22 ms·

They Thrive on All-Meat Diet (1929)

70 points by sridca 8y ago

teach 8y ago
Yowza. My wife has a PhD in nutrition and teaches a "culture in foods" course at university. It's about how various cultures around the world and throughout history had all their nutritional needs met from their various diets. An explorer might last a little while on an all-meat diet but you'd be missing out on a lot of essential vitamins and minerals. The Inuit for example, only avoid scurvy by getting their vitamin C from raw fish. (Cooking it destroys the little it contains.) Interesting article, though!
- ywnner_0001 8y ago
  I've been on an all meat diet for ~3 months. I've lost ~20 pounds (I was 30-40 pounds over what I consider my ideal weight) and feel great. Oddly, no scurvy or other health issues. I do not supplement apart from salt and other seasonings. Probably 50% of my calories are from grass fed beef, combined with other high quality meats, eggs and a little diary. There are people who get good results from only beef. And there are people who have done this for many years without adverse health effects. There is a ton of conventional wisdom / "science" that says we can't thrive on an all meat diet. Anecdotally, there are a ton of people who do. My health cares not for your wife's education.
  - simplecomplex 8y ago
    The requirement for vitamin C is a fact of human biology, and established science. Either you’re getting it from your dairy or other dietary sources or eating enough meat that’s raw enough to get your minimum. My experience as a lactose person is that people tend to greatly underestimate how much dairy they consume, which is largely fortified (edit: as others point out it’s not fortified with vitamin C). When you say all meat diet are you sure you’re not exaggerating? You probably consume all sorts of other stuff in small quantities. You don’t have any candy ever (often a source of vitamin C)? No potato chips ever? No cheese ever? No fortified yogurt or milk ever? You don’t ever eat cheeseburgers with buns or cheese or mayo?
    - inferiorhuman 8y ago
      > No cheese made with fortified dairy ever? No fortified yogurt or milk ever? You don’t ever eat cheeseburgers with buns or cheese or mayo? I don't think I've ever seen dairy fortified with vitamin C. In the US, at least, dairy is typically fortified with vitamins A and D.
    - geowwy 8y ago
      The carnivore diet is getting pretty big, a lot of people have been on it for years. I think their theory is you don't need as much Vitamin C when you don't eat carbohydrates. On the other hand there are carnivore Youtubers like sv3rige who drink vegetable juice but don't talk about it on their channel, so who knows if it's true or not: https://youtu.be/rQlvvbHqtj8?t=25 https://youtu.be/rQlvvbHqtj8?t=25
      - simplecomplex 8y ago
        Yeah I find it hard to believe anyone eats literally 100% meat no exceptions. I’ll bet $1000 Jordan Pederson is full of shit when he claims he eats nothing but cooked beef.
        andai 8y ago
        Recently, he added chicken to the menu.
        virtuallynathan 8y ago
        You’d be surprised... perhaps if you expand you definition of meat to animal products (eggs, cheese, fish, shellfish, etc), then I would say a growing number of people do this.
        geowwy 8y ago
        I don’t see what Jordan Peterson gains by lying. If anything it’s just another thing people can use to attack him.
        8y ago
  - KitDuncan 8y ago
    Did you do any blood tests before and are planning on doing some in the near future? I'd be really interested in hearing how they compare. Three months also might not be enough time to develop any serious deficiencies. Weight loss isn't a really good metric. I also lost a similar amount of weight in the first few months of going vegan. Around 40 pounds after half a year and I feel great. My blood tests came back more than great even after 3 years now.
  - jjjensen90 8y ago
    I'm glad you feel good, but your health hasn't really been established yet. A few things to remember: - 3 months is not enough time to know if a diet is good for you personally in the long term, even anecdotally - weight loss is a poor metric for the healthiness of a diet - anecdotes are not what you should base decisions about your one and only body on (remember that some diet pills in the 90s worked well and spread by word of mouth because people lost weight but also caused heart attacks in some)
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      > weight loss is a poor metric for the healthiness of a diet Most people are near-totally uninterested in their actuarial life expectancy. As a result, close to 100% of people on a diet are looking for weight loss. Whether you should consider it a "health" objective is a more interesting question. From a Darwinian perspective, attracting a mate is much more important than whether you live to be 67 or 72.
      - jjjensen90 8y ago
        While you are right, it's not a choice between pure life extension on one side and pure weight loss for attractiveness... Because the "healthiness" of a diet, in my opinion, includes its sustainability (do you regain the weight immediately after stopping?), reliability (can you use the diet to reduce your weight in a controlled way?), compatibility with exercise (which can also work to make you more attractive and therefore more successful in the Darwinian sexual selection sense). Another reason that "scale weight" is a poor indicator of the healthiness of a diet is that depending on the diet you may be losing mass via fat loss, muscle loss, water loss, etc. What's more important is body fat percentage reduction if we are talking about both traditional Western attractiveness and (usually) physical health overall. There are diets and lifestyles that make you more attractive and also increase your life expectancy.
        deno 8y ago
        Sustainability should be whether or not you are going around hungry. Because if not, then why would you ever stop the diet, or even worse go back to the old habits? Why would it be surprising that you would then gain your weight back? And yeah muscle tissue is the important one. Any diet is sustainable until you burn through all your secondary reserves. How many buff vegetarians do you see? In my experience, you need to be a bona fide nutritional expert to maintain muscle mass on an exclusively plant-based diet.
  - radicalbyte 8y ago
    Good going. It's amazing what creating a caloric deficit combined with weight training can achieve. I've also lost weight, I'm down about 9 kg of real weight (using the weight from week 2 of diet as start point) in 4 months. I took four weeks in Jan "off" from my diet, just eating when I was hungry (unfortunately lots of crisps). I still dropped 2kg over that period but 0.5kg of that was muscle. I changed me eating pattern such that I ate a normal balanced evening meal (50% veg, 25% protein/carb) with either a banana for breakfast and two slices of bread with filling for lunch OR porridge for breakfast and a banana for lunch. On trainings days I have two eggs on my bread and ham if I have it in stock. I've also added about 2kg of muscle mass overall. I would strongly recommend following a "diet" that you can stick to long term. I've done the whole meat-only diet, I've done the 6-a-day bodybuilders diet. I've done soup diets. Every single time I've put most of the weight back on afterwards and have had to battle hunger the whole way through. With my current attempt it's far easier because I'm not hungry and I love what I'm eating.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    > My health cares not for your wife's education. From all I've seen nutritional sciences barely qualify as a science given the large corpus of falsehoods produced by it, even in recent years. (Remember cholesterol in eggs?)
