#8: Basic Nutrition Science
I have kept the best part for the end.
As amazing as it is, few scientists and nutrition enthusiasts actually focus on what is inside food to choose their preferences.
We’re still conducting studies where two scholars feed people food and watch what happens afterward, with a complete disdain for all variables that cannot be controlled.
When you look at what’s inside foods, when you compare the bioavailability (percentage of nutrient absorbed in the stomach) of meat and vegetables, when you know what humans need and what’s inside plants and animals…the vegan narrative falls apart completely.
We have already outlined how harmful plants were due to their natural defense mechanisms. Let’s now have a look at how amazing animal foods are.
Consider the images below.
As we can see, not only does meat contain more nutrients, it also has higher bioavailability, and is free from all of the anti-nutrients and other chemicals present in vegetables.
The results don’t lie.
#9: The Results
The website revero.com is a great database. You can find 8000+ scientific articles, 60+ books written over 200 years, and read results from people having abandoned many of their medicine (most of them being for auto-immune diseases) and kicking ass now that they eat a carnivore diet.
This last point is the most important.
We can speculate on the past as much as we want, seeing actual results is actual science.
Carnivores feel, look, and have better test results than when they were on any other diet.
Unlike the idiot vegan diet, the carnivore diet is NOT ideological. It is science-based. It is empirically based. And it is entirely explained and justified.
But what about the vegan diet?
As you can expect, the results are not glorious.
The crazy Youtuber Sv3ridge made a series of videos called “Veganism, the epitome of malnourishment“. It’s not really scientific, but it carries the point almost better than this article does.
Anna’s analysis has made a long video analyzing the fact that twenty-three (!!!) vegan influencers quit due to health concerns and conditions.
Finally, basic science has debunked over and over again that vegans and vegetarians are more likely to suffer from bone fractures, depression, stroke, lack of nutrients, infertility, and everything else we do not know yet about the dangers of veganism.
Finally, a vegan diet will unlikely provide you with enough B12, calcium, iron, and high-quality proteins.
Yes, there is a difference between animal-sourced proteins and plant-sourced proteins.
I’ll let you guess which ones are better.
Part Two: Myths and Q&A
Maybe you heard in the past that meat gives cancer, that it raises your “bad” cholesterol, that eating only meat will give you scurvy, or that the surplus of protein will destroy your kidneys.
We will address each of these myths in this section.
#1: Meat and Cancer
Maybe you heard that the WHO some years ago declared that meat gave cancer. Amazingly, they have since retracted that claim (but mainstream media weren’t naturally going to talk about it).
Let’s be clear. Meat does not give cancer. However, I don’t expect you to eat up this statement without any explanation. So let me explain how this conclusion was originally made up.
When a study on the effects of diets is made, scientists round up a bunch of people and ask them what they eat then look at whether these people get cancer or not (the alternative being to feed mice in a laboratory, but even that is not 100% reliable).
In the case of meat, the results showed that people that ate meat more often had cancer while vegetarians and vegans had it less often.
Their natural conclusion was that vegans and vegetarians were healthier.
Unfortunately, that was a big mistake.
There are two reasons why meat-eaters appeared unhealthier.
The first reason is the social-economic factor. Vegetarians and vegans fit into the same social class: medium-high middle-class income, politically center-left, practice sport, very rarely smoke, and lead an overall healthy lifestyle.
Vegetarians also eat very little junk food because they become vegetarians “to take care of their own health“, or to “take care of the planet“.
Vegetarianism is in the extreme majority of cases, a lifestyle adopted by health-conscious people that believe what they read in magazines.
People that eat meat don’t live this way.
They usually don’t really take care of their health, smoke, and enjoy life without any restrictions. As a result, they end up with cancer more often than others.
If you smoke, don’t do any sport, eat junk food, and drink alcohol, you can eat as much meat as you want, this won’t compensate for your poor lifestyle choices.
When researchers at first saw this, they didn’t investigate it further and just screamed “meat=cancer”.
But as we are about to see, it’s not that easy.
The second reason concerns cancer cause: it is nearly impossible to trace it.
Cancer can be caused by an excess of sugar, by alcohol, nasty air, chemical products, genes, fried food, radioactivity, stress, lack of sleep, lack of physical activity, lack of social relationships (yes, you are more at risk to die of cancer if you got no friends) and much, much more.
Furthermore, it has been shown that cancer cells developed much quicker when the patient ate sugar than when they did not. As such, since there is no sugar, chemicals, or anti-nutrients in meat, it is very unlikely that meat gives cancer.
#2: Proteins and Kidneys
In the post-WWII world, the medical community noticed that a high-protein diet worsened kidney functions…of people that had malfunctioning kidneys.
