women being unfair, as it can be explained away by biological factors associated with certain personality traits that are more valuable in the capitalist marketplace. From arguments from social-science evidence, he has expressed uncertainty that lesbian couples can raise children without a male father figure. And it is academic evidence that leads him to write in his book that “the so-called patriarchy” is “an arbitrary cultural artifact.”
Yet in a July
appearance on the comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, Jordan Peterson explained how Mikhaila’s experience had convinced him to eliminate everything but meat and leafy greens from his diet, and that in the last two months he had gone full meat and eliminated vegetables. Since he changed his diet, his laundry list of maladies has disappeared, he told Rogan. His lifelong depression, anxiety, gastric reflux (and associated snoring), inability to wake up in the mornings, psoriasis, gingivitis, floaters in his right eye, numbness on the sides of his legs, problems with mood regulation—all of it is gone, and he attributes it to the diet.
“I’m certainly intellectually at my best,” he said. “I’m stronger, I can swim better, and my gum disease is gone. It’s like, what the hell?”
“Do you take any vitamins?” asked Rogan.
“No. No, I eat beef and salt and water. That’s it. And I never cheat. Ever. Not even a little bit.”
“No soda, no wine?”
“I drink club soda.”
“Well, that’s still water.”
“Well, when you’re down to that level, no, it’s not, Joe. There’s club soda, which is really bubbly. There’s Perrier, which is sort of bubbly. There’s flat water, and there’s hot water. Those distinctions start to become important.”
Peterson reiterated several times that he is not giving dietary advice, but said that many attendees of his recent speaking tour have come up to him and said the diet is working for them. The takeaway for listeners is that it worked for Peterson, and so it may work for them. Rogan also clarified that though he is also not an expert, he is fascinated by the fact that he hasn’t heard any negative stories about people who have started the all-meat diet.
“Well, I have a negative story,” said Peterson. “Both Mikhaila and I noticed that when we restricted our diet and then ate something we weren’t supposed to, the reaction was absolutely catastrophic.” He gives the example of having had some apple cider and subsequently being incapacitated for a month by what he believes was an inflammatory response.
“You were done for a month?”
“Oh yeah, it took me out for a month. It was awful ...”
“Apple cider? What was it doing to you?”
“It produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom. I seriously mean overwhelming. There’s no way I could’ve lived like that. But see, Mikhaila knew by then that it would probably only last a month.”
“A month? From fucking cider?”
“I didn’t sleep that month for 25 days. I didn’t sleep at all for 25 days.”
“What? How is that possible?”
“I’ll tell you how it’s possible: You lay in bed frozen in something approximating terror for eight hours. And then you get up.”
The longest recorded stretch of sleeplessness in a human is
11 days, witnessed by a Stanford research team.
While there is debate in the scientific community over just how much meat belongs in a human diet, it is impossible for all or even most humans to eat primarily meat. Beef production at the scale required to feed billions of humans even at current levels of consumption is
environmentally unsustainable. It is not even healthy from a theoretical evolutionary viewpoint, the microbiome expert Gilbert explained to me. Carnivores need to eat meat or else they die; humans do not. “The carnivore gastrointestinal tract is completely different from the human gastrointestinal tract, which is made up of a system designed to consume large quantities of complex fibers.”
What the Petersons are selling is rather a sense of order and control. Science is about questions, and self-help is about answers. A recurring idea in Jordan Peterson’s book is that humans need rules—its subtitle is “an antidote to chaos”—even if only for the sake of rules. Peterson discovered this through his own suffering, as when he was searching the world for the best surgeon to give his young daughter a new hip. In explaining how he dealt with Mikhaila’s illness, he writes that “existence and limitation are inextricably linked.” He quotes Laozi:
It is not the clay the potter throws,
Which gives the pot its usefulness,
But the space within the shape,
From which the pot is made
Dietary rules offer limits, good or bad, that help people define the self. This is an attractive prospect, and anyone willing to decree such rules—dietary or otherwise—is bound to attract attention. Fox News recently
declared Peterson “the left’s public enemy number one” in a segment where he discussed with Tucker Carlson “why the left wants to silence conservative thought.” Though to have lived through the last year is to have lived in a world where Peterson and his ideas have enjoyed near-constant amplification.
The allure of a strict code for eating—a way to divide the world into good foods and bad foods, angels and demons—may be especially strong at a time when order feels in short supply. Indeed there is at least some benefit to be had from any and all dietary advice, or rules for life, so long as a person believes in them, and so long as they provide a code that allows a person to feel good for having stuck with it and a cohort of like-minded adherents. The challenge is to find a code that accords as best as possible with scientific evidence about what is good and bad, and with what is best for the world.
* This article previously misidentified Peterson as the author of a guest post on her blog.