Why I'm Taking On the Carnivore Diet
I did a video before comparing the carnivore diet to plant based eating, and a bunch of the comments gave me this utter nonsense supporting the carnivore diet. So today I'm going to lay out, as thoroughly as I can, why I believe the carnivore diet is one of the worst diets out there — and after you read this, I hope it will feel unconscionable, unthinkable to continue eating carnivore. To me, love is telling you what you need to hear when you might not want to hear it.
Now, I'm not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. What follows is my opinion and my experience, built on studies and research from doctors and universities that I pulled together into a presentation. I've made it super quick and effective by looking at some of the very clear hard facts behind the numbers, and I'll simplify it for you.
Here's the first number that got my attention: according to research I've read, every single burger you eat is associated with about 30 minutes off your life expectancy. That's how bad I believe the carnivore diet is. According to a large amount of research, it's also utterly unsustainable from an environmental point of view. Every single burger is like pouring 600 gallons of water down the drain. I remember my ex would talk about water conservation and get upset when somebody left a faucet running. Then when she'd go out to eat, I'd say that burger you're eating took 600 gallons of water — water for the food a cow had to eat to produce that hamburger.
Meanwhile, there is zero fiber on the carnivore diet. Americans already are not getting enough fiber, and in my view fiber is one of the most important nutrients you can get for health — one of the easiest things you can do to raise your health is eat more fiber. And the cholesterol self-reported in one of the few carnivore studies shows numbers in what I consider dangerous territory. This diet is absolutely one of the worst things I've ever seen, and no amount of nonsense makes up for that. Meanwhile, people on the carnivore diet cite the most ridiculous sources — some influencer in a video talking to them. That doesn't mean anything. Anyone can get on camera and say whatever they want.
Following the Money and the Studies
Let's look at the studies behind carnivore. I can only find nine studies in history on the carnivore diet, because this is a pretty new fad diet being pushed by influencers — and it's questionable why they're even pushing it. I suspect some may be getting paid to push it. We know for a fact that there are huge amounts of money in the meat and dairy industry. So why would a diet promoting carnivore be getting pushed? To me it makes perfect sense, because there are huge amounts of money in marketing meat and dairy. Meanwhile, there's almost no research I can find that indicates anything positive about it at all.
If we need to define the carnivore diet: meat, eggs, animal products, animal fat — generally no vegetables, fruit, beans, grains, or nuts. In my opinion it's the most extreme, most ridiculous diet on the planet. It goes directly against a book like How Not to Die, which says if you want to live long and prosper, eat vegetables, fruit, beans, grains, and nuts — which is what I do, and have done for a decade. I've never been in better health.
All the medical history on carnivore amounts to nine small human studies. And the favorite study that carnivore fans consistently cite showed, as I read it, that the people on it had cholesterol in heart attack territory. But what might be even worse is the life expectancy you shave off. University of Michigan researchers scored foods in terms of minutes of healthy life gained or lost per serving, and by that scoring, carnivore takes time off your life. Losing 30 minutes of lifespan from one burger is the equivalent of smoking two cigarettes — in terms of carcinogens and life-expectancy impact, smoking two cigarettes shaves about 30 minutes off your life expectancy, and so does eating one single burger. A hot dog scores 36 minutes lost per serving. And I've shaved a hell of a lot off my own lifespan, because I used to eat a hell of a lot of meat.
But here's the amazing thing: when you eat beans, nuts, and fruit, by that same research these actually add time onto your life expectancy. So I'm hoping all the beans and nuts and fruit I've eaten will actually make up for all the meat I ate in my teens and my twenties. And it's one thing to have one serving of meat and shave off 30 minutes in a day — how insane is it that on a full carnivore diet you could be shaving hours off per day?