They interpreted it as “proteins hurt kidney” and we all know what happened: “don’t eat fat, don’t eat protein, eat carbs and be obese, sick and depressed” was the subsequent message.
What these scientists failed to understand was that eating proteins when your kidney malfunctioned was the equivalent of running a marathon with a broken leg: it will make the problem worse.
However, should you have well-working and solid legs, running the marathon will only strengthen them.
As such, it has been shown that the classic 0.8 g of protein per kg of body weight is a very low protein limit and that, for the most athletic of us, one can go up to 3-3.5g of protein per kg, although you’d need to eat a crazy lot to reach this point!!
#3: Cholesterol Is Bad For Your Heart
Cholesterol isn’t bad. In fact, most of the cholesterol in your bloodstream comes from your liver.
What is cholesterol exactly?
Cholesterol is a type of fat part of the building blocks of your body that needs to be carried around by lipoproteins.
You have two types of cholesterol. The “good” cholesterol (called HDL) and the “bad” cholesterol (called LDL). None of them are actually bad since they are equal.
When the lipoproteins leave your liver, they are called LDL and when they go back to your liver, they are called HDL. HDL is “less dangerous” because your liver will take off the cholesterol to expel it so it doesn’t build in your arteries.
You need cholesterol to survive. To acquire it, you can whether eat it (in red meat, eggs) or your liver produces it, which means that when you eat more cholesterol, your liver produces…less of it.
Why do people have too much cholesterol then?
Well, it’s not the right question to ask because there is no such thing as too much cholesterol.
Cholesterol becomes dangerous when it builds up in your arteries (especially coronary arteries) and plugs them.
And guess who is responsible for that?
Sugar!!!!
Sugar not only increases the amount of LDL and decreases HDL in the body, but it “carbonizes” cholesterol that subsequently builds up in your arteries.
Blood pressure increases and you eventually die of a heart attack.
Should you decrease your consumption of sugar, you’ll decrease your LDL and make cholesterol less dangerous.
Should you completely abandon sugar consumption, your arteries will be as clean as a whistle.
#4: No Vegetables Will Give You Scurvy
This question ultimately treats whether there is vitamin C in meat and the answer is yes: there is vitamin C in raw beef, livers, and fish.
Not a lot, but enough to survive veggies-free.
What happens in a condition of a normal diet is that the molecules that move VC around in your body also move…sugar around. If you eat sugar, you decrease vitamin absorption.
Furthermore, when you decrease vegetable consumption, you decrease anti-nutrient absorption and so increase vitamin absorption as well.
Finally, people with a carnivore diet eat a lot of collagen, produced by our body from…VC. As such, you need less of it.
Conclusion: you need much less VC on a carnivore diet than you do on a normal diet (recent science estimates we need about 10 mg, compared to the recommended dose of 75-90 mg).
#5: Potential Downsides and Risks of the Carnivore Diet
Unlike vegans, carnivores are mostly honest about the risks of eating an all-meat diet.
Science has not yet confirmed some health-related questions that we will talk about below and that present potential risks.
The first mystery concerns ketosis. Ketosis is a state when your body burns fat for energy instead of using carbs.
While we know that ketones are a higher quality energy source, we do not know if there is a risk to be permanently in ketosis.
The tribes we have talked about do not seem to suffer from it, nor do long-term (20+ years) carnivores.
The second risk is the lack of fiber. Studies have shown how fibers participate in the equilibrium of the gut by feeding certain bacterias.
A “rich gut” may have a positive effect on your brain.
Should you choose to stop eating fibers, these bacterias may die and endanger the equilibrium of the gut.
That’s the theory.
If you ask me though, since fiber is non-digestible, I don’t see why we would need to eat it.
Furthermore, fiber makes you poop a lot, and every time you do so, you take off bacterias from the gut which subsequently needs to regenerate, hence fragilizing the gut (check out @syltabor for her story).
As such, the latest trend to repopularize humans’ gut is a feces implant. I sh*t you not (pun intended), there are people undergoing surgery to have someone else’s poop introduced inside their gut.
If you’re looking for a business idea, a poop bank will make you rich.
We freeze sperm already, so why not poop?
Needless to say that a poop transplant does not apply to carnivores, since both the easiness to digest meat and the rare bowel movement frequency naturally enables the gut to regenerate.
Finally, the third risk is a lack of micro-nutrients only found in plant foods and a lack of other nutrients that are not present in a necessary amount in meat alone (depending on what type of meat you are eating).
Selfhacked.com pretends that a carnivore diet leads to 17 nutrient deficiencies. This is unlikely. However, this all depends on how you go about your diet. If all you eat is processed meat, your diet is not healthy. If you eat fresh cuts of beef, pork, and chicken, you are unlikely to have any problem.
