Carnivore Diet / Ancestral Living / Lion Diet - Food abominations, pseudoscience and cholesterol problems galore!

[MS Paint Gigachad]

Section 0: Slap fight prevention​

1. CURB YOUR STRAWMEN. Diets other than carnivore can include meat. Diets other than veganism can include plants. Many stated goals of carnivores (eg. avoid seed oils) can be achieved by other ways. This thread is neither a vegan hugbox, nor meant to dissuade anybody from eating meat altogether.

2. Meat-eating is normal and has benefits, but carnivores take it to extremes and can be mocked for it. CARNIVORY MAY NOT BE INHERENTLY CRINGE, but the existence of good members of any community has not stopped us from laughing at the cringe members of those communities.

3. This is NOT a nutrition and/or anthropology debate thread. No matter how many pubmed studies you cite, sunning your balls will still be cringe. Food abominations will still be food abominations.

Section 1: preamble​

The carnivore community is a group of people including some celebrities who suffer food abominations and negative health effects while adhering to their diet consisting mainly of meat, eggs, poultry, seafood and dairy, along with various dubious practices like eating raw meat which they justify using bullshit pseudoscience, health claims and other retard rhetoric.

Not all carnivores will do everything listed here, and some make exceptions for certain plant-based foods. Common examples include: honey, fruit, coffee. Some of them will also exclude various animal-based foods, especially fish, pork and chicken.

The carnivore diet can be considered a subset of the keto diet (this is also reflected in how some carnivores refer to their diet as "zero carb") and many keto dieters have carnivore tendencies, as such, some keto lunacy is welcome.

You could consider them the Bizarro World meat-eating equivalent of cringe vegans, right down to the imperious sense of superiority:

I am aware of the 2 existing threads on the same general topic:

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-carnivore-diet-and-anti-veganism.63421/

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/zero-carb-full-carnivore-diet.46974/

However, those seem to be focused on kiwis' experiences while on the diet and people telling them to eat vegetables. This is intended as a community watch thread, and to document failures and other cringe of people on the diet.

Section 2: celebrities​

Some well-known people have some out as supporters of the carnivore diet or similar.

Examples include Jordan Peterson and his daughter Mikhaila Peterson. They both switched to an all-meat diet because of food sensitivities and health problems, and Mikhaila has dubbed it "The Lion Diet"

Here she tells her story, and how it basically cured most of her health conditions
Link / Archive

Here's their FAQ page.
Link / Archive

There's also Brian “Liver King” Johnson, who had 1.7mil followers on instagram as of time of writing, who credited his muscular physique to his rigorous training and largely (but not strictly) carnivorous diet and vigorously denied ever taking steroids.


He then used his fame to promote his supplement brand, Ancestral Supplements.
Archive
Archive
Unfortunately for him, he was exposed for taking steroids by More Plates More Dates (AKA Derek), a youtuber who often discusses steroids. In late november 2022, Derek published an hour-long video entitled "The Liver King Lie" which also includes commentary about the Liver King and why he chose to expose him. Around the 32 minute mark, Derek reveals a set of emails sent by Liver King to a bodybuilding coach talking about steroids, including the full stack he was taking at the time. The bodybuilding coach in question was revealed to be Vigorous Steve, and he too made a video explaining why he chose to expose the Liver King.


He then responded in an apology video, where he admitted to taking steroids.

As a result, he was ultimately sued for misleading his followers
Link / archive

Section 3: bullshit pseudoscience and health claims​

They attempt to justify their diet using science. Speaking of Liver King, here he is using non-existent radioisotope studies to justify eating organs:

They’ll claim that cavemen or primitive tribes eat mainly meat.

It's a common trope among these guys to portray animal-raising as natural, environmentally-friendly, and good in general, requiring few chemicals and such and growing crops as unnatural, environmentally-unfriendly, and bad in general, requiring heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides. They seem to ignore factory farms and such, which produce a large proportion of meat sold.

