The carnivore diet, an eating regimen that exclusively includes animal products, has gained traction in recent years, fueled in part by social media influence and celebrity endorsements. While proponents tout its short-term benefits, a comprehensive understanding requires examining the long-term risks and considerations, as viewed by medical professionals.
What is the Carnivore Diet?
The carnivore diet is an extreme form of a ketogenic diet that involves minimizing carbohydrate consumption in exchange for high-fat foods. The carnivore diet meal plan only allows consumption of meat, poultry, eggs, seafood, fish, some dairy products, and water. You need to exclude all vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, seeds, and nuts.
In a typical diet, our bodies use directly-available glucose from carbohydrates for energy. But when carbs are cut out of the diet in exchange for fats, there’s no immediately available glucose in the bloodstream, and so the body switches to using fat for fuel. In a process called “ketosis,” stored fat is broken down into molecules called ketone bodies. Studies have demonstrated the efficacy of a ketogenic diet in weight loss, and even as a treatment option for epilepsy. Emerging research is even investigating the benefits of a ketogenic diet on other neurological disorders like Alzheimer's disease.
As mentioned, the Carnivore diet is an extremist cousin of the keto diet, and its advocates often back it with studies supporting keto diets. On a strictly Carnivore Diet, the body will enter a state of ketosis, in which it opts for fueling with stored fats because there's no glucose at-hand in the bloodstream-this may explain claims of dramatic weight-loss. But as we very well know, weight-loss is not always a useful metric for the healthiness of an eating routine. In fact, extreme weight-loss is often an indicator of the opposite.
Potential Benefits and Claims
Celebrities like Joe Rogan have touted it to millions of listeners. Rogan has claimed that the Carnivore Diet has helped him lose weight, reduce aches and pains, improve his mental health (hmmmm), and has even helped control his vitiligo, an autoimmune condition that causes patches of skin to lose color.
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Dr. Shawn BakerAthletically, he’s played professional rugby, won strongman competitions, set records as a Highland Games participant, and most recently, he became an indoor rowing world champion.
Risks and Concerns
Despite the anecdotal evidence of miraculous effects of an all-meat diet, science does not back up the other claims of the Carnivore Diet, and most doctors recommend avoiding it. While a diet that induces ketosis may be beneficial for some people, changing the way the body burns fuel is not the only factor in a diet.
First, the Carnivore diet is radically different from typical ketogenic diets because it calls for the complete elimination of carbohydrates-not just a reduction. With this complete elimination, as with other keto diets, there are increased risks of nutrient deficiencies. It’s extremely difficult to get enough of the necessary vitamins and nutrients from a strictly Carnivore diet. For even a chance of the Carnivore diet being remotely healthy, it can’t include just bacon and steak, it must also include a significant amount of nutrient-dense animal organs. Even then, experts worry about deficiencies, particularly fiber. The lack of fiber in the Carnivore Diet can cause severe constipation, which, besides being uncomfortable, can have serious complications.
Nutrient Deficiencies
This diet contains zero fiber, which is essential for gut health as it is a prebiotic that feeds our healthy bacteria and supports digestion. A diet exclusively animal is deficient in many key nutrients such as: Potassium, Iodine, Folate, Vitamin C, Calcium, Magnesium and Thiamine.
Cardiovascular Risks
Eating lots of meat can cause serious digestive issues, and eating lots of saturated fats, which are plentiful in the Carnivore diet, can elevate LDL cholesterol (the bad kind!) and increase risk of heart disease. Consuming large quantities of red meat has been scientifically linked to an increased risk of heart disease. High amounts of saturated fats found in red meats have been linked to increased risk of certain breast cancers.
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Other Health Concerns
Other longer-term concerns about keto diets, especially the carnivore diet, include the increased risk of kidney stones, gout, and osteoporosis. Consuming large quantities of red meat has been scientifically linked to diabetes, cancer, and kidney stones.
Doctors Who Support the Carnivore Diet
Despite the general reservations in the medical community, some doctors advocate for the carnivore diet, often based on their own experiences and observations.
Dr. Shawn Baker
Along with being the author of the 2019 book The Carnivore Diet, Shawn Baker is a doctor and an accomplished athlete. Air Force. Dr. Shawn Baker has gained notoriety as a leading proponent of the carnivore diet-where participants get nutrition from animal-sourced foods and severely limit or eliminate all plants from their diet.