It also depends on whether you include organ meats or not. Some of them, like liver, are extremely rich in nutrients and are the real superfood (not to eat every day though, as it is high in vitamin A). Some people do well without organ meats, but I am more and more persuaded that other people need it.
Mark Sisson outlined that the likeliest nutrient deficiencies you are risking are potassium, magnesium, and folate. These can be taken care of by incorporating fish, liver, and dairy into your diet.
#6: Why Do We Lose So Much Weight So Fast on a Carnivore Diet?
At first glance, it doesn’t make sense.
1 gram of fat has more calories than a gram of carb.
I personally eat many more calories on carnivore than I do when I ate a normal diet.
And yet, I lost 6kg in 8 weeks when I started my keto journey.
So, how can you lose weight on carnivore despite eating more calories and reaching a stable weight at the end?
Actually, it turns out it has nothing to do with calories, but with hormones.
When you eat carbs, your body triggers insulin so your cells absorb the sugar.
As it turns out, insulin is a hormone that signals the body it needs to keep and store fat.
-> getting rid of fat becomes harder.
When you don’t eat carbs, two things happen at the same time.
- Insulin levels decrease -> your body can get rid of fat
- Glucagon levels increase.
Glucagon is a hormone that signals to your body it’s time to burn fat.
As a result, not eating any sugar helps you lose weight very fast.
Part 3: How I Discovered the Carnivore Diet
As extraordinary as it is, sugar was originally why I went on an all-meat diet.
I was a huge sugar consumer in the past and saw instant benefits when I quit.
As a kid, I was eating cereals with plenty of sugar inside, and I was myself adding more sugar to them.
Then one day my sister told me to replace sugar with Nesquik, and so I did.
I was so addicted that I could eat up to four bowls of cereals per day, emptying a liter of soy milk within twelves hours and the maxi Nesquik box within two weeks.
On top of that, I loved chocolate and was eating a lot of it.
So sugar had been destroying my mind and body since I was born, and I didn’t know it.
It was probably between June 2018 and September 2018 that I first heard about the carnivore diet through Jordan Peterson on Rogan.
I was extremely disappointed.
Vegans extreme-left were a regular target of Peterson and I thought that he had adapted his diet as a way to annoy his detractors.
I thought it was ideological, that one thing Jordan Peterson had risen to fight.
It is only later that I heard he had gotten it from his daughter, which was extremely sick and was now feeling much better.
Symptoms she had cured were, among other things, depression.
And so I went to check her blog, which at the time, started with saying that the food pyramid was a lie.
I immediately dismissed it as a conspiracy theory and forgot about it.
Some months later, I moved to Colombia hoping to feel better.
But I didn’t.
Neither two years and a half of therapy, the girls, the country, the delicious food, or the weather were getting me out of this latent depression and anxiety.
As I was sitting in a giant mall over the city, Peterson came back to my mind.
A diet, after all, was the only thing I hadn’t tried.
Since diet affected physical health, I thought, maybe it was also affecting mental health?
Maybe this girl was onto something?
I went back to check her blog, it was the 28th of May 2019.
The next day, I gave a try to the paleo diet first and I felt much better.
Over the next few weeks, I started eating much more meat, vegetables, and dairy.
Not thinking I was able to quit chocolate altogether, I started buying 100% cocoa chocolate with little sugar inside.
About two or three weeks after I started my diet, the shop had run out of 100% chocolate, so I bought 83% chocolate.
As I took a bite, my mind went nuts and I ate half the tablet.
The next day, everything had come back!
Low self-esteem, low confidence, depression, anxiety, and endless complaining.
I was shocked!
Fortunately, I was lucid enough to be able to understand what was happening to me and not to identify myself with my feelings.
That’s how I understood how terrible sugar was. That’s how I understood carbs were the real enemy.
I eventually adopted a carnivorish diet in October 2019 and finally, a zero carb diet (only meat, eggs, fish, and water and nothing else, no coffee, tea, beer, alcohol…nothing else) on the 17th of April 2020.
I went on a lion diet half of January 2021.
What I can say though, is that since I kicked sugar out of my life end of May 2019, it has been radically transformative.
I never went back to my therapist and I started doing stuff I had always been scared to do.
I could wake up without hating myself.
The anxiety was gone.
I was no longer stressed about the future.
It took me more than a year between hearing about the carnivore diet for the first time and adopting it.
In between, I have read, read, read, and read because it seemed too crazy to be true.
I was brainwashed by mainstream media (I was reading the Guardian at the time lol), by the fake food pyramid, and by this plant-driven society.
Yet, here I (and many other people) am.
Much healthier, and much better.
I’d say that the biggest drawback of the carnivore diet is that you become highly skeptical every time you hear the government or Bill Gates are part of an initiative.