There’s plenty of speculation on how vegetables could be bad for you. Plenty of mentions of “defence chemicals”, or how seed oils are inflammatory. Paul “Carnivoremd2.0” Saladino does this a lot, as does Dr Kiltz.

Bashing seed oils and grain is another common trope, even if one does not necessarily need to be a carnivore to avoid them. Olive oil isn't a seed oil and is vegan; and vegetarians and omnivores can use butter.


They’ll also claim that somehow, no matter how much meat you eat, it won’t cause issues with heart disease or gout or anything.

Another common refrain: “But why was there less obesity in the past? It’s because they used less seed oils back then, unlike today!" While it is true there was less obesity in the past, the problem with these comparisons is that so many factors changed that it’s impossible to blame it all on one factor, as they do. For instance, we consume more calories overall and the number of people in manual jobs has fallen. You could also blame other factors, like a lack of emphasis on exercise, but I won’t go into that right now.


“But I was cured of X” is a common refrain of carnivores. This may be because a strict carnivore diet is essentially an elimination diet, and so if a person has any sensitivities or allergies to gluten, soy, etc, their condition won’t be triggered, but it won’t be cured. It’s equivalent to saying, “not going near water cured my tendency to drown”. Probably the most famous example of this is Mikhaila Peterson, but there are others.


Here's a redditor who evidently believed their ADHD would be cured on the diet
(link / archive)


The comments are all guys telling them to keep going.


There are occasionally more bizarre claims. Here's carnivorecoachpeyton on tiktok claiming that calories don't matter and you will lose weight as long as you eat carnivore (while MaTI):

There are other people who mainly put out pseudoscience, like Dr Kiltz and Amber O'Hearn. Dr Kiltz in particular is pretty active on tiktok.

Spoiler: Not necessarily pseudoscience but funny

Probably taken from a podcast or something. It's incredibly disjointed and he sounds unhinged. I don't know who's idea it was to post this.

"Dr Klitz"
https://www.doctorkiltz.com/
https://archive.is/wO3tw
Amber O'Hearn
https://www.mostly-fat.com/
https://archive.is/m8niV


While the objective of the thread is not necessarily to debunk them, I'll include a link to an article by Layne Norton, a powerlifter and PhD in Nutritional Sciences which debunks a number of claims.
Link / Archive

Section 4: Retard rhetoric​

The previous section was for factually untrue arguments. This section is for logically unsound ones.

They’ll claim to be “anti vegan”, even if "not vegan" includes lacto/ovo-vegetarians (vegetarians that eat dairy or eggs), omnivores and so on.


More often than not they’ll blame lobbying by farmers as the reason why research does not favor them, or why non-meat foods are so widespread. They conveniently ignore the fact that meat and dairy farmers can, and have lobbied for favorable regulations.


And on occasion, they blame Big Pharma for promoting "balanced diets" or plant based foods to keep you sick

Section 5: Food abominations​

Just as vegans have strived and failed to make plant-based substitutions for animal-based foods like meat, milk and eggs, rather than eating plant based foods that don’t pretend to be anything else, carnivores have attempted the same with similar results. A source for this shall be the tiktoker itscourtneyluna. Enjoy.

Note the exception made for coffee, which is plant-based. Note also that a conventional cappuccino should also be acceptable.

I also present to you the following recipe for a "bacon cheese ball" from the r/ketorecipes subreddit. While not technically a carnivore recipe, it is mostly "halal" as far as the carnivores are concerned.
Link / archive


A similar recipe from the website ladycarnivory.com, "fried cheese goat [sic] balls", consisting of goat cheese, coated in pork rinds, deep fried in butter
link / archive


Carnivore Beef and Cheese Enchiladas, made with Zero carb chicken tortillas - essentially meat and cheese, wrapped in meat and cheese.
Link (enchilada)
Link (tortilla)
Archive (enchilada)
Archive (tortilla)


Another common trope is the "freak mukbang" where they film themselves eating meat (in some cases raw, see liver king eating a mountain of raw testicles below), or in some cases straight butter.

