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High fat, high animal protein diet gurus: They die so young
In these videos someone showed how long the diet gurus actually lived. You can see that the gurus that pushed a high protein and/or high fat diet clearly had much worse health outcomes.
Forget about studies, because people will claim they are not valid anyway. Just take a look at these videos and see what diet made people actually live a long life.
It is just a fact that we dont have really old people that eat a keto diet or a carnivore diet. It seems proteins shouldnt be more that 15% of your calories and fats shouldnt be more that 20%. Carbs seem to be by far the macro nutrient that does the best in terms of longevity.
Just trying to warn people here, because carnivore/ high animal protein diets get pushed here quite a bit.
I would bet my money on it that a diet high in meat and/or fat will kill you a lot sooner. Maybe even 15 years sooner. I fell for this marketing bullshit of keto and carnivore as well because I was desperate to heal my skin of sebderm. But now I finally woke up. The carnivore diet and other animal based diets have been around forever, it is not a recent trend. Still, we have not one centenarian eating carnivore or even close to carnivore. NOT ONE. I think no one even made it to 90 on that diet. On the other hand we have countless centenarians that eat high carb diets.
Wake up people!
absolutely , I think having refined carbs like white rice is the best way to mix your food macros .
Just trying to warn people here, because carnivore/ high animal protein diets get pushed here quite a bit.
I dont think people are doing that here . The best food that you can while while lowering your vitamin A in the body is meat and only meat . Also people suggest adding beans and rice for carbs.
For me personally I think most of the calories should come from muscle meat , fats etc and good amount of carbs and sugar
Well, in the end it's all guesswork until you prove to yourself that your diet leads to great health and a long life. Meanwhile everyone should eat the diet that makes him or her feel best.
As for myself, during the past 15 years I've tried most everything from veganism to raw primal/paleo and, since a while, high fat carnivore. I'm going to stick to that because not only does it make me feel by far the best physically, mentally and emotionally, it also keeps changing my life for the better in so many ways.
I'm probably going to experiment with adding some carbs in the form of raw dairy and raw honey every now and then because I like to see if I can optimize workout performance on intermittent carb loading, but plants are most likely off the table for good.
I've only watched the first of the three videos so far, but there is nowhere near enough detail to draw any firm conclusions. There is no one carnivore diet, low carb diet, vegetarian or vegan diet. What exactly were these people eating, and for how long? There was no consideration for any other confounding factors, such as lifestyle and healthy user bias. This is pretty much the most unscientific approach imaginable, especially considering it is the most non-random sample you could come up with..."gurus".
The one thing it shows is that it is possible to live to an old age on a variety of diets...the human species, taken as a whole, is very adaptable. But you need proper randomized samples and hard data on food consumption over a lifetime to understand meaningful trends, and that simply does not exist.
Don't forget those videos are made by the YouTube handle "Plant Chompers"...not exactly without a strong bias.
The problem with gurus is that they are often very dishonest. People who go full vegan have very short life spans.
What happens with gurus is that they quietly change their diet to add more animal foods. But they don't tell anyone because that would be a big hit for their paycheck.
It would not surprise me at all to learn that theliverking doesnt eat any liver at all.
I just think it is interesting that all the youngest deaths (30 year old age range) mentioned in the first video were supposedly followers of the Weston A Price dietary guidelines. I find this very relevant to Grant's forum, as WAP pushes high vitamin A foods, including cod liver oil. Just wanted to point that out, as I do not think anyone else mentioned it yet.
Regarding the message that high protein dieters living shorter, I believe there is a lot more going on there than just diet. The "obvious" one is genetics, but I do believe other lifestyle factors play a big role in long term health outcomes. It is quite difficult to draw conclusions on associative relationships between any of these factors and age of death (or other health-related outcomes) when you start looking at individuals or populations. I do agree though, that long term excessive protein intake is probably not good, but my definition of excessive protein intake is definitely more than the roughly 10% of total energy the video mentioned. I think 20-25% of daily energy from protein should be fine long term, especially for those who are physically active.
I also wanted to point out that some of the individuals mentioned on the far right end of the spectrum in the first video (Zheng Ji, Ellsworth Wareham, Kummerow, Jeremiah Stamler, etc.) were either still actively researching or basically continued to work until they died, i.e. feeling a purpose in life seems to actually help you live longer! Mindset is powerful, just saying. 🙂
@max-3 I agree with your statement that the keto/carnivore space does not appear to produce a lot of centenarians. Just curious if you have any posts either here or on any other forum outlining your experience with keto/carnivore and why you jumped ship; I like to hear people's stories.
I think it might just come down to the known phenomenon of biological accumulation/magnification/amplificatiom. As we eat animals higher up in the food chain we get exposed to higher concentrations of any type of long lived poisons, which I believe are mostly fat-soluble such as DDT, HCH, mercury, lead, arsenic and so on.
