Should carnivore be the starting point?

(Karim Wassef) #42

Lean white meat is deficient in nutrients… chicken breast is not adequate.

However, carnivore includes real high nutrient density sources specifically from fats and organ meats. Liver is a phytonutrient and mineral smorgasbord- it’s my version of broccoli. Red meat is full of essential amino acid and animal fat is an amazing source of fat soluble vitamins. Bone marrow and bone broth are also dense. Eggs are amazingly balanced and nutrient full. Fish are also excellent sources of vitamins and minerals. I love my sautéed cod liver.

There are no deficiencies in a balanced carnivore diet. There are no issues with constipation either - only plants do that if we remove their fiber. Eating plants actually forces us to eat other plants because they consume vitamins to be digested. Vitamin C being the most impactful. Eating meats does not deplete vitamin C, so we don’t need to eat citrus to fix it… no scurvy for real carnivores.

We are basically made of meat and fat and eating animals gives us what we need. The only cohesive argument I’ve heard against life long carnivore was made by Dr Rhonda Patrick on the Joe Rogan show, where she was concerned that the gut bacteria could bias towards amino acid fermentation vs fiber fermentation. The byproduct of this AO fermentation could cause inflammation and colon cancer over long term use. My read is that this is a function of eating too much protein and not enough fat and organs… I believe that a balanced carnivore diet fixes these risks.

Tallow, liver and organs, eggs, bone marrow, fish, clams, oysters, shrimp, roe, fat, red and white meats… it’s all part of a healthy balanced carnivore diet to me.

(Chris) #43

Fixed that for ya <3

(bulkbiker) #44

Therein lies the issue… I’ve been 95% carnivore for the past 8 months with no supplements just salt in hot drinks… feel great…

(charlie3) #45

I just noticed that, starting tomorrow, March 7th, the first “Carnivore Conference” will be in session. Hopefully they will post the presentations on Youtube.

After a year of keto and listening to many many YT presenters I try to be cautious about everything everybody says. There will be more science, there is observational bias because everybody eats, I notice the most prominent opinion leaders get entangled in economic interests, or promotion of a body of acedemic work, then there are a lot of interacting variables and individual variations, and all that is complicated by psychology.

I’ll keep doing carnivore until I decide to stop doing it.

P.S. How do I quote a previous post?

(Raj Seth) #46

I’m with you - a carnivore, ‘just eat bacon and eggs for 2 weeks’, etc type of introduction to keto can simplify things. I do agree that it will seem like an extreme ‘DIET’ to the nooB initiate. However, it does eliminate tracking, getting tricked by food labeling, and other mental games that one may need otherwise.

I would suggest a related and complementary activity may be to use the excess mental energy on ingesting 2KD, Fung & Ramos, Phinney & Volek, Ivor Cummins, Nadir Ali, Dave Feldman et al in large doses while getting fast-tracked into keto adaptation by the carnivore induction. Then, if the initiate ever decides to give up carnivory, at least he will be up to speed on carb avoidance, medical skulduggery and the like.

(Raj Seth) #47

Whoa there big boy - easy - you can pry my tallow fried chicken wings from my cold satiated fingers…

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #48

Raj, he said “not adequate”; he didn’t say “not tasty”! LOL! :grin:

(Raj Seth) #49

I could have my home made tallow fried chicken wings daily for a month… Very adequate for my N=1 :grin:

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #50

Charlie, you highlight the words you want to quote, and a white-on-grey “Quote” button shows up. Click on that, and the highlighted words get inserted into a post. If you do this from the thread screen, a post editor window is automatically opened for you; if you are already composing a post, the quotation gets added wherever in the editor your cursor is located. You can insert multiple quotations in a post, and the Discourse software encourages that, instead of making multiple different posts for each quotation.

(Robert C) #51

N of one (celebs or otherwise) being Carnivore for decades - I have not heard about them but sure, they probably exist.

N of one - long term - on any food-type restrictive diet self-select (Vegan, Carnivore etc.). You don’t hear about the ones that tried it for a few months and got constipated (or worse) and stopped.

My mention of Shawn Baker was to emphasize the fact that he has a massive muscular body that regularly is heavily trained (to world class levels). He could drink a large coke before each workout to (likely) no ill effect. Any diet he is on might work differently in his body than a sedentary Ketoer thinking of going Carnivore. I guess I should not have mentioned any of his motivations as clouding the “Show me the science” side of things.

I am not dismissive of Carnivore in any way. It might be a great dietary strategy for some people for Keto induction or for clearing up a (sometimes significant) health issue. Diet is just a label because the Carnivore diet is very restrictive and telling you exactly what to eat/not eat. A WOE does not tell you what to eat (SAD, Keto are WOEs).

(bulkbiker) #52

Diet and WoE are the same thing in the dictionary for one definition of “diet” I’m not sure that your distinction here between Carnivore and Keto is justifiable… I would say a WoE tells you exactly what to eat just that in keto the menu is a bit longer than Carnivore… ?

(Robert C) #53

I respectfully disagree. Many in the Keto community have pushed hard to make the distinction that Keto is not just another diet but instead a way of eating.

I can eat anything on keto - absolutely anything, there is no limit to the food-type.
Sugar, grains, coffee, butter, meat, vegetables, frozen dinners etc. all okay - as long as I eat in a way that keeps me in nutritional ketosis.

Carnivore would limit that list to butter and meat (some will cheat and add the coffee too).

(Janelle) #54

Thanks for the answers. You may disagree with this statement but there is probably a right way and a wrong way to be vegan or vegetarian or whatever. You pointed out that one must probably eat organ meats for carnivore to be “healthy“. Since I never met a kidney, gizzard, or liver that I liked or could stomach (no pun intended - and I’ve tried - Grandma was old-school Hungarian and tried to force that stuff down us all the time), I guess I’ll stick with my 2 cups of leafy greens and one cup of an above ground veggie.