- abtinf 8y ago
  In all seriousness: as a non-expert who has read a few popular books that make contradictory claims, “nutrition” seems to be a field of non-knowledge, with about the same scientific credibility as social studies. So what does it mean to have a PhD in nutrition—-are there experts with a track record of scientific rigor whose claims have withstood close scrutiny?
  - jstewartmobile 8y ago
    I like Taleb too, but looking at what has happened to software, what does it mean to have a PhD in computer science? Or even an MD for that matter, judging by the drive-by prescribing most doctors do. The older I get, the more I understand why red-state bubba hates most accredited "professionals".
  - sridca 8y ago
    Nevermind PhD, all MD education on nutrition is based on weak science--almost no clinical trials to support current recommendations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19177014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19177014
  - teach 8y ago
    Thanks for asking a serious question. Getting a PhD in nutrition is the same as another other PhD -- you study at a graduate program under an existing tenured professor in that field, do original research and successfully defend your dissertation. My wife happens to have gotten her undergrad degree at a great school, did her dietetic internship at an excellent hospital and worked as a dietitian for a decade before returning to do her graduate work at an even better school. But one can call themselves a "nutritionist" with no training whatsoever; the term isn't legally protected like "doctor" is. Nutrition is a field where the underlying science is difficult as, say, cryptography, but is far more obviously relevant to the average person's life. So popular books are easy to get published and there's no guarantee that the author has much actual nutrition training at all. And again unlike crypto there are several large, entrenched, deep-pocketed interests in America that aggressively promote low-quality science to increase consumption of their products. When you make tens of billions of dollars per year, it's not too hard to fund a hundred studies that year and use p-hacking and other tricks to get at least a couple to come out with some result that shows your industry in a good light. Then you make sure that those get covered with a headline in some newspaper or magazine. > Are there experts with a track record of scientific rigor? I'm not the one with the PhD but I know that my wife is a big fan of both Walter Willett and Marion Nestle.
- tomhoward 8y ago
  There's a modern movement of people adopting an all-carnivore diet [1][2], who report it to be effective at overcoming conditions like autoimmune illness, depression and other chronic illnesses that defied other forms of treatment. The theory is that for highly sensitive individuals, any carb/fiber/allergenic content in food causes inflammation and dysbiosis, which leads to these chronic conditions. They believe that by removing all these food components, even if the diet has low levels of essential nutrients like Vitamin C, they are absorbed and utilised better than in a regular diet, due to the reduced inflammatory activity. I haven't tried it and won't be doing it myself, but I have been through episodes in my life where I was afflicted by these kinds of chronic "mystery" illnesses that didn't seem to respond to any kind of treatment, and I can understand the kind of pain and exasperation that would lead people to try this. [1] https://hvmn.com/podcast/meat-heals-the-autoimmune-disease-case-ft-mikhaila-peterson-episode-92 https://hvmn.com/podcast/meat-heals-the-autoimmune-disease-c... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/8f0o1w/my_experience_with_medium_term_zc_for_gi/ https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/8f0o1w/my_experie...
  - TACIXAT 8y ago
    I'm a celiac and I have a slightly different take on it. I've cut out gluten, sugar, caffeine, sodium nitrites, and MSG as triggers for sinus headaches (took years of trial and error to identify them all). First, I love hearing carnivore diet stories because I relate to them a lot. Varying symptoms, cut out some foods, drastically improved health. I lived for 23 years with sinus headaches, I had to figure out how to work through them in college. Life is so nice now that I don't want to take a drill to my forehead. That said, I think the carnivore diet is the shotgun blast approach. I bet there are specific triggers for their symptoms that they could identify by following a strict diet (e.g. chicken and rice) and slowly reintroducing stuff. It's an area that is drastically understudied. All the celiac papers are on gastrointestinal issues (which I had, but the sinus headaches were 50 times worse). My understanding is eating gluten while celiac causes your body to attack your small intestine, which causes deterioration. This usually leads to problems with FODMAPs. My brother has issues with lactose, and for me it was fructose. It's hard going to something that isn't evidence backed, but sometimes the best we can do is do the experiment on ourselves. I'm tracking what I eat everyday and when I get sinus headaches. I primarily eat protein. I get 3 beef patties and 2 small chicken breasts each day from the burger place at work. The french fries and corn chips at work are safe for me to eat, so those are the carbs I get regularly. I take a vitamin C supplement. On the weekends I cook steak, and some brazilian cheese breads. There is also a brand of gluten free bread with no sugar that I really like. I'm extremely fortunate that I work somewhere that can accommodate my diet and that I can afford meat regularly outside of that. So yea, shout out to everyone else with weird food reactions, stay strong.
- eesmith 8y ago
