The Carnivore Diet

by Shawn Baker

In “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption,” Angell explains that our evidence is pretty much bought and paid for. This includes drug companies and the pharmaceuticals they produce as well as nutrition. Unfortunately, disease is big business, and there’s not much money in healthy people.

When we look back at the creation of the modern “science” of nutrition, we can see that the various philosophies are influenced by their founders’ beliefs. For example, Lenna Cooper founded the American Dietetic Association (now called the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics) in 1917. Cooper was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which encourages a vegetarian lifestyle. Not surprisingly, vegan and vegetarian advocates often quote studies conducted at Loma Linda University, which is supported by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

we can point to that eat lots and lots of meat and live to be very old. For example, residents of Hong Kong consume more meat than just about any other place in the world. Guess what? They live longer than anyone else! (See Figure 2.1.) Does this mean that eating meat makes residents of Hong Kong live a long time? No, we can’t say that any more than we can say that eating plants makes Okinawans live a long time.

Based on this data, we could say that people who eat at least 50 kilograms of beef per year live about fifteen to thirty years longer than those who eat less than 15 kilograms.

You might be saying, “Surely humans would have eaten various berries, nuts, tubers, and whatnot along the way.” Of course, but that doesn’t contradict the point of a carnivore diet. Man is an opportunist omnivore and probably a facultative carnivore as well, and the capacity to extract some nutrition from plants was likely a conserved feature from the very first primates.

Given the structure of our digestive systems, humans do have some small capacity to extract a minimal amount of calories from fibrous plants. However, relying on only plants to supply our nutritional needs would be a pretty poor strategy, particularly because our brains are such energy hogs. A chimp spends ten more times chewing vegetation than a human does chewing meat to extract the calories and other nutrients from its food, and a gorilla spends even more time chewing. If we look at predictions about early humans based on jaw structure, we can estimate that they spent only about 4 percent of their time chewing, so we can feel pretty safe saying that they weren’t munching on leaves and stems all day.

humans to other animals, we find that we’re most similar to cats and dogs. These dramatic anatomic adaptations likely occurred in response to millions of years of dietary exposure to copious amounts of meat and relatively small amounts of plant fiber.

Even present-day indigenous humans who live in very tropical climates where fruit and other edible plants continuously exist still prioritize hunting animals because they know meat is vital for survival.

As the abundant megafaunal food supply dwindled, out of necessity, our ancestors had to become more reliant on alternative sources of fuel.

The grim reality is that we aggressively ate other animals.

when trying to provide evidence in support of a carnivore diet, we can point to successful multigenerational populations like the Maasai, Inuit, and Mongolians.

For example, the Maasai, who spend a significant portion of their lives eating nothing but meat and drinking blood and milk, don’t show any signs of scurvy or any other vitamin or mineral deficiency.

all over the world, there have been accounts of populations that have thrived on fully carnivore diets (or on diets that are almost entirely meat based). Despite our differences, we are all the same species, and we all can eat the same food and thrive provided that food is meat.

Do people on carnivore diets develop scurvy, which is a deadly result of vitamin C deficiency? Basically, the answer is a resounding no. The one exception would be if you attempted to live off a diet of only dried and preserved meats. That type of diet is the reason British sailors developed scurvy.

It has been known for well more than 100 years that meat, particularly fresh meat, both cures and prevents scurvy.

meat does contain a small but sufficient amount of the vitamin, particularly in the context of a fully carnivore diet.

It’s almost as if eating carbohydrates increases the requirements for antioxidants. Although humans can’t make vitamin C as other animals can, in the presence of a low-carbohydrate diet, we see an increase in some of our endogenous antioxidants (that is, our body makes them).

when you’re on an all-meat diet, vitamin C absorption is more efficient,

The fact that we’re still unsure what cholesterol’s functions are and what significance low and high levels may mean should indicate that we still have a very long way to go to full understanding.

Also, we have a mounting pile of evidence that shows that heart disease risk is more influenced by other factors, including things like hyperinsulinemia, inflammatory status, and triglyceride levels, than it is by cholesterol levels.

Dave Feldman, a wonderful citizen scientist, has been demonstrating that our cholesterol levels can change by up to 100 points in a matter of a few days based on nothing more than what that person has eaten in the preceding few days.

Your brain uses something like 25 percent of your body’s cholesterol, and many of your hormones are made from it. Cholesterol is integral to the structure of every cell in your body. You can easily find studies that link low cholesterol to depression, violence, suicide, and neurodegenerative diseases. Some studies report that people tend to die younger if they have low cholesterol. Some cancers have been linked to low cholesterol. Infectious disease can be more difficult to fight when cholesterol levels are low.

data on vegan and vegetarian mortality indicates the number-one and number-two killers for that group are cancer and heart disease.