Attaching a figure about the approximate biological magnification of DDT in sea animals that I just found at this site: https://sites.google.com/a/skagwayschool.org/bird-on-a-string/biology/biology-announcements/trophiclevelsbiomasspyramidsandbioaccumulation
As an example I have heard the stereotype of how many asians look relatively young until they age really hard after a certain point. Might be the common problem of arsenic accumulation that many asians will get from their staple food rice (low vitamin A) but that gets them quite hard them after several decades of enough exposure.
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Thank you for sharing, really interesting. I am aware of this problem, but I think it does not really apply here, because most meat based dieters have farm raised beef as their staple. And I dont think you can get away from this problem on any diet, because if you eat plant based you will eat different toxins like pesticides, plant toxins etc.
We live in such a polluted world that you have to choose your poison. But what we could maybe do is to switch up our food sources more often. Dont eat rice for years, maybe switch it up with some other grain. Same with beef. Maybe have some days with more small fish like sardines or more eggs. If you eat only the same stuff every day in huge quantities you will likely overload on some toxin.
Ok I will briefly share my experience with carnivore. I tried it to heal my skin of sebderm, but it didnt work and I really tried all different forms of a carnivore diet. I played with fat to protein ratios, different meats, eating raw etc. I would say the most success I had with only muscle meat but that still didnt heal my skin completely and I did that for a long time. So I thought: Why should I do such a restricted diet, if it doesnt even clear my skin? So I stopped and also I realized that it is not a good diet for longevity. Also it sucks for perfomance. 99,9% of high level athletes eat carbs. Also no carbs means higher cortisol and worse sleep.
Another thing that I hate on carnivore is that it is so hard to actually gain fat. I know most people dont have this problem but I get too lean quite easily because I move a lot and also think a lot. You could gain fat with dairy but I dont tolerate dairy.
At the end of my 1,5 years of carnivore I also developed weird symptoms like blisters in my mouth and I think even receeding gums (only a little bit) and my skin tone looked worse. Also stress levels got higher and higher and when I did some body building my blood pressure went up like crazy (probably because of electrolyte problems, which I also couldnt resolve whatever I did). So at that point I new I was getting worse and likely lacked some nutrients or I just got toxic because of too much iron or whatever. I never had it tested so I can only guess what was wrong with me.
For some people with really bad unresolveable digestion problems or life-altering auto-immune problems I would however still recommend going carnivore. Because they really have nothing to lose. For everybody else I wouldnt recommend it long term. It is a huge red flag for me that we have not one single person we can point to and say: Look, he only ate meat and lived to be 102!
Pretty sure many people will develop problems if they eat that much animal foods long-term. And with long-term I mean 20-30 years and not just the 8 years or something that someone like Shawn Baker has been doing this. My guess is you will see many of these guys drop dead before they are 70.
In order to "see a clear pattern", as you say, and be confident that pattern is not a statistical coincidence, the sampling framework needs to be scientifically rigorous. Otherwise, you are just a conspiracy expert like Garrett Smith who "sees patterns" everywhere he looks that aren't validated by anything but his own worldview.
Did you happen to notice, for one thing, that the sample size for supposedly "carnivore" gurus was way smaller than that of any other category? That right there means you can't draw strong conclusions because you lack statistical power...the less power, the greater the likelihood that the results are by sheer chance, not replicable, and not representative of the population. Then you need to control for confounding factors like date of birth, sex, geographic location, proximity to environmental hazards, detrimental habits like smoking or drinking, etc. Controlling for each confounding factor requires an ever larger sample size to reach sufficient statistical power.
So you have basically been sucked into a plant-promoter's propaganda piece, although to his credit he did spend quite a lot of time digging up different examples, and among his examples the people who reportedly ate less protein died, on average, at an older age. But you will also notice that a ton of people who weren't carnivore and who ate a variety of different diets died earlier than some of the "carnivore" folks.
Without the scientific method and an understanding of statistics, you are left seeing what you want to see.
I would suggest that you may have given up too early on the meat-only diet to see your issues resolve...I still have some skin, digestive, and nervous system problems after 2 years of mostly meat and low Vitamin A, but overall the symptoms are improving and I have seen so much crazy shit come and go on this diet that it's impossible not to be convinced that it is working. I won't say that your complaints about cortisol and sleep aren't accurate for you, but they clearly don't apply to everyone who's been doing carnivore, so you can't just make your blanket statements that "carnivore does X" when there is proof to the contrary. I would also suggest, based on my experience, that experiencing cortisol and sleep problems may very well be part of getting stored shit out of your body and not an inherent problem with carnivore.