Carnivore Diet Dietitian Review

Have you heard or seen anything about the carnivore diet lately? It's been making waves in the health and wellness world, but is it really all it's cracked up to be?

Whether you're considering the carnivore diet or simply curious about its popularity, this episode offers a balanced and informative perspective. Discover the truth behind the claims, learn about the potential long-term consequences, and gain insights from me, a registered dietitian.

Tune in to hear my review of the carnivore diet and make an informed decision about your health and nutrition. 

Resources Mentioned:

Article

Carnivore Cringe Instagram

TOPICS COVERED 👇 
Carnivore Diet Overview (03:00)
Comparison to Keto & Paleo Diet (06:11)
Importance of Nutrition Credentials (11:57)
Reasons for Feeling Better on Carnivore (15:22)
Long-Term Risks of Carnivore Diet (21:28)
Impact of LDL Cholesterol (22:36)
Research Studies on Fat Intake (25:03)
My Opinion on the Carnivore Diet (27:45)

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Transcript

Michelle 00:00:00  We're back with another dietitian review on nourished and free the podcast if you're new here. My name is Michelle Yates, a registered dietitian with my master's in health psychology, and this is the show devoted to helping you create a nourishing and balanced relationship with food while being free from food, stress and anxiety, disordered eating, and misinformation. I often do dietician reviews of popular diets and or diet trends on the show, so that we can discuss their validity, as well as any risks they pose. I feel like this is important if our ultimate goal is to be nourished and free. However you personally interpret that phrase, because in a lot of cases, these diets do the opposite. They make it harder for us to be nourished and free. So today we're tackling the carnivore diet. And before we dig in, I want to apologize for the last few episodes. I feel like the audio quality hasn't been great, and I noticed my Spotify ratings have gone down. So I'm like, well, I don't I don't blame people.

Michelle 00:00:58  Rating the show if it's based on the audio quality, because I get it. So anyway, I did some troubleshooting and I'm in a different environment. I think hopefully this episode is going to sound a lot better. speaking of ratings, if you haven't left a rating yet, please do so on either Apple Podcast or Spotify or both and show some love for this show. And then if you love this episode or you love the show, be sure you share it with a friend. So in the wake of the keto craze, we now have the Carnivore Colts emerging, and I put off addressing this diet trend for a while because it's so preposterous that I felt like it was unnecessary to even discuss it. But the problem is that it continues to bleed into my social media feed. And these zealous advocates continue to spread misinformation. And what I see is this diet being incredibly, incredibly harmful and taking years off of people's lives. I also just see a lot of confusion around it, because people do say that they feel better when they follow it.

Michelle 00:02:03  So I want to tease out why. That is why some people do feel better when it even is indicated, and also what the long term risks and effects of this diet can be, because you're bound to come across this at some point in your life, especially if you have people in your life that are following it. Now, I'm not recommending that you go and tell people to stop doing this diet if they're really passionate about it, because most people don't want to be told that they're doing something wrong if they didn't ask. But it is so easy when you see other people following a certain style of eating to feel like you should do it too and feel like you're you're missing out on something. So if anything, I hope that this podcast will just help to arm you in a way with education and knowledge so that you can kind of put the blinders on and feel confident about doing that. So if you're new to the carnivore diet and wondering what it is, or maybe you're familiar with it, but you just need to know the details.

Michelle 00:03:00  Basically, it's a meat only diet, which shouldn't be a surprise because if we remember from school, when you're learning about different animals, you know there's certain animals that are carnivores where they eat only meat. There's animals that are herbivores, they eat only plants, and then there's omnivores where they eat both. And those terms apply here. When it comes to the carnivore diet, apparently there are humans that are carnivores now, even though we've traditionally been omnivores. And then, of course, there's people that are herbivores that choose to have a vegan lifestyle. But yeah, with carnivore, this is this is somewhat new. So I'll talk about like kind of how it started, where it came from. But first I want to talk about what it really consists of, which is meat. Of course I already said that. But specifically meats like beef, pork, poultry and game. You can also have eggs on the carnivore diet and seafood such as fish and shellfish. Although some people don't have fish on the carnivore diet.

