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-c...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/8f0o1w/my_experie...

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.

You'll love my story. I'll keep it short.

Basically, one day, I started getting pressure and pain and ringing in my ear. It was really bad about every other day. I went to an ENT and he diagnosed me with meniere's disease and told me that I had permanent hearing loss. I kept going to doctors. One of them diagnosed me with endolymphatic hydrops.

I spent a month or so obsessively reading research papers, and internet sites seemed to basically be support groups for people whose lives are ruined and can never think straight again.

I had good reason to suspect it was an autoimmune disease, because steroids cured my symptoms. I also had my personal suspicions that wheat was involved but I couldn't correlate anything.

So I started eliminating foods and keeping a food diary. Long story short, about a year later, I was very confident that wheat was my biggest trigger. If I eat a large amount of wheat, my symptoms come back 36 hours later, and last for at least 2 days.

I struggled with the fact that I have no doctor suggestions, or diagnosis, or study of what problem I have, what it is, or any way to prove to anyone else that wheat is causing my problem. Most people think that I'm just jumping on a gluten free fad bandwagon. Oh well. I've tested it about 8 times, including blind tests where I accidentally ate wheat. I've been almost symptom free for like 2 years now.

One of the supermarkets near me often sells bags or vacuum packets lamb or beef offcuts. There are usually fatty, boney, meaty that don't display well.

Usually for about AU$4.50 a kg, compared to $14+ / kg for "quality" cuts of lamb.

I slow cook them, often with curry powder and extra turmeric, or a tomato base.

If I eat bread or pasta or baked goods regularly, I get intense urges to scratch my skin, cervical lymph nodes become active, my sinuses start getting mucousy, my knuckles and wrists start to ache, and I feel like my ears are a little blocked and sensitive.

A few good meals of mostly slow cooked mammal results in rapid improvement, and if I stay away from the things I know cause general, non-localised inflammation, I generally feel well. More awake when I'm awake, and more asleep when I'm asleep.

Just bear in mind there are people reporting the same cures from an all-plant diet. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.

There are also people who report things for almost everything. All of this anacdotal data is next to worthless.

Anecdotes are the first step to observing patterns that can lead to hypotheses that can be tested in controlled experiments.

Is there any other way that a chain of events leading to a scientific finding can begin?

Contrary to your beliefs there is lot's of data in favor of an all plant based diet (which i do not follow so I do not push any agenda here).

The data has been pretty clear since the early 90s and the large population studies that were made then.

Different diets foster different environments for bacteria. Different diets can work for many one works better than others

Its not my beliefs. I'm just pointing out that the simple act of strictly regulating your diet will almost always make you healthier because you have to watch what you eat and avoid crap like takeaway

I think a very small number of people have carb intolerance (e.g. Jordan Peterson and his daughter), but a much larger number of people would benefit from reading The Mind Body Prescription first. I was about to try keto when I found that book, which was literally a miracle cure for me.

Also meatheals.com is chock-full of anecdotes of people healing themselves using the carnivore diet.

Interesting. It's almost like religious faith-healing anecdotes.

Unfortunately most nutrition science is so bad, that I've come to the conclusion that "if it works for you, great!" If people change their diet and it makes them feel better, who am I to tell them they are wrong?

Do you have anything worthwhile to say, instead of sarcasm and cynicism, in response to people actually healing themselves by eating exclusively meat?

Or are you just here to denigrate your fellow human beings?

If a person is suffering from chronic or mild-acute allergies I usually suggest they try eating nothing but steamed or slow cooked fatty lamb or beef for at least a few days and a see if symptoms improve, then introduce vegetables one at a time.

As mammals, being allergic to mammal muscle meat and organs isn't compatible with life.

That's not necessarily true. For example, humans do not have Neu5Gc[1] unlike most mammals. Having Neu5Gc antibodies is perfectly compatible with human life, yet consumption of lamb, pork or beef can cause inflammation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Glycolylneuraminic_acid

AFAIK, none of these studies have been done on humans.

The popular article where I read about it referenced: [1] [2]. I guess it is a quite recent finding. But I am no biologist to judge.

