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So, the carnivore diet is everywhere at the moment. The idea behind the carnivore diet is pretty simple, but it's also pretty provocative as well.
Doctor Alex reviews the carnivore diet, its benefits, risks, and why he recommends a balanced approach instead.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Carnivore diet cuts out all plants, which removes essential nutrients and fiber.
- Initial improvements are mainly due to eliminating processed foods and refined carbs.
- Scientific research on carnivore diet benefits is minimal and low quality.
- The diet is hard to sustain and may raise cholesterol and other health risks.
- A balanced diet including plants offers similar benefits without extreme restrictions.
What the video covers
- The carnivore diet involves eating only animal products and excluding all plant-based foods.
- Many people feel better initially due to cutting out ultra-processed foods and refined carbs.
- The diet is extremely restrictive and difficult to maintain long-term.
- Scientific evidence supporting the carnivore diet is very limited and mostly anecdotal.
- Cutting out plants removes important nutrients like fiber, antioxidants, vitamin C, and folate.
- The diet can raise LDL cholesterol and may increase risks such as kidney stones.
- The argument that humans evolved to eat only meat is challenged by evidence of diverse diets in long-lived populations.
- Most health benefits come from removing processed junk foods, not from excluding plants entirely.
- Doctor Alex recommends a more balanced diet, such as the Mediterranean diet, that includes plants and animal products.
- Sustainability and long-term health protection are key considerations in choosing a diet.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to the Carnivore Diet
- 00:55Overview and Initial Benefits
- 01:59What You Can and Cannot Eat
- 03:03Why People Feel Better Initially
- 04:14Nutritional Benefits of Animal Foods
- 05:18Lack of Scientific Evidence
- 06:17Challenges of Long-Term Adherence
- 07:23What You Lose by Cutting Out Plants
- 09:33Health Risks and Cholesterol Concerns
- 10:35Evolutionary Arguments and Balanced Diets
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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You eat only animal foods like meat and fish and eggs, sometimes a bit of dairy, and you cut out literally everything else that isn't one of those things.
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Now, the people promoting this way of eating, promoting the carnivore diet, they make some pretty big claims from dramatic weight loss to reversing autoimmune conditions as well. I've just seen on Instagram. So, as a doctor, I wanted to look at what the evidence
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actually says about this. I want to be fair to both sides of the argument and explain why for the vast majority of people, I definitely would not recommend it. So, I'm going to go through what it is, why some people really do feel
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better at first, the serious problems with eating this way for most people, the argument about whether or not we evolved to eat only meat, and then I'm going to end on the way of eating that does almost everything carnivore
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promises with none of the downsides. And as always, if you find it useful, if you learned something from this video today, then please help me out by liking the video, also hyping the video and subscribing to the channel as well. All
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of those are free and it really, really, really helps me out. So, what actually is the carnivore diet? Well, at its strictest, it means eating nothing but animal products. So, that's meat of any kind. It means organs as well like liver
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and kidney and you know hearts and tripe as well plus fish and eggs. And for some people it means a bit of butter and some cheese and some cream and some milk as well. But there are zero vegetables.
