Is The Carnivore Diet Healthy and Good For Weight Loss?
Written by Jonathan Fletcher
What comes to mind when you hear the word “Carnivore”? For me, it evokes images of a scruffy haired cave man (think geico commercial) squatting over a lion or zebra, digging in with his bare hands.
I guess that’s not actually accurate though since cavemen probably ate a lot of plants. After all, grabbing a lion is probably not easy.
I keep seeing the word Carnivore pop up every week on IG. My podcast stream has several episodes on the topic, and we are asked about it often. So here we go!
Let’s talk about if the Carnivore diet is healthy and good for weight loss.
What is the Carnivore Diet?
Carnivore - An animal that eats flesh. Or… A flesh eating mammal of the order Carnivora, comprising of dogs, cats, bears, seals and weasels.
No idea why they mentioned weasels there. I hadn’t thought about weasels in years. Do they still have weasels? Anyway…
What we are talking about here is a diet comprised of only MEAT.
Imagine what a Vegan would eat and then think the complete opposite.
Picture what James Cameron is telling you to do in “The Game Changers” and then go 180 degrees the other way.
Eat 100% animal derived food.
No fruit.
No vegetables.
No grains.
No sugar.
No carbohydrates.
Hardcore carnivores avoid dairy also since lactose is a sugar.
What can you eat on the carnivore diet?
MEAT of course!
But also, fish, eggs, bone marrow, lard, tallow, and non-carb-containing condiments as long as they aren’t made from plants.
You’re going to become good friends with your butcher if you choose to go carnivore only. Load up your cart with ground beef, steaks, pork, bacon, fish, chicken, ribs, eggs and all things meat! Might want to snag some overtime at work too cause meat ain't cheap these days.
At its core, the carnivore diet is a low/no carbohydrate diet.
Meat doesn’t have carbohydrates in it. It’s all protein and fat. Low carbohydrate diets aren’t a new thing.
We’ve written about them many times.
Educate Before You Act
The Low Carb Craze
They come and go like bull and bear markets, being resurrected with slightly different rules. Back in the early 2000’s low carb was called “Atkins”. Now days it’s “Keto” and Carnivore. Regardless of what you call it, there are some loud voices shouting the benefits of the carnivore diet from the tops of the butcher shop.
What are the potential benefits of a carnivore diet, and do the benefits stand up to logic and research?
Is the carnivore diet good for weight loss?
The most commonly touted benefit of the carnivore diet is weight loss. If you’re not eating carbs, you’re going to be eating a lot of protein and a lot of fat. The commonly mentioned line is “You’ll be using fat for energy which makes you burn more fat”.
The more scientific explanation of what’s going on is that when you severely restrict carbohydrates your body will switch its energy source to ketones instead of glucose from carbohydrates.
Dietary fat that you’re eating can then be burned for energy in the absence of carbs. This process and the state that it causes (ketosis) doesn’t inherently cause a change in how much BODY FAT you have.
Think back to what you know about the basics of the human body. You burn calories for energy. Your food contains that energy. It can come in the form of protein, carbohydrates, or fat. All three of those macronutrients have calories and all of their calories “count”.
If your goal is weight loss, you need to keep in mind the golden rule of energy balance. The relationship between calories in vs. calories out. The number of calories you eat as opposed to the number of calories that you burn.
As long as you’re in a NEGATIVE energy balance (eating less than you’re burning) you’ll burn your body fat to make up the difference regardless of whether the calories that you DID eat came from a steak, a potato, or a popsicle. This is called being in a calorie deficit.
Here’s a graphic to show you how it works:
Energy Balance
How the number of calories causes weight gain or weight loss
But wait, if you’re not eating carbs won’t you burn more fat? YES! But if you’re not in a calorie deficit, you’ll be burning all that fat you’re EATING, not the fat on your BELLY.
So at the end of the day, you can lose BODY FAT on ANY “diet” that puts you into a calorie deficit. I hope that’s clear.
If you lost weight on the carnivore diet, you lost weight because you ate less calories as a result of calorie restriction. The meat didn’t melt the fat off your body.
Does the carnivore diet reduce inflammation?