  The information you gave seems to contradict information from elsewhere. You write "An explorer might last a little while on an all-meat diet". As the Maclean's article points out, "The Arctic explorer Stefansson and a former Arctic confrère, Andersen, went on an exclusive meat diet for a year". I think of "little bit", for a diet, as being somewhat less than one year. How long do you mean by it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson#Advocacy_of_an_exclusively_meat_diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson#Advocacy... further points out "In the end, the one-year project stretched to four years, during which time the two men ate only the meat they could kill and the fish they could catch in the Canadian Arctic. Neither of the two men suffered any adverse after-effects from their four-year experiment." Surely four years is enough to show that one can last a long time on an all-meat diet, yes? You write "The Inuit for example, only avoid scurvy by getting their vitamin C from raw fish." The Wikipedia article on Inuit cuisine, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine , says instead, "Vitamin C is obtained through sources such as caribou liver, kelp, whale skin, and seal brain; because these foods are typically eaten raw or frozen, the vitamin C they contain, which would be destroyed by cooking, is instead preserved." Note that while those meats are raw, they are not fish. The Wikipedia page cites http://discovermagazine.com/2004/oct/inuit-paradox http://discovermagazine.com/2004/oct/inuit-paradox (which in turn cites the same Stefansson described in the Maclean's article) wherein we can read: > Native foods easily supply those 10 milligrams of scurvy prevention, especially when organ meats—preferably raw—are on the menu. For a study published with Kuhnlein in 2002, Fediuk compared the vitamin C content of 100-gram (3.55-ounce) samples of foods eaten by Inuit women living in the Canadian Arctic: Raw caribou liver supplied almost 24 milligrams, seal brain close to 15 milligrams, and raw kelp more than 28 milligrams. Still higher levels were found in whale skin and muktuk. This makes it seem that the Inuit were not "only" dependent on fish, but also had non-fish sources for dietary vitamin C. The underlying scientific article is at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889157502910537 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915750... . It lists raw fish eggs, raw whale, caribou liver, ringed seal liver, and blueberries as the most notable sources of vitamin C in traditional foods.
  - teach 8y ago
    Thanks for calling out my mistake on fish vs meat. For what it's worth, I had originally typed "raw meat" but then second-guessed myself and changed it to fish. And my wife wasn't around to correct me. I'm aware that the article claims that these two went on an exclusive meat diet for a year. I'm saying that personally I don't believe the claim. Alternatively, that it's true but that they accidentally got required nutrition in ways similar to the Inuit.
- virtuallynathan 8y ago
  Plain old cow muscle meat contains at least enough in 1lb to prevent scurvy (10mg). Vitamin C competes for glucose transport, so less glucose means less need for vitamin C. What other vitamins and minerals can’t be found in animal products? So far as I know, pretty much 0. The vegans on the other hand... no B12, limited K2 (except fermented stuff), limited vitamin A, limited EPA/DHA/DPA/CLA, limited vitamin D (mushrooms maybe have some D2?). I’m being generous with “limited” here.
- tomp 8y ago
  In modern times, you can supplement vitamins that you don’t get with food. Otherwise e.g. vegans wouldn’t survive (I think their diet is missing B12).
  - coldtea 8y ago
    It's always from slightly worse to no absorption at all though, if you take them as supplements. Getting them from food is optimal.
    - randomsearch 8y ago
      Pro tip for vegans or veggies taking B12: chew the pill before you swallow. You’ll absorb more, according to “vegan for life” by Norris and Messina (which seems pretty well referenced).
jstewartmobile 8y ago
I like meat, but I wonder if the powers that be reached all the way back to 1929 for this nugget because there's a surplus they want to liquidate. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/24/17606958/meat-cheese-surplus-visualized https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/24/17606958/me...
gammateam 8y ago
> a lot of us might be dwelling too anxiously on what to eat and what not to eat 100 years and nothing has changed
- sridca 8y ago
  Ha, post on HN that you are on a carnivore diet and people will pounce on you to tell you that you are not eating """healthy""".
  - frou_dh 8y ago
    Warring internet factions of meme-dieters are all lamers.
    - sridca 8y ago
      And so are their criticisers. Why don't we all become nihilists and stop curing our medical conditions via dietary intervention?
      - frou_dh 8y ago
        It's the internet part. Taking something as deeply rooted in the physical world as food, and using online as a venue to clash over it. It's a recipe for lame outcomes.
- lars512 8y ago
  Today 70% of the adult US population is classified as overweight. Globally the rate is 30% and rising, at some 2.3 billion people now. The top three global causes of death are "lifestyle-related" illnesses. Perhaps dwelling a little on what we eat is reasonable. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...
glangdale 8y ago
A detail not mentioned here was that (if I remember correctly) they initially ate an all-muscle-meat diet and had real problems; it was only after they included a lot of organ meat (imitating the Inuit) that things stabilized. I think eating liver can get you enough Vitamin C, for example.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Liver also has enough Vitamin A to give you hypervitaminosis A if you’re not careful.
  - virtuallynathan 8y ago
    You have to eat a heck of a lot, but definitely be careful with polar bear liver :)
- latch 8y ago
  Inuits, and possibly others, also consumed predigested vegetation in animal stomachs (1) Also, worth noting that a meat-heavy diet can also kill you from lack of fat. This is known as protein poisoning. This obviously depends on what your source of meat is. (1) https://www2.dmu.dk/1_viden/2_publikationer/3_fagrapporter/rapporter/fr528.pdf https://www2.dmu.dk/1_viden/2_publikationer/3_fagrapporter/r...
  - mtgx 8y ago
    Weren't the Inuits or some other population preferring the fatty sides of the animal and throwing the muscle to their dogs? I heard that about them somewhere.
    - gnulinux 8y ago
      Muscle tissue is very protein rich, but is of very low protein and micronutrient density. Humans need a certain amount of protein per day, and it's very easy to get that from any animal tissue. The hard part is getting micronutrients and calories. Well, fats are calory dense, and organ tissue is micronutrient dense. I don't think not eating muscle tissue makes any sense in modern day. Nobody will just eat whale organ tissue any more, realistically. I mean, if you really do eat it, it might work, but will you really do that? You need those lean proteins from animals and you'll hopefully supplement fats, vitamins and minerals from other sources. Animals muscle is very Omega 6 rich, so ideally you wanna eat lean proteins (chicken, turkey breast, lean red meat...) and supplement your diet with Omega 3 sources like salmon, acai berry, walnut, flaxseed etc...
saagarjha 8y ago
I’m curious how other mammals, which are essentially purely carnivorous, get their vitamins and minerals. Presumably they’re similar enough to us that they’d require similar amounts?
- yostrovs 8y ago
  They, except us, guinea pigs, and a few others, synthesize vitamin C within their bodies.
  - bchallenor 8y ago
    I find this pretty fascinating. Apparently it's a single gene that is responsible for the inability to synthesize vitamin C. [1] [1] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/401/why-do-humans-not-produce-vitamin-c-like-other-mammals https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/401/why-do-human...