Section 6: health​

It turns out that defying the advice your parents, teachers and doctors gave you to eat your vegetables is sometimes not a good idea. High blood lipids, cholesterol, constipation and runny stools are common tropes.

The instagram page @carnivorecringe mainly posts these types of things.

Here's steak and butter gal admitting to hair loss


The r/carnivore diet subreddit has quite a few complaints, like so:
(Link / archive)

Section 7: lunatics and raw meat eaters​

Among the carnivore community there are some exceptionally exceptional individuals who propound some exceptionally loony ideas. 2 examples I would like to bring to your attention are S3vrige and Aajonus Vonderplanitz.

Aajonus Vonderplanitz is a proponent for what he calls the "primal diet", consisting mainly of meat, but with some vegetables and fruits, all raw, since apparently cooking it makes it bad for you. An article written from the /primaldiettm subreddit (archive No link, post was deleted while I was writing) is attached in PDF form (introductory information.pdf).

Aajonus also has a recipe for "high meat", which is essentially rotten raw meat. (Archive)


S3vrige, while way less wacky than Aajonus, is still pretty wacky, and a proponent for eating raw meat. He has a thread of his own here:

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/sv3rige-kids-range-gatis.41531/

The carnivore community is also host to some proponents of other alternative-health practices, like sunning your balls. This is @carnivoreaurelius and Paul Saladino on instagram promoting the practice:


This has been my first proper attempt at an OP, if there’s anything I should improve, please let me know.

Special thanks to @Blatant hypocrite for help with research; and for telling me about Aajonus. They made a post elaborating further on him here.
Special thanks to @Burning Fanatic for their feedback

 

[FiddleAFox]

To be fair, I know a few guys that have eaten raw meat before. However, they had this thing called "balance" within their diets, so really it is the equivalent of veganism, except it's not sponsored that much by any state.
Also, why the hell would you eat unseasoned meat? Note that guy looks like a vegan type of dude as well.

 

[Johnny Eastwood cash]

I'm on a Carnivore diet and I think all these people are morons they are no different then vegans by the way I also don't eat raw meat

 

[Syntaxion]

Great thread, though I wanted to point out something

They’ll claim that cavemen or primitive tribes eat mainly meat.

This has to be true though?

Don't get me wrong, it's an awful diet and by no means the optimal way to live, but given how much more energy dense fat is, and how much harder it is to find non-animal fat sources in the same quantity as wild game, primitive tribes wouldn't have much options besides meat.

Compare a wild boar vs the amount of nuts you'd need for the same amount of calories

or how seed oils are inflammatory

This is 100% true aswel. Seed oils/PUFAs are unsaturated and can oxidize extremely easy, which saturated fat simply cannot do (or atleast, not as easy) because the entire molecule is already saturated, and has no unpaired electrons. Though the argument is still dumb for them to use, because not all fat in animals is saturated iirc.

 

[Android raptor]

It'll be interesting to see how many of these weirdos have colon cancer in 10, 15 years.

It's like they think their dicks are gonna fall off because humans are omnivores or some shit.

 

[DumbDude43]

these are attention whores and grifters, like all influencers

carnivore diet is probably healthier than vegan diet overall, but still worse than a proper balanced diet, and very high effort and impractical

This has to be true though?

