I Veganize: Carnivore Diet: The Dumbest Trend in Nutrition History

The man who wrote the movement's bible quit it.

Paul Saladino, MD — "Carnivore MD," author of The Carnivore Code, the most-cited physician advocate for eating nothing but meat — spent five years telling anyone who'd listen that an all-animal diet was the pinnacle of human nutrition. He had a podcast, a supplement line, a devoted following of hundreds of thousands. His book is still on shelves right now, still being bought, still being recommended in Reddit threads.

In 2023 he quietly started adding fruit back in. Then honey. Then he was eating 300 grams of carbohydrates a day. In June 2024 he posted his reasons on X: after five years on the carnivore diet, his testosterone had tanked, his sleep was wrecked, and his joints hurt.

The man who built the carnivore diet's intellectual scaffold abandoned it. His book never got a retraction. The followers mostly didn't hear about it.

That's the carnivore diet in one paragraph. The rest is just details.

Carnivore Diet: The Dumbest Trend in Nutrition History - raw meat on black plate

Photo by zhugewala via Pexels

What They Actually Claim (I've Read It. All of It.)

I've spent more hours than I'd like watching carnivore content — the Shawn Baker podcasts, the Jordan Peterson interviews, the Reddit threads where people describe their "before and after." I wanted to understand the actual argument before dismissing it. So let me give it its best shot.

The strongest case they make is the autoimmune one. A 2021 survey of 2,029 adults on the diet found 56% started it for autoimmune conditions — and 89% of those reported improvement. That's real. People with Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and fibromyalgia reporting significant relief is a genuine phenomenon that deserves an explanation, not a wave of the hand.

The weight loss case is also real in the short term. Eliminating all carbohydrates forces ketosis. High protein is the most satiating macronutrient on the planet — people eat less because they're genuinely less hungry. BMIs drop. That part works.

And organ meats — liver, kidney, heart — genuinely are among the most nutrient-dense foods in existence. High in B12, retinol, zinc, choline, iron. Carnivore advocates aren't wrong about that.

So why is this still the dumbest trend in nutrition history? Because the short-term wins are real, and the long-term question has never once been asked. Not once. In five years of this diet being mainstream, not a single clinical trial has measured whether carnivore dieters develop heart disease at higher rates, get cancer more often, or die younger. The entire evidence base is self-report surveys and case studies — all less than five years old, none with clinical endpoints.

A 2026 scoping review in Nutrients — the most comprehensive to date, analyzing 9 eligible studies from 2021 to 2025 — concluded: "Current data are insufficient to assess long-term disease outcomes of the carnivore diet, despite claims often made on social media, and none of the available studies reported clinical endpoints."

Nine studies. Four years. Zero heart attacks measured. Zero cancers tracked. Zero mortality data.

People are betting their lives on a diet that hasn't been studied long enough to catch the things that kill you slowly.

The Three Prophets and Their Problems

Every movement needs its figureheads. The carnivore diet has three, and every single one of them is an argument against it.

Shawn Baker, MD. World-record powerlifter, the movement's most prominent athlete-physician. In 2017, the New Mexico Medical Board revoked his license for "incompetence to practice." He had it reinstated later. But more telling than the license story is his own bloodwork — which he published publicly: total testosterone of 237 ng/dL. Clinically low for a man of his age, size, and training volume. Fasting glucose and HbA1c in the prediabetic range. On the diet he says cures metabolic disease. His explanation: his "androgen receptors are just very sensitive." That's not how testosterone works and he knows it.

Jordan Peterson. Seven years on beef, salt, and water. In September 2025, he spent weeks in an ICU with pneumonia, polyneuropathy, and what his family described as a chronic inflammatory response syndrome flareup. His daughter attributed it to mold during house cleaning. Maybe. But I noticed something: seven years of zero fiber, zero plant antioxidants, zero microbiome diversity — and he's the one in the ICU every time something goes wrong. His daughter Mikhaila, architect of the "lion diet," has no medical credentials. Her reported remission from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis is their flagship case study. It's never been studied, controlled, or replicated.

Paul Saladino. Already covered. Quit. Eating fruit and honey now. His book is still being sold, still being bought, still not carrying a disclaimer.

I'm not calling these people stupid. I'm saying: these are the diet's greatest advocates. And when I look at their actual health data, I see low testosterone, prediabetes, ICU stays, and quiet reversals. That pattern means something.

What Happens to Your Cholesterol (The Numbers Are Ugly)

Carnivore advocates have a rehearsed answer for this one, so let me walk through both sides fairly.

LDL rises — significantly — on the carnivore diet. Consistent across every study that measured it. The 2026 scoping review confirmed elevated total cholesterol and LDL-C as reliable findings. A separate study on severe dyslipidemia found 11.1% of carnivore or strict keto followers developed severe hypercholesterolemia — versus 6.2% on standard diets. Nearly double the rate.

The defense you'll hear: elevated LDL on this diet is "benign" because triglycerides are low and the particles are large and fluffy. There's something called the "lipid energy model" that attempts to explain carnivore LDL as structurally different from the LDL that causes plaques. I'm not going to pretend that debate doesn't exist in the literature.

