It seems like only yesterday that I was putting down my bowl of ice cream to chuckle about the Paleo diet. You remember Paleo? Think only foods that Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble would have put on the table: meat and fish, fresh fruit and veg, eggs and nuts. Strictly hunter-gatherer – no grains, which need to be cultivated – no processed foods, and no dairy, because I guess there were no domestic cows for Wilma and Betty to milk. And Fred and Barney were getting their meat from animals like hyenas and not bothering to milk them on the fly. Or from animals like dinosaurs, that don’t produce milk.
Odd as Paleo struck me – I ain’t never going to give up my grains, thank you – it made more sense to me than vegan. Sure, vegans can have grains, which is an improvement on Paleo. And I’m cool with the vegetarian aspects. What I don’t get about vegan is thinking that it’s exploiting a chicken to take an egg, a cow to spritz some milk, a bee to nab some honey. If you have the chickens in your backyard air-conditioned chicken coop, and know that they’re cared for, etc., how exploitive is it to ask them to produce an egg or two for you?
But, hey, I couldn’t stick with Atkins or South Beach for more than three days before falling off the no-carb wagon and landing, mouth wide open, in a big old bowl of pasta.
And then there’s the carnivore diet…
…a regimen that involves eating only animal products like meat, offal and eggs, and no plant-based foods. It’s an extreme version of the low-carb, high-fat ketogenic diet – which trains the body to run on fat rather than carbohydrates – that has become popular in recent years. Proponents of the diet say it reduces inflammation and blood pressure while increasing libido and mental clarity. (Source: The Guardian)
I like meat and eggs just fine. But offal? Oh, how awful.
I wouldn’t refuse liver if it were the last food on earth, and I do occasionally eat pate. But kidney? Isn’t their function to filter out impurities? And don’t they come with a whiff of urine?
Sweetbreads I tried once: too rich for my blood. Brain I ordered by accident in Paris. I recalled from high school French that veau meant veal, but I forgot entirely that cervelle was brain. It actually didn’t have much taste, but it looked kind of like chewing gum that had been extruded through the space between my front teeth.
As for tongue. Big gross beef tongue. Little pink lamb tongue. Really weird duck tongue. Yuck of yucks.
And no plant-based foods? No apples. No oranges. No peppers. No pears. No pistachios. No tomatoes. No potatoes. No broccoli. No grapes. No peaches. No cereals. No asparagus. No cukes. No bread. No blueberries. No walnuts. No rice. No thanks…
One of the adherents to the life of carnivory is Shawn Baker, a surgeon who eats roughly 4 pounds of steak a day. Which is about the amount of steak I consume in a year. Baker admits.
“It can be monotonous eating the same thing over and over again, but as time goes by you start to crave it.”
I tend to be kind of a boring, monotonous eater. After all, I’m somone who ate a baloney sandwich on white bread with kosher dill pickle every Monday through Thursday for all four years of my high school career. (On Friday’s – fish day – I ate a PBJ.) Yet I don’t think I could hack eating steak all the time.
But Baker likes the simplicity of it. No meal planning, no thought going into what’s to eat, quick in-and-out grocery shopping. All you need to know is where the beef is. Sort of like wearing the same outfit everyday. (What to wear today? Jeans and a sweater. That was easy.)
It did not surprise me in the least that:
…the all-meat diet has been embraced by a cluster of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, who describe themselves as “bitcoin carnivores”.
As Michael Goldstein, a “bitcoin and meat maximalist” has it:
“Once someone has grown capable of seeing beyond the lies and myths that experts peddle in one domain, it becomes easier to see beyond them in other domains as well.”
Should we all be spending more time on Reddit and with InfoWars? Will that help us grown capable of ferreting out lies and myths?
While all sorts of wonders are attributed to the carnivore diet, many are skeptical. One such skeptic is Stanford professor of medicine Christopher Gardner, who has this to say:
“Are these T rex? African lions? Or humans? Assuming [you are referring to] humans, this sounds disastrous on multiple levels,” he said.
The lack of dietary fibre in an all-meat diet is likely to wreak havoc on the bacteria in our colons, known as the microbiome, he said. “Growing evidence suggests that in the absence of adequate fibre, the bacteria in the colon consume and thin the protective mucus lining, which then leads to impaired immune function and inflammation.”
Well, mucus-consuming bacteria is a bit more medical-ness than I needed. But it does seem logical that all meat wouldn’t be all good for you. There’s also research that suggests that consuming more meat is bad for your heart. Then there’s:
Factory farming of animals is also linked to antibiotic resistance in humans and is a huge contributor to the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
You’ve convinced me. No carnivore diet for this gal.
Think I’ll go have a cookie and a glass of milk.
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