It’s demonstrated over and over again, that people following a strictly ketogenic lifestyle, especially carnivore, reverse a lot of their metabolic problems, enjoy great health, feel amazing, are at lower risks for cancer…
But…Most conscientious people when discussing carnivore, always add… “we don’t know the long term effects of this diet”
That statement is absolutely true, but it also applies to every other diet as well, we know of deficiencies of certain restrictive diets, but we don’t know the long-term benefits of any specific diet. Clean populations who follow only one diet are very rare now.
It’s not quite a paradox, but it feels like a paradox, the people promoting carnivore are very detail-oriented and conscientious so they list the restrictions of our knowledge, but everybody else competing for People’s health interests don’t list the restrictions of knowledge of their diet of choice.
The current methods of farming, both animal and plants, needs to change to a sustainable regenerative model. Any system that requires external inputs (especially petrochemical inputs) wont work long term. Plants and animals work together to regenerate topsoil and are essential to the biocycle.
Great point, I’m glad you brought it up! Let’s examine this.
Remember when people adopt a strict keto / carnivore lifestyle, they are not mindlessly snacking all the time, eating becomes intentional, people simply eat less (and no need for grains).
For the average adult male (lets assume all 7 billion people are males for simplicity) - they require about 500g of animal food per day (after adapting to a fat based metabolism) - don’t forget most of the energy on a carnivore diet comes from fat, most of which we throw away now, so that is extra yield per animal)
Given that the current world fishing capture feeds 1 billion carnivores annually.
and Current world meat production could feed about 2 billion carnivores annually.
There is a gap in current production (3billion vs 7 billion), but the health of the people depends on closing this gap (more focus on range land, de-vilifying animal nutrition). Right now we are not prioritizing meat production and people’s health is suffering, I hope we can rectify that.
Also worth noting that the majority of the worlds vegetarians are economic vegetarians (they don’t have access to animal foods). But that speaks to a historical trend - the rich and elite eat meat, and the peasants eat plants (i.e. robin hood’s Sherwood forest)… which is just another spin on economic vegetarians
This -
Cannot be reconciled with this. The difference in land use is absolutely insurmountable. What you’re suggesting would require turning every scrap of undeveloped, farmable land into farmland. We would have no wilderness left.
That ignoring the huge flaw in your fishing calculation. Global fish populations are plummeting. Harvesting so much is also wildly unsustainable and the entire fishing industry is headed for collapse if we don’t reign in how much we collect every year.
There are a lot of things ‘the rich’ have done through history that should not be used as a model of how we should structure our society.
Right I admit there is lots of work to be done to close the gap. Getting people in the west onto whole food diets is probably the most helpful in the short term, Getting people in the global south off processed foods and some animal proteins (especially in childhood) would also have a huge outsized impacted.
If we can’t get the whole world carnivore, we should at least try to get them keto, and if we can’t do keto, we should try for low carb.
That’s where we fully agree, whole foods and low carb are absolutely the way to go!