The Carnivore Diet Is Worse Than We Thought (ugly new data)
In a Nutshell
The carnivore diet delivers short-term benefits like rapid weight loss, reduced hunger, and better blood sugar control, but these stem primarily from eliminating ultra-processed foods, achieving ketosis, and unintentional calorie restriction rather than the meat-only approach itself. Serious long-term risks include dramatically elevated LDL cholesterol and ApoB levels that drive atherosclerosis, nutrient deficiencies from zero fiber intake, increased kidney stone and gout risk, and substantial declines in athletic performance. A modified low-carb approach incorporating oily fish, dairy, eggs, nuts, seeds, and non-starchy vegetables provides the same benefits with far fewer health risks and better sustainability.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Many people suffer from sharp increases in LDL (bad) cholesterol, which is one of the worst types of cholesterol. You may experience gout attacks and unpleasant changes in urine. Suffering is not only physical but can also be psychological. You may feel some social isolation, face many difficulties in restaurants, and may get into conflicts with the family because eating only meat all the time is really strange.
Dr. Mike from RP Strength discusses the meat-eater diet because a recent literature review made him think this is a diet getting a lot of attention on social media. The question is whether it is really beneficial or actually very harmful. If it is a diet you would like to follow, there are probably smarter ways to do it or even better dietary modifications that will not harm your health.
The meat-eater diet has a rather loose definition with no official definition. Its essence is complete reliance on animal-based foods. Some people use the meat-eater diet as an elimination diet, a system in which you get rid of almost all foods and then slowly reintroduce them to see which ones were causing problems for your digestive system. However, many people use this system as a lifestyle that they adhere to all the time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
The benefits that fans of this diet say they have experienced include rapid weight loss at the beginning. Much of that is due to glycogen because you are not consuming carbohydrates. The glycogen stores in your muscles do not replenish themselves. You are losing too much glycogen and lose a lot of water along with glycogen, suddenly finding that you have lost 5 pounds in one week. If this regimen leads to a reduction in calories, which often happens because your ability to eat regular meat is limited, then this is followed by a loss of fat over many weeks, and this effect can be truly impressive.
Many people accurately report feeling less hungry and having less desire to eat, often due to a higher protein intake, partly to ketosis, and much of it due to repeated food choices. If your food today is steak, tomorrow is steak, and the day after tomorrow is steak again, you really can't crave steak. If you cannot crave what you eat, many of your cravings fade away. The most important point is that this system simply eliminates all super-delicious foods. You can't crave potato chips if you're not eating them.
For some, the meat-eating system is unsustainable because it does not help them deal with their cravings. People are divided into two groups: abstainers and moderates. Those who abstain, if they stay away from the foods that arouse their desires, will stop wanting them. For these people, the meat-eating diet works best. As for the moderates, they actually prefer to eat a few potato chips to be satisfied with that. If they do not, they crave it intensely, and in most cases, they do very poorly with a meat-eating diet.
Another real benefit that people report is that food decisions become simpler. You don't have to track your calories. You don't need food recipes. You don't need to argue about what is acceptable and what is not, or whether you will round the fiber number up or down. There are no fibers to speak of in the first place. You just eat a large amount of meat, eggs and liver, and that's it. Therefore, the matter is actually so simple and specific that it cannot be complicated in any way.
Some people report more stable energy and less fluctuation after meals. Post-meal lethargy is simply your body relaxing and entering a state of restorative balance after receiving food. A meat-eating diet can certainly reduce that, especially if you consume a lot of refined carbohydrates. Some of these people report improved blood sugar control or a reduced need for diabetes medication, which makes perfect sense because you are no longer consuming carbohydrates.
Some, often survivors who did not have to abandon the diet due to diarrhea problems, report a reduction in bloating, gas, reflux, diarrhea, or abdominal pain. This usually happens when the diet unintentionally removes FODMAP triggers, which are basically things that upset and irritate the gut of many people, such as lactose, gluten, or others, because you don't get any lactose or gluten when you don't eat any carbohydrates at all. If milk is allowed, you get lactose, but many strict carnivore dieters do not allow milk.
Some people report an improvement in skin, joint, autoimmune disease, or inflammatory symptoms. These are usually people who already have a bad immune reaction to something in their diet, and it's often not just about eating meat. Some report improvements in mood, mental clarity, concentration, sleep, strength, or endurance. Unfortunately, most of these perceptions are not supported by evidence, although some people have better results than others. The issue of optimal tolerance often proves incorrect when measured.