Second on the list of claims most often mentioned in the “pro-carnivore” conversation is reduced inflammation. Reducing inflammation? That sounds like a good idea! We don’t want inflammation right?!
Well, what exactly is it anyway? Inflammation is an immune response to an irritant in our bodies. Ever had a splinter that you didn’t get out right away? I bet the next day it was sore, a little swollen, and red. You were seeing inflammation. It’s a natural defense mechanism enacted to try and protect your body from harm. Inflammation is good in this case.
Inflammation can be bad in other cases too, like chronic inflammation. Some diseases cause a miscommunication in the immune system that causes the body to attack otherwise healthy cells. Examples of this are Crohn’s Disease, Rheumatoid Arthritis, or Psoriasis.
When you have elevated levels of inflammation in your body certain chemicals are measurably more prevalent.
A 2013 study took 55 obese participants and divided them up into 2 groups. One group went super low carb and the other ate about 60% of their calories from carbs.
After the 3 month study, the group that ate super low carb had decreased levels of the blood markers that signal inflammation compared to the group that ate all those carbs.
So there you go, carbs cause inflammation!
Not so fast hobo Joe. They didn’t take some pretty darned important things into account in this study. Are all carbs equal? Was the carb group eating Twinkies and chasing it with a slice of cake? I’d say that the SOURCE of the carbs just MIGHT have an impact on inflammation and overall health.
Just as important… Something else not accounted for in the study was that the “low carb” group was eating MUCH more protein than the carb group was. About twice as much to be specific. Did the increased protein play a factor in reducing inflammation? Maybe so!
Are FODMAP foods inflammatory?
One thing to note is that some people do have a negative immune response to certain foods. Most commonly these foods are called “FODMAP” foods. That stands for “Fermentable Oligo-, Di-, Mono-Saccharides And Polyols”. While it’s not technically “inflammation”, some people can display digestive discomfort (that’s a nice way of putting it) when they eat high FODMAP foods. Some examples of these foods are (but not limited to):
Wheat, Rye, Barley, Onion, Garlic, Brussel Sprouts, Cabbage, Asparagus, Beans, Apples, Apricots, Avocados, Peaches, Pears, Watermelon, Cauliflower, Mushrooms, and artificial sweaters like Maltitol, Sorbitol and Xylitol. Whew!
If you notice a problem when eating some of these foods, try pulling them out of your diet and see how you do.
Does the carnivore diet improve your heart health?
The pro-carnivore crowd claims that a meat-only diet can help IMPROVE your heart health and decrease your chances of getting heart disease. This one is easy to get confused about because there are several variables and some die-hard beliefs and misconceptions about dietary fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol in the mix. It used to be believed that fat was at the root of all health evils, including heart problems.
Then there’s the whole cholesterol thing. We know we don’t want elevated levels of blood cholesterol, but what really causes it? We went pretty deep into the topic of cholesterol in THIS article.
Here’s the deal.
Dietary cholesterol in food isn’t the culprit. Fat in and of itself isn’t the smoking gun either. The most recent research shows that SATURATED FAT lies at the root of many non-hereditary cases of elevated blood cholesterol and heart disease. Saturated fat (mainly from animal sources) comes from things like: fatty beef, pork, chicken skin, lard, cream, butter, whole milk, and cheese. It’s not that you can’t have these things and be healthy, but research shows that keeping the calories from saturated fat UNDER 10% of your daily calories is the sweet spot.
So how does this relate to the carnivore diet? I suppose if you go carnivore and stick to chicken and turkey breasts it doesn’t really. But when I think about the carnivore diet I think about burger patties and steaks too. If you’re eating about 2000 calories per day (as an example), we’d recommend getting NO MORE than 200 calories per day from saturated fat. A 4oz ribeye alone has 11g of saturated fat (not including the butter it was cooked in). At 9 calories per gram of fat, you’ve already blown through about 1/2 of your daily recommended saturated fat with that steak alone. It’s our suspicion that the carnivore diet will get you eating much more than 10% of your calories from saturated fat, and we can’t get with that.
What are the risks of the carnivore diet?