I no longer trust anyone with anything. If the nutritious lies are so big…where else are we being lied to?
The Bottom Line
It is impossible to lead research on humans and to control for all variables without locking people up in laboratories.
As such, I’ll be the first one to admit that most nutrition science is garbage, which many scientists will also be happy to tell you.
Strictly speaking, we don’t know for sure what diet is best, even though the majority of the few scientific quality proofs we have tends to lean towards meat.
So, what do we do in this case?
We base ourselves on the testimony of random people that eat these extreme diets: vegans and carnivores.
Indeed, vegans and carnivores are not so different from each other. They both want to have the best and healthiest diet to reach their highest performances and take care of the planet at the same time.
Vegans and carnivores lead a very similar lifestyle, except for one variable: food.
Comparing their respective health is, therefore, one of the best scientific arguments we have to understand the effects of plants and meat on the human body.
At this game, vegans are clear losers.
Most of the time, a vegan’s journey into veganism goes like this: they feel super good the first year (no sh*t, they quit McDonald’s) and from the second to third year, their health starts deteriorating.
The community is telling them that it is because “they are not doing it right”, that taking 5 pills of vitamins per day because “modern agriculture robbed veggies from their nutrients” is not enough and that it is all in their heads.
Then, if they are a bit smart, they realize their diet is simply not healthy and they quit to save their lives.
Amusingly, a lot of them go completely carnivore after their failed vegan experience (on Instagram, @syltabor, @food.lie, @mikhailapeterson experienced veganism then turned carnivore, @alyseparkerr quit veganism and experienced with carnivore for 30 days, @humantimothy quit veganism altogether, then bodybuilder @jonvenus quit as well, and there are many more on the restoration health vegan recovery group.)
We have yet to hear about a similar case of carnivores turning vegans.
To Conclude
History taught that all great discoveries started with one person against the mainstream narrative.
In this case, it was probably the opposite that happened.
One day, someone said meat and fat were really bad for health and everyone believed it.
The avalanche of obesity, cancer, and other diseases should be an alarming sign that what we think we know about nutrition is plain wrong.
I have read an article recently in mainstream media about the “identification of a gene to treat obesity”.
You won’t believe me, but to control the trial, researchers fed mice…a McDonald’s diet.
If this isn’t intellectual terrorism…it is at the very least, scientific dishonesty.
In case you skipped through the entire article to read the conclusion, there it is.
The carnivore diet is the healthiest and best diet for humans. Obesity has for sole cause mental greediness and laziness expressed through the consumption of high carbohydrates and trans-fat foods. Should one remove this diet from their life, one will effectively get rid of obesity, 100% guaranteed. The carnivore diet is the best manner to do so.
I can therefore only encourage you to be open-minded enough and defy, as Columbus or Copernicus did in their time, the established narrative.
It took me a lot of time, trust, and reading before I completely cut sugar off my diet and this decision may have been one of the most influential decisions of my life.
I hope that thanks to this work, you too will start questioning a bit what you are told.
Alternatively, you can always check out this video.
Post Scriptum: Why Shouldn’t You Go on a Carnivore Diet?
I am not insane. The carnivore diet is crazy. It requires extreme discipline to maintain it. Few people have the mental strength to actually follow it.
As such, I want to be clear: I do not encourage people to go on carnivore, simply because they rarely need it.
The carnivore diet is a diet made for people struggling with
- eczema
- Crohn disease
- lupus
- type 2 diabetes (can also reverse type 1 diabetes, very recent science, stay tuned!)
- inflammation
- leaky gut
- psoriasis
- thyroïd malfunction (Hashimoto syndrome)
- arthritis
- tinnitus
- joint pain
- constipation
- food craving
- seizure attacks
- gout
- Lyme disease
- muscle cramps
- obesity
- reproductive system issues
- diarrhea
- weak digestive system
- and more
Should you not have any of these problems, don’t go carnivore. Eat vegetables, dairy, fruits.
My sole and only piece of advice is to decrease processed foods, seed oils, and sugar as much as you can. These are the worst foods for your health, and you will only feel better if you cut them off.
A healthy diet is not so hard to follow. And it shouldn’t be.
My Diet Today
I am no longer carnivore, but keto.
I eat olives, tomatoes, mushrooms, cucumbers…
My diet is 65% based on meat, fish ad eggs, and the rest is vegetables. I also drink beer.
Ultimately, keto is the best diet for me.
Find here why I failed carnivore, and my journey through all of these diets.
You should now find out what’s best for you.
Resources:
I want to say a big thank you to @nutritionwithjudy, @maxlugavere, and @ketogenicgirl for the use of their material. Go follow them on Instagram.
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