Proven 8y ago
But that was before global warming. If we don’t stop eating meat the world will come to an end in 12 years.
sridca 8y ago
For some perspective, contrast this to the current fashionable trend of recommending plant-based diets where people unwittingly use nutrition epidemiology studies to validate their beliefs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19100718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19100718
newnewpdro 8y ago
Something I've read multiple times throughout the years being somewhat curious about nutrition and diets is that the Inuit's would often eat their meat raw. When eaten raw, there can actually be significant carbohydrates present. The mitochondria for instance contain glucose in-flight that apparently gets destroyed by the cooking process. At least that's what I've read. It seems plausible to me that one could get all the nutrition they need eating copious amounts of raw animal flesh, drinking the blood, eating the liver, everything.
- 6nf 8y ago
  There are no essential carbohydrates. Your body can function perfectly fine without them.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    My intention in mentioning the carbohydrates lost when cooked was more meant to suggest other nutrients are also likely intact when consuming the meat raw. The classical Inuit diet is more unique than just being meat-based, it's also mostly raw. This detail is often overlooked by those using the Inuit diet as proof for some dietary argument.
slics 8y ago
All humans are unique in their own way- thus what might be working on some humans it might have a different effect in some others. As an example: My wife has horrible migraines almost every other week. She has followed so many different diets that worked for some others but didn’t even improve her migraines at all. Simply put, be mindful about what you read and what you put in your body.
- dzink 8y ago
  Sleep depravation releases a stress hormone that can also cause migraines. Check if they correlate to times she has missed on usual sleep and just taken a nap to restore it ( frequent culprit).
- fouc 8y ago
  >The "classic" ketogenic diet is a special high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that helps to control seizures in some people with epilepsy. Doctors usually recommend the ketogenic diet for children whose seizures have not responded to several different seizure medicines. You're saying she already tried a ketogenic diet for a few months and it didn't help?
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  You can get tested for micro allergies. Might find out you have a common trigger.
openloop 8y ago
Oh shit it’s 2019 tho.
davesailer 8y ago
More info. Vilhjalmur Stefansson's book, "THE FAT OF THE LAND": https://web.archive.org/web/20180802084820/http://highsteaks.com/the-fat-of-the-land-not-by-bread-alone-vilhjalmur-stefansson.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180802084820/http://highsteaks... Vilhjalmur Stefansson's coverage of the same topics from Harper's Monthly Magazine, November 1935: - Part 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20180109155358/http://www.biblelife.org/stefansson1.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20180109155358/http://www.biblel... - Part 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180104021843/http://www.biblelife.org:80/stefansson2.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20180104021843/http://www.biblel... - Part 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20171206075942/http://www.biblelife.org:80/stefansson3.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20171206075942/http://www.biblel... The Harper's Magazine articles cover the same ground as the book but are better written in my opinion. Also note: I am not associated with any web site.
dilap 8y ago
Owsley "The Bear" Stanley (legendary SF producer of acid and sometimes sound engineer for Grateful Dead) was huge all-meat guy. http://highsteaks.com/carnivores-creed/owsley-the-bear-stanley/ http://highsteaks.com/carnivores-creed/owsley-the-bear-stanl... Stayed healthy till his death in a car crash at 76. A fun story here: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/uncle_johns_ham_the_grateful_deads_all-meat_diet https://dangerousminds.net/comments/uncle_johns_ham_the_grat...
mruts 8y ago
I pretty much only eat meat and bread. I’ve only eaten vegetables a handful of times in my life, usually because my parents were forcing me when I was young. It’s not so much a conscious choice as just who I am, I personally find vegetables pretty gross. Though it’s not really about vegetables either I think I just have some weird food phobias: I don’t like my food to touch, I only eat ‘plain’ things, I need my food to be homogenous (like smooth salsa vs chunky salsa).
- jchanimal 8y ago
  This book will probably extend your lifespan by much longer than it takes to read. https://charleseisenstein.org/books/the-yoga-of-eating/ https://charleseisenstein.org/books/the-yoga-of-eating/
  - mruts 8y ago
    I’m exactly sure what that book is about, but reading the description, it seems to be geared for people (women?) who have trouble eating healthy and want to. I’ve never really met someone like me before, but let me explain my seemingly unique situation. You know how when you look at garbage or vomit you have this viceral reaction of disgust? That’s me, but for most food. I don’t even like to look at salad, it makes me want to vomit. I’ve been this way since I was born (according to my parents) and maybe if I worked really hard and CBT or something for years I could overcome it. But why fight it? I’m not overweight, if a little bit out of shape. I’m happy with what I eat (steak, pizza, plain hamburgers, chinese food with no vegetables, candy, etc) and feel fine (though I don’t have anything else to reference I guess).
    - nate_meurer 8y ago
      I know two people just like yourself. One has a texture aversion, to the point of gagging, and both eat very plain diets like what you describe. They were essentially raised on the American kids menu (hamburger, fires, chicken nuggets, macaroni, grilled cheese sandwiches, etc.), and the picky eating became worse over time, continuing right into adulthood. The younger of my acquaintances is in his 20s, skinny but with a gut, visibly undernourished to my eyes. My older friend is in her 40s, and is suffering severe health problems likely due to or exacerbated by her diet. I have many friends and acquaintances who put no effort into directing their kids away from their picky eating habits, and the kids invariably end up living on the canonical kids-menu diet. Some kids naturally grow into more balanced eating habits and preferences, but many don't, and those parents are setting their children up for a lifetime of health issues. This may or may not have anything to do with you. It's just what I see in my circle.
onnnon 8y ago
I found Dr. Ede's website helpful on the subject if anyone else is interested. She also includes a lot of information on other food types as well. http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/food/meats/ http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/food/meats/

