The Carnivore Diet: Can We Live On Meat Alone?

A lot of influencers are going on all-meat diets, saying that all this meat is clearing up inflammation, healing their guts, and sharpening their focus. But others say, hold up — this diet is sure to lead to heart disease, cancer, and even scurvy. So we’re asking: Is it possible to live on meat alone? Is there any benefit to the carnivore diet? And what are the risks? We talk to nutritionist Prof. Caryn Zinn and internist Dr. Adrian Soto-Mota. Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsCarnivoreDiet In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Carnivores Bring the Meat (04:28) They’re Gonna Get Scurvy, Right? (13:09) Fiber? Cholesterol? Heart Disease? Cancer? (20:11) A Miracle Diet? (22:31) Are Plants the Enemy? (25:57) Is it Just Keto? (27:50) Weight Loss (28:50) Should You Go Carnivore? This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, with help from Wendy Zukerman, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Michelle Dang, and Meryl Horn. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Emma Munger, So Wylie, Peter Leonard, Bumi Hidaka and Bobby Lord. A special thanks to the researchers we reached out to including Dr. Lawrence David, Dr. Andrija Karačić and others. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Verses.

• 0:05Wendy Zukerman?

  This is the show that pits facts against flesh. Today on the show, the carnivore diet.

• 0:17Wendy Zukerman?

  Fancy eating meat? A lot of meat?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  This is day 312, eating nothing but meat, eggs and seafood. 18 ounces of the chuck eye portion of the chuck roast. Beef, chicken, lamb, pork.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Burgers, beef tallow.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  So good.

• 0:34Wendy Zukerman?

  Some say this diet is so good because it's...

• 0:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Others say it's the best thing they've ever done for their health. They feel more vital, their brain seems to work better, and their chronic illnesses seem to have disappeared. One big influencer here is Michaela Peterson. She's the daughter of the controversial author Jordan Peterson. And Michaela says that the carnivore diet cured her rheumatoid arthritis. Here she is giving a talk about it.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  And I cut everything out except for beef. And two weeks after doing that, thinking, I'm nuts. Hopefully I don't get vitamin deficiencies. The itch went away and my joints started to feel better. Four weeks after that, I stopped crying in the morning. And five months after that, the anxiety lifted and I was back in what I felt was heaven compared to how I'd been living. All beef, all lamb, salt and water.

• 1:24Wendy Zukerman?

  Her dad went on the diet too. Here he is telling Joe Rogan about it a couple of months ago.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  I eat steak. And when I deviate from that, things start to fall apart around me pretty quick.

• 1:34Wendy Zukerman?

  This diet is blowing up right now. People cannot get enough.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Y'all, I have never felt better. My energy has been amazing. I have been sleeping so much better than I normally do. I don't get any bloating, gas, like my stomach issues are completely gone.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  I was able to lose 90 pounds. My knee pain of over a decade went away. My mental health is the best it's ever been.

• 1:56Wendy Zukerman?

  In fact, researchers did a big survey of people who have been on the carnivore diet for at least six months, asking them about their mood, hunger levels, weight and health. And tons of people reported that they loved this diet and it improved their health. But to a lot of us listening to this right now, the carnivore diet feels plain wrong. There's the environment to think about. Plus, we've been told our whole lives that eating vegetables is good and eating loads of meat puts us on a fast track to crappy health, stuff like heart disease and cancer.

• 2:31Speaker 05

  The carnivore diet is going to kill you.

• 2:33Wendy Zukerman?

  What is so terrible about this diet is the insanely high amounts of saturated fats people are consuming.

• 2:39Speaker 06

  Do not embark on the carnivore diet unless you would like to get scurvy.

• 2:42Wendy Zukerman?

  Scurvy.

• 2:46Wendy Zukerman?

  So who's right here? Can a carnivore diet really make you mean and lean? Or is this diet a big mistake? Because when it comes to the carnivore diet, it makes a lot of people feel... Cr-no! But then, there's science. Science versus the carnivore diet is coming up just after the break.

• 3:19Speaker 07

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• 5:23Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today on the show, meat, meat, meat, meat. I'm here with senior producer, Meathead, Rose Rimla.

• 5:31Speaker 09

  Hi, Wendy.

• 5:32Wendy Zukerman?

  So, on this diet, people just eat meat, right? You can't eat any vegetables.

