January 29, 2019

The "carnivore diet" aka carnivore diet? What do scientific studies say about this topic?

Die „Carnivore Diät“ alias Carnivore Diät? Was sagen wissenschaftliche Studien zu diesem Thema?

Here is a brief summary:

The Carnivore Diet involves consuming only animal products - no plants and mostly meat.
People claim that this diet will help you lose weight and reduce inflammation, while protecting you from disease and increasing your testosterone levels.
Like any highly restrictive diet, the Carnivore Diet can help you lose weight, but it's probably unhealthy to follow long-term.

What if I told you that by eating nothing but meat and other animal products - no fruit, no vegetables, no plant foods of any kind - you could achieve the following:

Lose fat without counting calories
Protect yourself from diabetes or even cure diabetes
Avoid blood sugar fluctuations
Increase your testosterone levels, build more muscle and improve your athletic performance

. . . But wait, there's more!

You may also be able to get rid of digestive problems like bloating and constipation and overcome depression, fatigue, joint pain and other ailments.

Well, according to a growing number of self-proclaimed health and diet gurus, this is exactly what happens when you follow the carnivore diet, which includes only animal products (along with water and salt).

One of these carnivore diet gurus is Dr. Shawn Baker, a former orthopedic surgeon and powerlifter who has been one of the more vocal advocates of the diet.

Baker shared many interesting things during a podcast in December 2017 (1), which included the following:

"We eat for two reasons. We eat to get energy and to build muscle tissue... You and I are "animals" - we are made of animal tissue. The most efficient way to eat is to simply eat animal tissue because it gives your body everything it needs in the proportions it needs it."
"When smoking was shown to cause cancer, the epidemiology showed a 2,000% increase in cases of cancer...when they compared that to meat and cancer, they only found an 18% increase."
"If we look back in history, there are all kinds of accounts of people using meat for athletic performance enhancement. Even in ancient Greece, people knew that you perform better if you eat a lot of meat.

Such statements may seem grotesque at first glance, but who knows...?

Scientists also used to believe that cocaine improves digestion, a lobotomy cures mental illness and drinking mercury can relieve constipation, so it's not too far-fetched to at least question some of the sacred cows of nutrition too - such as the importance of eating plants.

However, Baker destroys his credibility with statements like this (1):

"A molecule of glucose and a molecule of vitamin C are nearly identical and therefore compete for the same transporters.

Wait a minute, what?

A vitamin C vitamin looks like this:

And this is what a glucose molecule looks like:

Yes, Baker, I see where you're going with this. These molecules look "almost identical", but in a completely different way. It makes sense if you don't think about it.

And then there's the whole "competing for the same transporters" thing.

Scientists have known for decades that even though vitamin C can get into cells using some of the same transporters (which you can think of as passages) as glucose, cells also have special transporters for vitamin C that don't accept glucose (2).

And so here we have someone who doesn't even understand the basics of chemistry and biology...and who had his medical license revoked in 2017 due to "incompetence" (3) ...giving radical dietary advice to the unsuspecting masses.

It's things like this that can change people's lives forever - in a very negative way.

However, none of this means you should throw the carnivore baby out with the bathwater. If you do some research online and read people's experiences with the Carnivore Diet, you'll find some compelling success stories.

Men and women of all ages and walks of life say that this diet has cured their arthritis, their digestive problems, their headaches, their sleep problems, their anxiety disorders, their concentration problems, their depression and their alcohol and nicotine addictions, while at the same time helping them to build muscle, lose fat and feel and look healthier than ever before.

On the other hand, there are decades of scientific research showing that eating fruits, vegetables and whole grains is healthy and some scientific evidence suggesting that eating large amounts of animal products can increase the risk of disease and dysfunction (4).

At this point, which position weighs heavier and which is better supported by scientific evidence?

Well, the short answer is that while it is possible to stay healthy on the carnivore diet (at least for a while), there is an overwhelming amount of scientific research showing that this diet is far from optimal and that there are much better options.

