"Popular" Science, on Medium; "Please Do Not Try to Survive on an All-Meat Diet"

(Chris) #22

We may not know what humans ate a thousand years ago, but we know for sure it wasn’t pop tarts, heart healthy Cheerios, boca burgers, broccoli and Diet Coke

(Stickin' with mammoth) #23

(High-fives a fellow Pacific Northwesterner)

(Herb Martin) #24

If you listen to the whole Rhonda Patrick/Joe Rogan back and forth about carnivore the best she came up with against it was (words to the effect): ‘we don’t know what you might be missing or doing to your cells 7 years out.’

She convinced me of one thing: Go back to my mega-vitamins even though I hadn’t used them in 6 months of Carnivore Diet – in an abundance of caution and because they are likely good for me anyway.

If it’s wasted money so what, it’s my only current vice.

8 months carnivore, finished a 12-day water fast, and currently at 5-days on a second fast after 5 days back to carnivore.

Paradoxically carnivore is easier for me than a biological 0-carb keto – oddly fewer food choices but less cravings. (Some other carnivores report this too.)

Always on keto I was “planning” for getting off or planning to relax. With carnivore I find myself making no such plans and without desire to exit.

Going on to the fast from carnivore was trivial. Going back to carnivore felt LUXURIOUSLY DECADENT after a 12-day fast.

(Allan Misner) #25

I’m not so sure about that. I’m fairly certain that my ancestors from northern Europe would go days when the hunt didn’t go as planned and there were no veggies growing in the frozen ground.

Humans are opportunistic eaters. When fruit and vegetables were abundant, we’d feast on that. Fish, fowl, and critters would be our next choice and we’d only go after big game when things were tough (too easy to get injured or killed trying to kill an elk or bear).

(Ken) #26

A few factoids about Northern European culture during Paleo times. I’m mainly referring to our current interglacial period.

Grain cultivation spread throughout Europe by around 4,000 years b.p.a. when they reached Scandinavia and the British Isles. It was an earlier form of wheat such as Spelt, having much less gluten than our current triticale varieties. Wide spread grain cultivation began around 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. It took around 8,000 years for it to be spread completely across Europe. One plausible hypothesis is that an impact on Greenland caused the Younger Dryas, when the vast majority of Northern Hemisphere Ice Age Megafauna went extinct. Grain cultivation replaced this food source.

Big Game hunting was usually safer than how it is portrayed during the Paleo Period. Our ancestors were every bit as intelligent as we are, and understood how dangerous it was to stick a large animal with a spear/dart/arrow. That’s why animals were run off cliffs and into rivers. It was much safer and you could make a years worth of pemmican from one hunt. All you needed to know was their migration route.

(Robert C) #27

I am no expert but it seems you could argue the exact opposite.

If a large animal suddenly feels the pain of a non-kill-shot spear, it does not seem likely it would attack nearby humans. Instead, probably the main thing on its mind might be to not get hit again (i.e. get away)?

Getting big game to go cliff diving - not sure how safe that is either. Some percentage will fall for it :grinning: but some of the big game will not - and now you are on their only path of survival - seems like a dangerous position to put yourself in.

#28

“too-good-to -be -true”
“gorging”

this is such poor journalism

(less is more, more or less) #29

If this quoted attribution to me were correct, it’d say; “Pork rinds? Don’t mind if I do!”

(Todd Allen) #30

I think the biggest danger is dietary fear mongering to convince people to blindly follow an institutionally prescribed one size fits all diet versus encouraging people to experiment and learn what works for themselves.

(Herb Martin) #31

First of all “4000 years ago” or even 20k probably has almost nothing to do with our evolution.

Even so, it’s very clear that people have had to survive over winters when food ran out, especially if they were dependent on storage of crops or other food stuffs. This likely explains why it’s no big deal to do a 30 day fast (or much longer) if you have body fat.

Agriculture is fairly recent in evolutionary terms. We have been able to get by with only hunting and/or gathering for millions of years (or tens).

As to killing by running animals off cliffs, that is quite viable for animals in large herds. Native Americans used this to kill many if not most of the bison. It was not just the arrival of the rifle and Europeans which killed the bison.

The problem is waste. Literally and figuratively.

(Chris) #32

Comparing running one herd off a cliff to feed an entire tribe to nearly wiping a species off the face of the planet and leaving the carcass and meat to rot so you can sell the skin and tongue is a little much dude.