• 5:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, some people eat eggs and dairy, too, but definitely no vegetables, certainly no carbs or bread or anything, but also like no broccoli, no spinach, no oranges.

• 5:50Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, because when it comes to this diet, I have seen people proudly taking photos of a plate of food that's like two steaks, two eggs, a sausage on the side. And then just for garnish, three blueberries. And they're like, carnivore diet. And all the comments will say, um, get that blueberry off your plate. Blueberries, no.

• 6:10Speaker 09

  Yeah, no, if you're, I guess if you're a true carnivore, you're not eating any blueberries, according to the diehards. For some reason, they always showcase their food on cutting boards. Have you noticed that?

• 6:21Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 09

  It's like a cutting board.

• 6:23Wendy Zukerman?

  Because that's how T-Rex ate.

• 6:24Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 6:25Wendy Zukerman?

  Ate her food, right?

• 6:26Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 6:28Speaker 09

  I mean, your instinct would be this would wreak havoc on your body, right? Because it seems like you'd be missing out some very important vitamins, minerals, stuff like fiber. If you get rid of all that from your diet, my question is, like, will you be OK? You know, just basically, are these people OK? That's my question.

• 6:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Are these people OK? Yes, yes.

• 6:51Speaker 09

  Well, I talked to Karen Zinn about that. She's a professor at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.

• 6:58Speaker 10

  And I'm also a registered dietitian. So nutrition is my game, if you like.

• 7:06Speaker 09

  Karen, like us, has been hearing more and more about people going on the carnivore diet. And she wanted to know, if you go full meat, what are you potentially missing? So she and some colleagues analyzed the nutritional value of an all-meat diet. Was there any glaring deficiency that could pop up?

• 7:25Speaker 10

  Well, well, yes. Vitamin C, that would be the natural one. Where's, you know, where's the vitamin C? It's not, it's not there.

• 7:35Speaker 09

  We need vitamin C to make collagen. And so without it, your skin and mucous membranes and blood vessels start to break down.

• 7:42Wendy Zukerman?

  That's why your gums can bleed? That's all I know about scurvy.

• 7:46Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we're talking about scurvy here, right? And your gums can bleed and it can get really serious. People can die. And that wasn't the only nutritional deficiency that Karen was worried about. It looked like some other nutrients might be kind of low in this diet.

• 8:01Speaker 10

  Folate, potassium, where these, where these things? Folate you get from green leafy vegetables. Fruit and veg give you lots of potassium. So you ordinarily go, well, those things potentially do jump out.

• 8:14Speaker 09

  We need folate to make red blood cells and to keep our brains running smoothly. And we need potassium and other electrolytes for all our cells to make them, you know, just work. So not having enough of those things is a big deal.

• 8:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 8:30Speaker 09

  But this idea that you will not get them and will be deficient in these things on the carnivore diet, like, from what we've just talked about, that's all theoretical, just like written down on paper.

• 8:41Speaker 10

  It feels pretty non-theoretical, I'll say.

• 8:45Speaker 09

  Well, I mean, well, here's why I say it's theoretical. We don't have many studies on the carnivore diet. It's pretty new, it's very specific. It's not like the Atkins diet or the paleo diet where you're restricted, but you're not that restricted, like, you can still eat lots of fruits and vegetables. So, I kind of had to go digging, and I did find this amazing study that I am delighted to tell you about.

• 9:10Speaker 10

  Okay.

• 9:11Speaker 09

  It's a study of two Arctic explorers. Their names were Stephenson and Anderson. Stephenson claimed that he had lived in the Arctic for months, eating nothing but meat. And he said that it had gone just fine. Back then, people were as skeptical as today about this, and they were saying, like, "You can't do that, you're gonna have some kind of nutritional deficit, or something terrible will happen to you." And so, he and this other guy, they offered to be guinea pigs.

• 9:36Speaker 10

  Mmm.

• 9:37Speaker 09

  So, in the late 1920s, while they were in New York City, they started eating an all-meat diet. It was a lot like what you see people on TikTok showing us that they're eating.

• 9:48Speaker 10

  It was literally just meat, fish, chicken. And I think, was it, one of them didn't eat eggs either for the year. So, it's literally, literally just meat.

• 10:01Speaker 09

  And at first, it didn't actually go so well. And that was because the researchers wanted to know what would happen if these guys ate only very lean meat, so, so very little fat. And one of them, Stephenson, he agreed to do that. And when he ate that diet...

