Originally Posted by
Kristen Walker
I'm hoping Robert doesn't mind if I chime in here as I have many years of experience with the carnivore diet, as well as some other loony eating disorders I'm recovering from. I also have Precision Nutrition Level 1 coaching certification, take that as you will.
What Saladino is advocating, as others have pointed out, is no longer really a carnivore diet, but a more or less arbitrary regimen based on Saladino's belief that plants are full of "toxins," and only certain carbs are okay to eat. Nowadays, fruit, honey, and (I guess) rice.
He's not wrong, in a sense. Yes, plants contain natural pesticides (antinutrients) and yes, eaten in large enough quantities certain compounds can potentially be harmful to certain people who are particularly sensitive. A lot of the "evidence" for this is mechanistic, though, and it seems a stretch to look at the current state of health in the civilized world and blame it on spinach and kale. In his book The Carnivore Code, Saladino relates an anecdote of a woman who almost died from drinking like 4 spinach smoothies. She got oxalate poisoning. But, call me crazy, I feel like that doesn't happen a lot.
Saladino's carnivore-ish protocol sounds like a not-bad idea for an elimination diet if someone is suffering from gastrointestinal or perhaps autoimmune issues. As for mental health, I don't know by what mechanism this diet would improve it, unless it's by way of just cutting junk food, copious amounts of refined carbs and white sugar. In which case, you can still eat a lot more stuff than just meat, fruit, honey, and rice.
I recall reading about some interesting preliminary research on nutritional ketosis as a potentially therapeutic intervention for certain mental health disorders (schizophrenia was one), and the internet is rife with n=1 anecdotes. L. Amber O'Hearn is a long-time carnivore who uses the diet to control symptoms of bipolar II. She has done so quite effectively for many years. I don't know if she trains for strength -- I doubt it -- but having the same disorder and having done both years of strict carnivore and only a couple months of strength training, I can tell you that strength training has been markedly more effective for me in a much shorter time. Quite simply I have never experienced fewer mental health symptoms in my adult life than I have in the last 9 weeks of strength training.
However, you can find tons of heart-wrenching testimonials for veganism too. (I was also a raw vegan for the better part of a year in my 20s. I've sampled every eating disorder.)
In my opinion, and based on many years of unfortunate experience, a severely restrictive diet is almost always unnecessary and often harmful. This is getting too long to go into the neuroses you have to adopt in order to eat only like 4 things, but it will mess you up. Or, perhaps more accurately, you have to be messed up to do it. I did experience health benefits from going carnivore back in 2010, but I was severely obese at the time (293 lbs when I started), I did carnivore IN LIEU OF training, and many of the benefits were probably the result of cutting shitty food. Much of the weight loss was the result of my appetite decreasing due to ketosis; eventually my weight plateaued at 220 lbs and did not drop any further no matter how much of a strict carnivore I was. (Like most religious carnivores, I did not "believe" in calories.)
A trainee on the NLP is becoming a more and more efficient user of substrate. For an obese sedentary person who refuses to train, it makes sense to lower insulin signaling with low carb or fasting ketosis. But of course, you shouldn't be obese and sedentary. You should be training. And if you are, your muscles are using glucose. You are insulin sensitive, or getting there, and you don't have to be so damn picky about everything you eat. It's a good idea not to eat garbage, but IMO carnivore scapegoats plants for poor physical and mental health caused by a general poor lifestyle and lack of training. It's great for neurotic people who like being in weird cults, but IMHO, it's simply not necessary for a serious strength trainee.
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