We know you’re going to do what you want to do, but if you’re considering going carnivore, let us at least point out some of the potential problems.
There are two main issues with ALL severely restrictive diets that wholesale eliminate large categories of foods (like carbohydrates).
First, they are darn near impossible to sustain long-term. Are there outliers? Of course. I know people who have maintained restrictive diets for 2-3 years. But is that actually long-term? I dunno. To us, we prefer to eat in a way that doesn’t feel like a diet at all but rather a way of life. If I want to have some popcorn at a movie I can make that work since I understand how to eat in a balanced way without gaining weight.
Super restrictive diets are tempting because there’s something in us that feels like if we can just be super hardcore for a short amount of time we will accomplish our goal. We thrive on it. We wear the restriction like a badge of honor and we even feel proud telling our friends “I’m on the *insert restrictive diet of the month* diet.
All of these diets have one thing in common. If they make you lose weight it’s because they caused you to restrict calories. We can help you do that without going hardcore on anything, in a much more sustainable way.
Moving on, there are other things to watch out for if you’re going to pull the sausage-filled trigger and do the carnivore diet. If you’re only eating meat, you’re not eating fruits and vegetables. The problem with that is that a diverse diet that contains fruits and veggies of different colors is rich in things other than calories. It’s rich in vitamins, minerals, and MICRO nutrients.
Eating a diverse diet is your best natural defense in avoiding deficiencies in different vitamins and minerals essential for health.
Meat is awesome for protein and SOME other nutrients, but it’s missing quite a few. You’ll never be able to eat enough meat in a day to reach the RDA guidelines for Pectin, Quercitin, Vitamin C, and Fiber. It doesn’t take much Vitamin C to avoid scurvy, but you won’t get any from meat.
Fiber is a big one for us. We use it with our clients to help them lose fat, stay full, and improve their digestion. It’s also been linked through research to improved cholesterol and heart disease outcomes.
You can learn more about the importance of fiber and how much is right for you in the article below.
If you’ve never paid attention to how much fiber you get per day you should track it for a week and see how much you’re getting. We recommend that our clients get about 5-10g of fiber per day per 500 calories that they eat. That usually works out to about 25 grams or more for women, and 30-40 grams for men.
The thing about nutrient deficiencies is that you might not notice their effects right away. You’ll think you’re killing it and then little symptoms like fatigue, weakness, or digestive issues start popping up. Often times these go undiagnosed since culturally we place such little emphasis on a diverse diet.
Final thoughts and summary about the carnivore diet
We covered a lot of meat-covered ground, so let’s recap about the carnivore diet.
If you’re going to do the carnivore diet you’ll need to stick to animal meat and eggs for all of your meals. No fruits, no veggies, no sugar… If it wasn’t attached to or didn’t come out of an animal don’t buy or eat it.
This is going to put you on a no-carb diet that will put you into ketosis (unless you cheat). That will switch your body from burning the carbohydrates that you were eating to the fat that you’re now eating. Notice that I said, “the fat that you are eating”. Only if you eat less total calories than you burn will you tap into your BODY FAT for energy, and lose weight. The carnivore diet does not automagically cause fat loss.
We talked about the claims that the carnivore diet reduces inflammation, improves heart health, and finally we talked about important things like high saturated fat intake, micronutrient deficiencies, and the long-term sustainability of hyper-restrictive diets.
I’m sure that you can tell at this point that we aren’t fans of the carnivore diet for our clients. We aren’t fans of any fad diets really. We’re kinda boring. We like the basics that have been proven to work over the long term. We like to help people make sustainable changes to their nutrition that make them healthier and more balanced from a nutritional perspective. It’s why we wrote our 5-Step Nutrition Freedom Framework. It works, it just isn’t as sexy and probably won’t get a spot on a morning talk show. That’s ok with us.
But hey, while you’re here…. We wrote a free guide that can be both your “Grocery List Builder” & your “Meal Prep Guide”. No more wondering what to buy when it’s time to place that grocery order. Download yours for free today!
All our best!
Jonathan & Blakley
P.S. Since you’re into health and fitness, check out our Podcast.