What I've Seen With My Own Eyes
I also personally have never seen one person on the carnivore diet who looked healthy to me in person. Every single person I've seen on it has looked bloated and sick to me. Now, I'm not a doctor, and this is just my own impression — but I've seen hundreds of people in person. The whole plant eaters like me tend to look absolutely amazing to me. And when I ask people what kind of diet they eat, in my experience it's almost always heavily plant based if I think they look healthy, and almost always heavily meat or ultra processed junk if they don't. To me this stuff is super obvious — you'd have to have your eyes and ears shut not to see it.
Look at the cholesterol numbers. A healthy LDL, like mine, is under 100 — and I believe mine is there because I haven't eaten any significant amount of meat or animal products over the last 10 years. In the carnivore study data I've seen, the average was 172, and if you measured the meat-only eaters, 256. To me, that means you are setting yourself up for a heart attack — which is kind of obvious. If you stuff yourself with meat, I don't find it surprising that heart trouble follows. I swear this is stuff we know intuitively. I know a person in my own life who switched to this carnivore diet and was in the hospital within 24 hours. You don't see that on the carnivore videos, do you?
Influencers try to compensate by telling you cholesterol does not matter, but every major heart organization on earth disagrees — their position is that high LDL cholesterol causes heart attacks. It's only on YouTube, where people can say whatever they want, that you hear otherwise. And look, I'm a YouTuber with six channels who uploads six videos a day and publishes and says whatever I want — I recognize the benefits of saying whatever you want. But you need to be careful who you trust and who you listen to. Do they actually know something valuable, and are they living it themselves? The way I see it, if you took a pill that raised your cholesterol to 172, it would be pulled off the market overnight. Yet the carnivore diet keeps spreading.
Here's one that struck me. The World Health Organization — and I certainly don't agree with everything they say — has processed meat like bacon on the same carcinogen list as cigarettes: a Group 1 carcinogen that contributes to colon cancer. Studies linking millions of people found associations with type 2 diabetes; a study tracking 120,000 people found associations with earlier death. All the research you want is out there challenging the carnivore diet. The question is, are you going to look for it? It's as easy as going into your AI program and typing up all the research against the carnivore diet, and then trying to get some research in favor of it — you'll find almost nothing.
A Diet I Believe Your Gut Can't Survive
Haven't we heard the narratives about how important gut health is? I personally know how important it is. There are zero grams of fiber on the carnivore diet. Meanwhile, most Americans aren't even getting enough fiber, your body needs 25 to 35 grams of it, and 100 percent of the fiber you get comes from plants — there are no real workarounds. Personally, I would not mess with fiber supplements or any of that. Fiber feeds your gut bacteria, keeps you regular, steadies your blood sugar, and pulls cholesterol out of your body. If fiber were a drug, I'd call it a miracle drug. But people on the carnivore diet seem absolutely unaware of how important fiber is, while plant based eating gives you all the fiber you need. I eat a lot of fiber, I'm very regular, and my gut health is shockingly good. And is it any surprise that, with my gut health this good, the rest of my body seems to work nearly flawlessly too? It's not.
But have a carnivore person tell you how all this is working for them — and for how long. The problem, as I see it, is that you can get away with doing some of this stuff for a while. The carnivore diet hasn't even been around at scale long enough to see where it goes long term. To me it looks bad. It looks like the Titanic just hitting an iceberg: people don't realize it's sinking yet, but I'd get off as soon as possible.
The Blue Zones Tell the Story
If you want to look at the longest lived people on earth, the Okinawans ate about 98 percent plants, and all of the longest lived blue zones on earth focus their diets on whole plant based foods. All of them. All of them minimize meat and animal products. All of them. And yet carnivore goes directly against that. So the way I put it: if you want to be healthy for the rest of your life, pick a plant based diet for you and your wife. There are literally zero meat-only blue zones. There aren't even any blue zones where meat is a significant part of the diet — some ate a tiny bit of meat, but historically they usually couldn't even get much meat. And now some of the old blue zones have transitioned toward meat and junk food, and they've transitioned away from being blue zones. Long lived populations have been built on plant based eating. This is a whole bunch of historical fact you can look up yourself.