Don't get me wrong, it's an awful diet and by no means the optimal way to live, but given how much more energy dense fat is, and how much harder it is to find non-animal fat sources in the same quantity as wild game, primitive tribes wouldn't have much options besides meat.

it varies from place to place
in some places, the primitives actually ate carnivore diet. eskimos in the north for example used to eat nothing but seals, whales, and fish all day every day, because that's literally the only food you can get your hands on in the godforsaken frozen wastelands they inhabited.
but in other places, like some parts of africa, wild fruits are plentifuly and easily accessible, so the primitives there ate lots of fruit in addition to the animals they hunted.

tl;dr primitives in different locations ate different variations of diets, from balanced to carnivore. but it is worth noting that no primitives are known that ate vegetarian or even vegan diets (at least as far as i know)

 

[Syntaxion]

these are attention whores and grifters, like all influencers

carnivore diet is probably healthier than vegan diet overall, but still worse than a proper balanced diet, and very high effort and impractical


it varies from place to place
in some places, the primitives actually ate carnivore diet. eskimos in the north for example used to eat nothing but seals, whales, and fish all day every day, because that's literally the only food you can get your hands on in the godforsaken frozen wastelands they inhabited.
but in other places, like some parts of africa, wild fruits are plentifuly and easily accessible, so the primitives there ate lots of fruit in addition to the animals they hunted.

tl;dr primitives in different locations ate different variations of diets, from balanced to carnivore. but it is worth noting that no primitives are known that ate vegetarian or even vegan diets (at least as far as i know)

Still though, their main source of calories/energy would still be meat.

Getting 2500 calories from hunting is quite easy, especially with fattier animals. But fruit? That's just sugar and fiber, not only is that half the calories per gram, the volume is also much lower.

Getting most of your calories from fruit would take so much time and energy (in primitive times), you'd lose more than you'd gain. Not to mention your health would deteriorate due to the lack of protein, fat and certain micronutrients.

 

[DumbDude43]

Getting most of your calories from fruit would take so much time and energy, you'd lose more than you'd gain

depends entirely on the location.
like yeah if you spend all day picking blackberries in cold and rainy woods in central europe, that's gonna suck balls, and you'd simply starve to death in winter. but if you can just spend an hour casually walking around the jungle near the outskirts of your village/camp in africa and collect a dozen melons, that's not a lot of effort, and they do provide a lot of energy. and winter is not an issue near the equator so it works much better.

 

[Syntaxion]

depends entirely on the location.
like yeah if you spend all day picking blackberries in cold and rainy woods in central europe, that's gonna suck balls. but if you can just spend an hour casually walking around the jungle near the outskirts of your village/camp and collect a dozen melons, that's not a lot of effort,

For one person, maybe. But a dozen melons doesn't come close to what an entire village would need. Unless they happen to live next to a mountain the size of the kilimanjaro made out of melons.

and they do provide a lot of energy.

I disagree, sugar only provides 4 calories per gram, while fat provides 9. That's more than twice, for the same volume. A melon is mostly water, plus sugar. Not only lacking in energy, but also lacking in neccesary micro- and macronutrients. A diet of majorily fruit would lead to a lot of deficiencies and malnutrition, if you don't die from starvation first.

A medium melon is, what, 200 kcal? Even with a modern sedentary lifestyle, you'd need to find 10 melons.... per person.... every single day.... Now take a small vilage of 200 people. That's 2000 melons to find. Every day, without taking a day off. Or, 750k melons per year.

And remember, these cannot be farmed but have to be found. Simply not possible.

Meanwhile, one 250g steak provides over 600 calories...

 

[FatalTater]

People who preach about food are irritating as fuck.

I eat food and it cured me of starving. Will it work for everyone? Try it and see!

 

[byuu]

This has to be true though?

Don't get me wrong, it's an awful diet and by no means the optimal way to live, but given how much more energy dense fat is, and how much harder it is to find non-animal fat sources in the same quantity as wild game, primitive tribes wouldn't have much options besides meat.

Compare a wild boar vs the amount of nuts you'd need for the same amount of calories

No, cavemen ate everything. We're omnivores and it's clear from our biology - that isn't some freak mutation that happened recently.

Why would you even want to emulate a cavemen's diet? Cavemen didn't live long healthy lives.

