[shijie]

Do you eat nose-to-tail? I hear a lot about people’s carnivore diets and they sound mostly like an “animal flesh diet,” which is lacking in myriad key micronutrients. It seems one would absolutely need to supplement animal flesh with kidney, liver, heart, etc... I’m curious to hear your experience.

[spacephysics]

I spent the first year and a half only doing ground beef, and sirloin tips/ribeye (grass and grain fed). More recently I begun stocking up on ground beef (shipped from a grass fed pasture), and on days I eat nose-to-tail will make a 3lb meat loaf with 1/3 a mix of ground liver, kidney, heart, 1/3 75/25 ground beef, and 1/3 55/45 ground beef with heart. Other days I'll have ribeye for my two meals.

Before the meat loaf I tried liver numerous times, usually calf liver, cooked more on the rare side as it was far more palatable. Oddly enough, and others have similar experiences, on days I ate the liver, I was satiated much sooner, and had roughly 30% less muscle meat for that day.

I was on the same page as you when I looked into the diet initially, but from the myriad of resources I've skimmed, or trusted other's review over, it seems we really are in the dark with nutritional science.

Countless epidemiological nutrition studies attempt to show causality, regardless of the amount of confounding factors they attempt to account for, then prescribe guidelines that are inherently flawed. Gwern.net has a great article on this [0]

My point is, there are most likely many other mechanisms our bodies have in it's 'arsenal' to sustain homeostasis that we have yet to map out, due to ethical, economic, and practical limitations of truly randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind nutritional studies.

That is to say, despite on paper the typical muscle-meat carnivore diet lacks nutritional variety, we see anecdotally people are generally flourishing on this diet. This I think is a significant counter example to our current model of nutrition, and will hopefully spur further research.

[0]: https://www.gwern.net/Causality

[mannanj]

Not OP but I've been doing carnivore as well for the last year, and I don't eat across the board. I generally eat Ribeyes and can share a lot of the same benefits he's mentioned. Red meat in particular actually has a fair amount of the vitamins you need such as vitamin-c and the less you cook it the more they're preserved which is why I go on the rarer side of things.