On the plant based side — the winning diet, in my view — one analysis I looked at combined 76 studies with millions of people studied, and found plant based eating associated with lower diabetes, lower heart disease, and lower cancer. Nothing on the carnivore side comes even close to this, and that's just one particular analysis I took. There are thousands and thousands of studies on plant based eating and plant based interventions. Read the book How Not to Diet. Actually, if you want the trilogy, read How Not to Die, then How Not to Diet, then How Not to Age by Dr. Michael Greger — the best research I've ever seen on diet and eating.
Vegan Junk Food Is Still Junk Food
Now, some people will say, well, I ate vegetarian, I ate vegan, and I had all these problems. In my experience, that's usually because you're still eating trash. Oreos are technically vegan, and they're absolute trash. I've known people who ate vegetarian or vegan, but when I look at their diet, they are not eating anything close to whole plant based. Potato chips are not whole plant — the majority of the nutrition has been fried away and there's a whole bunch of oil in them. Eating a baked potato is whole plant. Eating hummus is whole plant. Eating beans is whole plant. Junk food like popsicles, ice cream, candy, and cookies — they make vegan versions of all of it, and none of it is whole plant, and in my opinion none of it is good for you. So it's totally possible to eat vegan or vegetarian and still have a crappy diet.
Why Some People "Feel Better" on Carnivore
Sometimes what you're seeing is people who switch to carnivore from a crappy vegan or crappy vegetarian diet, and then they say, oh, I felt better. Yeah — maybe you felt better because you stopped eating a bunch of processed junk and putting it in your body. Maybe if you had switched to whole plant eating and stopped putting all that processed garbage in your body, you'd have felt better off that too.
The Environmental Cost Nobody Wants to Talk About
But even beyond the personal health effects, we shouldn't just be thinking selfishly about our own lifespan. I roasted my ex over this so many times — maybe it's part of the reason we're divorced — but it's so irrational to me how some people care so much about the environment while every single burger they eat is like an F-you to the environment. A lot of the reason forests are getting cleared around the world is to pasture and feed beef. About 75 percent of our farmland right now goes to livestock. You could feed the entire population of Earth multiple times over just on the farmland that's devoted to livestock. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people are starving to death every day on Earth because they can't get enough food, and we're using three quarters of the farmland to feed livestock. And you only get about 18 percent of those calories back, along with 15 times as much methane, which is a greenhouse gas.
So if you care about the environment, I believe eating meat is utterly unconscionable in anything besides the tiniest portion. Maybe you want to have one hamburger a year? Fine. But eating burgers regularly is like contributing an extra 20 gallons of water use every single day. Is 20 gallons a big deal? That's enough for a 10 minute shower on a 2 gallon per minute showerhead. So picture turning the shower on and letting it run for 10 minutes every single day for a year — or you could eat one single burger. That's the amount of water we're talking about.
And this is roughly the same for any kind of meat. I love when people say, well, I eat chicken, that's not so bad. In my view, all meat is more similar to each other than different. Yes, the numbers might be a little lower for chicken, but you're still looking at hundreds of gallons of water for every piece of chicken. And don't get me started on fish — I love the pescatarians. Fishing has been devastating sea life; 70 percent of the surface of the earth is water, and whole ecosystems are being destroyed by human fishing. The way I see it, there's no way out except whole plant. You're locked into whole plant — anything else, I believe, and you're hurting your body and the environment. Sorry to be the one to tell you. And to be clear, this isn't medical advice — this is what other people who know much more than I do have said. I'm synthesizing it, I'm living it myself, and I'm repeating it.