70 points by sridca 8y ago

Yowza. My wife has a PhD in nutrition and teaches a "culture in foods" course at university. It's about how various cultures around the world and throughout history had all their nutritional needs met from their various diets. An explorer might last a little while on an all-meat diet but you'd be missing out on a lot of essential vitamins and minerals. The Inuit for example, only avoid scurvy by getting their vitamin C from raw fish. (Cooking it destroys the little it contains.) Interesting article, though!

ywnner_0001 8y ago
I've been on an all meat diet for ~3 months. I've lost ~20 pounds (I was 30-40 pounds over what I consider my ideal weight) and feel great. Oddly, no scurvy or other health issues. I do not supplement apart from salt and other seasonings. Probably 50% of my calories are from grass fed beef, combined with other high quality meats, eggs and a little diary. There are people who get good results from only beef. And there are people who have done this for many years without adverse health effects. There is a ton of conventional wisdom / "science" that says we can't thrive on an all meat diet. Anecdotally, there are a ton of people who do. My health cares not for your wife's education.
- simplecomplex 8y ago
  The requirement for vitamin C is a fact of human biology, and established science. Either you’re getting it from your dairy or other dietary sources or eating enough meat that’s raw enough to get your minimum. My experience as a lactose person is that people tend to greatly underestimate how much dairy they consume, which is largely fortified (edit: as others point out it’s not fortified with vitamin C). When you say all meat diet are you sure you’re not exaggerating? You probably consume all sorts of other stuff in small quantities. You don’t have any candy ever (often a source of vitamin C)? No potato chips ever? No cheese ever? No fortified yogurt or milk ever? You don’t ever eat cheeseburgers with buns or cheese or mayo?
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
    > No cheese made with fortified dairy ever? No fortified yogurt or milk ever? You don’t ever eat cheeseburgers with buns or cheese or mayo? I don't think I've ever seen dairy fortified with vitamin C. In the US, at least, dairy is typically fortified with vitamins A and D.
  - geowwy 8y ago
    The carnivore diet is getting pretty big, a lot of people have been on it for years. I think their theory is you don't need as much Vitamin C when you don't eat carbohydrates. On the other hand there are carnivore Youtubers like sv3rige who drink vegetable juice but don't talk about it on their channel, so who knows if it's true or not: https://youtu.be/rQlvvbHqtj8?t=25 https://youtu.be/rQlvvbHqtj8?t=25
    - simplecomplex 8y ago
      Yeah I find it hard to believe anyone eats literally 100% meat no exceptions. I’ll bet $1000 Jordan Pederson is full of shit when he claims he eats nothing but cooked beef.
      - andai 8y ago
        Recently, he added chicken to the menu.
      - virtuallynathan 8y ago
        You’d be surprised... perhaps if you expand you definition of meat to animal products (eggs, cheese, fish, shellfish, etc), then I would say a growing number of people do this.
      - geowwy 8y ago
        I don’t see what Jordan Peterson gains by lying. If anything it’s just another thing people can use to attack him.
        8y ago
- KitDuncan 8y ago
  Did you do any blood tests before and are planning on doing some in the near future? I'd be really interested in hearing how they compare. Three months also might not be enough time to develop any serious deficiencies. Weight loss isn't a really good metric. I also lost a similar amount of weight in the first few months of going vegan. Around 40 pounds after half a year and I feel great. My blood tests came back more than great even after 3 years now.
- jjjensen90 8y ago
  I'm glad you feel good, but your health hasn't really been established yet. A few things to remember: - 3 months is not enough time to know if a diet is good for you personally in the long term, even anecdotally - weight loss is a poor metric for the healthiness of a diet - anecdotes are not what you should base decisions about your one and only body on (remember that some diet pills in the 90s worked well and spread by word of mouth because people lost weight but also caused heart attacks in some)
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    > weight loss is a poor metric for the healthiness of a diet Most people are near-totally uninterested in their actuarial life expectancy. As a result, close to 100% of people on a diet are looking for weight loss. Whether you should consider it a "health" objective is a more interesting question. From a Darwinian perspective, attracting a mate is much more important than whether you live to be 67 or 72.
    - jjjensen90 8y ago
      While you are right, it's not a choice between pure life extension on one side and pure weight loss for attractiveness... Because the "healthiness" of a diet, in my opinion, includes its sustainability (do you regain the weight immediately after stopping?), reliability (can you use the diet to reduce your weight in a controlled way?), compatibility with exercise (which can also work to make you more attractive and therefore more successful in the Darwinian sexual selection sense). Another reason that "scale weight" is a poor indicator of the healthiness of a diet is that depending on the diet you may be losing mass via fat loss, muscle loss, water loss, etc. What's more important is body fat percentage reduction if we are talking about both traditional Western attractiveness and (usually) physical health overall. There are diets and lifestyles that make you more attractive and also increase your life expectancy.
      - deno 8y ago
        Sustainability should be whether or not you are going around hungry. Because if not, then why would you ever stop the diet, or even worse go back to the old habits? Why would it be surprising that you would then gain your weight back? And yeah muscle tissue is the important one. Any diet is sustainable until you burn through all your secondary reserves. How many buff vegetarians do you see? In my experience, you need to be a bona fide nutritional expert to maintain muscle mass on an exclusively plant-based diet.
- radicalbyte 8y ago
  Good going. It's amazing what creating a caloric deficit combined with weight training can achieve. I've also lost weight, I'm down about 9 kg of real weight (using the weight from week 2 of diet as start point) in 4 months. I took four weeks in Jan "off" from my diet, just eating when I was hungry (unfortunately lots of crisps). I still dropped 2kg over that period but 0.5kg of that was muscle. I changed me eating pattern such that I ate a normal balanced evening meal (50% veg, 25% protein/carb) with either a banana for breakfast and two slices of bread with filling for lunch OR porridge for breakfast and a banana for lunch. On trainings days I have two eggs on my bread and ham if I have it in stock. I've also added about 2kg of muscle mass overall. I would strongly recommend following a "diet" that you can stick to long term. I've done the whole meat-only diet, I've done the 6-a-day bodybuilders diet. I've done soup diets. Every single time I've put most of the weight back on afterwards and have had to battle hunger the whole way through. With my current attempt it's far easier because I'm not hungry and I love what I'm eating.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  > My health cares not for your wife's education. From all I've seen nutritional sciences barely qualify as a science given the large corpus of falsehoods produced by it, even in recent years. (Remember cholesterol in eggs?)
abtinf 8y ago
In all seriousness: as a non-expert who has read a few popular books that make contradictory claims, “nutrition” seems to be a field of non-knowledge, with about the same scientific credibility as social studies. So what does it mean to have a PhD in nutrition—-are there experts with a track record of scientific rigor whose claims have withstood close scrutiny?
- jstewartmobile 8y ago
  I like Taleb too, but looking at what has happened to software, what does it mean to have a PhD in computer science? Or even an MD for that matter, judging by the drive-by prescribing most doctors do. The older I get, the more I understand why red-state bubba hates most accredited "professionals".
- sridca 8y ago
  Nevermind PhD, all MD education on nutrition is based on weak science--almost no clinical trials to support current recommendations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19177014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19177014
- teach 8y ago
