I have a friend who went on the carnivore diet recently.
They lost 36-pounds in just 6-weeks time (and ate as much as they wanted, so never hungry).
But they did a blood test and it was panic time. The doctor told him he's on the brink of cardiac arrest and had to be put on medication and immediately introduce vegetables into their diet.
Most of the supposed magic is simply eating high protein and fat and getting sated.
These diets work for people who will not stop eating until they feel full. As that fullness takes so much longer with processed sugary foods they consume too many calories. It’s very hard to consume 2,000 calories of red meat in one sitting.
The idea eating meat alone is healthy is totally spurious.
No it's not. Calories is just a unit of energy. And there are good energy sources, and bad ones as well. It's not just one single factor that rules everything. Quality and variety of food matters a lot.
> The trick is, meat is actually fairly low in calories and protein (meat) is extremely filling.
What? Meat, from fish to chicken to beef, is one of the most caloric foods, rivaled only by nuts and oils. Meat usually is high in fat, it's very hard for it to be low-calorie. The weight loss doesn't come from a low-calorie diet, but from forced ketosis due to prolonged lack of glucose.
As others hace said, it's the carb deprivation that makes you lose weight, you could easily do a vegetarian diet and lose the same or more weight without abusing fat and rising your bad cholesterol.
> Meat usually is high in fat, it's very hard for it to be low-calorie. The weight loss doesn't come from a low-calorie diet
For me, eating a keto diet makes it easy to achieve a daily caloric intake that is significantly less than other diets I have tried because of meat being high in fat it creates greater satiety that lasts longer. Most keto and carnivore diets result it being easier to achieve caloric deficits for that reason.
There may be some out there that increase caloric consumption (and usually do for the first couple of weeks of the diet) but soon after your body adapts to fat for energy, you tend to eat much less in my experience.
So if you are religiously tracking (and I have for 8 years now), you will find that your weight loss under keto also abides by CICO rules. Ketosis is helping to burn your fat stores, and it’s easier to get there because you are not eating carbs, but your body is burning fat stores because it has a calorie deficit.
Even if you are in ketosis, never eating a carb, but not in a caloric deficit, you simply will not lose weight.
I'm not a carnivore diet advocate, but 6 weeks of a poor diet, alone, is to blame for being on the brink of a cardiac arrest? That's really not believable. If that's not what you meant, then you should really clarify in your post.
That must not have been a very good doctor. If the man is on brink of cardiac arrest he should be in the hospital. He can do a simple Ultra fast CT scan to see the atherosclerosis impeding blood flow, or even an exercise treadmill test will give you some hints of it.
I believe the modern understanding of the cholesterol theory of heart disease is that it's not simply LDL that is the problem, but instead small dense LDL. SD ldl can be measured directly of course, but you can kind of get a sense of whether you're likely to have it based on having triglycerides over 115, and the high triglycerides are in turn usually caused by lots of sugar or simple carbs in your diet. Something a person on a carnivore diet won't probably have
I have been on carnivore diet for 5+ years now. Did a blood test and the doctor prescribed me statins due to high cholestrol readings. I declined to take them, of course.
The Mediterranean diet is really good. Start frying or roasting vegetables with lots of olive oil. They will become tasty after the olive oil and salt. As long as you keep cooking yourself and avoid processed foods, you should be good.
I don't know if this is a troll, but in case it isn't: Buddy, listen to your doctors. At least, please, go talk to another MD about your blood work and see if they recommend other methods. You don't have to listen to just one MD, but if 5 are telling you the same thing then you should probably listen.
I'm not the guy you are replying to, but most MDs really don't know anything about nutrition. That simply is not a topic they ever took a class in, and official nutrition recommendations themselves are completely changing. The "food pyramid" with a base of carbs? Must eat breakfast of sugary cereals and orange juice? That's all murderous nonsense. (And it's changed!) And so on.
MDs want "stable" patients who resemble patients they've familiar with. Even though that could mean being diabetic on half-a-dozen meds. Based on my genes, I would be fat and diabetic by now if I had kept following only my doctor's advice.
This is a rather odd dig towards a non-anonymous user (using his real name) and is ironically coming from a pseudoanonymous account (with no real name associated with it).
If you are saying that you too were on a carnivore diet long term (5+ years) and very possibly experienced "the worst possible outcome" related to cholesterol levels, you would be the first person to report as such. Perhaps you would like to publish the anecdote in detail somewhere (including just exactly what you ate, as "a high cholesterol diet" is imprecise enough to mean many things)?
To be fair, that uncommon situation is not in the dataset used to train doctors. We can theorize that he needs medication and vegetables, but we lack certainty.
It's peculiar that so many think the carnivore diet is prime cuts of meat with butter and cheese. All of those are prime products with historically limited availability. Much of the diet would be tendons, tripe, organ meats and other such cooked together with vegetables for essential potassium. What we know of traditional carnivore diets is radically unlike what most nowadays think of which is based on a highly productive industrialized farming infrastructure that was not available for most of human history.
Eating reams of butter and cheese is a hell of a lot easier to sell than "hey you wanna go on this organ meat diet?" even if that's probably a lot more technically accurate
Do a Google image search for Carnivore Diet. It's not at all "peculiar that so many think the carnivore diet is prime cuts of meat with butter and cheese" - this is exactly how it is marketed.
reminds me of obsession of some politicians with GDP as a single metric to optimize the economy (while offshoring jobs and local population deals with stress via drugs/opiates/antidepressants)
While this is a particularly extreme example but I think most fad diets work because being so different from a normal diet people have to actually stop and think about what they're eating and make some level of plan around it which is easier to skip if you're just trying moderation where it's easier to grab something anywhere.
