Carnivores diet

[TRISTAN]

My sister keeps going on at me about trying this as she feels it’s the cure to everything, has anyone on here heard of it or better still tried it ????

[Quinn1]

Tristan, it’s a load of BS
It is just another fad.

[BlueIris]

I think it could also be a very good way to make yourself severely unwell very quickly, not to mention flat broke.

[ankietyjoe]

Personally I don't think it's BS, it's just an elimination diet.

What it's actually doing is removing 90% of the crap processed food out of your system and replacing it with easily digested concentrated nutrition. You are drastically lowering carbohydrate to near zero which has a profound effect on the mind and body, which is why it's not BS.

It's also not unhealthy if done properly. This isn't a diet of sausages and bacon. It's more about eating offal, good quality whole cuts of meat, eggs and fish. There are numerous communities around the world that exist almost completely on a carnivore diet with no health issues, but it's important to remember that these people are eating wild animals, not factory farmed sausage pigs.

The jury is out on the benefits or health issues long term for the kind of animal products WE eat, but if you're prepared to eat the whole animal and not just live off fillet steak and bacon it might be worth a try. It's important to keep the high quality fats in the diet though.

[BlueIris]

That's fair, Joe. I was just thinking of that idiot Jordan Peterson who claims to live on nothing but steak.

[ankietyjoe]

There are always obsessive advocates of any lifestyle, but there is merit to the way of eating if it's done properly. But again, who knows what years of eating that way would do to you. In the short term it's just an easy way to not eat processed crap.

[Quinn1]

Sorry Joe.x, I still believe it’s a load of BS.

[ankietyjoe]

Well it depends on how you define BS. Elimination diets are a proven thing, and can have a profound effect on your mind and body. Good quality meat is immensely nutritious, and easy on the gut. It's not hard to digest. The result of this is that people 'can' feel a lot better doing it.

People generally eat a lot of crap, crap that was sold as being healthy for decades. Bread, pasta, etc etc etc yadda yadda. If you go carnivore, you are obliged to stop.

The BS part could be that the carnivore part itself is the cure, now that I believe to be BS. I believe that the magic is happening because of what you're not eating way more than what you are eating on carnivore.

[MyNameIsTerry]

It's like a vegan's nemesis!

Getting back to less processed food and less sugar is obviously a good thing but what about veg & fibre? What about calcium (those that won't eat dairy)? It's the opposite of health advice and I am questioning the claims it says your GI is better for it when you are eating things that aren't aimed at helping with that. People thousands of years ago would be eating a combination and not just meat.

I would agree it's benefits are more about removing heavily processed foods, something which are recent to humans, and cutting back on so many areas that you end up eliminating some bad foods too.

I have never heard of it so did a quick Google. The first result sounded like every BS product claim out there stating how it solves so many healthy problems and utter nonsense about never feeling hungry or counting macros (healthy eating is all about watching what you eat or you end up overeating and putting weight on with bowls of salad every day if they are bin lid sized). Like the bogus claims found in paleo I guess.

[ankietyjoe]

I did do carnivore for a couple of weeks (otherwise I wouldn't have commented here), and the claims of lack of hunger are absolutely true. When you take carbs out of your diet, you stop the insulin spikes and crashes and you just don't feel like you need food for the most part. The insulin factor is another reason why people seem to have remarkable health improvement from carnivore too. There are plenty of current studies/theories showing that too much insulin is potentially the cause of the vast majority of current health issues, metabolic syndrome being at the heart of the issue (no pun).

And I agree, thousands of years ago people would have been eating a varied diet, but there are communities around the world now that exist almost entirely on animal based products. But again, these people aren't isolating 'choice cuts'. They are eating everything, and what they are eating is wild and not farmed. The difference there is significant. For example liver is often cited as being the single most nutritious food we can eat, but most people would turn their nose up at it.

It's difficult to quantify mineral requirements because RDA's are often based on very old 'guesstimate' data. A lot of the suggestions were originally made in the 1800's for long ship journeys based on how much of something you'd need to simply not get sick, but the contemporary animal based communities have existed this way for multiple generations/centuries so there is merit in the way they eat. I'm not sure you can mimic it with a tesco shop, but as a short term health experiment it can't do any harm.

So much of the health advice we were given over the last few decades has now been widely debunked. Low fat diets are absolutely not good for us, and neither are high carb diets, yet that is what has been pushed.