Carbohydrates are the undisputed king of actual measured performance. When you see people participating in cycling, triathlons, and other sports, most of them are on high-carbohydrate diets for a good reason. It's not just a feeling, it's something that actually works.
Some report improvements in triglyceride levels on these diets, better values for good cholesterol (HDL), a better ratio between triglycerides and HDL, a decrease in CRP protein, or an improvement in liver enzymes even with high bad cholesterol (LDL). However, most of these results are a result of weight loss, and not of replacing all your food with just meat while keeping your calorie intake constant.
The real drivers of all these benefits are not the carnivore elements themselves. You get more protein, less ultra-processed food, less alcohol, and sometimes zero. You are entering a state of ketosis. You have a very monotonous eating habit. You achieve significant weight loss in most cases. Often, you are simply removing the individual allergens. This is the source of almost all the benefits of the carnivore diet. The carnivore part is not responsible for that. You can achieve this through a variety of other diets.
When randomized research on low-carbohydrate diets is conducted, the initial benefits in weight and sugars often diminish over time. You will lose a few pounds doing that, but when your progress slows down and you are only eating meat and not losing any more weight, most of the benefits are no longer there.
The downsides that people report from a meat-eating diet include the very classic keto flu. In the first few days or weeks, people experience headaches, fatigue, weakness, irritability, brain fog, and poor concentration. This only happens during the transition period. If you follow a meat-eating regimen for more than a week, most people start to feel better.
Some people experience dizziness, low blood pressure, and fainting due to the initial loss of water and sodium. Most of these symptoms disappear within a few days. However, some of them do not disappear.
Many people report constipation, difficulty defecating, and worsening of hemorrhoids. Many people simply suffer from irregular and uncomfortable bowel movements. This is because they do not consume any fiber, which is objectively a bad idea. Some people go to the opposite extreme, experiencing diarrhea, oily stools, an urgent need to defecate, or nausea when their fat intake rises faster than their digestive system can handle, because many of these meat-eating diets contain a huge amount of fat.
Some people experience muscle spasms, tremors, or palpitations related to changes in fluids and electrolytes. Most of these symptoms disappear within a few days. Some of the things that persist are bad breath, a metallic taste, dry mouth, and a change in body odor.
Some people develop a ketogenic rash. Some people experience food aversion or nausea. Boredom affects many people because some of these people find that eating meat becomes actually disgusting after a while because they keep eating meat and only meat. Any time you eat the same food over and over again, most people will feel bad about it after a while because that kind of monotony is insane.
Athletes report a decrease in running ability, interval training, CrossFit performance, bodybuilding workout volume, and performance in many other sports. Your muscles often look flat due to severely reduced glycogen and lack of water within them. This diet is definitely not designed for athletic performance.
Sometimes people lose a lot of weight unintentionally when their appetite shrinks too much. This is generally good for most people, but for some, that may be too much. Many people report a decrease in body energy because carbohydrates are better at providing available energy.
A slow recovery is very common. Carbohydrates are the first food for recovery after protein has been provided. Many people also lose a significant amount of muscle mass when their appetite becomes too suppressed. This is mostly a good thing, but when lifting weights is difficult and you lose muscle mass, this is not a good thing.
This is where the real problems begin. Many people suffer from sharp increases in LDL (bad) cholesterol, which is one of the worst types of cholesterol. Elevations in ApoB protein also occur. These are bad signs indicating that things are not going well in your body. Sometimes people have lower triglycerides and higher good cholesterol (HDL), but this is balanced by those other indicators.
You may experience gout attacks, high uric acid levels, kidney stones, flank pain, or unwanted changes in urine, all of which sound like a very unpleasant experience.
A bad experience is not only physical, it can also be psychological. You may feel some social isolation. You may face significant difficulties in restaurants. You may get into a lot of conflicts with the family because eating only meat all the time seems really strange. It is not a sustainable diet in the sense that you still have great freedom in food. In many diets, such as macro-based diets, you can substitute this for that, and still maintain your fitness. But with the carnivore system, it's very restrictive, and you end up having to prepare all your own food or order really strange things in restaurants.
Your flexibility and enjoyment of food deteriorate significantly. Sometimes food costs are high. Meat is very expensive, especially if you're buying liver and things like that, it can get very expensive. The hardship of travel is also great, because you have to pack all your meat with you. Meat is not exactly suitable for travel, so dealing with food while traveling is very strange. What you eat on the plane becomes a big question mark at some point.