Follow the Money Behind Carnivore Marketing
Now, some of you might wonder, how did I get tricked into this carnivore diet? I went out with a woman who sells people coaching for the carnivore diet, telling them it's going to solve their health problems. I thought, oh my God. She does that full time on Instagram, and she runs a bunch of ads. What you need to do is follow the money. Meat, dairy, and animal products have huge marketing behind them, and a history of being willing to do almost anything to get people to buy — which, to be fair, really isn't unique in capitalism at all. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of money in whole plant based living, because whole plant based eating reduces almost every problem you'd have, which reduces almost every expense you'd have. Carnivore is the opposite. In my view, carnivore is sold on shallow information — before and after photos, miracle stories — not on real medical results.
I've had so many people tell me in person about one thing or another that's supposedly toxic about plants. Like, oh, kale creates inflammation. I don't buy it — I eat so much kale and I have no inflammation that I notice. Because nutrition is so complicated, what people do is take one tiny data point and link it without context. If there's some tiny compound in kale that can cause a little inflammation by itself, without looking at the big picture of everything else you're eating and how much, then when you put things together without context, you can say things that don't make sense — like flatly claiming kale causes inflammation. Where's the evidence for that? There's evidence of compounds that can be linked to inflammation, but where's the evidence that kale itself creates inflammation in a person? People follow claims like this, they have partial information, and they're not even presenting it right.
And I hate to break it to you, but I can say almost whatever I want online, and a lot of people go on their videos saying almost anything with almost no science behind it. So ask: what is their motivation to say it? I guarantee you, if that woman on Instagram were selling a whole plant based diet, she would not make as much money coaching as she does with carnivore, because carnivore is so different from what most people are doing. And — how do I not get too dystopian here — I've personally seen that certain narratives seem to get pushed by bots. If I make videos about certain topics, there seems to be obviously artificial traffic that pushes them, which then results in more real traffic seeing them. So what I see is that something weird is going on. Whether it's bots, paid ads, algorithms artificially pushed to hype things, or influencers who were paid, something funny is going on with how carnivore gets pitched and all the people making money off it. Here's the thing: if it really worked, would it need that much marketing to sell it? I literally read a book on whole plant based eating that was recommended to me by my uncle, a general practitioner who has practiced for 45 years. Nobody had to sell me on social media to switch. To me, that's why anyone's even thinking about the carnivore diet: it's all money. Everybody selling it, everybody teaching it and sharing it — money is their main consideration.
My Motivation, and an Invitation
With my videos, your well-being is my main consideration. I'd like to make some money too, and I've certainly set up ways to do that. If you want to talk to me about whole plant based eating — how I changed my diet, how I got away from meat, how I broke all those stupid narratives in my mind — you can schedule a call with me. Narratives like "I like steak." No, you don't — in my experience these are just memes stuck in your head that you think are true, because you don't realize you accepted programming at some point. Most kids do not like the taste of meat. That's part of why I don't go to birthday parties — I can't stand seeing parents push their kids to eat junk food when the kids intuitively know they don't want it. "Eat your pizza with pepperoni on it if you want dessert." My gosh. If you want support in breaking all this down in your mind, I've set things up so you can talk with me — but my primary motivation is to get you information that will change your life. That's what I care about. I hope this post alone is enough to change someone's life, so that you don't even need to talk to me.
Yes, carnivore has one valid point: you do need to detox off junk food. But whole plant based is the way to detox off junk food, according to the vast amounts of medical research that doctors have compiled and put into books that I've read. They've dedicated their lives, they've simplified it, and they've given it all to me.
So any time someone mentions carnivore again, I'm sending them this. No amount of superficial comments about carnivore, or "one other person said this," changes my mind — let's see how carnivore works out for you in the long term. I want to live. I love living, I love being healthy, and I can tell you what I'm attracted to: whole plant based. In my experience, it works. I've done it myself for ten years. Before that, I ate meat — I damn near ate carnivore plus junk food for about ten years too. I was fat, I hurt, and I had higher everything bad: higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol, all of it. So I've lived this firsthand from both sides — not strictly carnivore, but mostly meat and junk food with the occasional plant here and there. If you want to see more of how I live this out day to day, I share it on my Life playlist. I hope this makes a difference in your life. Let's talk.