In this article, we'll look at the whole story. This includes the following:

What is the Carnivore Diet?
Why do people follow this diet?
What are the pros and cons of this diet?
How safe and harmless is this diet?

. . . and much more.

Let's get started.

What is the Carnivore Diet?

The carnivore diet - which is often referred to as a "zero carb diet" or "ketogenic paleo diet" - is exactly what the name sounds like:

You eat only animal products (in combination with water and salt).

This means no fruits, no vegetables, no toppings, no herbs and plant-based spices, and no vegetable oils.

Dairy products are technically allowed, but many followers of the Carnivore Diet forgo them in order to keep their carbohydrate consumption as low as possible and minimize the risk of digestive discomfort.

It is not known when this trend began, but some of the better known followers of this diet include Charles Washington, who claims to have been following this diet for over 10 years, and Joe and Charlene Andersen, who claim to have been following this diet for almost 20 years.

The Carnivore Diet food list

The primary foods allowed on the Carnivore Diet include red meat, fish, poultry and eggs.

So a shopping list might include the following:

Beef steaks	Pork and veal chops	Ground beef
turkey	chicken	salmon
Sardines	Anchovies	Whole eggs
Bacon	Sausage	Breakfast meat
Liver	Lard	Bone marrow

Fattier meats such as ribeye steaks, salmon and lamb are preferred as they make it easier to achieve the right balance of protein and fat.

Processed meats such as breakfast bacon, sausage and beef jerky are also allowed and more extreme followers of this diet favor offal such as liver, kidney and heart, which are more nutritious than commonly consumed meats.

Some advocates of this diet also insist that only organic food, meat from grass-fed animals and meat from wild-caught animals should be eaten, while most do not see this as mandatory.

Plant-based ingredients such as horseradish, mustard, ketchup, barbecue sauce, soy sauce and salsa are not allowed. The strictest advocates of this diet even avoid pepper.

Why do people follow the Carnivore Diet?

There are two reasons why people follow the carnivore diet:

To lose weight and get healthy
To alleviate symptoms that they believe are caused by

food intolerances and food allergies.

You can find many examples of people who have lost weight using the Carnivore Diet, but as you probably know, this is simply a function of energy balance and can be achieved with any type of diet.

In other words, the Carnivore Diet has no special or unique weight loss effects. Many people simply subconsciously consume fewer calories when they can only eat meat, making it easier for them to lose weight.

Even more common than weight loss success stories, however, are reports of people who have used the Carnivore Diet to alleviate or eliminate negative symptoms they associate with food intolerances or allergies.

A food intolerance is an unofficial term for a consistent, negative reaction to a particular food or food group.

For example, some people experience negative side effects - both physical and psychological - when they have eaten wheat, dairy or fermented foods and many believe that this means they are suffering from an intolerance to something contained in these foods. This includes things like gluten, lactose or histamines (which are found in fermented foods).

You'll also often hear carnivore dieters talk about how plants contain so-called 'antinutrients' such as lectins, phytic acid and gluten, which prevent animals from being able to digest them (and thus act as a natural defense mechanism against consumption).

In fact, these compounds are found in many plant foods including soy, wheat, corn, oatmeal, tomatoes, apples, cherries, potatoes, carrots and more.

Meat does not contain these compounds, which means that if people eat nothing but meat, they can easily avoid all foods and compounds that could cause adverse reactions in their bodies.

This is common sense. It's basically the first step of an elimination diet - a scientifically tested way to determine which foods you can and can't eat (5).

By first removing all potentially problematic foods from your diet and then gradually adding them back in, you can easily figure out which foods you're better off not eating based on how your body reacts to each of these "challenges" (reintroductions).

Unfortunately, the Carnivore Diet never goes beyond the first step of complete elimination. Instead of using the Carnivore Diet as a way back to a nutritious and balanced diet - as a tool to achieve a goal - many use this way of eating as a goal.