The short version: Try the carnivore diet because meat is delicious and packed with nutrients.
In case you need an engaging, easy-to-read listicle (meaticle?) here are the top nine reasons to try the carnivore diet.
1. Humans Were Created to Eat Meat
A healthy human has a gastric pH of 1.1 to 1.5. Very acidic. Why? To digest meat. Plant-based primates have a 4.0 pH.
The allocation of the human digestive tract resources to ferment plant material is 17%. This is closer to cats and dogs. For comparison, ruminant animals that eat grasses all day are in the 70-80% range. Anything our animal-based cells need to thrive is in other animal-based cells. Plants have nothing we need.
2. Meat Is For Winners
Back in the day when the crew went out for a hunt if you came back with nothing you had to settle for plants to sustain you until you could get back out on the trail of a wild animal. Meat is the most nutrient-dense food on the planet. Eating the spoils of a successful hunt is living large. Eating plants is desperation.
3. You Can Only Get These Vital Nutrients From Meat
Another reason meat and humans are a match made in heaven. There are nutrients found in meat that you can’t get enough of in any other foods. They are critical for your body to thrive into old age. They include:
- Carnitine – better sexual function and helps with anemia.
- Carnosine – mitigates the development of Alzheimer’s disease, atherosclerosis, and renal disease.
- Creatine – improved cognitive function and glycemic control.
- Taurine – reduces anxiety.
- Heme iron – the best bioavailable source of iron. Helps with anemia. Helps the formation of red blood cells, transport of oxygen, support immune function and cognition.
- Vitamin B12 – deficiency connected to dementia and depression. Helps the nervous system.
4. Plants Are Poison
Plants don’t kill you immediately upon ingestion like, say, a swig of Round-Up might, but over time the natural pesticides inside plants build up in your body and cause issues.
Plants can’t run away or fight predators like animals, so they have nasty internal substances to discourage people, animals, and insects from eating them.
Professor Bruce Ames discovered in the early 90s that 99.9% of pesticides that people consume come from the plants themselves. Not the toxic poisons sprayed on them. I’m not saying the environmental devastation wrought by chemical-based factory farming is cool. It’s awful. But, the majority of the poison entering your gut, bloodstream, and cells comes from the plants themselves.
5. Meat Heals
Have you seen the case studies and success stories on Dr. Shawn Baker’s website? Remarkable. I have personal experience with this. My son healed a severe case of Crohn’s with an all-meat diet. And, I got over chronic IBS when I finally took the plunge and went full carnivore.
If you have gut issues you need to eat fewer plants and carbs and focus on eating meat like it’s your job (as Shawn Baker says). Baker runs a carnivore diet community and sees life-transforming changes in people, who transition to an all-meat diet.
Here are some of the documented health issues the carnivore diet helped:
| ADHD Alcohol dependence Amenorrhea Anemia Angina Ankylosing spondylitis Anxiety Arthritis Asthma Athlete’s foot Atopic dermatitis Autism Bipolar disorder Boils Bulimia Candidiasis Carpal tunnel syndrome Cholelithiasis Chronic bronchitis Chronic fatigue syndrome Cocaine dependence Colitis COPD Crohn’s disease | Dental caries Depression Dermatofibroma Diabetes mellitus Diverticulitis Diverticulosis Dupuytren’s contracture Eczema Ehlers-Danlos syndrome Epicondylitis Epilepsy Erectile dysfunction Fatty liver Fibromyalgia Floaters Gerd Gingivitis Gout Hashimoto’s thyroiditis Headache/migraine Hemorrhoids Hidradenitis suppurativa Hypertension Hypertriglyceridemia | Hypothyroidism Insulin resistance Irritable bowel syndrome Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis Keloids Lipoma Lyme disease Meniere’s disease Narcolepsy Nephrolithiasis Neuropathy Parkinson’s disease PCOS Psoriasis/psoriatic arthritis Quadriceps tendonitis Rheumatoid arthritis Rosacea Sciatica Scleroderma Synovitis Systemic lupus erythematosus Tinnitus Trichotillomania Trigger finger Ulcerative colitis |
6. Longevity
You hear about the Blue Zones where people live long, happy lives. They don’t mention the ideological bias behind the studies and the cherry-picked data. You never hear about a place like Hong Kong, which has the highest meat consumption per capita in the world and a long average lifespan.
