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Comment by jononomo | Hacker News Reader

I eat eggs, bacon, beef, and salmon. More than half my calories, maybe more than 75%, come from beef.

One thing you notice is that because there is no fiber or sugar (or carbs of any kind) in the diet, you end up basically never farting -- and the volume of your poop decreases by something like 80%.

You also hold a lot less water weight, your tolerance for alcohol decreases dramatically (although if you were strict about the diet you wouldn't be consuming alcohol anyway), you seem to have much less nasal congestion, and heartburn completely disappears. And your skin feels better.

I've looked into it, and this diet is nutritionally complete -- it is not lacking in any vitamins or minerals. Fresh meat even contains some vitamin C. You can eat some sardines from time to time for extra calcium.

On the whole I can't recommend this diet enough -- you end up in phenomenal shape.

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This can't be healthy, can it? Plants give trace minerals, vitamins necessary for life. Not to mention the high-cholesterol and high-blood pressure cauding diseases of the heart by eating a meat-only diet. It's good to cut down on carbs but this seems extreme.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/carnivore-diet#downside...

Healthy for who? I have Inuit heritage (Sami) the Inuit pretty much 80 vegetables except for seaweeds. Our genetics have changed because of this diet and we’ve adapted to it to become our healthy diet.

It’s frustrating to me that there is zero talk about genetics when it comes to diet and specifically when it comes to keto because those of us who are carry genetic polymorphisms in our CPT1A gene that makes it harder for us to go into ketosis. Therefore, we do better on a higher meat diet.

The Inuit are distinct from the Sami. Different ethnicity, different language group and different region.

There's a lot of false information out there. Many people on low carb find their cholesterol levels improve and blood pressure lower. Also organ meats are far more nutrient dense than plants and not only that they are more bio-available.

I like the flavor of plants, so I don't do carnivore myself. But you seem to be a few decades behind on the research.

It doesn't seem healthy if you are accustomed to the standard American diet.

One overlooked factor is bioavailability of nutrients, not just how much there are in food. Lots of plants are high in X, but it's not very bioavailable, but nutrients in meat tend to be highly.

> It doesn't seem healthy if you are accustomed to the standard American diet.

This is such a low bar that it's not really saying much at all. There are very real reasons why this kind of diet is almost certainly not healthy long term - risk of CVD being the main one.

> One overlooked factor is bioavailability of nutrients

This is not a significant factor that someone should be basing a diet on. Bioavailability is influenced by many factors and the vast majority of people aren't eating enough nutrient-rich foods, period. Optimizing based on bioavailability misses the forest for the trees.

"This is not a significant factor that someone should be basing a diet on."

Yeah it is, if you aren't eating meat and aren't getting the required nutrients, despite eating foods rich in them, but aren't bioavailable leading to deficiency.

Claiming the efficiency of a fuel (food) isn't important is pretty silly.

> if you aren't eating meat and aren't getting the required nutrients, despite eating foods rich in them, but aren't bioavailable leading to deficiency.

How many people do you think have this problem? Logically, it doesn't even really make sense: you would have to somehow be eating enough of a food that would, if "optimally bioavailable" (as in the best case real world scenario), give you enough of that nutrient but you are eating too little of it to overcome the lack of bioavailability and so little to result in deficiency (but again, still enough that deficiency would not happen with "optimal bioavailability"). What nutrient do you think has this issue and what is your evidence?

Again, far and away the biggest issue is people not eating enough healthy food period. Anyone who cares enough to eat sufficient healthy food (with little consideration for bioavailability) would be the kind of person who's diet would be overcoming any bioavailability issues anyways. Essentially the only people I see who nitpick bioavailability are those trying to convince others that their diet is the best one.

You’re begging the question. What is healthy food? In my view plant-based foods are not healthy. Red meat is healthy.

> In my view plant-based foods are not healthy. Red meat is healthy.

Luckily we don't have to depend on our "views". We have data to work through differing perspectives and there is no good data to support your conclusions (and much to the contrary)

It doesn’t seem healthy from basically every diet across the world. The amount of cultures, in history, that consumed only meat is incredibly tiny.

Ignoring that, just the cost alone will be extreme. Oh it’s fine for you, you’re probably consuming garbage meat. Oh you only buy “grass fed” you’re probably buying grass pellet fed meat that has been shown to not have the nutritional diversity of actual grass fed meat.

How is, eat a balanced diet, mostly plants become so controversial.

It became controversial because Big Food co-opted "balanced diet" in the mid 20th century to demonize animal fat and lionize agricultural fat and sugar. All the extreme diets you see are a reaction to that. There is absolutely nothing wrong on a dietary level with the majority of "traditional" diets--whether that is the fish, miso, and rice of Japan or the English meat and two veg. The problems come when you get to introduce a million cheap, tasty calories in the form of added fats and sugars.

Prior to agriculture human beings got the vast vast majority of their calories from meat. We followed a carnivore diet as a species for about 200,000 years until basically yesterday.

This isn’t true. When you look at modern hunter gatherers who don’t practice agriculture today, the bulk of the calories still come from plants they forage rather than meat.

That's because we hunted all the megafauna to extinction during the Pleistocene. Modern hunter gatherers live in the modern world.

The megafauna extinction was in the Americas. Human coexist with megafauna in Africa: elephant, giraffe, hippo, rhino.

Megafauna don't make much of diet of African hunter-gatherers cause they are a lot of work to hunt. They hunt smaller game. Gathering is much easier and safer.

Elephants are easy to hunt — they turn toward you and easily fall into disguised holes. They’re now protected by governments, however.

On the other hand, global warming (methane emissions from beef), water crisis (water to grow feed, instead of water to grow food), and wanton animal cruelty (most meat and eggs are industrially farmed and ethically dubious).

It's a diet with lots of externalities, which really shouldn't scale up - Atkins and Paleo were disasters, really. (And it's worth reading about the long term research on the Atkins diet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet )

Worth considering whether you can get similar effects with, say, 50% of the calories coming from plants. It sounds like you're mainly after carb- or gluten-free, which is quite doable without resorting to an all meat diet.

Meh beef emissions are 3% of the emissions in the U.S. That and they could even be far lower with food additives. Globally it's higher but that is because of poor farming practices and very loose/negative regulation.

I did keto for 8 years and it was fantastic. I am no longer on it for other reasons that have nothing to do with the diet itself.

you sound no different than every other diet of the month fanatic - overselling the benefits while downplaying any downsides

That's mainly because any dramatic change feels like a change and they haven't seen the downsides yet. Some downsides take decades to develop with some diets.

And the argument of "now I feel so much better" I have heard it with absolutely every kind of diets. Vegetarians now eating meat. Meat eaters now vegetarians. Paleo. Gluten-free. Crude/Raw...

Atkins, low carb, paleo, keto, carnivore -- diet of the month. Sure but they are very close to the same thing and these have been rolling along for decades. Intermittent fasting and some new drugs are the only things in recent years that seem novel imo.

this is ill-advised and often actually dangerous over time - source: witness to similar approach and after several years an adult damaged their stomach and GI tract (at least)

Your microbiome diversity is not going to love this. You‘re killing off swaths of the strains your ancestors have passed on to you.

No, you are. I’m doing it right.

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