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There are no fruits. There are no grains, no beans, no nuts. Nothing at all that grows from the ground. Now some followers of carnivore go even further and eat only beef and salt and water just three things which these people
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tend to call the lion diet. Lion as in the animal. So it sits at the very far end of the low carbohydrate spectrum well, well, well beyond keto because it strips out plants altogether. Now, most people end up on this way of eating on
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the carnivore diet after struggling for years with their weight or their energy or their gut or some sort of autoimmune condition, having tried other things that just didn't work. And they are pulled in by the simplicity and by some
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of the striking before and after photos and these stories that you see online. And the thing is, a lot of people really do feel better when they start the carnivore diet. So let me explain why I think that is. So when you switch to the
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carnivore diet from this normal western way of eating, you automatically strip out all of the ultra-processed food, the sugar, and the refined carbohydrates in one go overnight. So if your old diet was this typical western one, then the
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improvement can feel really dramatic. But the most important thing here is where that improvement actually comes from. What's actually happening in my opinion is that you've just removed yourself from a really damaging way of eating and you've taken out almost all
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of the carbohydrates and the ultra-processed stuff, the refined stuff, which flattens those really big glucose spikes that I talk about all the time, the ones that leave you tired and foggy and craving lots of sugary things, you know, throughout the day. Now obviously
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there is real goodness in these sorts of foods. You know meat and fish and eggs are loaded with complete protein and vitamin B12 and iron as well and zinc and omega-3 fats and choline and creatine as well. All of which your body
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really does need. So you've cut out all of the junk stuff and you're eating plenty of protein. And so that alone makes a lot of people feel really well really fast. There's even a fair argument that if somebody who eats a
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full western diet where they get most of their calories, you know, 80 or 90% of the calories from ultra-processed food, if they suddenly switch to a full carnivore diet, which is basically a very extreme version of keto, you could argue that
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this is better for them. But the thing is, better than terrible isn't the same as best. And in my view, it's nowhere near the best way that you could be eating. Now, when you look past the testimonials of this way of eating, the
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actual evidence for the carnivore diet and any health benefits is remarkably thin, to be honest. So, there was a review in 2026 that went looking for every human study ever done on the carnivore diet, and it found only nine
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of them. And this is really important because nine is almost nothing. And nearly all of them were just case reports, tiny case series or online surveys, which sits right at the bottom of the evidence ladder of how sort of
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accurate and reliable and trusting they are. So basically there isn't a single proper randomized control trial on this way of eating on this diet. There's no long-term studies and there's no data at all on the things that matter most like
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heart attacks and strokes or how long you know people actually live. The evidence you'll probably hear quoted most is this survey of around 2,000 people who already followed the diet and then later on said that they felt great.
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But that doesn't really prove anything because the people who feel awful on a diet simply quit and never fill in the survey obviously. So the fairest summary that I can give it in terms of the research is that there are lots of
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short-term self-reported enthusiasm but almost zero hard long-term science either way. But for me, the single biggest issue with the carnivore diet is simply the restriction itself and the simple fact that almost nobody can keep it going for life. Just think about it
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for a second. Cutting out every single plant food on the planet is a huge thing to sustain. It makes eating out hard. It makes eating with your family hard and traveling hard as well. So most people either quit within a few months or
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slowly start adding foods back in. And here's the thing, right? So if you're going to add foods back in anyway, then you may as well start with a diet that is less extreme in the first place, like the one that I will come back to in a
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few minutes, where you still get loads of protein and natural fats, but you keep all of the other good stuff as well. And again, I want to hammer this point home because it's probably the most important point in this video, and
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I've mentioned it a couple of times already. The real benefits that people get on carnivore, the weight loss and the steadier energy and the better gut, and you know, just feeling healthier in general almost always comes from cutting
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out the ultra-processed junk and the refined carbs. It doesn't come from banning broccoli and blueberries. You could keep every healthy plant on your plate, but cut the junk out and get those exact same results without going anywhere near such an extreme way of
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eating. So, let me talk you through what you're actually giving up when you go carnivore because it is a lot. So, by removing every single plant, you lose fiber pretty much completely. You are ingesting almost zero fiber and fiber is
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the main fuel for the trillions of bacteria in your gut that help to run your immune system and your metabolism and even your mood as well. You also lose the thousands of plant compounds like the polyphenols and the
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antioxidants that we find in fruit and veg and beans and nuts. Tied again and again in the research to lower rates of heart disease and cancer along with vitamin C and folate and other really helpful nutrients that are hard to get
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from meat alone. And this is one of the biggest reasons why I wouldn't recommend it. Now, there's another point that I know a lot of you are going to be sort of thinking in your head about all of
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this. All to do with your cholesterol. So, a meat-heavy, high-fat diet pushes up your LDL cholesterol in a lot of people. And I know that the carnivore community are going to be pushing back really hard on this point. But
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is there are plenty of randomized control trials showing exactly this effect which I will put a load of them in the description below so you can click on them and read the research yourself. So for me we can't really
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argue with what the research shows. So a big rise in your LDL cholesterol isn't really something I'm willing to just wave away. Now, this diet has also been linked to a higher risk of kidney stones. And we already know that
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processed meat in particular is tied pretty strongly to bowel cancer and other nasty things as well. And beyond the risks, there's something really sad about this sort of way of eating as well because there are thousands of beautiful, colorful, really great
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tasting plants and veg every supermarket that you're just never going to be eating. And it seems a real shame to cut all of those out of your life. Remember, the people who switch to carnivore are nearly always coming from a poor western
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diet, which is exactly why they feel better. But the thing is, if you're already eating all of these beautiful colored foods and mostly whole foods, basically the Mediterranean style way of eating, full of protein and fiber and healthy fats, you'd find very little
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reason to switch to carnivore at all. Now, one of the strongest arguments you'll hear in favor of the carnivore diet is that humans evolved to eat meat.