Here’s a chart from pulled from The Carnivore Diet by Shawn Baker comparing countries with longer average life spans versus countries with shorter average life spans, and their average beef consumption.
Other factors contribute to longer life spans, like hygiene and relative wealth, but you can’t ignore the meat connection.
Researchers have linked meat consumption to longer life expectancy in a couple of ways.
Carnosine, which is abundant in meat, reduces oxidative stress. It also prevents advanced glycation end products. Researchers associate these with aging.
Telomeres, the bits at the end of DNA strands, indicate cellular aging. The longer the telomere the less aging. According to this Nutrition Journal study, there’s only one food that helps lengthen telomeres … red meat.
7. Robustivity
Pretty sure I made that word up. If your body is getting the exact nutrients it needs, and plenty of them, it can focus on building a robust immune system, fully functioning organs, and strong muscles. The typical modern diet is full of life force draining garbage. The all-meat diet can rebuild you from depletion to robust health. Robustivity!
8. Weight Loss
It shouldn’t be the primary goal of the carnivore diet, but overweight people typically lose a lot of body fat when they go carnivore.
However, because the typical Western diet is so bad, the primary objective of switching to an all animal-foods diet is healing.
You don’t want to be calorie-restrictive and mess around when you start the carnivore diet. Let your body tell you what it needs. Once you cut out processed foods, grains, fruits, and vegetables, your body can focus full time on taking the abundant nutrients from the animal foods and rebuilding.
That said, I lost body fat on a low-carb diet, and lost even more going full carnivore. My body composition is better. This definitely happens for people.
Look at the abundant before and after pictures. Losing weight is a side effect. The primary benefit is better health.
9. Liberation
Once you’re established as a carnivore your hunger and satiety signals are on point. You can trust them, which is very liberating. You can actually trust your body and mind. There’s no willpower needed. If you feel hungry, eat meat until you’re full.
The problems arise when you’re eating a lot of junk, specifically processed foods that combine fat and sugar.
Satiety signals go out the window. Your brain tells your body you need it when it doesn’t. Addiction psychology comes into play. That’s why food corporations love to pump their products full of poor-quality fats and processed sugar. It’s like crack cocaine in convenient packaging.
Cravings for carbs were strong for me when I started carnivory, but over time that dissipated. Every once in a while, I smell food cooking that triggers a desire, but for the most part, my signals are pure.
Hungry? Eat meat and eggs until full. Sometimes that’s a lot more meat than you think depending on what your body needs at the moment. As a clean-eating carnivore, you can have faith in what your body is asking for. Very cool.
Bonus: Meat is the Most Sustainable Food Source on the Planet
Skeptical? Do you have talking points bouncing around in your brain about livestock being the top greenhouse gas culprit and destroying our planet?
It’s all bunk. I could get into the reasons that multinational mega-corporations want this propaganda bombarding the airwaves, but suffice it to say there’s a lot of money in the processed food racket, and a lot of political capital gained by keeping the populace weak and feeble-minded. Anyways, that’s a big, hairy topic for another time.
Regenerative Agriculture!
Think about it. If done right raising animals for food is a perfect solar-powered cycle.
Sun and rain feed the grass. Cows eat the grass. Cows poop on the land, which feeds the land with nutrients so more grass can grow. And on it goes.
Monocropping commodity grains and vegetables devastates the land by destroying the topsoil and sapping it of nutrients. Not to mention all the toxic chemicals, used to keep predator bugs away, that poison the soil and seep into our waterways.
Factory farming of animals is also unsustainable. It’s bad for the animals, the environment, and the people that eat the poorly raised product.
But, regenerative agriculture can heal our lands, and feed people the most nutrient-dense diet. I’ll lift my steak-laden fork to that!
I’m no hippie. And, usually, when I hear the word “sustainability” I brace for a propaganda deluge meant to separate people from their sovereignty. But, if regenerative agriculture with livestock is the subject I’m all ears despite the patchouli and Imagine singalongs.
This farm raises meat and poultry on pasture and claims a net-negative carbon footprint.