Google Scholar: scholar.google.com The FREE nutrition tracking app I use:
Is the carnivore diet debunked as a healthy way for humans to eat? You tell me after seeing some of the evidence in this video. Whenever a new diet comes into the spotlight, I always take a look at it from several perspectives: nutritional density, short-term effects, long-term effects and the logic behind it. In this video I look at the carnivore diet from that perspective and show you guys what I find.
Nutritionally speaking, the carnivore diet has an abundance of protein, fat and many vitamins and minerals. But when using the top ranking site on Google search for "carnivore diet meal plan," the example meal plan I found came up short on calcium, vitamin C, vitamin K, fiber and other micronutrients. I explain some ways to combat this in the video, such as adding milk for calcium and chicken liver for vitamin C, but the complete lack of fiber in animal-based food is a very big concern for eating carnivore. And to my knowledge, no one supporting this diet has explained how to get fiber from animal-based food.
I then go into the short-term effects of the diet, which have shown to be quite good from anecdotal evidence. The carnivore diet results are actually very promising in the short-term. Many people report feeling great, losing weight and even having improved blood sugar levels when switching to carnivore. All of this makes sense. Many whole food diets show these improvements in the beginning because it's always beneficial to remove processed and refined food products from the diet.
There aren't a lot of long-term effects recorded for the carnivore diet. I couldn't find any studies on Google Scholar related to any sort of "all meat" diet plan. However, I did find one epidemiology study that shows some concerning evidence about red meat intake.
***NOTE: I misspoke at this part in the video. The red meat study had a population broken up into fifths based on red meat intake, but I said "increasing quantities" which is misleading. They did not increase anyone's meat intake in that study. They divided a population up based on meat intake. Sorry about that.
I show a couple studies in the video. One of which displays the concerns for high meat intake and shows correlation with an increasing rate of mortality from several diseases. The other study shows that cholesterol-lowering foods have been shown to reduce blood pressure. I showed the 2nd study because the carnivore diet has an alarming amount of dietary cholesterol and that should be of concern to everyone. I also show that the USDA's current dietary guidelines say to eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible.
And lastly, we talk about the logic of the carnivore diet. Humans evolved from primates, specifically chimpanzees and bonobos (we share a common ancestor with them), so how much sense does it make to eat like a lion or tiger?
Is the carnivore diet debunked? You tell me. What do you think of the evidence I show in this video? Are there studies out there showing that we actually don't need fiber? Is dietary cholesterol actually not concern and red meat actually doesn't increase the rate of disease? If so, put some links in the comments below, because I'd like to see them!
-Ryan
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