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by ywnner_0001 2677 days 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.

5 comments

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)

Other things to remember:

- Personal health and nutrition is one of several criteria by which diets can be compared - A carnivore diet is harmful to the environment - A carnivore diet causes more suffering to sentient animals

It doesn’t necessarily cause more suffering. The only thing it necessitates is more death. Suffering of livestock is not a given, though it’s very likely.
Yes, I was indeed making a point about the actual conditions of farmed animals; not an abstract one about what may hypothetically be possible. I do consider what happens in the world to be more relevant here, than what we imagine could be happening.

Death, even if painless, is usually something we prefer not to have happen to us, most of the time.

FWIW, a lot of people who are really into meat also care about the living conditions of the animals they eat.

And regarding death: the alternative for livestock is not a life of leisure where they get to meander through the country side and nibbling a little here and a little there. No, the alternative is never being alive. And death on a farm is usually much more humane than death in nature.

> No, the alternative is never being alive.

Interesting. If we accept this argument -- that one who has brought someone else into existence is allowed to use lethal force on them (although "gently") -- because otherwise this someone wouldn't be in existence; then wouldn't we then also have to allow human parents to euthanise their children?

> And death on a farm is usually much more humane than death in nature.

Non-human animals are usually transported in trucks or on trains for many hours or days on their way to the slaughterhouse, with little access to food and water, under conditions you surely wouldn't want to travel.

Regardless, if we ignore that, and assume the trip to the slaughterhouse is 100% painless, would you still want someone to give you a "humane" death at the time of their choosing? Often animals are gassed; and I wonder how the same method of causing someone's death can be "humane" when applied to non-humans, but not (and here I'm of course making an assumption on your behalf and might be wrong) when done to humans?

It doesn’t necessarily even necessitate more death.

If you ate only meat you eat the equivalent of 1 cow per year.

Compare that with the amount of bugs, nematodes, rodents, etc. killed by modern farming methods.

Consider that it takes anywhere from 6 to 20 pounds of feed to get a pound of beef. That's way more resources used, environmental harm done and creatures killed to produce meat.
Only if you replace meat consumption with grains. A quick look at vegan and vegetarian recipes on social media makes it obvious that is not happening. Plants have a 50x range in the amount of calories they provide for $1, which suggests a similar range in their environmental burden.
What do you think most farmed cows eat?
> 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.

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.
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.

Chronic reflux, constipation, nocturnal urination etc also make these diets unsustainable.

As buff vegan the proportion of buff vegans among vegans is probably the same as proportion of buff non-vegans among non-vegans. You have to be braindead not to be able to figure out what to eat as vegan to grow muscle, in the worst case I guess you can go to factory farmers who have mastered the art of growing muscle from plants..

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.

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?

> 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.

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

> I think their theory is you don't need as much Vitamin C when you don't eat carbohydrates.

If that's the theory, it's definitely wrong. Vitamin C serves basic structural purposes like binding your cells to your other cells.

Herbal teas, like anything with hibiscus as the base can be a very potent source of Vitamin C as well.
> Collagen is a primary structural protein in the human body, necessary for healthy blood vessels, muscle, skin, bone, cartilage, and other connective tissues. Defective connective tissue leads to fragile capillaries, resulting in abnormal bleeding, bruising, and internal hemorrhaging. Collagen is an important part of bone, so bone formation is also affected. Teeth loosen, bones break more easily, and once-healed breaks may recur. Defective collagen fibrillogenesis impairs wound healing. Untreated scurvy is invariably fatal. [0]

Looks like we should see several prominent YouTubers die horribly... about a year ago.

> The onset of symptoms of scurvy depends on how long it takes for the person to use up their limited stores of vitamin C. The human body is unable to make vitamin C. For example, if the diet includes no vitamin C at all, the average onset of symptoms is about four weeks. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy#Pathogenesis

[1] https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/scu...

Sv3rige aka Gatis is notorious for being bashful about his consumption of fruit and vegetable juice but maybe supplementing with human blood lowers one's vitamin C requirement?

He doesn't say much about the blood's nutritional content in the clip here but he does express what might be a feeling of sexual arousal at around 2:50: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX9T4xJqxFo

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.

The Bear (Owsley Stanley) ate nothing but animal products for several decades. It's definitely possible.
Recently, he added chicken to the menu.
I don’t see what Jordan Peterson gains by lying. If anything it’s just another thing people can use to attack him.
He and his daughter do consultations at $150/hour based on the diet, so he has $150/hour to gain by lying.
By your strange logic contractors and freelancers would automatically be lying as well.
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.
I may be mistaken, but I don't think there's dairy in the carnivore diet. Just meat, organs, and maybe bone marrow? Also, I'm not sure why you would think that burger buns and potato chips are so irresistible as to doubt people don't eat those things?
Dairy is optional on the carnivore diet, some believe it is better without as it can be another source of allergens. Others are less dogmatic and see no issue with it. Lastly, some recommend to go without for some time like a month or so and then reintroduce to see how you do. In this way the carnivore diet can be used an elimination diet to discover allergens.
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.

> 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?)