Michelle 00:03:58  It just depends on who you're talking to, I guess. And then dairy products that are low in lactose like butter, lard, hard cheeses and maybe depending on the person, cream or heavy cream are allowed as well. And then water and bone broth are the only drinks that are allowed. So that might sound a lot, but it's not at all because the do not eat list of of carnivore foods is everything else. Any grains, any vegetables, any fruits, nuts and seeds and legumes. Anything that's plant derived at all, including coffee, tea, any other beverage besides water and bone broth, essentially. And then all the other dairy products besides the butter and the lard and the hard cheeses and and maybe cream, all the other ones are off limits, like yogurt and milk and, cottage cheese, stuff like that. And then, of course, processed foods are off limits. So this is cutting down the selection of food. Immensely. I mean, that's going from like 100% of food being your options unless you have like allergies or whatever.

Michelle 00:05:08  But for the sake of argument, down to 10%, like we are vastly restricting our diet. So interestingly, with the carnivore diet, it seems to be from as far as I can tell, it seems to be just like that's the main focus. We're just focusing on meats and eating and eating meat. There's not much focus on any other rules. Sometimes with other diets there will be like additional rules that are a big part of it, like a protocol or whatever. But with this particular diet, it's more just about like foods that are allowed, foods that are not allowed. That's it. I have seen that condiments are not allowed unless we're talking salt and pepper. So that's another thing. But yes, I think any rules that are a part of this diet are going to depend on probably who you're talking to But yeah, the biggest thing is just what you can and can't eat. So some people confuse this with the keto diet, which is understandable because people who are following a carnivore diet are certainly going to end up in a state of ketosis, which they may find desirable for whatever reason.

Michelle 00:06:11  But it's not the same thing as the keto diet, because the keto diet does allow a small amount of carbohydrates, whereas the carnivore diet is trying to completely omit them. And in terms of keto, you can usually go up to about 50g or so. It kind of depends on, you know, if you're testing your ketones regularly or trying to figure out what's your specific threshold, but it's usually about 50g or less. Whereas the carnivore diet, like I said, is more about completely eliminating them. And the carnivore diet is, again, not allowing you to have plants, which if you're following a keto diet, you can in the sense of having certain vegetables, nuts, seeds, avocados, all these things are obviously derived from plants. And then the paleo diet is also another one that gets confused with the carnivore diet, I guess compared to the carnivore diet, because they both claim to be how our ancestors ate. And this is a really like popular thing that people like to say, like, oh, well, of course it's the right diet for us because this is how our ancestors ate.

Michelle 00:07:16  Which is just a preposterous argument to me, because we have evolved and advanced so much at this point in time. It's 21st century like our our society is completely different. Our food systems are completely different. The way that our body processes food has adapted to that. And so it's just a terrible argument, but it sounds attractive for us to justify a way of eating because it's quote unquote, how our ancestors ate. So that's something that the paleo diet says is like, we're going to eat this way because it's how our ancestors date. But the paleo diet allows any whole foods, including plant derived ones like fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, and it also allows the use of oils. Carnivore diet does not allow anything but meat. Doesn't allow oils. Only allows low lactose dairy products. If you're going to have anything besides the meat. So they are different. So where did this come from? Why is it so popular right now? The carnivore diet was popularized by a few people, namely Paul Saladino, who's a psychiatrist and apparently certified functional medicine provider, which I need to do an episode on this.

Michelle 00:08:32  But if you have heard me talk about functional medicine, you know that that's kind of a red flag right off the bat. It's not that functional medicine should always be discounted, but functional medicine providers are notorious for pseudoscience, quackery, selling snake oils and unnecessary supplements So the fact that he's a functional medicine provider is a red flag right off the bat. And that's not even getting into the things that he says. But anyway, he he is a big driver behind the carnivore diet. And he published The Carnivore Code, a book back in 2020, which which made the it really put the carnivore diet on the map. I mean, he's very active on social media. He's got tons of videos demonizing different things. And the hilarious part about this is that he is so popular and well known for the carnivore diet, but he stopped doing it because he started to have adverse health consequences that he didn't like and that he was worried about. So he started adding in fruits and honey again into his diet. He's still very restrictive.

Michelle 00:09:43  He's still insane when it comes to nutrition. But even like the guy who really popularized this wrote a whole book about it. Decided? You know what? This is not doing anything good for my health. So I need to come away from being strict carnivore, which is just like, I feel like I can just end the podcast there, you know? But I won't because there's other people who have popularized it too. One of them is Anthony Chaffee or Chaffee, I'm not sure, but he says he's an American MD. The problem is that there's no mention of him actually being a medical doctor. If you look up like records, because you can look up like, you know, medical licenses and stuff like that. There's no mention of him being a doctor in American databases. So that's interesting. His credentials are very questionable. He does have a bachelor's. in I'm trying to remember what it was. I'm not something medical oriented. from somewhere in Ireland. But other than that, we are pretty confused as a collective people on what this guy's credentials.

