Anthony Chaffee is dressed in a tight gray T-shirt that shows off his muscular physique. He works at a private medical practice in Australia that specializes in functional medicine, an umbrella term popularized in the 1990s to describe unregulated alternative medicine. He is telling me, as he tells many of his patients, that the solution to dealing with the threat posed by vegetables is to choose meat over almost all other types of food.
“Plants are trying to kill you,” Chaffee says within the first few minutes of our first video call. “We have some defenses, and that’s why some plants are edible, but they still cause harm with long-term exposure over years and decades,” he continues, comparing the long-term health impacts of eating salad to those of cigarettes and alcohol.
Chaffee is one of the leading exponents of the carnivore diet, the latest trend in the wellness universe, in which people claim they turned around their health — and their lives — by eating bowls piled high with ground beef and boiled eggs.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The diet has been platformed by Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. Peterson recently tried to evangelize about its magical healing properties to a circumspect Elon Musk.
I discovered the diet last year when my Instagram explore page began serving me videos of women biting into sticks of butter and men chowing down on huge cuts of steak for breakfast.
“Here’s what I’m eating for dinner as someone who lost 60 pounds of body fat,” says one, username animalbasedtaste, holding up a wooden chopping board featuring beef short ribs, beef marrow bones, oysters and sardines fried in leftover beef fat, and an avocado.
Self-proclaimed carnivores eat mostly four ingredients: beef, bacon, butter and eggs. (Some incorporate other raw dairy products, selected fruits such as blueberries and seafood into their regimens.) Influencers share recipes for delicacies such as “beef lattes” (coffee, butter, beef protein, colostrum, cinnamon) and snack on “pup patties” from In-N-Out’s secret menu (unseasoned beef, so called because you can safely give it to your dog).
According to its fans, the benefits of the diet range from rapid weight loss to the healing of long-term chronic conditions including depression, polycystic ovary syndrome, acne, eczema, diabetes and psoriasis.
According to almost everyone else — including the registered nutritionists and doctors trying to treat people who have tried the diet for prolonged periods — a diet of only meat with no vegetables or grains is, at best, a form of disordered eating, and at worst incredibly damaging for its adherents, particularly in the long term.
‘CARNIVORE CRACK’
Many of the carnivore diet’s proponents are men who, when not shirtless, tend to wear vests emblazoned with slogans such as “my pronouns are car/nivore” or “make beef great again”. But there is also a considerable minority of women in the movement.
“It’s been a bit of an awakening, eating this way,” says Courtney Luna, a meat influencer who hosts a podcast called Eat Meat + Question Everything. Luna’s forthcoming carnivore cookbook includes a recipe for “carnivore crack:” melted butter topped with bacon sprinkles and frozen into a chocolate-bar-like slab.
“Why are they telling us that butter is bad, that meat is bad?” she asks me. “Follow the money trail. The higher-ups, they can’t make money off of us if we’re all healthy and thriving. There’s been proof of a lot of science being paid for.”
Luna has struggled with her weight and moderation around eating for most of her life, attending her first Weight Watchers meeting when she was 13. She says the carnivore diet has not only helped her with weight loss and mental health after a lifetime of “yo-yo dieting”, but has also given her “food freedom”. Her sentiments are common in the carnivore diet community, where many adherents have previously struggled with moderation around food.
Danielle Shine is a registered dietitian whose work with patients suffering from social media-induced eating disorders has led her to pursue a PhD in the impacts of nutrition misinformation on social media. In her view, adherents to viral food trends are misinterpreting the feeling of found community online for signals of better holistic health. “I have seen people that have come from binge eating, so they find a diet that is highly restrictive, and they find the community, and it helps.” But, she says, highly restrictive diets are “not sustainable”.
“I’ve had people sit in my clinic and tell me they ‘feel so much better’, and I’m looking at blood test results with clinical signs and symptoms that are telling me the exact opposite, but it’s getting ignored,” Shine says.
One of Shine’s recent patients was someone following the carnivore diet who had been referred into her care by his doctor.
“He walked in and he said: ‘I’m only here because I have to tick a box. You can tell me whatever, but I’m not stopping eating butter and I’m not going to stop eating steak.’”
Over the course of eight weeks, she was able to slowly find common ground with him, encourage him to read outside of his echo chamber and eventually get him off the diet.
“I’d never seen cholesterol so high, and so bad. I have so much empathy for people that think it’s working, but I would challenge whether it is working for them,” Shine said.
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