Going on 3 years now, with comprehensive blood tests taken every 3-4 months for 2 years. Never had better markers for inflammation (below error threshold), cardiac health, liver health, etc.
Tried keto (proper), vegan, vegetarian, low-FODMAP, paleo, all without success. Found a forum of other IBS people, and decided to risk going against mainstream 'authority' such as the American Heart Association.
So far, feel better than I ever have, on all markers I could measure objectively, and subjectively.
Whats a terrible idea is to have fats linked to heart disease in a massive lie that spanned decades, breed fruit for higher sugar, then say sugar from fruit is fine and healthy, but refined sugar should be moderated (even then its not discouraged). Or in the face of (currently anecdotal, I agree) evidence of dozens and dozens of chronic, autoimmune diseases cured by a carnivore diet from thousands of people. (Harvard Survey finished collecting data end of April)
Cured meaning we've removed the inflammatory foods causing the chronic illness. At least see it as an elimination diet, to where a user can add foods back in, and find out whats causing the adverse symptoms initially.
But science remains dogmatic, as history shows, for better or worse.
Do you eat nose-to-tail? I hear a lot about people’s carnivore diets and they sound mostly like an “animal flesh diet,” which is lacking in myriad key micronutrients. It seems one would absolutely need to supplement animal flesh with kidney, liver, heart, etc... I’m curious to hear your experience.
I spent the first year and a half only doing ground beef, and sirloin tips/ribeye (grass and grain fed). More recently I begun stocking up on ground beef (shipped from a grass fed pasture), and on days I eat nose-to-tail will make a 3lb meat loaf with 1/3 a mix of ground liver, kidney, heart, 1/3 75/25 ground beef, and 1/3 55/45 ground beef with heart. Other days I'll have ribeye for my two meals.
Before the meat loaf I tried liver numerous times, usually calf liver, cooked more on the rare side as it was far more palatable. Oddly enough, and others have similar experiences, on days I ate the liver, I was satiated much sooner, and had roughly 30% less muscle meat for that day.
I was on the same page as you when I looked into the diet initially, but from the myriad of resources I've skimmed, or trusted other's review over, it seems we really are in the dark with nutritional science.
Countless epidemiological nutrition studies attempt to show causality, regardless of the amount of confounding factors they attempt to account for, then prescribe guidelines that are inherently flawed. Gwern.net has a great article on this [0]
My point is, there are most likely many other mechanisms our bodies have in it's 'arsenal' to sustain homeostasis that we have yet to map out, due to ethical, economic, and practical limitations of truly randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind nutritional studies.
That is to say, despite on paper the typical muscle-meat carnivore diet lacks nutritional variety, we see anecdotally people are generally flourishing on this diet. This I think is a significant counter example to our current model of nutrition, and will hopefully spur further research.
Not OP but I've been doing carnivore as well for the last year, and I don't eat across the board. I generally eat Ribeyes and can share a lot of the same benefits he's mentioned. Red meat in particular actually has a fair amount of the vitamins you need such as vitamin-c and the less you cook it the more they're preserved which is why I go on the rarer side of things.
> Whats a terrible idea is to have fats linked to heart disease in a massive lie that spanned decades, ...
THIS. Combine with NYT article on the sugar lie[1] and we have a disturbing picture that in the least betrays incompetence. Also there is a lot of evidence from Robert Sapolsky's work with baboons that atherosclerosis has little to do with blood cholesterol and is much more about stress[2]
The main takeaways for me are: eat stuff that looks like food - meat and veggies. Fruit has fructose which must be processed by the liver and split into sucrose and glucose so keep the fruit and HFCS to a minimum. And don't stress (too much). And move your body. Walk 30 min a day, do some pushups, just do something.
Inuits did not adapt to their diet. Maasai adapted well but still not enough to avoid severe atherosclerotic build up, there's Maasai people ~20 years old dying from atherosclerosis.
It's not just AHA recommendations based on epidemiological studies, it's also the vast amount of data showing that unfortunately, cultural diets high in animal fat and protein eventually get the best of you.
Scientifically watching these kinds of interventions and showing they have positive outcomes still does not mean that practicing the intervention long-term is fine.
Following a "carnivore" diet is a really terrible idea. Unless you're an Inuit living in the frozen north, you should eat some greens.