Michelle 00:10:51  truly are, because you should be able to look it up and find it, but you can't. And then so anyway, I bring that up because it's like, okay, do we do we really trust this guy in terms of anything that he says? If we can't trust that his credentials are real? And then there's another guy whose name is Sean Baker, who was an orthopedic doctor who actually had his license revoked in 2017 and then reinstated in 2019 with restrictions and required supervision. He's another one that popularized the carnivore diet. And so anyway, I bring this up because you'll notice that all three of these guys who have popularized the diet don't have a PhD in nutrition. They're not dietitians, and they have a questionable track record. The reason I bring this up is because it's important to remember a medical doctor is very specialized in human anatomy, the human body, diseases, pharmaceuticals. They are not specialized in nutrition. They get about one class in their whole education about nutrition. I'm not saying this to rag on doctors.

Michelle 00:11:57  I think they are so important, and I absolutely love when I get to collaborate with the doctor. I love the doctors that I have that helped me. I have such a admiration and respect for doctors because they do so much. They go through so much. I'm merely pointing out the fact that just because somebody is a doctor or an MD does not mean that they are qualified to talk about the topic of nutrition. But we see this happen a lot. It's this perceived credibility, the white coat syndrome. We think that because they're a doctor, they know everything. So we believe them when they say things like the carnivore diet is the way to go or oatmeal is killing you, which is something that Paul Saladino says or whatever it is. It's this perceived credibility that can be really dangerous. And some of these doctors really capitalize on that, especially if they have things to sell, like supplements and all of that. So it's a shame, because I know that there's a lot of doctors who don't do that, and they recognize their limitations and they recognize that they don't know everything.

Michelle 00:13:03  And it's a shame that, like, there's people like this who are then kind of dirtying up the water that they swim in because they're misusing their credentials. And you can say that about any profession, and they're certainly dietitians that that muddle the waters of my profession, too. So anyway, I want to remind you two that dietitians are not automatically PhDs in nutrition, though a lot of them do go on to get their PhDs. It's different, though, in the sense that like, okay, so there's somebody could go on and get their PhD in nutrition, but not be a dietitian yet because they got their PhD in nutrition. They are incredibly knowledgeable on the topic. I have a friend, Adriana Chavez, who is an awesome follow if you don't follow him on Instagram and he's a PhD in nutrition. He's not a dietitian, though. Doesn't matter to me. He's so knowledgeable. He knows exactly what he's talking about when it comes to nutrition. Then there's dietitians who may or may not have their PhDs in nutrition, but there's still a more reliable source for nutrition information because their entire education is focused on the topic of nutrition and at this point in time, are required to get up to a master's degree of education.

Michelle 00:14:14  So that's much different than a medical doctor only getting one class. So anyway, a little bit of a tangent, but I want to explain, I feel like it's important to explain that because we are so easily fooled by people waving credentials around and and believe what they say, when maybe they're not even an expert on that topic to begin with. So let's talk about why some people do feel better on the carnivore diet, because if you look up these people who promote it and follow it. They're going to tell you, I feel so much better on this. Why is that? Why can somebody feel so much better only eating meat? And isn't that so compelling to hear somebody say that they do, right. It makes you want to do it yourself. So first of all, one of the things that is really important to note here is that you're eliminating so many foods out of your diet. When you follow a carnivore diet, some of those foods might have been making you feel crappy for multiple reasons.

Michelle 00:15:22  It could be because you were allergic to them or intolerant to them. It could be because maybe they were high in FODMAPs or fibers that were difficult for you to diet. Well, I mean, fiber is difficult for everybody to digest. That's kind of the point. But for some people, that makes them feel crummy and all of that you could be unaware of, you could be unaware that gluten is actually something that doesn't make you feel good, or the dairy doesn't make you feel good, or that a certain Fodmap doesn't make you feel good. But when you're taking away so many foods, you're naturally going to be taking away something that could have potentially been making you feel crummy. And so then we think, oh, the carnivore diet is superior because I feel great when really it's just because you eliminated one thing and that was the only thing you needed to eliminate. You didn't need to eliminate 90% of the foods you were eating. So that's that's a big reason. A lot of times people talk about how the carnivore diet healed their autoimmune disease or their gut.