[1] Okerblom J., Varki A.: Biochemical, Cellular, Physiological, and Pathological Consequences of Human Loss of N-Glycolylneuraminic Acid, ChemBioChem 18, 1155, 2017, DOI: 10.1002/cbic.201700077

[2] Peri S. et al.: Phylogenetic Distribution of CMP-Neu5Ac Hydroxylase (CMAH), the Enzyme Synthetizing the Proinflammatory Human Xenoantigen Neu5Gc, Genome Biology and Evolution, 2018, DOI: 10.1093/gbe/evx251

Thanks for bringing this up, I wasn't aware of it.

>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.

Famously, Jordan Peterson:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/the-peter...

This drives me crazy, this all stems from Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. We have no idea what JP or his daughter are actually eating. This is the smallest sample size of anecdotes. The fact that this diet has gotten this much attention is absurd.

No it doesn't, there are lots of people 5,10 or longer years on a zero carb diet, has nothing to do with JP. Lots of anecdotes as well ( amber ohearn, kelly hogan, shawn baker, zeroing in on health FB group etc)

A Facebook group? Really? Those are not the kinds of sources that increase credibility in my book

You cherry-picked one of several sources listed just so you could snarkily dismiss the whole point.

We're talking about groups of people experiencing similar health problems, engaging in ongoing discussion to experiment with possible remedial techniques and reporting back with their results.

If they are achieving positive results, which seems to be the case, they deserves better than this kind of sneer.

Peterson and Rogan are new kids in the block. Charlene Anderson for example has been on it for 20 years.

There is nothing absurd about this diet if it is enabling people to successfully manage their diseases (meatheals.com). You should respect and appreciate that fact instead of getting mad about it.

Diet is not religion. It is simply a tool and for some can be a lifestyle.

There are also people reporting that they have cured cancer with crystals. I mean, always consider the source.

This is such a low-quality comment.

You're talking about people who have suffered for years with painful illnesses that have seemed impossible to treat, connecting online and working together as they experiment to find possible treatments, testing the results and reporting back so others can benefit from the learnings.

It deserves better than this kind of grunting dismissal.

People say that about the crystals, too, though. And alleged non-coeliac gluten intolerance, and fluoride avoidance, and vaccine avoidance, and many, many other things.

People deserve to be judged on the outcomes they achieve and the evidence they provide.

Sure, much of the evidence around for this stuff is anecdotal or n=1 pathology results, but it's necessarily the case that anecdote and small-sample data is the first step in the chain of events that can lead to scientific findings.

If your point is simply that sometimes people believe things that are untrue, that is obvious to the point of banality.

If it’s that anyone experimenting with carnivore diets and reporting positive results should by-default be treated with distrust or contempt, your point seems to lack both compassion and scientific awareness.

Good thing these people on the carnivore diet did not have you cynically advising them when they were coming across it, eh? Otherwise they would still be suffering and this conversation may not be taking place.

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.

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.

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?

Humane is perhaps a poor word choice on my part.

But, no, I do not consider animals to be morally equivalent to humans, so I am okay having a different moral system for animals. And I, personally, would rather live to be executed than never get a chance to be alive. Life is precious. I think we forget that. Here’s something that will perhaps drive home just how precious it is. Almost every black American is the descendant of people who thought it was A) worth living in cruel and brutal bondage, and B) worth bringing children into such a life.

> Life is precious. I think we forget that.

Life is precious. So why do we allow suffering and killing to please our taste buds?

While existing life is precious, do you also believe that not-yet-existing life of a calf is so precious, that we need to forcefully inseminate cows at the highest possible rate their bodies can handle?

If life is that sacred, do you support doing that to human women, too? Because otherwise we'd be acting unfairly to all the unborn children who would otherwise "never get a chance to be alive", right? If we don't do that we'll take away the life of millions of hypothetical humans, right?

> But, no, I do not consider animals to be morally equivalent to humans, so I am okay having a different moral system for animals.

This is somewhat agreeable. Non-humans are not equivalent to humans, and therefore it would be non-sense to argue that dogs should have the right to vote, and pigs should be allowed drivers license. They are so different from humans that they lack the capacity to do any of this.

However, many mammals (dogs, cats, cows, pigs, horses) can feel pain and distress and react to it in a way very similar to humans, by screaming and wrenching and sweating, by trying to escape. Why should their interest in not feeling pain be considered?