• 10:17Speaker 10

  He developed a lot of diarrhea.

• 10:19Speaker 09

  Yeah, I was reading about this, he felt awful.

• 10:21Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 10:26Wendy Zukerman?

  Interesting. What was going on?

• 10:28Speaker 09

  Well, it's interesting because Stephenson actually knew in advance. He was pretty sure this was going to happen to him. He told the researchers about it, but he was like, "All right, I'll try it anyway." Because he knew about something that's sometimes called rabbit starvation. It's also called protein poisoning.

• 10:43Speaker 09

  And that's basically when your diet is made up primarily of lean meat, like rabbit, you can actually get really sick. And we think that's because when someone is eating mostly protein, their body may not be able to convert that much protein into urine fast enough. So you get ammonia built up in your body, which is toxic. So, yeah, so after a few days of this, the researchers eased up on Stephenson.

• 11:11Speaker 10

  So what they did was they added fat to the meat. So they changed the type of the meat and they added more fat to it. He came right within a few days.

• 11:23Speaker 09

  So adding more fat to the diet brought down the protein, you know, just because the percentage of protein got lower, because the percentage of something else got higher. And so he got a lot better. And then, in the end, both of these guys stayed on the diet for a full year.

• 11:37Speaker 10

  If these guys were going to get scurvy, they would have got it. I mean, they had 12 months of doing this. They would have got neurological issues from not having the folate. They would have got all sorts of deficiency states, rickets, that you get from not having some of these nutrients.

• 11:55Speaker 09

  But at the end of the year...

• 11:56Speaker 10

  Everything was just normal. It was, there was nothing there that was a little bit untoward. All intense, they were healthy, two healthy individuals who had good vitality. They, all their organs, all their systems, all their, everything, was in good working order and, you know, totally good as gold.

• 12:20Speaker 09

  And no, yeah, so no deficiencies? No vitamin deficiencies? Not as far as anyone could tell, which is interesting.

• 12:27Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm, it is interesting. So why not?

• 12:30Speaker 09

  Well, for scurvy. So one hypothesis is that if you eat a lot of meat, you get a lot of this nutrient called carnitine. And maybe carnitine does some of the same stuff in our bodies that vitamin C does. And so that would mean we would need less vitamin C. That's a hypothesis. It has not been tested, as far as I can tell. And we also know that fresh meat actually does have a bit of vitamin C in it. In fact, studies have found that some of the traditional meat foods that are eaten up north by people native to that region, like whale skin, they're surprisingly good sources of vitamin C.

• 13:02Wendy Zukerman?

  But most people on the carnivore diet, I mean, including this Stephenson and Anderson, right, they weren't eating whale skin, were they?

• 13:11Speaker 09

  No, they were probably eating organ meats, though, like liver, which does have a little vitamin C in it, and it has other micronutrients like folate. But another explanation for why these people were OK is that maybe if you don't eat any carbs at all, your body can adjust in these really interesting ways.

• 13:33Wendy Zukerman?

  Like how?

• 13:34Speaker 09

  So, for example, with folate, even if you are a carnivore dieter who's like, ew, I don't want to eat liver, what we have seen is that people on really low carb diets, their gut bugs start pumping out more folate. So in some ways, the body can kind of adjust in certain circumstances.

• 13:50Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, that's cool. So you think people on the carnivore diet, maybe they won't get these deficiencies?

• 13:57Speaker 09

  Um, well, I mean, I realize the evidence I presented is maybe not the most convincing. It's a 100-year-old study of two people. It does tell us something, and another thing to consider is that we know for thousands of years, there have been people living in high latitude places where not much grows, eating an animal-based diet without glaring deficiencies.

• 14:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 14:21Speaker 09

  On the other hand, people eating these traditional diets would also have eaten non-meat stuff when they could. They would eat berries, other plants, they would eat kelp.

• 14:29Wendy Zukerman?

  Right. No one was [BLEEP] on them on Instagram for eating some berries.

• 14:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think so. I think if everyone who went on the carnivore diet got scurvy, it would not be getting more and more popular. We wouldn't be hearing about it as much. So I think it's possible to live on a meat-only diet and avoid glaring deficiencies. But Karen says, like, look, we don't really know what's going on here. If you want to do this, please take a multivitamin.

• 14:55Wendy Zukerman?

  I really don't want to say, well, let's see if you manifested deficiency, and then we can patch it up with some, you know, vitamin C.