 

[Syntaxion]

No, cavemen ate everything. We're omnivores and it's clear from our biology - that isn't some freak mutation that happened recently.

Why would you even want to emulate a cavemen's diet? Cavemen didn't live long healthy lives.

My point was that the majority of their calories came from meat, not that they only ate meat. Nor is my point that a carnivore diet is good, or optimal.

Obviously they ate everything, and pretty much whatever they could find. Since, yeah, humans are inherently omnivores. But it's not possible for hunter-gatherers to live on mostly fruit, or anything that isn't meat. Meat would 100% have to be their main food.

 

[MS Paint Gigachad]

For the folks going on record saying that seed oils are in fact inflammatory and bad for you, i don't necessarily disagree, but you can still avoid them by cooking potatoes in tallow for example. You dont need to be a carnie to avoid seed oils or grains...

My point was that the majority of their calories came from meat, not that they only ate meat. Nor is my point that a carnivore diet is good, or optimal.

Again, what do you mean by majority? 51% is a majority, 99% is a majority, and with the carnivore guys on tiktok, it feels like they took this to justify getting 95% of their calories from meat. Not sure if that's truly ancestral...

EDIT: according to the article linked below, it's 40% for men in a certain African tribe and less for women. It's worth noting that African tribe was specifically brought up by Paul Saladino as evidence that the carnivore diet is ancestral.

I just remembered this article written by Layne Norton, a powerlifter and phd in nutrition responding to claims Paul "carnivoremd2.0" Saladino made on Joe Rogan. Read it, it's got 272 citations

Paul Saladino on Joe Rogan Experience: Hype vs. Evidence

In this article that should’ve been a book, Layne systemically investigates Paul Saladino’s claims from his recent Joe Rogan appearance.

biolayne.com

 

[Disheveled-Human]

People should just eat what they want and hit the fucking treadmill.

 

[Syntaxion]

For the folks going on record saying that seed oils are in fact inflammatory and bad for you, i don't necessarily disagree, but you can still avoid them by cooking potatoes in tallow for example. You dont need to be a carnie to avoid seed oils or grains...

Again, what do you mean by majority? 51% is a majority, 99% is a majority, and with the carnivore guys on tiktok, it feels like they took this to justify getting 95% of their calories from meat. Not sure if that's truly ancestral...

Yeah, fair points on both. Sorry for going on a bit of an autistic tangent there.

 

[realitysurf]

I was waiting for Paul Saladino to get mentioned in a thread at some point. Anyone who exposes their testicles to sunlight on purpose is totally cow worthy.

 

[MS Paint Gigachad]

I was waiting for Paul Saladino to get mentioned in a thread at some point. Anyone who exposes their testicles to sunlight on purpose is totally cow worthy.
View attachment 4568644

Heh, i first heard of it from carnivoreaurelius. If you think SALADino is cow worthy, i guarantee you carnivoreaurelius is 110% cowworthy

 

[PHILLIP BANKS]

eat healthy food and get in touch with vegetables is a must
Our ancestors where not retards who invented agriculture just so that we can go back and start strictly eating meat.
Eat meat bros, but also keep in mind to have well balanced meals

 

[byuu]

My point was that the majority of their calories came from meat, not that they only ate meat.

And my point is that there would be no such thing as a paleo diet.
If you had tons of animals that are easy to hunt you'd be eating mostly meat. If you had tons of roots and fruits around you, you'd be eating mostly plants. Depending on your geography/season/whatever.

 

[Syntaxion]

If you had tons of roots and fruits around you, you'd be eating mostly plants

Is that before or after you'd die of starvation? Or when the malnutrition kicks in?

Again, getting 2000 to 3000 calories from plant sources is such a gargantuan task, you'd burn more energy than you'd get. And that's without looking at all the micronutrients you'd miss. And the essential fats and protein. It's simply not possible to sustain an entire hunter gatherer population on mostly non-meat sources. Especially not fruit, that's just ridiculuous.