  Thanks for asking a serious question. Getting a PhD in nutrition is the same as another other PhD -- you study at a graduate program under an existing tenured professor in that field, do original research and successfully defend your dissertation. My wife happens to have gotten her undergrad degree at a great school, did her dietetic internship at an excellent hospital and worked as a dietitian for a decade before returning to do her graduate work at an even better school. But one can call themselves a "nutritionist" with no training whatsoever; the term isn't legally protected like "doctor" is. Nutrition is a field where the underlying science is difficult as, say, cryptography, but is far more obviously relevant to the average person's life. So popular books are easy to get published and there's no guarantee that the author has much actual nutrition training at all. And again unlike crypto there are several large, entrenched, deep-pocketed interests in America that aggressively promote low-quality science to increase consumption of their products. When you make tens of billions of dollars per year, it's not too hard to fund a hundred studies that year and use p-hacking and other tricks to get at least a couple to come out with some result that shows your industry in a good light. Then you make sure that those get covered with a headline in some newspaper or magazine. > Are there experts with a track record of scientific rigor? I'm not the one with the PhD but I know that my wife is a big fan of both Walter Willett and Marion Nestle.
tomhoward 8y ago
There's a modern movement of people adopting an all-carnivore diet [1][2], who report it to be effective at overcoming conditions like autoimmune illness, depression and other chronic illnesses that defied other forms of treatment. The theory is that for highly sensitive individuals, any carb/fiber/allergenic content in food causes inflammation and dysbiosis, which leads to these chronic conditions. They believe that by removing all these food components, even if the diet has low levels of essential nutrients like Vitamin C, they are absorbed and utilised better than in a regular diet, due to the reduced inflammatory activity. I haven't tried it and won't be doing it myself, but I have been through episodes in my life where I was afflicted by these kinds of chronic "mystery" illnesses that didn't seem to respond to any kind of treatment, and I can understand the kind of pain and exasperation that would lead people to try this. [1] https://hvmn.com/podcast/meat-heals-the-autoimmune-disease-case-ft-mikhaila-peterson-episode-92 https://hvmn.com/podcast/meat-heals-the-autoimmune-disease-c... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/8f0o1w/my_experience_with_medium_term_zc_for_gi/ https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/8f0o1w/my_experie...
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  I'm a celiac and I have a slightly different take on it. I've cut out gluten, sugar, caffeine, sodium nitrites, and MSG as triggers for sinus headaches (took years of trial and error to identify them all). First, I love hearing carnivore diet stories because I relate to them a lot. Varying symptoms, cut out some foods, drastically improved health. I lived for 23 years with sinus headaches, I had to figure out how to work through them in college. Life is so nice now that I don't want to take a drill to my forehead. That said, I think the carnivore diet is the shotgun blast approach. I bet there are specific triggers for their symptoms that they could identify by following a strict diet (e.g. chicken and rice) and slowly reintroducing stuff. It's an area that is drastically understudied. All the celiac papers are on gastrointestinal issues (which I had, but the sinus headaches were 50 times worse). My understanding is eating gluten while celiac causes your body to attack your small intestine, which causes deterioration. This usually leads to problems with FODMAPs. My brother has issues with lactose, and for me it was fructose. It's hard going to something that isn't evidence backed, but sometimes the best we can do is do the experiment on ourselves. I'm tracking what I eat everyday and when I get sinus headaches. I primarily eat protein. I get 3 beef patties and 2 small chicken breasts each day from the burger place at work. The french fries and corn chips at work are safe for me to eat, so those are the carbs I get regularly. I take a vitamin C supplement. On the weekends I cook steak, and some brazilian cheese breads. There is also a brand of gluten free bread with no sugar that I really like. I'm extremely fortunate that I work somewhere that can accommodate my diet and that I can afford meat regularly outside of that. So yea, shout out to everyone else with weird food reactions, stay strong.
eesmith 8y ago
The information you gave seems to contradict information from elsewhere. You write "An explorer might last a little while on an all-meat diet". As the Maclean's article points out, "The Arctic explorer Stefansson and a former Arctic confrère, Andersen, went on an exclusive meat diet for a year". I think of "little bit", for a diet, as being somewhat less than one year. How long do you mean by it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson#Advocacy_of_an_exclusively_meat_diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson#Advocacy... further points out "In the end, the one-year project stretched to four years, during which time the two men ate only the meat they could kill and the fish they could catch in the Canadian Arctic. Neither of the two men suffered any adverse after-effects from their four-year experiment." Surely four years is enough to show that one can last a long time on an all-meat diet, yes? You write "The Inuit for example, only avoid scurvy by getting their vitamin C from raw fish." The Wikipedia article on Inuit cuisine, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine , says instead, "Vitamin C is obtained through sources such as caribou liver, kelp, whale skin, and seal brain; because these foods are typically eaten raw or frozen, the vitamin C they contain, which would be destroyed by cooking, is instead preserved." Note that while those meats are raw, they are not fish. The Wikipedia page cites http://discovermagazine.com/2004/oct/inuit-paradox http://discovermagazine.com/2004/oct/inuit-paradox (which in turn cites the same Stefansson described in the Maclean's article) wherein we can read: > Native foods easily supply those 10 milligrams of scurvy prevention, especially when organ meats—preferably raw—are on the menu. For a study published with Kuhnlein in 2002, Fediuk compared the vitamin C content of 100-gram (3.55-ounce) samples of foods eaten by Inuit women living in the Canadian Arctic: Raw caribou liver supplied almost 24 milligrams, seal brain close to 15 milligrams, and raw kelp more than 28 milligrams. Still higher levels were found in whale skin and muktuk. This makes it seem that the Inuit were not "only" dependent on fish, but also had non-fish sources for dietary vitamin C. The underlying scientific article is at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889157502910537 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915750... . It lists raw fish eggs, raw whale, caribou liver, ringed seal liver, and blueberries as the most notable sources of vitamin C in traditional foods.
- teach 8y ago
  Thanks for calling out my mistake on fish vs meat. For what it's worth, I had originally typed "raw meat" but then second-guessed myself and changed it to fish. And my wife wasn't around to correct me. I'm aware that the article claims that these two went on an exclusive meat diet for a year. I'm saying that personally I don't believe the claim. Alternatively, that it's true but that they accidentally got required nutrition in ways similar to the Inuit.
virtuallynathan 8y ago
Plain old cow muscle meat contains at least enough in 1lb to prevent scurvy (10mg). Vitamin C competes for glucose transport, so less glucose means less need for vitamin C. What other vitamins and minerals can’t be found in animal products? So far as I know, pretty much 0. The vegans on the other hand... no B12, limited K2 (except fermented stuff), limited vitamin A, limited EPA/DHA/DPA/CLA, limited vitamin D (mushrooms maybe have some D2?). I’m being generous with “limited” here.
tomp 8y ago
In modern times, you can supplement vitamins that you don’t get with food. Otherwise e.g. vegans wouldn’t survive (I think their diet is missing B12).
- coldtea 8y ago
  It's always from slightly worse to no absorption at all though, if you take them as supplements. Getting them from food is optimal.
  - randomsearch 8y ago
    Pro tip for vegans or veggies taking B12: chew the pill before you swallow. You’ll absorb more, according to “vegan for life” by Norris and Messina (which seems pretty well referenced).

