Recently, a trend called the carnivore diet has become more discussed on the Internet. While most people eat meat, you may ask yourself what exactly counts as a carnivore diet and if it’s worth trying. If you don’t have enough time to spare right now, let’s give you the short answer: it’s all meat and no veggies…which is not good news for your overall health. Here is why you should not try the carnivore diet.
1. It is lacking in essential nutrition.
The carnivore diet consists solely of meat and animal products. Limiting your diet to a single food source severely reduces your intake of vitamins, minerals, and other antioxidants found in plant-based foods. According to Harvard Health Publishing, plant-based eating patterns, such as a vegetarian or Mediterranean diet, have been carefully researched by their dietary specialists. As a result, they have been proven to reduce the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. It also takes a toll on your various organ systems causing things like brittle bones and back pain, poor digestion, poor skin and hair, and more.
In addition to limiting the nutritional value of your diet, limiting it to only meat and animal products can lead to an unhealthy relationship with food. Family gatherings, work dinners, and lunches with friends will all be problematic if the only food you can eat is meat.
2. It increases your risk of developing cancer.
Scientists investigated the effect of various fruit compounds on liver cancer cells in vitro. Many of them significantly inhibit cancer cell growth. Proteins are constructed from amino acids; however, not all amino acids are the same. Unfortunately, the carnivore diet provides a consistent high dose of some of the “bad guy” amino acids linked to an increased risk of certain diseases such as cancer that can land you in hospice and palliative care with doctors.
3. It’s hard on both your liver and your kidneys.
Whenever we consume protein, the body breaks down nitrogen molecules and converts them to ammonia, which is then processed into urea by the liver, which exits the body via the kidneys as urine.
The urea cycle is the name given to this process. The body uses a series of enzymes coded for specific genes to break down the nitrogen in protein. The CPS1 gene, for example, produces an enzyme that represents the first step in the urea cycle. Children born with impaired urea cycle function become severely ill due to ammonia toxicity.
4. It is high in fat content.
The carnivore diet is high in saturated fat and cholesterol because it focuses solely on animal foods, and proponents recommend eating fatty cuts of meat. The American Heart Association (AHA) has confirmed that consuming foods high in saturated fat raises cholesterol levels in the blood, specifically LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. This increase in cholesterol can put you at risk for heart disease and stroke.
The American Heart Association recommends limiting saturated fat to 6% of total daily calories. If you consume 2,000 calories per day, saturated fat should account for only 120 of those calories, which amounts to approximately 13 grams of saturated fat per day. The carnivore diet easily exceeds the AHA’s saturated fat recommendation.
Conclusion
Overall, always remember to consider all of the major food groups to maintain a quality diet.
