The Carnivore Diet Explained

What’s all the hype about?

Ok, so you’ve heard everyone talking about the carnivore diet. From your friends and family to celebrities like Joe Rogan and prominent figures around the world, everyone seems to be hyping the carnivore diet. If you’re like me, it sounds great to eat meat for every meal but is it really beneficial to my health? Are there any potentially detrimental side effects that could happen to me if I decide the give this super popular fad diet a try? In this article we’re gonna take a dive into the what the carnivore diet actually is, the positives, the negatives, and give you the necessary info so you can decide on whether to give it a shot or not. Let’s check it out.

The Carnivore diet vs the Atkins diet

Eat all the meat you want. Sounds awesome, right? If you’re old enough to remember the Atkins Diet, you may remember all the hype around that at the time. As it turns out, the Atkins diet is still around and thriving. It promotes eating high protein, low-carb foods that are nutrient dense while cutting out high starch vegetables and high sugar fruits. The Atkins Diet was first incepted in the 1960’s. It didn’t really gain traction until around 2003 when the controversial diet took the health and nutrition world by storm.

The Carnivore diet is an offshoot of the Atkins diet that goes a step further by eliminating all other foods except meat and meat byproducts. That means no:

• Fruits
• Vegetables
• Grains
• Legumes
• Sugars
• Fruit and vegetable byproducts (such as olive oil, fruit juices, beet sugar, vegetable oil, etc.)
• Nuts
• Seeds
• Alcohol

Basically, it’s eating anything that walks, crawls, swims, or flies and the byproducts and the byproducts of those animals. So you’d be able eat such things as:

• Beef
• Chicken
• Fish and shellfish
• Pork
• Eggs
• Butter
• Lard
• Bone broth
• Marrow
• Sauces and gravy reductions that use no binding agent (i.e. flour or corn starch)
• Milk
• Yogurt
• Cheese

The original Atkins diet was more similar to the current carnivore diet but they it seems to have evolved allowing some carbs and limited amounts of sugars in fruits and vegetables.

What are the benefits of the carnivore diet?

There are many claims about the benefits of the carnivore diet but there is little evidence out there to support the claims. It was created around 2018 by one of the major founders named Shawn Baker, who wrote a book named The Carnivore Diet in 2018. He also co-founded an online coaching and support group named Revero that is centered around the carnivore diet.

Many people claim that the carnivore diet helps with weight loss and raising testosterone levels. Jordan Peterson and his daughter Mikhaila Peterson fueled this movement to prominence by stating that by eating only beef, salt, and water relieved them of such ailments of arthritis, psoriasis, anxiety, depression, gastric reflux. Many people also claim that the carnivore diet helps with auto-immune diseases by being anti-inflammatory.

Ketosis

I’m sure you’ve heard of the ketogenic diet over the last several years. Your body burns carbs for energy and when it runs out of carbs to burn it starts burning fat. That’s a general nutritional fact called ketosis. The theory is that by severely limiting carbs you force your body into “ketosis” and therefore burn calories in fat rather than carbs to lose weight faster.

Ketosis seems logical but there are some caveats. Eating lean meats with too much protein and not enough fat may prevent you from ketosis. Also, eating too much saturated fats may cause problems such as heart disease, high cholesterol, obesity, and more. Eating too much meat protein has also been shown to cause stress on your kidneys as well.

Should you try the carnivore diet?

Listen, I believe that everyone should do what they think is best for themselves. I’m willing to try almost anything and adjust according to my overall sense of well-being. Like anything, if something I’m doing to my body seems to be working and I feel great, I’m gonna keep doing it. Duh.

Personally, I am more of the belief that you should eat everything in moderation. Humans are omnivores for a reason. We need foods such as fruits, vegetables, grains, and legumes, and yes, meat and fish for a myriad of different nutrients. Some of the foods we eat are more beneficial than others for multiple reasons. You may have to supplement more to get the optimal amount of nutrients in your system.

In Conclusion

It’s up to you. Given, the amount of strictness you allow in any fad diet is up to you, but if you want to adhere to a strict purity diet, in my personal opinion, it seems the Atkins style diet would be best for me. Now, I’m not a licensed dietician, so legally I have to state that this is just my opinion, but personally, I believe that the current incarnation of the Atkins diet sounds like it would be most beneficial for health by including beneficial fruits and vegetable into your diet.

Technically, you can derive all your nutrients by eating meat and meat byproducts. There are all sorts of “bro-science” flying around the internet, so do your research. In the past, I tried the plant-based diet but it wasn’t for me. I was hungry all the time and had to eat a huge amount of food to keep up with the amount of calories I needed per day. Especially when training hard. The plant-based diet also was rough on my digestive system and I had diarrhea fairly often. Plus, I love eating meat. Giving up eating a big, juicy, medium rare ribeye steak was just to much.

My personal philosophy is eat everything in moderation and keep to a macro scale that works for you. Make some tweaks based on your lifestyle and how you feel. There’s some incredible stories on the results of these diets throughout the years. However, regardless of whether we’re eating meats, fruits, veggies, etc.; I believe eating whole, unprocessed, natural foods with the are the best for our overall health. How do you feel about fad diets? Let me know any of your results in the comments below.