If we are OK to just say that we have a "different moral system" for a anyone who is not a member of our species -- regardless of what capacities they may have -- then surely it's also OK to have a "different moral system" for anyone who is of a different gender, or different race, or different nationality than ours, isn't it?

> Almost every black American is the descendant of people who thought it was A) worth living in cruel and brutal bondage, and B) worth bringing children into such a life.

Is your point that life is so precious that it's fine to enslave animals (both human and non-human) because even when someone is living under horrid conditions, it is still "worth bringing children into such a life" and "worth living in cruel and brutal bondage", and that makes it somehow justifiable?

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..

How about 20 years? http://meatheals.com/2018/02/04/charlene-andersen/

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.

Funny, I hire freelancers all the time and work as one myself. There are plenty of frauds who are all talk until it comes to proving their value, and then they can't.

Why? There is an incentive to lie for a profit. However, I never claimed that Peterson is a fraud because he charges for consultations. I responded to a comment asking about what he had to gain from lying by showing that he has ample financial incentive to do so.

Just because you disagree with my comment, doesn't mean you should strawman my post.

People wouldn't be suspicious of Peterson's claims if he provided proof. I mean, even breatharians agreed to be documented while following their purported diet. Surely Peterson can do the same.

The keyword is "automatically". Your previous comment is cynical. Not even a modicum of curiosity is in there.

Weird, I don't see any curiosity in your posts, just emotional reactions to mine.

You're also confusing healthy skepticism with lack of curiosity, almost as if you're jumping to the defense of something you made an emotional investment in without consulting rationality.

> Weird, I don't see any curiosity in your posts,

Curiosity as to what? The cynical content of your mind?

> just emotional reactions to mine.

Respond to my words, not your imaginations of what I'm feeling.

> You're also confusing healthy skepticism with lack of curiosity,

First of all, yours is a knee-jerk rejection of someone's report of recovering their health. It is unhealthy cynicism, and not even remotely healthy. It is just as well I did not have you advising me, all those years ago, when coming across the likes of Peterson and meatheals.com before proceeding with curiosity to heal my own chronic condition of 4 years, eh? Otherwise this conversation would not be happening.

> almost as if you're jumping to the defense of something you made an emotional investment in without consulting rationality.

Look, factual reports are there to establish a prima-facie case worthy of further investigation (sign of curiosity) – rather than capricious dismissal like yours (sign of cynicism) – and thus find out what it is on about. It is called being sensible. Maybe this is how your mind words, but neither emotional investment nor the counteracting rationality (which ironically tends to be emotion-influenced) is required.

You need to have an emotional investment to be cynical.

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?)

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?

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

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.

Thank you for the thoughtful answer and the names - it is very hard to google this topic or to find credible experts. I will be sure to look them up.

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".

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... 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 , 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 (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/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.

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.

Why do you not believe the claim?

Do you think they were lying/cheating on the food they ate, as published in http://www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.full.pdf ?

Do you discount the observation that "Inuit would often go 6 to 9 months a year eating nothing but meat and fish"?

Do you think the meat items mentioned in the JAMA are incomplete sources of nutrition?

Why "accidentally got required nutrition in ways similar to the Inuit"? After his many years of polar exploration and friendship with the Inuit, how can you dismiss that it was a learned practice?

Do you know of subsequent papers casting doubt on the results? Or replicating it, for that matter?

I found http://home.exetel.com.au/surreality/health/A%20Review%20of%... which says

> This level of protein intake may have been sustainable if hepatic enzymes were given time to upregulate (as there were several years between Stefansson living with the Inuit and the experiment at Bellevue Hospital and any previous upregulation of hepatic enzymes would have diminished), but the result for this limited study (where n = 1) indicates that the values shown in Table 1 are at least realistic, although we would speculate that individuals would tend to be at the lower end of the range for MRUS without a lead-in time for upregulating hepatic enzyme function.

which considers it feasible.

When people say they don't believe something (despite available facts) it could also mean that those facts run contradictory to what they already believe.

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).

It's always from slightly worse to no absorption at all though, if you take them as supplements. Getting them from food is optimal.

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).