A very cool YouTuber tried the meat-eater system for a while. He reported that the social aspects are bothersome. For example, he was at a friend's birthday party and they set aside some unseasoned meat for him. He thinks meat-eaters don't add spices. Salmon cannot be kept out of the refrigerator for more than two hours, and he has a three-hour drive. He pulled over to the side of the road, ate the bowl of salmon, put the bowl in the next seat, and left the bowl making the car smell like salmon while he was at his destination.
The YouTuber bought American cheese for his burger patties, so he made a six-egg omelet with the American cheese. It was too much. He finally got egg sickness just two days before it was due to end. He described feeling great but looking great was a lie. He looked really great, but he didn't feel great. Even when he was doing stretches earlier, he was already feeling pain before starting the exercise, and he can immediately say that he felt much weaker. Everything was more difficult to implement.
The YouTuber received a message because his blood test results showed that his cholesterol level was much higher than it had been in January. The message from the doctor who examined his blood tests stated that his latest blood test shows that his bad cholesterol is very high. The doctor strongly recommended that he start taking cholesterol medication. He stated that receiving this was frightening. He doesn't really care what someone on Reddit says about the carnivore diet regarding his cholesterol. This doctor seems concerned about him.
Doctors are not lying for the benefit of big pharmaceutical companies. Bad cholesterol is actually bad for you. It is not a myth. Statins are generally beneficial to the health of most people who take them and have surprisingly low side effects. That's what you'll find in forums; they'll tell you the exact opposite. That's not the case.
There is a recent review of the scientific literature entitled The Carnivore System: A Comprehensive Review of Current Evidence, Potential Benefits and Risks. Published in the journal Nutrients. The author was Almira Letts and her colleagues. A total of nine studies were analyzed between 2021 and 2025. The carnivore system is very, very new. The carnivore system is a phenomenon dating back to the late 1990s and early 1920s.
The evidence consists largely of case reports, small case series, sample menus, one exploratory study, and two social media surveys. There are no randomized controlled trials here, no long-term prospective cohort studies, or measurements of serious things like heart attacks or cancer.
The carnivore system has been defined very inconsistently. Some of its versions include dairy products, eggs, honey, coffee, alcohol, or even plants. They conducted some dietary models, and those models provided plenty of protein, which is great, and tons of vitamin B12, zinc, and selenium, which is amazing. But they often lack fiber by a considerable margin and many other micronutrients that are usually found only or mostly in plants.
Consuming large amounts of liver, which is actively promoted by some, may provide excessive amounts of vitamin A. Vitamin A is one of vitamins A, D, E and K that accumulate in your body over time. Therefore, if you take excessive amounts of vitamin A repeatedly, you may experience undesirable health effects.
People who adhered to these diets in the studies often reported weight loss and a better feeling of satiety. They reported better health and improved metabolic markers, especially with regard to managing glucose levels, but LDL (bad) cholesterol often rose significantly, even among participants who had previously been healthy. Uncontrolled cases reported recovery from illnesses, while other cases showed gout, kidney stones, or microbiome changes that may be somewhat worrying.
In general, there are potential short-term benefits, especially those related to weight loss, but the long-term benefits and safety of this diet are still not definitively known scientifically.
The biggest concern probably relates to the heart and blood vessels. Most of these diets are very high in saturated fat. It can significantly raise levels of LDL cholesterol and ApoB lipoprotein. Cumulative exposure to particles containing ApoB causes atherosclerosis. Lower triglycerides and higher good cholesterol (HDL) do not negate that pathway, and the consensus of the European Society for Atherosclerosis says exactly that.
Meat is rich in nutrients, but muscle meat alone does not provide enough vitamin C, folate, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iodine, vitamin E, manganese, and sometimes thiamin or vitamin D. It turns out that plants contain many more nutrients. Because you eat from only one food group, you may get an excess of some nutrients. Specifically, consuming large amounts of liver may lead to excessive levels of vitamin A and copper.
Supplements made from organ meats make it difficult to determine the dosages of these vitamins. You can buy liver pills and things like that if you are seriously following a meat-based diet.
When you reduce your fiber intake to almost zero, you get very little stool mass. Fiber is the primary source for gut bacteria to produce butyrate and other short-chain fatty acids, which are very healthy for the gut microbiome. Many of the same people who talk about the greatness of a meat-based diet also say they are very concerned about their gut bacteria. But a meat-based diet is probably one of the worst diets theoretically for gut bacteria. Fiber is an absolute and undeniable benefit. If you eat hundreds of grams of fiber, you'll have a hard time, but lots of fiber is very good for you, and not eating any fiber is really bad.