(Robert C) #55

Another way to think about it, with Carnivore (a diet) you just think about “is it meat or not” or “is it meat or come from a cow” or whatever.

With Keto - you are not thinking about what it is, you are thinking about its composition and mass to determine its effects on your hormones.

(And with the SAD example, you are not thinking about what it is - or anything else!)

(bulkbiker) #56

Diet has 2 meanings as I’m sure you are aware and one of them is “Way of Eating” so your basic premise is faulty… but
I really can’t see why you think that Carnivore is a diet i.e. a short term invention, usually to lose some weight, as opposed to a way of eating that simply embraces all products produced from the animal kingdom (which is what most carnivores include).

I think that for people like me who find it easier to follow stricter guidelines at the start of things that carnivore would have been a very easy way to start a ketogenic way of life as I could have simply eaten the things I love like bacon and eggs for a month. this is effectively what I did at the start of my T2 journey anyway… cut carbs to the absolute limit and skipped breakfast. if someone had told me eat meat, fish, butter, eggs, cheese and cream I would have been fine with that. It’s when you start introducing vegetables etc int the mix that it becomes complex and you have to start monitoring macros etc. Made even more complicated by people like Berg who say ignore green veg carbs…
In the early days simplicity is good. Bit like Dan Quibell and his bacon experiment although he recently seems to have gone a bit CICO which is a shame…

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #57

Since the word “diet” is derived by way of Latin from a Greek word meaning “way of living,” I wouldn’t spend too much effort trying to make a distinction. When we talk of the keto “way of living,” we are merely trying to get people to realize that it needs to be a long-term commitment to healthy eating, not a short-term method of fat loss (or worse, weight loss). The same is true of carnivore/zero-carb eating.

I’m not saying that the premise of this thread is a bad idea. My only objections are as stated above: too many people have been brainwashed into thinking carbohydrate is “healthy,” and fat is not, for carnivore to be their starting point; and too many people are addicted to carbohydrate to be receptive to the idea of giving it up altogether. Just look at the number of threads about carb cycling and going back to eating more carbohydrate, plus all the threads of ketofied recipes of carb-rich standard foods, especially desserts, to get an idea of the power of this addiction.

All I’m really saying is that people have to start from where they are, not from where we’d like them to be. Alas! :frowning:

(Robert C) #58

You can make Keto a “diet” (instead of WOE) by trying to follow foods lists of okay vs. not okay foods but, if those foods don’t keep you in ketosis - you are not following the Keto WOE. Anyway, I guess the people of the Keto community want what they do to be a WOE and want other things to be called “diets”. Both because keto does not limit food type - vegan, carnivore all fine - but also because it includes the eating to satiety concept. (I do not think they care about what the dictionary says.)

In the Carnivore case - you again are following a food list - Ribeye is on the list and spinach is not.

But again, the science is not in. What if Carnivore with grassfed beef and raw milk is really good for you and Carnivore with hormone+omega 6 laden beef and pasteurized milk is not so good (or generally gives you constipation or is actually bad for you in the long run)?

In my Carnivore experimentation, I am going with the grassfed beef and raw milk - hoping to avoid yet another dietary mistake. But, it would be nice if the studies were done - both on Carnivore generally and on the specifics of implementation.

(Kirk Wolak) #59

I had my neighbor do it this way.
He never looked back.

The downside, adding vegetables back in, he ended up with severe heart burn. Digestive enzymes were required to stop it.

It is easier to explain. What I usually say, and Dr. Boz has a whole thing about this. You can and SHOULD go in phases:

  • Remove grains, Breads, sugars
  • Remove carbs from the house, donate them
  • Then the next week, remove the stuff you add to your coffee
  • … But it quickly gets complicated

I had him take this approach:

  1. No snacking
  2. eat until you are full
  3. Fat good, Carbs bad, Protein dangerous if too much
  4. go 12 hrs without eating, then 16, then 18, then 23-24

That’s what he did. #4 took about 1 week for 12hrs then 1 week to get to 18, by the third week, he was doing OMAD and LOVING it.

I encouraged him to eat bacon and ribeye, he did. He has shrimp, and sometimes has cauliflower rice with butter!

Rocked it.
He avoids all the coffee, BPC, etc and drinks only water.

He is flying in, and joining me at Low Carb Denver today!

(bulkbiker) #60

I’d like to see how foods on an okay keto food list knock you out of ketosis because as you say you wouldn’t be following a keto diet if they did. As @PaulL has said above your singular definition of diet is not what the word means but if that’s how you want to argue it then fine.
I don’t follow a “food list” I’ve never had one but like I wouldn’t eat bread on keto I wouldn’t eat brocolli on Carnivore but I think you are making a false distinction… Whatever… you do you… I’m out.

(Chris) #61

Here’s a short list, the only one I’m not too sure of is a decade in is Dana, but if not, she’s close. Same with the testimonials on ZeroCarbZen - it varies.

Charlene (and her husband Joe, and their kids, even) http://meatheals.com/2018/02/04/charlene-andersen/
@amber empiri.ca & ketotic.org
Charles http://blog.zeroinginonhealth.com/ (the website is mostly dead-they moved to the facebook group Zeroing in on Health)
Kelly http://myzerocarblife.jamesdhogan.com/wp/
Dana http://www.zerocarbhealth.com/
Many others https://zerocarbzen.com/
Vilhjalmur Stefansson (RIP) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT7u2GlEfxs&feature=youtu.be&t=757 and http://www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.full.pdf
And Bear (RIP) http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=287013&page=1&pp=30&goto=journalformat