But here's what the model ignores: apolipoprotein B — a more reliable cardiovascular risk marker than LDL cholesterol — is also significantly elevated on carnivore diets. ApoB is the protein that physically carries LDL particles into arterial walls. It rises with LDL particle count regardless of particle size. Every major cardiovascular association treats elevated ApoB as a serious red flag. And the "benign LDL" hypothesis has never been tested in a long-term carnivore study, because no long-term carnivore study exists.

The burden of proof doesn't work the way they want it to. You don't get to spike multiple cardiovascular biomarkers and declare your diet safe because no one's yet proven it dangerous. That's how you end up in a cardiologist's office at 58 with a 90% blocked LAD wondering why nobody warned you.

The Cancer Math Nobody Wants to Do

The World Health Organization classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen in 2015 — same certainty tier as tobacco and asbestos, based on 22 experts reviewing 800+ studies. Red meat is Group 2A: "probably carcinogenic." Those aren't fringe positions. That's the global scientific consensus, and it hasn't changed.

The numbers are specific: every 50 grams of processed meat per day — one sausage, a couple strips of bacon — increases colorectal cancer risk by 18%. Every 100 grams of red meat by 17%. The WHO estimates processed meat contributes to approximately 34,000 cancer deaths per year worldwide.

The carnivore diet is only meat. Multiple servings of red and processed meat every day, with zero fiber to move anything through, zero plant antioxidants, and zero protection against the HCAs and PAHs produced by cooking meat at high temperatures. Heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — the compounds formed when you char a steak — cause direct DNA damage in colon cells. When you combine zero fiber with maximum HCA/PAH exposure every single meal, you're not biohacking. You're running an uncontrolled experiment on your digestive tract and hoping for the best.

The fiber gap matters beyond cancer. Short-chain fatty acids — produced when gut bacteria ferment fiber — are the primary fuel for colonocytes, the cells lining your colon. Zero fiber means zero SCFAs. Meat-heavy diets consistently shift the gut microbiome toward bile-tolerant bacteria and reduce diversity. The 2026 scoping review confirmed fiber intake on carnivore falls "significantly below recommended levels." Not slightly. Significantly.

Meanwhile, the American Heart Association's 2021 Scientific Statement found that eating more red and processed meat was associated with 22% higher cardiovascular risk per daily serving. Their recommendation: choose protein "mostly from plants."

None of this is from vegan activists. It's from the WHO, the AHA, and IARC. Does it bother you that the carnivore content you watch never mentions any of it?

Who's Getting Paid Here

I wrote about the $38 billion in annual meat industry subsidies recently. This is the same machine working a different lever.

The beef industry has a documented "Digital Command Center" that tracks and responds to meat-negative media in real time. They run a formal "Master of Beef Advocacy" program that trains influencers. They advertise across Google, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, ESPN, Spotify, and SiriusXM. Meat and dairy received 800 times more public funding and 190 times more lobbying dollars than plant-based alternatives between 2014 and 2020.

And the individual influencers? An analysis of health misinformation spreaders found 96% have a direct financial stake — supplement lines, books, coaching businesses, membership communities, sponsored content. Saladino had a supplement line. Baker has a coaching business. Peterson has been monetizing the diet as part of his broader brand for years.

As FoodNavigator put it in 2024, the carnivore trend is "ripe for food makers to profit." That's industry trade press describing an opportunity. When someone profits from selling you a diet with no long-term safety data, the question isn't whether they're lying. The question is: who carries the risk?

Spoiler: it's you. Not them.

The Study They'll Never Run

Here's the thing carnivore advocates never do: compare their diet to a Mediterranean or whole-food plant-based diet in a head-to-head clinical trial measuring heart attacks, cancer, and mortality. They can't — that study doesn't exist. And the absence is telling, because the diet's been mainstream for five years now. Five years is long enough to run a two-year trial.

The asymmetry of the evidence is stark. The Mediterranean diet has the Lyon Diet Heart Study, showing significantly reduced heart attack recurrence. The 2023 review on animal-based diets concludes directly: "consuming a carnivore diet, which maximizes consumption of animal-based foods at the detriment of plant foods, carries substantial risks of nutrient deficiencies and the development of cardiovascular disease." Plant-based diets have decades of cohort data, randomized trials, and clinical endpoint studies.

The 2026 carnivore scoping review covered everything published in five years. Nine eligible studies. Not one measured heart attacks. Not one measured cancer rates. Not one tracked whether people lived or died at different rates than everyone else.

That's not absence of evidence that exonerates the diet. That's a five-year experiment running without safety monitoring, without controls, and without accountability — while the people running it sell books and supplements to the people taking the risk.

I've written before about how little nutrition training most doctors actually have. Carnivore influencers fill that gap — with a diet that hands people some short-term wins while quietly loading cardiovascular and cancer risk over years. If eating more protein and fewer processed foods makes you feel better, I get it. But you don't need all-meat to get there. You need to cut the junk, eat real food, and get your protein from sources that don't come bundled with Group 1 carcinogens.

The movement's own founding physician figured that out after five years, tanked testosterone, wrecked sleep, and aching joints. You don't have to run that experiment yourself to learn the same lesson.

Next time someone sends you a Joe Rogan carnivore clip, send them this. They deserve the actual data. So do you.

Carnivore Diet: The Dumbest Trend in Nutrition History