By George Savastio, ND
You have probably heard the saying, “If some is good, more is better”. This seems to me to be a very American expression. If you know any Ayurveda, it’s the kind of thing American pitta people think. We live in a country where our automobiles, TV screens, coffee cups and dinner plates must be “super-sized” to enormous proportions to suit our bottomless appetites.
I bring this up because I’ve just been made aware of a new dietary fad called the “Carnivore Diet”. As the name implies, it’s a diet based entirely upon the consumption of animal products. I suppose in hindsight that we could see it coming. First came the “paleo” diet, with its emphasis on eating large quantities of meat and no farm foods such as grains in imitation of our imagined stone-age ancestors. This diet proved to decrease inflammation and often leads to weight loss and stabilization of blood sugar values. We often recommend a variant of this diet called The Whole 30 Diet, which has been helpful to many of our patients and others. We could label the paleo diet under the heading, “Some is good”. Next came the ketogenic diet, which purports to improve the paleo diet by increasing the amount of meat and, particularly, fat while removing more carbohydrates with the goal of inducing a state called “ketosis”. Somehow, ketosis became a good thing to induce. Ketosis represents the body’s method of dealing with slow starvation by converting stored fats into ketones, which can then be burned for energy. Why artificially induced starvation at the same time that we’re stuffed with fats appeals to anyone is beyond me, and the difficulty in digesting copious fats and heavy proteins is a strain on the digestive system. For people with stagnant digestions such as those with gallstones or constipation, the “keto” diet is a disaster waiting to happen.
But, apparently even the keto diet isn’t extreme enough for some people. Now we must consume only meat in an attempt to refashion ourselves into carnivores. True carnivores, animals that live strictly from eating prey, come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but none of them look like humans. They typically have sharp teeth, digestive tracts specialized for dissolving flesh, and do little but eat, sleep and hunt. We, on the other hand, have varied teeth (incisors, canines and molars), a digestive tract between herbivores (plant eaters) and carnivores, and spend a lot of time awake doing a lot of different things. We’re omnivores, that is, we eat whatever we can nourish ourselves with, which turns out to be a lot of different things. Our imagined paleo ancestors were also omnivores, and only ate lots of meat in environments that made it possible or necessary. The carnivore diet is the keto diet on steroids and is probably just about as healthy as steroids in the long run.
Now, we can get a bit ridiculous in the other direction, such as eating only fruit (yes, there are people who call themselves fruitarians) or only raw vegan foods. These diets are just as extreme, leading to deprivation instead of stagnation. Over time, raw foods become increasingly hard to digest, and much of the extra nutrients and enzymes present in raw food pass through the system without nourishing the well-meaning extremist.
In the long run, here’s wishing for a return of the concepts of balance and harmony and a letting go of the idea more is always better.