• 15:02Speaker 09

  You don't want to be like, well, if your gums start to bleed in a few weeks, come back.

• 15:06Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, give me a call. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 15:09Speaker 09

  The other thing that seems obviously missing here is fiber, and you'd expect people eating no fiber would be constipated. But Stephenson and Anderson said that their bowel movements were fine. In fact, the scientists actually collected their stool and said, not only were they fine, they were great.

• 15:27Wendy Zukerman?

  It was like it had no odor and...

• 15:31Speaker 09

  That's kind of funny because like there's that expression like, oh, he thinks his shit don't stink. I'm like, wow, their shit really don't stink.

• 15:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Totally.

• 15:39Speaker 09

  The paper does say that their poops were actually smaller than average, which does make sense if there's no fiber to bulk it up.

• 15:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes, that's right. You start veering towards the little kangaroo poos.

• 15:52Wendy Zukerman?

  But it's not just about poop because fiber is very important for a bunch of other things. It can lower your risk of heart disease, lower your risk of colorectal cancer. I mean, what...

• 16:03Speaker 09

  Well, that, this all brings me to my next question, which is, okay, maybe these people are okay, surprisingly okay in the short term, a year, whatever.

• 16:10Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 09

  But what about long term? What are the long term risks?

• 16:14Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 16:15Speaker 09

  So let's start with heart disease.

• 16:17Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, right.

• 16:19Speaker 09

  I think this is like a really visceral fear people have of this kind of diet of eating so much meat because when you're eating a lot of meat, you're probably eating a lot of saturated fat and cholesterol. And a lot of us just have this like bleh feeling about that, like, ooh, so much grease building up in your body.

• 16:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Mmm.

• 16:36Speaker 09

  Uh, I think that's why this particular case report went viral recently.

• 16:40Speaker 11

  Man on a carnivore diet starts oozing cholesterol from his skin.

• 16:44Speaker 05

  Can we please just talk about how unhinged it is that people on the carnivore diet are eating so much fat and cholesterol that it is leading to a visible buildup of fatty deposits under the skin?

• 16:55Speaker 09

  Yeah, this guy had been on the carnivore diet for eight months. He showed up to the doctor because he noticed something interesting. I'll show you some pictures, Wendy.

• 17:03Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, was he turning yellow? Like an egg yolk? Because an egg yolk's full of cholesterol, right?

• 17:09Speaker 09

  Pretty much, yeah. Look, scroll down, look at the pictures of his hands.

• 17:14Speaker 06

  Ah, oh wow.

• 17:18Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. It's like if you imagine the sort of creases on your palm, and all those creases are basically the color of an egg yolk. Ooh.

• 17:31Speaker 09

  It wasn't actually oozing out of his skin. It was just built up under it.

• 17:33Speaker 06

  Okay. That's fine then.

• 17:36Speaker 09

  Well, this got reported as like, look at what the carnivore diet will do to you. But I think that's unfair. In addition to the not oozing, it was also probably a genetic condition this guy had, where his body couldn't clear out cholesterol very efficiently. So this is kind of, we expect this to be rare. This is not going to happen to most people on the carnivore diet.

• 17:59Speaker 06

  Okay, so all right, well, that's good news. But will they eventually get heart disease?

• 18:04Speaker 09

  Right, that's a more reasonable thing to worry about. And, and the reason that the idea is out there is because a lot of us have heard that when you eat a lot of saturated fat, cholesterol, it'll clog your arteries and that will kill you. Now, these days, we know that that old story is not quite true. It's actually a lot more nuanced than that.

• 18:22Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 18:23Speaker 09

  But some people on the carnivore diet will take this a step further. And they'll say, not only will it not increase your risk of heart disease, it should actually protect you from getting heart disease.

• 18:33Speaker 06

  Oh, how, how?

• 18:37Speaker 09

  Well, they say that this diet is really good for your blood sugar. And so you're not going to end up getting diabetes, type 2 diabetes. And therefore, you're not going to get heart disease, which comes with type 2 diabetes.

• 18:48Speaker 06

  Is that true? Does the carnivore diet protect you from diabetes and getting heart attacks?

• 18:57Speaker 09

  Well, okay, it's true that diabetes increases your risk of heart disease. It actually doubles that risk, according to the CDC.

