I hadn’t planned on writing about the carnivore diet, which started trending several years ago. To me it just seemed like yet another in an endless parade of unevidenced, out-there eating fads cooked up by algorithms designed to maximize engagement by promoting the wildest and most controversial content imaginable. The carnivore diet entails eating nothing but animal protein—absolutely no fruits, vegetables, legumes, or other plant-based foods—which is clearly restrictive in the extreme. Last year I was interviewed about an even more draconian version of the diet, after which I more or less put it out of my mind. Nobody I knew was on the carnivore diet or asking about it, and it just seemed too outlandish to have any real staying power.
But it turns out this is a fad diet that doesn’t want to die. In late March, noted wellness misinformationist Jenny McCarthy raved about the carnivore diet to Page Six, saying her functional medicine doctor had recommended it. Then, recently, I was at a (conventional) doctor’s appointment in a highly ranked hospital when a registered nurse mentioned that her colleague—a jocular man who looked like a tattooed John Cena in scrubs—was on the diet. I’d told her I was a dietitian, so she asked what I thought of the diet, and she seemed relieved when I said I thought it was both nutritionally unsound and concerningly restrictive. “I’m really worried about him,” she said. “I don’t think he’s eating enough—he sometimes drinks bone broth and calls it a meal.”
That’s when I started to wonder: what was a nurse doing on the carnivore diet? Had it jumped from fringe wellness spaces to mainstream medicine when I wasn’t looking? Or was this just an isolated case that was really more about one person’s troubled relationship with food than about scientific evidence?
More importantly: what does the science say about the carnivore diet? Is there any there there? I decided it was time to dig in and see.
To my surprise, I found more papers on the topic than I’d expected.