jstewartmobile 8y ago

I like meat, but I wonder if the powers that be reached all the way back to 1929 for this nugget because there's a surplus they want to liquidate. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/24/17606958/meat-cheese-surplus-visualized https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/24/17606958/me...

gammateam 8y ago

> a lot of us might be dwelling too anxiously on what to eat and what not to eat 100 years and nothing has changed

sridca 8y ago
Ha, post on HN that you are on a carnivore diet and people will pounce on you to tell you that you are not eating """healthy""".
- frou_dh 8y ago
  Warring internet factions of meme-dieters are all lamers.
  - sridca 8y ago
    And so are their criticisers. Why don't we all become nihilists and stop curing our medical conditions via dietary intervention?
    - frou_dh 8y ago
      It's the internet part. Taking something as deeply rooted in the physical world as food, and using online as a venue to clash over it. It's a recipe for lame outcomes.
lars512 8y ago
Today 70% of the adult US population is classified as overweight. Globally the rate is 30% and rising, at some 2.3 billion people now. The top three global causes of death are "lifestyle-related" illnesses. Perhaps dwelling a little on what we eat is reasonable. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...

glangdale 8y ago

A detail not mentioned here was that (if I remember correctly) they initially ate an all-muscle-meat diet and had real problems; it was only after they included a lot of organ meat (imitating the Inuit) that things stabilized. I think eating liver can get you enough Vitamin C, for example.

saagarjha 8y ago
Liver also has enough Vitamin A to give you hypervitaminosis A if you’re not careful.
- virtuallynathan 8y ago
  You have to eat a heck of a lot, but definitely be careful with polar bear liver :)
latch 8y ago
Inuits, and possibly others, also consumed predigested vegetation in animal stomachs (1) Also, worth noting that a meat-heavy diet can also kill you from lack of fat. This is known as protein poisoning. This obviously depends on what your source of meat is. (1) https://www2.dmu.dk/1_viden/2_publikationer/3_fagrapporter/rapporter/fr528.pdf https://www2.dmu.dk/1_viden/2_publikationer/3_fagrapporter/r...
- mtgx 8y ago
  Weren't the Inuits or some other population preferring the fatty sides of the animal and throwing the muscle to their dogs? I heard that about them somewhere.
  - gnulinux 8y ago
    Muscle tissue is very protein rich, but is of very low protein and micronutrient density. Humans need a certain amount of protein per day, and it's very easy to get that from any animal tissue. The hard part is getting micronutrients and calories. Well, fats are calory dense, and organ tissue is micronutrient dense. I don't think not eating muscle tissue makes any sense in modern day. Nobody will just eat whale organ tissue any more, realistically. I mean, if you really do eat it, it might work, but will you really do that? You need those lean proteins from animals and you'll hopefully supplement fats, vitamins and minerals from other sources. Animals muscle is very Omega 6 rich, so ideally you wanna eat lean proteins (chicken, turkey breast, lean red meat...) and supplement your diet with Omega 3 sources like salmon, acai berry, walnut, flaxseed etc...

saagarjha 8y ago

I’m curious how other mammals, which are essentially purely carnivorous, get their vitamins and minerals. Presumably they’re similar enough to us that they’d require similar amounts?

yostrovs 8y ago
They, except us, guinea pigs, and a few others, synthesize vitamin C within their bodies.
- bchallenor 8y ago
  I find this pretty fascinating. Apparently it's a single gene that is responsible for the inability to synthesize vitamin C. [1] [1] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/401/why-do-humans-not-produce-vitamin-c-like-other-mammals https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/401/why-do-human...