• 19:05Speaker 09

  But as far as, does the carnivore diet have a protective effect on your diabetes risk? The thinking here comes from the fact that this is a low carb diet, right? I mean, it's actually a zero carb diet. So as I mentioned, we don't have much in terms of studies on the carnivore diet specifically. But we can look at studies of other low carb diets to get some clues here. And those studies do find that cutting out carbs can improve people's insulin sensitivity and have even been shown to reverse diabetes in people who already have it.

• 19:38Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 19:40Wendy Zukerman?

  That's cool. But that's just part of what this diet is about, right? You cut out the carbs. But what about eating all that meat? I mean, what happens to your heart disease risk when you eat all that meat?

• 19:58Speaker 09

  Well, that's the thing. When researchers have compared people on a low carb diet who eat a lot of meat versus people on a low carb diet who eat a lot of plants, guess who does better?

• 20:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Plant eaters.

• 20:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, the plant, the plant eaters.

• 20:11Wendy Zukerman?

  OK.

• 20:12Speaker 09

  They do better.

• 20:16Speaker 09

  So that led a group of heart health nerds who looked at that study and they put a lot of other evidence together. They concluded that it's OK for people to follow low carb diets for their hearts. But if they do, their doctors should, quote, "encourage the consumption of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes, and whole grains."

• 20:36Wendy Zukerman?

  Repartined, repartined. Do you know how much they're gonna [BLEEP] on you on that carnivore diet subreddit? If you stop increasing your consumption of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes, and whole grains?

• 20:50Speaker 09

  Maybe they'll ease off. I have some good news here for the carnivores. It's about cancer. So when I looked at the link between red meat and cancer, that's squishier than I expected it to be. The best evidence that meat is linked to cancer is for processed meats.

• 21:09Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:09Speaker 09

  To these influencers' credit, they seem to be promoting eating freshly prepared meat. And that is probably less risky when it comes to cancer.

• 21:20Wendy Zukerman?

  OK, so here's where we're at. These risks that people are concerned about with the diet around vitamin deficiency and heart disease and cancer, it's not as if these risks are total garbage and this diet is 100% safe. There still could be risks here. We're just not entirely sure. Which means that the benefits... It's all about how good the benefits are.

• 21:48Speaker 09

  Yeah, to outweigh these unknowns.

• 21:50Wendy Zukerman?

  It's potent... Exactly. So after the break, the benefits.

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• 23:40Wendy Zukerman?

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• 25:21Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Rose Rimla. People say they feel amazing on this diet. Tell me about it. I want to hear the good stuff.

• 25:31Speaker 09

  Yeah, I want to start with people who say this diet has healed their guts. Because some people who decide to do this diet are doing it because they're in really bad shape, like in terms of their GI stuff.

• 25:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 25:43Speaker 09

  I talked about this with Adrian Sotomota. He is a doctor and a researcher at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico City. He sees a lot of patients with inflammatory bowel disease. That is a group of conditions that includes Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. And it's just, it's just awful.

• 26:04Speaker 11

  It's among the most, you know, incapacitating diseases. Makes everything harder. It makes going to work harder. Makes, of course, eating harder. Even mild forms of IBD are still, you know.

• 26:21Speaker 09

  Really suck?

• 26:21Speaker 11

  No joke. Not a walk in the park.

• 26:26Speaker 09

  People's guts are inflamed in these conditions, or they get ulcers on their intestinal walls. And it can cause a lot of pain, cramping, bloating, diarrhea. Adrian's heard about people who get diarrhea 12 times a day, often with blood in it. And sometimes people get anemic and they need blood transfusions.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh.

• 26:46Speaker 09

  I know. And while there are medicines for it, they don't always work for everybody. Adrian says IBD is-

• 26:55Speaker 11

  Stubbornly persistent.

• 26:58Speaker 09

  But then Adrian started hearing about people going on the carnivore diet for their IBD.

• 27:03Speaker 11

  The first thing I felt was curiosity. The second thing I thought was, I mean, of course, it did work.

• 27:11Speaker 09

  So he and a colleague started collecting stories from these people. And they ended up with 10 case reports from people whose IBD had been stubbornly persistent. And?

• 27:23Speaker 11

  Many of them used, still use the term life-changing, which is something people don't throw away, you know, easily.

• 27:35Speaker 09

  Besides life-changing, another patient called it a miracle.

• 27:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Miracle. Wow. So how is this diet helping them?

• 27:41Speaker 09

  Well, one explanation that I heard again and again online about why this diet might be so good for you is basically because plants are toxic.

