The Carnivore Diet: A Cautionary Tale for you
This is the post I've been yearning to write, the one that I was thinking about before I even created this website, and that took some time and now I can finally start writing. It has been quite a journey and it all began with the carnivore diet. I don't know if anyone will listen but I need to try, people with autoimmune issues who decide to try the carnivore diet need to know and understand the risks. So here we go this is my story.
I've had eczema/dermatitis all my life, I grew up on a typical Australian diet which didn't help and I just put up with my skin issues. For the first 23 years of my life, I was never health-focused and didn't understand people who were. At one point it got worse causing me to seek answers, I found an eczema elimination diet book and following that was able to improve things somewhat. But in the years following, I would alternate between eating this way and whatever I wanted, things would get worse and I had to go back to eliminating certain foods.
As I became progressively more interested in fitness I started to think about health more and wanted to improve things further. One day I came across the carnivore diet, it sounded stupid but the more I looked into it the more sense it made, because it is essentially the best type of elimination diet that there is. By that I mean you can’t really cut out more than eating only meat. I had found elimination diets helpful in addressing these issues previously so I started to consider the idea. I know this seems like a weird thing to do, to eat meat without vegetables or fibre, but as someone with skin issues, I was willing to try anything.
It is interesting because growing up with eczema there wasn't the discussion about autoimmune or the prevalence of people with autoimmune issues or allergic diseases that there is today, there has been an ever-growing increase as time goes on.[1][2] There is a whole ecosystem of information products, gut health supplements, and products promising to solve your problems.
So off I went on my carnivore journey with little regard for any potential long-term health impacts it would bring. As is well known there is a definite transition period where your body gets used to a high-fat and high-protein diet, as well as dealing with electrolyte changes. I was going to FitStop (a functional fitness gym) at the time and my workouts did struggle for a while from electrolyte changes due to less salt in the diet from processed carbohydrates, but I had recently found LMNT so that mostly solved this issue. After I upped my salt intake I unintentionally achieved a previous running goal of mine which was 10 kilometres in 60 minutes or less which I had been trying to reach a year or two before. I also felt that my testosterone levels may have been higher because in one basketball game, a player from the other team kept trying to push me out of the way and I just felt different like I wanted to fight which was out of character for me. I would say carnivore was good for my skin issues at the start as I wasn't eating foods that I reacted to (the definition of an elimination diet). Because the diet is high in protein you feel very satiated and you don't have this urge to overeat like you do with processed carbohydrates. However, if you slightly overdid it and it took a while to kick in you could feel very oversatiated later like very overfull and not wanting to eat. This way of eating was also great for working out due to the protein so you didn’t have to worry about getting enough and you got pretty lean but stayed strong without really trying.
I was on the carnivore diet for 4 months and at the start it was great but about halfway through I started having some dry and itchy skin so I felt like I was missing some nutrients. I started adding in organ meats but that may not have been enough to provide me with what I needed. If I was to try it again I would try using organ supplements to support my body with the required nutrients which is a lot easier with organ supplements as you don’t have to deal with the taste. I ultimately stopped the carnivore diet after 4 months as I didn't feel it was helping me reach my goal of being free from skin issues.
One thing I didn’t expect, was after some time on the diet I found it hard mentally. At first eating lots of steak, beef mince and eggs was great because that stuff is pretty tasty but after some time I wanted to eat things that weren't dead, warm or greasy, I wanted to eat things that were alive and fresh like a lettuce leaf or some vegetables, I also wondered if there was a nutritional/biological element to this influencing of food cravings.
Inside the life of the carnivore diet: Here you can see the doona cover I cut a hole in so I could wear it while eating to stop getting meat juice/oil stains on all my clothes. I thought it was an ingenious invention.
Living this way was quite isolating as it made eating out a lot harder, to adhere to a strict carnivore way of eating you had to ask specifically for meat only at restaurants. If they used any spices other than salt you would have bathroom issues due to a much narrower microbiome, and food I came to realise, really is at the core of all our social interactions. I really felt like I was missing out on a key aspect of life, while this is common of anyone with skin issues who has trouble eating out I feel like it was a lot more isolating due not being able to eat anything other than pure meat. When I was doing it and believed in it I knew it was different, but now looking back at that way of eating, it is pretty out there. Some people do stay on the carnivore diet long term but for me, after some time I didn't find it mentally or socially sustainable. So for some people, it doesn't get to the point where it is beneficial to discuss the question of whether the carnivore diet is healthy long-term as they aren't able to adhere to it anyway.
This blog post isn’t attempting to address the question of whether the carnivore diet is healthy long-term because I don't know enough about that yet. There are some intelligent doctors and practitioners on both sides talking about this who are pretty convincing so it can be hard to know what to believe. I tried to find some research for this blog post but didn’t find anything relevant, so this is purely anecdotal from my own experience and not science-based. The carnivore diet continues to take a place in the nutrition conversation due to the large amount of people flocking to it to escape their autoimmune issues. It’s an area that is starting to be researched and I remain curious about where the truth lies and look forward to discussing this in future. For now, what I will say is that if people are talking about how symptoms/issues went away on the carnivore diet, this could be achieved with other vegetarian or vegan elimination diets. It is not necessarily because the carnivore diet is healthier for you, but because of cutting out certain plant foods that people can’t tolerate. It is widely accepted that some plant foods do cause problems for some people, especially if they have autoimmune issues.
What I want people to know is that it’s not just an experiment you can try for a few months and if you don’t like it you can go back and there won’t be any issues. That is what I thought and when I came off the carnivore diet and started with other foods again I started reacting to so many foods. Foods that I was perfectly fine with before the carnivore diet. At the time I didn’t understand it but I knew something had changed, what I would later come to learn was I had drastically changed my microbiome so my food reactions were even worse when introducing plant foods again.
As Kiran Krishnan said, “Because it reduces diversity, to me that’s a long-term misstep.”[3] And that is something that I have personally found to be true, for just over two years I have been on a journey to get my microbiome back to its pre-carnivore state. There’s a big difference between foods I used to be able to tolerate and foods I can tolerate now, and maybe there is an age component but I am fairly sure carnivore had one of the biggest impacts on reducing what I can tolerate. Before I knew what the microbiome was I was seeking support because I could tell something had changed after the carnivore diet. But looking back now it seems pretty clear that I caused a major die-off of bacterial diversity and that is something I am still suffering the effects of today. So I went through a program with a nutritionist and microbiologist which helped a bit and now as an individual I have invested considerable time, energy and resources to improve my microbiome health. Whilst pre-carnivore I still had skin issues I would give anything to get back to where I was, and I don’t know if I ever will.
If you have read this far I hope it has resonated, I want people to be thoughtful about how and if they engage with the carnivore diet. If I had read an article like this I may not have tried it and be where I am now. So if this reaches one person I will be happy.
Thanks for reading.
References
Murray, M. (2024, March 28). Guest Blog: A Major health crisis: The alarming rise of autoimmune Disease - National Health Council. National Health Council. Retrieved August 17, 2024, from https://nationalhealthcouncil.org/blog/a-major-health-crisis-the-alarming-rise-of-autoimmune-disease/
Wang, A. (2024, February 7). Why are autoimmune and allergic diseases rising? Yale School of Medicine. Retrieved August 17, 2024, from https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/why-are-autoimmune-and-allergic-diseases-rising-andrew-wang/
Chappus, J. (Host). (2024, May 24). Microbiologist Dispels the MYTHS About Gut Health & the Microbiome | Kiran Krishnan (No. 600) [YouTube podcast episode]. In The Ultimate Health Podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGTvMQzG5T0&t=4629s
