I agree that Mutzel was probably just having an off day. It sounded so much like what you said that I thought you were inspired by it!
While I agree that to meet RDAs the carnivorous diet would need to consist of more than just steak, the RDAs are not really applicable as they stand, and we’re in uncharted territory. A couple of reasons:
- They were established in high carb diets, and high carb diets drastically change some aspects of metabolism. Vitamins are coenzymes for metabolic processes, so on a ketogenic diet we have different requirements, and it’s currently an unknown.
- Plants actively interfere with nutrient absorption, so RDAs are almost certainly inflated by an unknown amount.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to assert that we know what does or does not constitute a well formulated carnivorous diet. That’s still an empirical question. While I tend to conservatism (believe it or not!), and relish organs, fatty fish, and shellfish myself, I can’t dismiss the reports of carnivores such as Joe and Charlene who have been eating essentially only steak for some 20 years and not only are in excellent health, but claim to feel better than when they did include organs. If you consider the fact that humans were motivated to waste nothing, an argument can be made that nose-to-tail was just what we did because it was food. It’s quite possible that now that a person could afford to eat only fatty steak, that’s even better, and the organs were a concession.
Like the proverbial story of the woman who always cut her pot roast in two because her mother did, only to find out later that her mother’s pan was too small to hold the whole roast, it is a mistake to assume that everything a hunter-gathers gather society did was specifically beneficial outside of their particular constraints. There are also reports from Steffanson that the Inuit fed organs to the dogs, not to themselves. Understand that I’m not asserting that we know the organs were less important than some believe, I’m just saying that logically you can’t rule it out. My conservative stance comes from the known importance of the nutrients involved, especially for the brain, but again, the change in metabolism and lack of plants has an effect of unknown magnitude. It’s too soon to make a judgment on that. It’s a fine hypothesis, as far as that goes.
I’ve never found it particularly challenging to get normal fat to protein ratios, of somewhere around 65-80% fat by eating as appetite dictates, with untrimmed fatty steaks, ribs, pork belly… these things are so dripping with fat that it’s hard to eat it all! When I eat leaner, I cook it or serve it with reserved tallow and lard from previous meals. These percentages are the typical profile from the people I’ve interacted with, with the exception of lipophobes who can’t shake the fear of fat, but that’s a general problem with keto. I think this falls out naturally because protein is naturally satiating, and after you’ve had enough you crave fat, as we’ve learned from rabbit starvation. Are you saying you’ve tried this and it was hard for you? You might be surprised at how your appetite is guided in practice.
Carnivory hasn’t been tested by most people on LC, so it’s premature to say whether it would be better or worse in the typical case. Anecdotally, I’ve encountered a handful of people who found no extra benefit, and a handful who it didn’t seem to agree with, but the vast majority of people I’ve talked to who tried it said they felt better than on LC, either somewhat or mind blowingly so. So my guess is different from yours.