• 27:52Speaker 15

  Plants are loaded with things that are designed to hurt us.

• 27:55Speaker 16

  Plants do not want to be eaten. They're going to defend their leaves, their stems, their roots, and their seeds. Lectins, phytic acid, oxalates.

• 28:03Speaker 17

  When you put that oxalate, those vegetables, into your body, your body then recognizes it as something that it needs to fight against.

• 28:11Speaker 09

  The thinking here is that plants make chemicals to defend themselves against diseases or getting eaten by bugs. They'll use stuff like tannins, oxalates, et cetera, and that those chemicals are bad for us. And frankly, Wendy, this is the most irritating part of the whole carnivore diet spiel that I see online. Because I think it irritates me because it's like plants are being framed for a crime that they didn't commit.

• 28:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, so what's happening here?

• 28:41Speaker 09

  I mean, as always, these influencers are taking little grains of truth and blowing them up. So like, yes, there is some stuff that can be toxic in plant foods. Including some stuff that some might call anti-nutrients in plants, that they can interfere with us absorbing certain nutrients. But most of these things either break down when they're cooked, or they're there in very small doses, or they just don't matter that much as long as we're eating a generally healthy, varied diet.

• 29:09Speaker 06

  That, I mean, that makes sense, right? Like spinach, carrots, then they're not toxic. They're not toxic, right?

• 29:16Speaker 09

  No, they're not toxic. Yeah. I mean, just throw the carnivores a bone. Maybe some people are uniquely sensitive to these chemicals. And like going back to our IBD people we just heard about. Maybe their guts were really reactive to stuff that's in plant foods. But that doesn't mean that everybody should throw out our vegetables and like call them the enemy. Because, I mean, I also found a case series where people with IBD switched to a vegan diet. Literally the opposite, all plants, and their IBD cleared up too.

• 29:49Speaker 06

  Oh, okay. Despite all the tannins and oxalates and less, less than that they were eating.

• 29:58Speaker 09

  Right.

• 29:58Speaker 06

  What's, what's the thinking here? That these bowel conditions are caused by an array of different things potentially? And if, if you personally, maybe you are a little sensitive to some of the stuff in vegetables, and then cutting them out of your diet actually might help. But on the other hand, you might be someone who's sensitive to the stuff in meat, and then a vegan diet is going to help you out. Is that the idea? So there's no miracle IBD diet?

• 30:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, there's probably no one IBD diet to heal them all. Although the typical Western diet full of ultra-processed foods is best avoided. But beyond that, we really don't know. Actually, one review paper I found said that it basically comes down to, if it hurts, don't eat it.

• 30:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay. All right, but I guess if you are really suffering and have tried a bunch of things, heck, maybe give it a go, I guess. Um, with the risks that we talked about at the beginning of the show in mind.

• 31:00Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, if I, if I was shitting blood every day, yes, I would try this. If, and everything else hadn't worked, sure.

• 31:05Wendy Zukerman?

  All right, so from not shitting blood to other benefits.

• 31:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, people talk about stuff like the carnivore diet curing arthritis, psoriasis, a lot of autoimmune stuff, actually. And people will also say it helps them with brain fog, and that could also be an autoimmune issue.

• 31:23Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 31:24Speaker 09

  And maybe, like I said, some people are uniquely sensitive to something in various plants, and this diet functions basically as an elimination diet for these issues. But there may be another explanation. The carnivore diet is also a ketogenic diet. You know, on a ketogenic diet, you might have a steak and a side of broccoli. On this diet, you're just having the steak. Either way, you're gonna wind up in ketosis.

• 31:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. Which is where your, your brain and your body starts using this chemical called ketones for energy, rather than using sugars, which is what it mostly runs on.

• 32:02Speaker 09

  And there is some evidence that for some people, going into ketosis tamps down their inflammation. Uh, it might have to do with one of the ketones that your body makes, BHB. It's thought to be an anti-inflammatory agent. So I don't think there's anything special about the bucket loads of meat for people who are seeing a benefit with this diet. I think it's, could be that they're just in ketosis, which for some people, they feel really good in ketosis.

• 32:34Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, and so that's very helpful news that if you are going all the way on the carnivore diet, you can have some vegetables and probably still stay in ketosis.

• 32:44Speaker 09

  Yeah, experts told me that if ketosis is the thing that's making you feel good, you don't have to go on such a restrictive diet to get there. Bottom line, you don't have to be this hardcore.