I don’t recall the early Arctic explorers having to administer enemas to the Inuit populations when they arrived.

Why do we ignore these observations and instead rely on that good ol’ standby of nutritional epidemiology? Could it be because the origins of the nutrition field were tied to vegetarianism and a religious group that started feeding people cereal to cure them from having and acting on impure sexual thoughts?

Humans cannot digest fiber because our digestive tract wasn’t designed for fiber. Just because we shove fiber-filled foods down our digestive tube and some bacteria start to grow and eat it in no way indicates that our bodies require it.

fiber consumption has been shown to increases rates of diverticular disease, or that removing it from the diet often solves longstanding constipation?

Protein doesn’t damage kidneys, but damaged kidneys tend to leak protein, which is something that contributes to the confusion about the relationship between protein and the kidneys.

If protein did indeed damage our kidneys, humans would not have made it this far through history.

When we look at populations of meat eaters, such as the Maasai, Mongols, or Sámi, we see that there’s no indication that they were hobbled by gout.

So what about those rich dudes from a few hundred years ago? Why did they have gout? Because they had access to something that the common folk did not. Sugar! The wealthy also had more access to alcohol, and both sugar and alcohol are strong drivers of gout.

People who follow a carnivore diet often report greatly improved insulin status, lower levels of abdominal obesity, and significantly reduced inflammation.

The end goal of nutrition has a simple two-pronged explanation: It provides us with energy, and it gives us structural components to build and maintain our animal-based cells. We don’t need anything from a plant to accomplish either of those goals. Anything your animal cells need is found in other animal cells. It’s as simple as that.

Nutrition science is based around fundamental assumptions that have never been thoroughly tested.

Other studies have shown that we upregulate our endogenous production of antioxidants as we adopt low-carbohydrate diets, so if we want more antioxidants, all we have to do is eat fewer carbs or even exercise.

The long life spans of Hong Kong residents don’t prove that meat makes people have longevity, but it definitely makes it hard to say that meat shortens one’s life span. The lesson here is that wealth leads to a long life; poverty, not meat, shortens it.

We know that carnosine, which is a molecule in plentiful supply in meat, is perhaps the most powerful substance for reducing oxidative stress and preventing the formation of something called advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which are associated with aging.

it’s becoming clear that all-meat diets are improving insulin function dramatically.

Eat meat and no junk (like a true carnivore), and things are great. Eat meat plus junk (or, worse, eat only the junk), and things are bad.

Meat is rich in several unique compounds found exclusively, or almost exclusively, in animal-based foods. These compounds include carnitine, carnosine, creatine, taurine, retinol, and vitamins B12, D3, and K2. These compounds offer some tremendous benefits.

Carnosine’s antiglycating properties can help mitigate the development of things like Alzheimer’s disease, atherosclerosis, and renal disease.

It has been shown to help with anemia, particularly for anemia associated with kidney dysfunction.

Carnitine is a vital component, and we can synthesize it from the amino acid lysine, which we also obtain from eating animal products.

It’s also interesting to note that patients with Alzheimer’s disease have lower levels of creatine. Heart failure patients who receive creatine have shown improved overall performance, and type 2 diabetics who supplement with creatine have improved glycemic control, particularly when they also exercise.

Taurine is similar to carnosine and has been shown to inhibit glycation. It’s also a powerful antioxidant. Some evidence suggests that taurine contributes to preventing the development of diabetic renal disease.

A deficit of vitamin B12 has been associated with several neurological diseases, including dementia; it’s also related to depression.

On average, people who include meat in their diets generally have better vitamin and mineral status than those who do not, and the vast majority of nutritional deficiency problems are in parts of the world where access to meat is scarce.

When you examine the studies, the researchers always have evaluated a mixed diet, often the standard American diet, so they’ve looked at the effects of adding fruits and vegetables to the other garbage many people eat. Sure, if the result is that you eat less sugary, oily, processed garbage because you’re eating more fruits and vegetables, then you would expect to see a benefit. Do any studies compare an all-meat or meat-based diet to a more plant-based diet? Nope, no one has ever done that.

Quick, tell me which fruit, vegetable, or other plant is an absolutely essential requirement for human life? If you can think of one, then I’d like to know whether it grows all year round and in all parts of the world. If we have essential requirements for them—and we don’t—we would have had limited access to them for roughly 99 percent of our time on Earth as a species. Given that, why does it make sense to recommend we eat copious amounts of fruits and vegetables every day?

We need fat, protein, and some vitamins and minerals. We require no other nutrients to live or—I’ll argue—to thrive. We require zero carbohydrates, zero phytochemicals, and zero fiber.