For your comments on evolution, if we’ve come so far since 20,000 years ago, why are we still seeing issues from eating grains, leafy vegetables, tomatoes, peppers and cane sugar? You surely can blame a lot of the world’s metabolic issues on modern processed foods but that isn’t the whole story. You can eat a whole foods diet and still suffer from Crohn’s, IBS and a massive variety of leaky gut and autoimmune issues which carnivorous eating almost always seems to have a drastic healing effect on.

#33

The near extinction of the bison has nothing to do with the Native Americans and everything to do with the conscious effort of the United States government to purposefully wipe them out to hasten along the Native genocide.

(Herb Martin) #34

It was actually a common practice among plains indians to run giant herds of cliffs. Almost all of this would rot.

Apparently there was lore – true or not – that it was required to get the ENTIRE herd, no stragglers, to ensure that the escaping animals would not warn the new herd they joined.

Most of this would waste. It was NOT an efficient use of the animals. In fact it was as least as inefficient and wasteful as any later rifle hunting which Native Americans engaged in enthusiastically as well.

It seems the carnivore diet folks do just fine without anything other than meat (I do), and I have yet to hear of a single one complaining about any of leaky gut, IBS, or of course glutin intolerance (while on carnivore.)

I did carnivore for weight loss and general health (after watching Jordan Peterson describe his and his daughter Mikhaila’s experience with it.)

It was VERY obvious from Peterson’s videos over the last five years or so that he had undergone a remarkable transformation. Not only had he lost weight, he looked 10 years younger, healthier and obviously improved so much it was difficult to believe it was the same person.

(For those interested, go back and watch some of Jordan Peterson’s CLASSROOM videos pre-2015, maybe earlier and then compare them to his current appearance YouTube or news shows.)

So Peterson said that he figured he could try anything for 30 days and that made sense to me as a keto dieter.

After a couple a week or so I never even thought about when the time would be “up” and just kept going with the carnivore diet.

Eat what you want but for me carnivore works wonders. I found a handful of health improvements that no on even suggested would happen.

The biggest surprise was my should pain. Both my shoulders have been jacked for about 8-10 years but had become painful enough to interfere sleep in the last 3-4.

My orthopedic should surgeon had been giving me steroid injections about every 4 months in both shoulders. These would work about 3 months, but then shoulders would start to intermittently hurt more while I’d make a new appointment for a refill.

As I started carnivore, the injections were ‘due’, they had twinged once or twice, and they immediately stopped. Never hurt again in the 8 months of carnivore (so it’s been about a year with the 3-4 months preceding carnivore.)

Told my surgeon (on a visit for my wife’s knees) and the immediate response: “That’s because carnivore is an anti-inflammatory diet”.

Gee, they might have told me that a few years ago.

(Robert C) #35

I think it is more the case that the Carnivore diet avoids the consumption of the modern versions of the whole foods (overly sugary, pesticides, etc.). I think we (like wild bears do now) fattened in summer if fruits and vegetables were easily had. I don’t think (and I don’t know) that wild bears suffer from Crohn’s, IBS or leaky gut type issues.

#36

This isn’t true. Most bison dives were coordinated by multiple tribes coming together, so we are talking hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Native Americans killing a heard. And they were very efficient at using nose-to-tail and even bones, getting the most out of the animal. And they didn’t kill the bison for sport (or part of a government-backed genocide effort). Sorry but you don’t get to both-sides the near extinction of the bison.

(Karim Wassef) #37

Curing and preserving meats were common traditions in all carnivore-based cultures. It’s why salt was so valuable.

(Consensus is Politics) #38

If you only ate lean meat, you would probably die within a month or two (speculative based on what i have read about only eating rabbit meat for one month). However, I suppose it could have been a troll feeding the tourists.

(Consensus is Politics) #39

Indeed, where is the money in that?

(Todd Allen) #40

And yet there were tens of millions of bison on the plains until the 19th century…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison

Humans were almost exclusively accountable for the near-extinction of the American bison in the 1800s. At the beginning of the century, tens of millions of bison roamed North America. American settlers slaughtered an estimated 50 million bison during the 19th century.[63] Railroads were advertising “hunting by rail”, where trains encountered large herds alongside or crossing the tracks. Men aboard fired from the trains roof or windows, leaving countless animals to rot where they died.[64]

(Chris) #41

Ate nothing but lean London Broils for quote some time without adding fat and survived just fine. Probably also depends on the person’s bodyfat level.