• 32:54Wendy Zukerman?

  The whole hog.

• 32:56Speaker 09

  Right, you don't have to go whole hog. Also, Wendy, a lot of people lose weight on this diet, and that could be why they feel better, because, you know, weight loss can sometimes help with chronic diseases.

• 33:06Wendy Zukerman?

  That makes sense. And then as far as why you might lose weight on this diet.

• 33:13Speaker 06

  You know what? Let me guess, Rose. If you are restricting what you eat in such an extreme way that not only are you not eating muffins and cakes, but you've cut so many things out of your diet. Chances are you will lose weight because you're eating less calories. Is that right?

• 33:35Speaker 09

  That's what I would expect. That's what experts told me. There's no studies of weight loss on people on the carnivore diet. We could look at studies of people on the keto diet if we want. That's probably the closest we can get. And there's a meta-analysis that found that on the keto diet, people lost on average about 11 pounds over at least a year. But um, yeah, Wendy, I think it's as simple as that.

• 34:00Speaker 06

  So we've talked about people with specific conditions giving this a go. But I guess for the rest of us who are just trying to live our best, healthiest lives. Do you think the carnivore diet is a good idea?

• 34:15Speaker 09

  No, I think it is a very stupid idea.

• 34:18Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 34:19Speaker 09

  That's because studies have shown over and over again, thousands and thousands of people, that eating plants is good for you. Uh, my favorite of these studies is the Seventh Day Adventist studies. They followed people who were either vegan or vegetarian or vegetarian, except they ate a little fish, or they were meat eaters. And it turned out that everyone who avoided meat, even if they ate a little fish or a little dairy, they had better health and they lived longer than the meat eaters. So the more veg, the better, essentially.

• 34:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, and those studies are huge, right?

• 34:52Speaker 09

  Yeah, this one, um, this one in particular was like 70,000 people.

• 34:57Speaker 06

  And we compare that to two art explorers who just didn't get scurvy, you know?

• 35:03Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 06

  All right, not to mention the environmental issues around eating a lot of meat, right?

• 35:10Speaker 09

  Yes, and in, and some people in this space, they argue against this. They say, eating meat isn't actually that bad for the environment. That's a myth. Or they'll say like, it's okay as long as you eat grass-fed meat or you get meat that's farmed via regenerative agriculture. We looked into this and you know, Wendy, um, I just want to pull something out of the science versus storage closet that we haven't used in a while. It's, it's a little dusty. Um, hopefully it, it still works.

• 35:42Speaker 09

  No, that's not true. Meat eating is bad for the environment, full stop. Meat and dairy account for at least 12% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Wow. Grass-fed beef, this surprised me. It might actually be worse for emissions than feedlot-raised beef. And that's basically because grass is a less efficient feed. And then when it comes to regenerative agriculture, it's not anywhere near ready to offset the emissions caused by feeding and raising livestock.

• 36:15Wendy Zukerman?

  All right. There you go. The risks to the environment are known. And for that alone, for me, anyway. You got that sound effect again. I'm gonna give the carnivore diet A.

• 36:31Wendy Zukerman?

  Thanks, Rose.

• 36:31Speaker 09

  Thanks, Wendy.

• 36:33Wendy Zukerman?

  How many citations are in this week's episode?

• 36:36Speaker 09

  This week, there are 100 citations.

• 36:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh. And if people want to see these citations read more about meat, meat, meat, meat, where should they go?

• 36:46Speaker 09

  They can check the link to the transcript and they'll find that in our show notes.

• 36:50Wendy Zukerman?

  Excellent. All right. I'm hungry. Let's eat, Rose. Bye.

• 36:54Speaker 09

  Okay, bye.

• 37:03Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from me, Wendy Zukerman, Akety Foster-Keeys, Michelle Dang, and Merrill Horne. We're edited by Bligh Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Emma Munger, So Wiley, Peter Leonard, Bumi Hidaka, and Bobby Lord. A special thanks to the researchers we reached out to, including Dr. Lawrence David, Dr. Andrea Koricik, and others. Science vs. is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And wherever you do listen to us, give us a five-star review if you like what we're doing. It helps others find the show. But if you are listening on Spotify, then to follow us,

• 37:44Wendy Zukerman?

  tap the bell icon so you get notifications when new episodes come out. I am Wendy Zukerman, and I'll back you next time.

• 38:04Speaker 12

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