Michelle 00:16:19  They had gut issues before. And this is a big telltale sign that, like, hey, you probably did have issues digesting certain things and it made you feel a certain type of way that was unpleasant. It's not that the carnivore diet is magical, it's just that you never identified what that one thing was. But we did naturally take it out because you eliminated 90% of the foods that you eat. So that's one reason that people feel so much better is because they're just naturally eliminating things that they're potentially intolerant to or allergic to, or that they had a hard time digesting. Another thing, too, is that when there's basically zero carbohydrates in your diet, you're going to lose a lot of water weight initially. This is why I like people who do crash diets or super low calorie or low carb diets lose weight really quickly, and it's very motivating when you see that on this scale, it's like, oh my gosh, I'm crushing it. Like, absolutely, I feel great. I'm going to keep doing this.

Michelle 00:17:14  But really, you're just losing water weight when you're using up all of the carbohydrate stores in your body. there's going to be water that's excreted along with that. So when people lose all this weight, when they first start the carnivore diet, that's very motivating. They feel great. They're super encouraged. So yes, of course they're going to be very excited, especially if that was a goal of theirs. Doesn't mean that it was a better thing for them or that that was like true weight or body fat. It's just water weight because you're not having any carbohydrates. And then circling back to the topic of elimination. Because the carnivore diet is so strict and it doesn't allow processed foods, having less of those things can naturally make you feel better, whether you went carnivore or not. Let's say that somebody has a diet that's very high in ultra processed foods, fried foods, high sugary foods, whatever, and then they take them out of their diet. But they never went carnivore necessarily. They just changed the quality of their diet.

Michelle 00:18:16  They're going to feel better. You didn't need to go carnivore for that. But because people are jumping on the carnivore train and then naturally coming away from those ultra processed foods, they might have this perceived benefit of feeling so much better when really it's just because they aren't eating those foods anymore that generally don't make us feel so good. And then, of course, like I said, they might have naturally eliminated something that even though it's a generally considered healthy food for them, it doesn't make them feel good. So the last thing I'll mention, two of why people might potentially feel better on this diet is because it does induce a state of ketosis, which is only preferred in a very small number of circumstances. But some people do enjoy the way that it makes them feel. When you're not relying on carbohydrates as your energy source, it can help to stabilize your mood a bit. Stabilize your well because there's no glucose rise and fall throughout the day, it can help with energy levels. But that doesn't mean that ketosis is optimal or ideal for your health.

Michelle 00:19:18  It's just that sometimes people like the way that it feels for them, and then it could be a combination of all these things. People might be feeling better because all of those things are coming into play. So yes, even though it is a very unwise diet to follow, it's very convincing for people to get roped into it because of first of all, people with credentials claiming that it's very healthy and making these wild claims that are very like believable because they make them sound really believable. And then also, it's easy to get just stuck in the carnivore world, because if you felt better initially following it, then you always have that on your mind, right? Of like, well, I feel a lot different or I feel a lot better on the carnivore diet, even though it's not necessarily the carnivore diet that's making you feel better. It's all of these other little things that could be at play. Now, on the topic of feeling better, there's a lot of people who do not feel better following this diet.

Michelle 00:20:23  But you never see this on social media, because if you're looking at the profiles of, like, Paul Saladino or any carnivore coach, they delete comments that are people saying they're having trouble with the carnivore diet or they don't feel good on the carnivore diet. So what you need to do is you need to get away from those people's accounts and look at some other ones to see how people are actually feeling. A really great account actually to follow if you're curious about the side effects people have from this, that isn't great. Is this account on Instagram called Carnivore Cringe? Basically, it's like, I don't know how this thing got started, but it's it's actually really alarming when you look through the account, it's just screenshots of people who are updating about their journey on the carnivore diet, whether it's something they posted on Facebook or on Reddit or on Instagram, wherever it is, and it's talking about the side effects that they're having in their problems that they're having and the health concerns that they're having. And so there are so many people that are having problems as a result of this diet.

Michelle 00:21:28  We just don't see it when you're only looking at people who are promoting the diet, because of course, they don't want something that they're promoting to be jeopardized, especially if they have a supplement on the line and a lot of them do, because the carnivore diets so restrictive that you need to supplement with other things to make up for the nutrients you're not getting. So what about the long term side effects? In the short term, there are some people who feel really great. There's other people who don't feel great. And the long term, it doesn't matter if you feel really great in the short term, because saturated fat in high intakes is known to be harmful for our health. There's so much mental gymnastics being done by people who promote the carnivore diet to try and justify it, but it's just not working because they get to a point where they're just making stuff up. Saturated fat and high intakes is harmful for our health because it increases the amount of LDL that we have floating around our system. LDL is your bad cholesterol, which is notorious for being the dangerous one when it comes to heart disease.