Baker shares his journey toward a carnivore diet. Until his early forties, he thought he could eat however he wanted and burned it off as long as he exercised and worked hard. That stopped working pretty abruptly for me as he transitioned into his forties. He found himself forty or fifty pounds overweight; he developed sleep apnea, metabolic syndrome, back pain, joint issues, and just general wear and tear from a long and arduous athletic career. He decided he was going to lose weight and get leaner. So he went on a nutrition journey; he cut calories drastically, ate low fat, and ate high fiber and vegetables, making him thinner. But I was miserable. I was grumpy, I was tired, I was irritable, and I wasn’t satisfied. He transitioned into a paleo diet, where he included more animal foods. Then he went into this rabbit hole of reading about nutrition and decided to try a low-carb diet. After that, he played with a ketogenic diet for some time. But he was reading about people who were only eating meat, and they were, by his objective observation, the healthiest group he’d seen. I’m down with experimentation, so I tried eating only meat for 30 days. And nothing terrible happened. People told me You’re going to get scurvy. Your arteries are going to seize up. Your colon’s going to fall out. None of that ever happened. He did the 30 days and then went back to the more varied diet. And I didn’t feel as good. He started noticing digestive discomfort and my aches and pains came back. He decided that I liked feeling good, so I went back to an entirely carnivorous diet. I’ve been there for over three years, and I enjoy excellent health. My experience has been all win and very little loss. At 53, I feel 20 years younger than I am. I perform that way as well. And now, there are tens upon tens of thousands of people who are trying this. And the vast majority of them are getting great results as well. He gets a dozen to 20 people a day telling me that the carnivore diet has changed their lives. That should make people very curious. If you want to check to see if meat is healthy or not, study these crazy people who are only eating meat.
Baker is also a proponent of people identifying the foods that work best for their bodies. Take it upon yourself to figure out what’s working. We’re pretty arrogant to think we can predict the future-that we can tell someone how long they’re going to live based on their diet. What we can focus on is that we have a person who’s not healthy right in front of us today; what can we do to make them healthier or less diseased? We have this new company called MeatRX.com, and we have daily support meetings. We’ve had a guy, who’s been on the carnivore diet for 3 weeks, and he was taking 72 units of insulin a day, and in three weeks, he’s now taking zero. He’s inarguably less diseased, and I think that’s the best we can do. My suspicion is that when people are no longer diseased, they’ll generally live longer, and they’ll certainly have a better quality of life. So when we say this or that diet is going to make you live longer, it’s sort of like reading tea leaves. The goal is to make people who are sick today healthy.
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Dr. Christine Najjar
At Food First MD, Dr. Christine Najjar specializes in customized keto and carnivore diet solutions designed to help you achieve your health goals sustainably. If you are embracing a low-carb diet lifestyle, you want to work with a ketogenic doctor who will support you. A ketogenic doctor uses low-carb plans such as ketogenic and carnivore diets as powerful tools to address imbalances in your metabolism. Dr. Christine Najjar is a board-certified medical doctor and Certified Metabolic Health Practitioner with advanced training in Human Nutrition from Columbia University.
Food First MD is a physician-led medical practice where modern medicine meets root-cause nutrition. Founded by Dr. Christine Najjar, board-certified in Internal Medicine with a master’s in nutrition, we offer personalized, food-first care for people ready to restore energy, reduce medications, and feel in control of their health again. Every plan is tailored, every visit is thoughtful, and every step is designed to create sustainable change.
Important Considerations
Whether or not a diet is healthy for someone comes down to far more than just whether the body is burning fats or carbs. For some people, there may be nothing wrong with eating a high fat, low carb diet.
Individualized Approach
Every patient has a unique metabolism. By regularly monitoring your health, Dr. Najjar can provide customized low-carb plans tailored to your body’s specific needs and health conditions.
Long-Term Sustainability
In general, strict exclusionary diets are hard to follow and often lead to increased isolation and stress related to food.
The Importance of Fiber
The lack of fiber in the Carnivore Diet can cause severe constipation, which, besides being uncomfortable, can have serious complications.
The Role of Meat in a Balanced Diet
Meat is a vital part of that metric. For many people that have these severe medical issues with real bad sensitivities like auto-immune and GI diseases, a pure meat diet seems to work wonderfully to get out of this illness stage. Most people end up eating what we call carnivore-ish, so they eat meat about 90 percent of the time and they have other foods they enjoy the other 10 percent, and it works pretty well. “When it comes to long-term adherence to a diet, if you’re constantly hungry, it doesn’t seem to work,” “If you don’t enjoy the food, you’ll fail as well. You have to find a diet that’s satiating, palatable, and it doesn’t leave you with hunger.”I’ve seen people get good results with just making meat a bigger part of their diet in general. The standard American diet, which we all vilify, is 70% plus plant-based. When you flip it around and make it more animal-based when you make meat the focus of the diet, and you eliminate all the junk food, people get healthy. Some people have to continue to be more and more selective and restrictive to finally get full relief for certain things. I’ve seen cases where people were eating mostly meat and certain fruits and vegetables and they took out the fruits and vegetables and they got healthier. That does occur. Does everybody need to do that to get results? Absolutely not.