That is also why the second round of such diets fail. First round you are eating less. Second round you start be finding the recipes for the "whatever diet" brownies and those tend to be just as high calorie and so you don't lose. Nothing wrong with a brownie once in a while. Even if you are overweight - so long as most days you don't each such things and so are on a calorie deficit.
Health conscious, figure conscious people all of us experiment with our food to see the impact it has on us emotionally and physically. In fact, look at what the subject of our discussion himself said, "Since taking on this brow-raising food plan, he claimed his weight dropped, his energy levels increased, and his "mental clarity" improved."
But yes, as you pointed, there has been a real increase in "weird" diets in the past 3-4 decades. The internet is one factor. The other major reason for this, I believe, is the increased commercial competition in the food and agriculture industry. In the last 2-3 decades, we've all been bombarded with ads and PR campaigns about organic foods ("eat pure / natural / raw") and superfoods ("eat smart / right") or promotions of old-new crops ("eat what our elders ate") like Millets etc. etc. Then there's the PR campaigns from fast food and processed food industries and the PR campaigns from the instant cooking industry.
However much we would all like to think that we are immune from advertising campaigns, the reality is that it does impact us. So we shouldn't be surprised that people are confused and there has been a rise in eating orders - https://www.yandex.com/search/?text=rise+in+eating+disorders
Usually they are suffering from something that did not go away with a doctor's visit so they take matters into their own hands. Diet is obviously one of the first things to try to change. You should see the food list I was permitted (FODMAP, though there's a lot of different versions of it) to try to see what was causing my gut issues. Almost all normal vegetables, carbs, and fats are on the Avoid list.
Usually it's not just the diet, but it is an easy and even fun place to start.
Eating in moderation and making informed, healthy choices is common sense, I agree.
It's just against the operating principles of a society with a massive industrial food economy. People are conditioned to eat on every occasion to the point that consuming food becomes the occasion.
It's fine if it works for you but still on your page as well as your linked resources there are a lot of false claims.
For instance on that page about the Comanche it is claimed they only ate meat (which is absolutely inplausible from the start) but Wikipedia says they "also gathered wild fruits, seeds, nuts, berries, roots and tubers, including plums, grapes, juniper berries, persimmons, mulberries, acorns, pecans, wild onions, radishes, and tuna, the fruit of the prickly pear cactus. The Comanche also acquired maize, dried pumpkin, and tobacco through trade and raids."
Also, it seems, that meat is indeed not "nutritionally" complete and your source for that claim is some quack trying to sell his book?
It's great if a meat-only diet works for you, but I don't think there's scientific evidence to support it.
That page <https://justmeat.co/peoples/> actually says "have eaten meat-heavy, if not exclusive diets" and even follows up with "Not all are necessarily fully carnivorous". If this is all the supposed fault you can find, it does easily expose your "a lot of false claims" motte-and-bailey furphy for what it actually is. In regards to "I don't think there's scientific evidence to support it", 'tis just as well I didn't have you advicing me all those years ago, else this conversation wouldn't even be happening (and I be free of my chronic condition), eh?
Finally, in regards to your "some quack" put-down, it actually behoves on you to provide evidence that an exclusively animal-based diet (especially with offal) is necessarily "deficient". It would seem that you lack sufficient understanding of nutrient bioavailability (generally high in animal foods), as well as the fact that RDA is not absolute (note for instance the reduced requirement speculations for Thiamin & Vitamin C in <https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/1/140>)?
I don't get why you cite this study, or maybe you read it totally differently than me. As I understand it it only confirms my view:
"The carnivore diet met several NRV thresholds for nutrients such as riboflavin, niacin, phosphorus, zinc, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, selenium, and Vitamin A, and exceeded the sodium threshold. However, it fell short in thiamin, magnesium, calcium, and Vitamin C, and in iron, folate, iodine and potassium in some cases. Fibre intake was significantly below recommended levels."
Yes, I read it beyond the abstract. And if you did too, you'd know about the theory that "the requirement for thiamin is reduced due to a reduction in thiamin-requiring glycolytic metabolism" or that "the large quantities of carnitine available in an animal-based diet may provide Vitamin C sparing effect".
> As I understand it it only confirms my view
As even the abstract, that you limited yourself to read, goes on to confirm that these nutrient requirements are reduced in a carnivore diet -- cf. "facilitates a lower requirement of certain nutrients" -- then your understanding is a doozie, let alone it support your unsubstantiated view that "meat is indeed not "nutritionally" complete".
Actually I read the abstract and the conclusion. However I think the abstract is there for a certain reason and my quote from the abstract absolutely confirms my point that a meat-based diet is insufficient. Anyway, I hope it's good for you, also in the long run (you mentioned something about cholesterol in another comment).
A bit off topic, but I thought this would be kind of a comedic fiction article a-la-Onion. I thought, "Oh here they go, unjustly skewering people from Florida again."
Then I read the article.
Sigh.
I've tried to agitate against the "Florida Man..." and "Florida Woman..." stereotype, but it's just gotten to a point.. I guess I don't know what to say anymore?
Normally the whole "Florida man" thing happens because unlike many other states, Florida has a history of relatively public documentation of legal cases and police arrests. Journalists can just pick any cases that stand out and make funny looking articles because of whatever stunt the local teenagers, drunks, or drug addicts have been caught doing now. It's unfortunate that something like public access to law enforcement documents is being used to ridicule the state so much.
This isn't one of those cases, though. This is someone speedrunning a heart attack.
They lost 36-pounds in just 6-weeks time (and ate as much as they wanted, so never hungry).
But they did a blood test and it was panic time. The doctor told him he's on the brink of cardiac arrest and had to be put on medication and immediately introduce vegetables into their diet.