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So, this is how we are meant to eat. And yes, obviously there is some truth in it because meat mattered a great deal in our evolution and almost certainly helped fuel the growth of the human brain. But the claim that we evolved to
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eat only meat just doesn't hold up. We've got clear evidence that our ancestors ate plants right the way through history from starch trapped on ancient teeth to the tools they used to grind up seeds and roots. And our bodies
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literally carry multiple copies of the genes that digest starch. So, the truth of the matter is this, and I'm fairly confident in saying this, is that we are omnivores, which simply means we were built to eat and thrive on both animals
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and on plants, rather than being locked into one or the other. And the populations alive today who live the longest don't eat only meat. And obviously, they're not just vegan either. They eat a base of vegetables and beans and whole grains and fruit
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with smaller amounts of fish and meat and animal fats. So, we didn't evolve as carnivores and we didn't evolve as herbivores. We evolved as wonderfully flexible and complex omnivores. And that flexibility really is the whole point.
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So this is what I'd recommend instead of the carnivore diet which sits at almost the complete opposite end of the food spectrum and it is no surprise the Mediterranean diet. So the Mediterranean way of eating is built around vegetables
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and fruit and beans and lentils and whole grains, nuts, extra virgin olive oil and fish with some dairy and you know modest amounts of meat. It's varied. It is delicious. It's colorful.
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You know, we eat this way all the time. And the thing is, you can happily eat this way for the rest of your life, which makes it far more useful than any diet that you've got to force yourself
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through joylessly. And it's got more high quality evidence behind it than almost any other way of eating. There is a really large randomized control trial called PRYMed. And I mentioned this probably a million times on this channel. And it took more than 7,000
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people who were at high risk of heart disease. And they put them on either a Mediterranean diet with extravirgin olive oil or nuts or a lower fat control diet. And the Mediterranean groups had around a 30% lower rate of heart attacks
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and strokes and cardiovascular death. So, that is the kind of hard long-term outcome data that the carnivore diet simply doesn't have, and it comes from a way of eating that asks you to add wonderful food onto your plate rather
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than stripping all of that goodness out of it. So, having said all of that, should you actually do the carnivore diets? What do you think my response is going to be? Obviously, for the vast majority of people, my answer is no. But
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if you forced me and you know I had to pick between the average western diet stuffed full of ultrarocessed refined industrial formulated foods and the carnivore keto diet, then yes, carnivore probably it's hard, isn't it? It's probably going
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to be healthier than getting all of your calories from ultrarocessed foods. But that is a low bar, isn't it? The real problem is that almost nobody could stick to this way of eating for the next 30 years. And that's exactly what we're
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talking about here. We are not after a quick fix on this channel or a shortcut.
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We are after a way of eating for the rest of your life that protects you for the rest of your life as well. So the carnivore diet is extreme. It is very hard to sustain. It strips out whole
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groups of food that your body actually benefits from and there's almost zero long-term evidence behind it. For pretty much everybody that I can think of, a Mediterranean style way of eating gives you almost everything that carnival promises, but with the evidence and the
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variety and the long-term safety data to back it up. So, the takeaway and the learning point from this video is obviously a pretty simple, but it's also a reassuring one. You do not need a dogmatic, polarizing, punishing, all or
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nothing diet to transform your health. You just need to clear out all of the ultrarocessed junk and all of the refined stuff. Build your meals around real whole ingredients and pick a way of eating that you can actually enjoy and
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sustain for the rest of your life. So why don't you start this evening after watching this video? Go online and Google Mediterranean recipes and just see what comes up and cook one tonight or tomorrow night. And I promise you
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that it is going to be much better for you than something that's ultrarocessed. Remember, the best diet in the world is simply the enjoyable whole food diet that you can happily stay on for the next 50 or even 60 is
Topics:carnivore dietDoctor Alexanimal-based dietnutritionhealth riskscholesterolfiberMediterranean dietdiet sustainabilityprocessed foods