Proven 8y ago

But that was before global warming. If we don’t stop eating meat the world will come to an end in 12 years.

sridca 8y ago

For some perspective, contrast this to the current fashionable trend of recommending plant-based diets where people unwittingly use nutrition epidemiology studies to validate their beliefs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19100718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19100718

newnewpdro 8y ago

Something I've read multiple times throughout the years being somewhat curious about nutrition and diets is that the Inuit's would often eat their meat raw. When eaten raw, there can actually be significant carbohydrates present. The mitochondria for instance contain glucose in-flight that apparently gets destroyed by the cooking process. At least that's what I've read. It seems plausible to me that one could get all the nutrition they need eating copious amounts of raw animal flesh, drinking the blood, eating the liver, everything.

6nf 8y ago
There are no essential carbohydrates. Your body can function perfectly fine without them.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  My intention in mentioning the carbohydrates lost when cooked was more meant to suggest other nutrients are also likely intact when consuming the meat raw. The classical Inuit diet is more unique than just being meat-based, it's also mostly raw. This detail is often overlooked by those using the Inuit diet as proof for some dietary argument.

slics 8y ago

All humans are unique in their own way- thus what might be working on some humans it might have a different effect in some others. As an example: My wife has horrible migraines almost every other week. She has followed so many different diets that worked for some others but didn’t even improve her migraines at all. Simply put, be mindful about what you read and what you put in your body.

dzink 8y ago
Sleep depravation releases a stress hormone that can also cause migraines. Check if they correlate to times she has missed on usual sleep and just taken a nap to restore it ( frequent culprit).
fouc 8y ago
>The "classic" ketogenic diet is a special high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that helps to control seizures in some people with epilepsy. Doctors usually recommend the ketogenic diet for children whose seizures have not responded to several different seizure medicines. You're saying she already tried a ketogenic diet for a few months and it didn't help?
b_tterc_p 8y ago
You can get tested for micro allergies. Might find out you have a common trigger.

openloop 8y ago

Oh shit it’s 2019 tho.

davesailer 8y ago

More info. Vilhjalmur Stefansson's book, "THE FAT OF THE LAND": https://web.archive.org/web/20180802084820/http://highsteaks.com/the-fat-of-the-land-not-by-bread-alone-vilhjalmur-stefansson.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180802084820/http://highsteaks... Vilhjalmur Stefansson's coverage of the same topics from Harper's Monthly Magazine, November 1935: - Part 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20180109155358/http://www.biblelife.org/stefansson1.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20180109155358/http://www.biblel... - Part 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180104021843/http://www.biblelife.org:80/stefansson2.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20180104021843/http://www.biblel... - Part 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20171206075942/http://www.biblelife.org:80/stefansson3.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20171206075942/http://www.biblel... The Harper's Magazine articles cover the same ground as the book but are better written in my opinion. Also note: I am not associated with any web site.

dilap 8y ago

Owsley "The Bear" Stanley (legendary SF producer of acid and sometimes sound engineer for Grateful Dead) was huge all-meat guy. http://highsteaks.com/carnivores-creed/owsley-the-bear-stanley/ http://highsteaks.com/carnivores-creed/owsley-the-bear-stanl... Stayed healthy till his death in a car crash at 76. A fun story here: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/uncle_johns_ham_the_grateful_deads_all-meat_diet https://dangerousminds.net/comments/uncle_johns_ham_the_grat...

mruts 8y ago

I pretty much only eat meat and bread. I’ve only eaten vegetables a handful of times in my life, usually because my parents were forcing me when I was young. It’s not so much a conscious choice as just who I am, I personally find vegetables pretty gross. Though it’s not really about vegetables either I think I just have some weird food phobias: I don’t like my food to touch, I only eat ‘plain’ things, I need my food to be homogenous (like smooth salsa vs chunky salsa).

jchanimal 8y ago
This book will probably extend your lifespan by much longer than it takes to read. https://charleseisenstein.org/books/the-yoga-of-eating/ https://charleseisenstein.org/books/the-yoga-of-eating/
- mruts 8y ago
  I’m exactly sure what that book is about, but reading the description, it seems to be geared for people (women?) who have trouble eating healthy and want to. I’ve never really met someone like me before, but let me explain my seemingly unique situation. You know how when you look at garbage or vomit you have this viceral reaction of disgust? That’s me, but for most food. I don’t even like to look at salad, it makes me want to vomit. I’ve been this way since I was born (according to my parents) and maybe if I worked really hard and CBT or something for years I could overcome it. But why fight it? I’m not overweight, if a little bit out of shape. I’m happy with what I eat (steak, pizza, plain hamburgers, chinese food with no vegetables, candy, etc) and feel fine (though I don’t have anything else to reference I guess).
  - nate_meurer 8y ago
    I know two people just like yourself. One has a texture aversion, to the point of gagging, and both eat very plain diets like what you describe. They were essentially raised on the American kids menu (hamburger, fires, chicken nuggets, macaroni, grilled cheese sandwiches, etc.), and the picky eating became worse over time, continuing right into adulthood. The younger of my acquaintances is in his 20s, skinny but with a gut, visibly undernourished to my eyes. My older friend is in her 40s, and is suffering severe health problems likely due to or exacerbated by her diet. I have many friends and acquaintances who put no effort into directing their kids away from their picky eating habits, and the kids invariably end up living on the canonical kids-menu diet. Some kids naturally grow into more balanced eating habits and preferences, but many don't, and those parents are setting their children up for a lifetime of health issues. This may or may not have anything to do with you. It's just what I see in my circle.

onnnon 8y ago

I found Dr. Ede's website helpful on the subject if anyone else is interested. She also includes a lot of information on other food types as well. http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/food/meats/ http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/food/meats/