Some people eat too much processed meat in the carnivore diet. This increases the likelihood of developing colorectal cancer. Red meat may technically be somewhat carcinogenic. Eliminating fiber-rich foods makes it worse because fiber cleanses that. There are no direct studies on cancer and the carnivore system, but they are likely to be conducted at some point.
Cooking a lot of meat and excessively processing, smoking, charring, or cooking at very high temperatures increases exposure to nitrites, cooking-derived heme compounds, heterocyclic amines, and other potential carcinogens. Eating lots of grilled meat is a good thing, but eating only grilled meats is probably not the best option for your health.
The likelihood of developing kidney stones and gout increases significantly. Facing dehydration, low urinary citrate, high sodium, purines, uric acid, and a high animal protein acid burden can create several pathways for kidney stones all at once, doubling your risk.
Training performance: Fat oxidation increases, but fat is not the limiting factor in many of those reactions. Carbohydrates are the limiting factor. If you want the best performance and the best results in the gym, you'll probably have to eat carbohydrates.
The psychological and social effects are harsh effects. If you're going to say that carnivore is a sustainable system, then what you're sustaining isn't a very enjoyable system. If you think you can handle it, that's great, but most people won't have a good experience.
If you really wanted to follow something similar to Carnivore, but you realize that good health and good performance are things you still aspire to, focus on fresh and minimally processed foods. Don't start with bacon, sausages, and hot dogs. Reduce your consumption of dried meats. Severely charred meat is not a good thing.
Diversify your food sources away from beef. Only eat beef if you are very sick and it is the only thing that makes you feel better. Try to include plenty of oily fish, lots of shellfish, eggs, poultry, and reasonable amounts of dairy products if they suit you, because dairy is an amazing healthy food. Technically, it is considered part of the carnivorous system.
Improve the quality of the fats as much as possible. Seafood is good for this purpose. Fish is amazing. And if you can allow yourself to do so, olive oil, avocados, nuts, and seeds are better for your health in direct comparisons and studies than butter, beef tallow, cream, and fatty red meat in every meal.
A great nutritional trick to make a meat-eater's diet much better is to allow low-carb plants, non-starchy vegetables, berries, avocados, nuts, seeds, and legumes because you will get a huge amount of micronutrients and an incredible amount of fiber. A diet that is based primarily on meat plus nuts, oils and vegetables is much better for your health than meat alone. There is no comparison. The diet is still very low in carbohydrates, but much healthier.
Calcium, magnesium, potassium, iodine, folic acid, vitamins C, D and E, and thiamin are nutrients that may not be adequately covered by meat alone. Don't assume that meat covers everything.
Treat liver as a concentrated dietary supplement, not as an unlimited essential ingredient. The "Liver King" turned out to be a fraud and a liar. Do not eat liver to the point of exhaustion, and be sure to have blood tests done.
Keep the body hydrated and adjust electrolytes appropriately. When eating only meat, the sense of thirst may decrease, leading to unintentional dehydration. This is particularly problematic for athletes.
A completely carbohydrate-free meat-eater diet is not ideal for athletes whose training is important. Consider consuming carbohydrates before and after strenuous training. Some fruit before and after training, with meat, nuts, oils and vegetables for the rest of the day, creates an effective approach for sports performance.
This low-carb, whole-food diet provides tremendous benefits and is much better than a completely carbohydrate-free meat-eater diet. It includes lots of meat of different kinds, especially lots of fatty fish, lots of dairy, lots of eggs, oils, nuts, seeds, and vegetables. Fruit should be consumed before and after exercise when following this system.
Persistent digestive problems, feeling faint all the time, gout, urinary pain, menstrual irregularities, dramatic loss of performance, deteriorating glucose levels, or significant increase in LDL apoB protein should prompt reassessment. These symptoms should not be dismissed with internet searches for justifications that claim they are normal.
A meat-eating diet might be effective for some people who already eat foods that don't suit them well, but this does not mean it is the ideal diet. There is great value for some people in reducing carbohydrates, and some people feel better this way. There is great benefit for most people in drastically reducing processed carbohydrates found in fast food.
The recommended diet includes lots of meat of different kinds, especially fatty fish, dairy, eggs, oils, nuts, seeds, and vegetables, with fruit before and after exercise. This approach is better than a strict meat-eater's diet psychologically, physically, and in terms of long-term commitment.
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