In part 2, Hannah & Victoria go full carnivore nerd and explore the full spectrum of evidence surrounding an all-animal food diet.
What’s the evidence for carnivore?
PubMed search for “carnivore diet” returned 21 results, but only a small handful are applicable to this conversation, i.e., this diet has not been thoroughly studied.
https://journals.lww.com/co-endocrinology/abstract/2020/10000/can_a_carnivore_diet_provide_all_essential.11.aspx Can a carnivore diet provide all essential nutrients? Current Opinion in Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Obesity
By L. Amber O’Hearn, aka @ketocarnivore on X, “Eat Meat, Not Too Little, Mostly Fat” major nutrient she reports as possible deficiency is calcium, likely due to acid load
More on her background:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34934897/ Behavioral Characteristics and Self-Reported Health Status among 2029 Adults Consuming a "Carnivore Diet"
social media survey was conducted 30 March-24 June 2020 among adults self-identifying as consuming a carnivore diet for ≥6 mo
2029 respondents (median age: 44 y, 67% male) reported consuming a carnivore diet for 14 mo (IQR: 9-20 mo), motivated primarily by health reasons (93%)
Most common sx were GI related, but still low (3-5%)
Among a subset reporting current lipids, LDL-cholesterol was markedly elevated (172 mg/dL), whereas HDL-cholesterol (68 mg/dL) and triglycerides (68 mg/dL) were optimal. Participants with diabetes reported benefits including reductions in median [IQR] BMI (4.3 [1.4-7.2]), glycated hemoglobin (0.4% [0%-1.7%]), and diabetes medication use (84%-100%)
BSL and OHH were supported by National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases grants K23 DK119546 and R03 DK123541 to study a low-carbohydrate diet. JTM was supported by National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health training grant T32AT004094. The funders had no involvement in the design, implementation, analysis, and interpretation of the data. Author disclosures: Dr. David Ludwig: DSL reports royalties for books that recommend a carbohydrate-modified diet; his spouse owns a nutrition education and consulting business. All other authors report no conflicts of interest.
Carb/insulin model - obesity is caused by excess consumption of carbohydrate which then disrupts normal insulin metabolism leading to weight gain
Biggest issues were altered lipid profiles, specifically high LDL. Authors state that for those with a more extreme LDl response, meds could be considered.
Authors propose benefits could be due to eliminiaton of reactive foods/plant chemicals, (though they do state that plant compounds have proven benefits)
Calcium might be a problem
Did a great job of stating limitations
Limitations of Self-reported Health Status and Metabolic Markers among Adults Consuming a "Carnivore Diet" editorial
“The authors are aware of many of the limitations of their study design and the generalizability of the results. It is also abundantly clear that higher-quality research is required to determine the carnivore diet’s long-term positive and adverse health effects. However, considering the propensity of media outlets and the lay public to misinterpret, exaggerate, and disseminate findings from scientific research, we believe caution should be exercised when discussing the study’s conclusions. In particular, discussion relating to the changes in health status and metabolic markers recorded in this study requires considerable reference to the unverifiable nature of the data.
We congratulate the authors on taking the first steps towards scientifically quantifying the health effects of the carnivore diet and welcome any future, high-quality studies that may provide valuable data to fill the sparse literature on this specific eating pattern.”
Ancestral:
Some traditional people ate close to exclusive meat and fat diets due to what was available (Arctic), but most ancestral people ate plant foods. Katharine Milton laid this out in an editorial for AJCN in 2000…she looks rad af: https://nature.berkeley.edu/miltonlab/index.html
She says, “The hunter-gatherer data used by Cordain et al. (4) came from the Ethnographic Atlas (5), a cross-cultural index compiled largely from 20th-century sources and written by ethnographers or others with disparate backgrounds, rarely interested in diet per se or trained in dietary collection techniques. By the 20th century, most hunter-gatherers had vanished; many of those who remained had been displaced to marginal environments. Some societies coded as hunter-gatherers in the Atlas probably were not exclusively hunter-gatherers or were displaced agricultural peoples. Because most of the ethnographers were male, they often did not associate with women, who typically collect and process plant resources.
Finally, all the hunter-gatherers that were included in the Atlas were modern-day humans with a rich variety of social and economic patterns and were not “survivors from the primitive condition of all mankind” (6). Their wide range of dietary behaviors does not fall into one standard macronutrient pattern that contemporary humans could emulate for better health. Indeed, using data from the same Ethnographic Atlas, Lee (1) found that gathered vegetable foods were the primary source of subsistence for most of the hunter-gatherer societies he examined, whereas an emphasis on hunting occurred only in the highest latitudes.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10702155/
Net base/acid load of ancestral diet:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12450898/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10702160/
Anecdotal:
Some people feel crazy better!
Mikhaila Peterson’s video on the Lion Diet article by the Mayo Clinic:
The Mayo Clinic article:
For reference: 44,000 people follow The Lion Diet on FB, 165K on YouTube, and many post their success stories.
Episode #3: Carnivore Diet, Part 2