Which Diet is The Best Nutrition?

Can a carnivore diet (only meat and eggs, no plants) sustain you? Or is it just a fad diet? Is it just “another way to eat badly” as David Katz often quips? There seems to be something to it, as there is a lot of buzz around the carnivore diet. Along with a lot of Instagram influencers and the likes of Dr. Shawn Baker, an orthopedic surgeon and athlete and author of The Carnivore Diet, Dr. Paul Saladino, author of The Carnivore Code, (who now includes fruit and honey in his program) and Dr. Ken Berry, a family physician who wrote Lies My Doctor Told Me, there seems to be a lot of “good vibes” around the carnivore diet. But do the facts back up the buzz? There is a dearth of actual facts about the nutrient profile of the carnivore diet. What does a meat-only diet provide in terms of macronutrients, vitamins, and minerals? In this article we will break it down and show you what a carnivore diet actually delivers in terms of nutrients.

How We Examined the Carnivore Diet

Here is how this analysis is set up. I put together a 4-day menu for a carnivore diet, including eggs, but no dairy and definitely no plants. For comparison, I also have an analysis of a 7-day menu from a study of the Hallelujah Diet. I analyzed the nutrients with an app (Cronometer) for the carnivore diet, and NutriBase analysis software for the Hallelujah Diet menu comparison.

The carnivore diet can actually be very simple. Here is the menu records for the model carnivore diet. It is pretty simple. Eggs and maybe bacon for breakfast, ground beef or steak for lunch, maybe a boiled egg and pork rinds for a snack, and meat (beef, chicken or fish) for dinner. The quantities for each day were set so that it was just a hair over 2,000 calories per day. A person could optimize this menu to squeeze a few more nutrients into it, but adding more eggs or a small amount of dairy won’t change the nutrient profile very much. So, this analysis is representative of all carnivore diets.

The Carnivore Diet Menu

So, this diet actually could be a bit monotonous, but I’m sure quite a few ladies have worked on that so that it remains interesting over time. Unfortunately, most spices that people use on meats to make them more palatable come from plants. Kind of ironic.

Nutrient Profile of the Carnivore Diet

I won’t bore you with the detailed breakdown of each day’s nutrient profile. The days are pretty similar, actually. So here is the macro nutrient intakes for the 4 days.

Macronutrients

Vitamin Profile of the Carnivore Diet

Here is the vitamin profile for the 4-day menu of the carnivore diet. The green bars in the graphic show were vitamin RDIs were met, and the gray bars are the shortfalls. So, the carnivore diet was good for many of the B vitamins–B2, B3, B5, B6, and B12. But it fell woefully short for B1, folate, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, and vitamin K. (Vitamin K2 in animal products is mostly from aged cheeses.) While you could dwell on what is right, these vitamins can’t “transmutate” and become some other vitamin. It doesn’t work that way. So, your body will actually become deficient in these vitamins not supplied by the diet.

Mineral Profile of the Carnivore Diet

Here is the mineral intake profile for the 4-day menu of the carnivore diet. There are some serious shortfalls here–calcium, magnesium, potassium, copper, and manganese are all in short supply on the carnivore diet. Iron, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc are found in abundance. Sodium levels, if you prepare your own food, can be held to a healthy level.

What are the Implications of Following the Carnivore Diet?

I remember when people were very concerned about my following a vegan diet. B12! Iron! Where are you going to get enough protein? What about calcium? You probably have had similar questions from family members who were concerned about your sanity.

If we apply that same kind of questioning to the carnivore diet, the list is actually pretty long. Where are you going to get your B1, folate, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, and vitamin K? How are you going to get enough calcium, magnesium, and potassium? Are you going to get enough copper and manganese and other trace elements? (We didn’t even talk about other trace elements, like chromium, vanadium, and iodine.) And we haven’t talked about protein or saturated fats at all, which is for another time.

The Carnivore Diet is NOT Nutritionally Adequate

There is a measurement called the “mean adequacy ratio.” It is a measurement of how well a diet meets the RDI (recommended dietary intakes) of the essential vitamins, minerals, and fiber. If the RDI nutrient is met or exceeded by the diet a score of “100” is given to it. If the RDI is not met, the score is the percentage of the RDI that is met. So, for the carnivore diet, B1 gets a score of 47, while B2 gets a score of 100. Capping the score of adequacy at 100 keeps you from masking nutrients in shortfall by other nutrients present in abundance.

So, what is the mean adequacy ratio for the carnivore diet? And how does it compare to the mean adequacy ratio of the Hallelujah Diet?

Adequacy of Carnivore and Hallelujah Diet

The data shows that the Hallelujah Diet, as a plant-only diet, is a much, much more balanced diet than the carnivore diet. Whether you look at average nutrient density as a percentage of the DRIs, or as mean adequacy ratio, that Hallelujah Diet trounces the carnivore diet. It isn’t close. As a percentage of DRIs the Hallelujah Diet is 60% more dense than the carnivore diet. This is true for all whole food vegan diets, not just the Hallelujah Diet. The mean adequacy ratio of the carnivore diet is 63; the Hallelujah Diet comes in at 93, very close to a perfect score of 100.

The data shows that the Hallelujah Diet, or any vegan diet, is a much, much more balanced diet than the carnivore diet.

So, if someone wants to use the carnivore diet for a short term weight loss program, they won’t run into long-term deficiencies. But long-term use of such an imbalanced diet is very likely to cause a great deal of harm.

But Aren’t There Some Benefits to the Carnivore Diet?

Yes, there are benefits to the carnivore diet, but they are not exclusive to eating only meat and eggs. Eliminating processed foods, highly processed vegetable oil, refined carbohydrates and sugars are all sound dietary advice. You get that same advice from any whole foods oriented dietician or whole foods program. Eliminating grains is another benefit for some people. You can do that with the Hallelujah Diet as well. But the elimination of all plants from your diet is a radical step that is very unscientific and based on unsound principles.

Do Plants Really Want to Harm Us?

It turns out that the phytochemicals, which protect the plant from their environment, that are denigrated by advocates of the carnivore diet, are actually protective for us as well. There is a very deep scientific literature supporting the use of these phytochemicals for our benefit. Astaxanthin, curcumin, EGCG in green tea, boswellia resin, vitamin C, beta-carotene and all the rest of the carotenoids, phytates, flavonoids, and the thousands of “medicinal” roots, seeds, and leaves containing perhaps millions of beneficial compounds. The list is very, very long. Truly, the leaves of the plants are given, “for the healing of the nations.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

Do you know someone who has been dabbling in the carnivore diet? Or maybe they are really into it? Maybe a little bit of data would help sow a seed of doubt, so that when they do have health troubles down the road they will be open to considering a different way of eating.

Better yet, be forewarned and forearmed. Know your nutrition and recover health and healing in a dietary pattern that is sustainable for a long time.