Michelle 00:22:36  You don't want your LDL to get high because that is one of the most correlated biomarkers that we have to having cardiovascular issues. One thing that helps with circulating LDL or bad cholesterol is fiber. But where is the fiber on a carnivore diet? It's nowhere to be found. We're only eating meat. There's no plants. There's no grains. That's where fiber comes from. So yeah, we're just accumulating these sources of LDL over time that's going to cause issues. There's going to be problems back to this. Like, well, I feel great on the carnivore diet. The thing is that you can't feel plaque buildup in your arteries and you can't feel cancer cells developing. Which meat is associated with an increased risk for cancer? Unless you eat fruits and vegetables, then it helps mitigate that risk. But we're not doing that here, right? So it's just Increasing our risks exponentially for things that you can't feel. So when people say they feel great on the carnivore diet, it's irrelevant. The risks that we see with high amounts of saturated fat intake aren't something that you would be able to feel interestingly, too, with these people that are avoiding carbohydrates like it's the plague.

Michelle 00:24:01  High amounts of saturated fat can actually increase insulin resistance and raise your hemoglobin A1, c inducing type two diabetes. So even though they're avoiding carbs like they're the devil, it's still going to induce type two diabetes in some cases. There's a few different sources that I'm going to put in the article associated with this because I like to I like to write everything out and give you all the sources and stuff that we can go look up the evidence on your own if you like. So I'll put that in my article. Basically there's there's three different studies that I'll be highlighting. There's one that followed people that had a low fat diet. about 8% of their diet or calories were coming from fat. And then a high fat diet, about 55% of their calories from fat. And almost half of that was was saturated. They control the amount of calories because they wanted to make sure that the number of calories being taken in was not going to affect the results, especially if someone like lost weight or something like that, or as a result of lower calorie.

Michelle 00:25:03  So they controlled that. And what they found was that glucose disposal decreased on the high fat diet, and they concluded that high fat diets may contribute to the development of type two diabetes. There's another one that overfed people buy a thousand calories a day, and they over, they overfed them with either a thousand calories of saturated fat or unsaturated fat or simple sugars for three weeks. And they found that the saturated fat group, the people who consumed a thousand more calories a day that was coming from saturated fat. Had an increase in liver fat by 55%, which was the highest of any of the groups. The unsaturated fat had an increase of liver fats by 15% and the simple sugars by 33%. So the saturated fat group, the people who were having an excess amount of calories just from saturated fat, increase the amount of liver fat by 22% more than the sugar group, which is what these carnivores are avoiding, right? Like having straight sugar fattened up their liver less than having saturated fat. So again, we see that saturated fat is inducing insulin resistance because liver fat is associated with that.

Michelle 00:26:24  The last study is a study that tested polyunsaturated fats versus saturated fats on metabolic markers. Again, calories were controlled, and they found that saturated fat trended towards increased liver fat. Again polyunsaturated fatty decrease liver fat. And also they noticed that the insulin was higher. It increased in the higher saturated fat group and the insulin decreased in the polyunsaturated fat group. So again we're seeing saturated fat intake is increasing insulin which can induce insulin resistance or even diabetes. So there you go. All in all to wrap this up carnivore diet. Not it. It's posing a huge risk to our cardiovascular health. It can induce insulin resistance, even diabetes. And it's increasing our risk for cancers, which would be mitigated if we had fiber in our diet, plant foods and our diet. But of course, the carnivore diet does not allow for those. The carnivore diet is popularized by people who have questionable credentials at best, and who have questionable moral values as well, and ethics and the people who follow it. Ultimately, in the end, they're not feeling better because they're following a carnivore diet.

Michelle 00:27:45  They're feeling better because they cut out things that were probably causing them issues which they only needed to cut that out to feel better. Not all the other foods that they did. The only time this is really warranted is when you are trying to figure out, what is it that's making me feel so crummy? It might make sense to go on a carnivore style diet for a short period of time. That way you can eliminate all of that. But then we would want to reintroduce foods one at a time to figure out what is it that's causing that symptoms. So really, the only time carnivore diet is justified is if it's going to be a short term elimination phase with the intent of reintroducing foods. I hope you found this episode helpful. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Carnivore diet. Feel free to share this episode to your story and tag me at Yates Nutrition, and we'll catch you on the next episode.