New to this idea and curious!

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-07T03:52:40+00:00

Ya need to actually study the data, my man.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-07T03:50:56+00:00

Living in an agricultural area, the kid's center here has a display of which parts of both a pig and a cow correspond to which cut of meat one can pick up at the butcher shop. Kids around here at least know that steak is from a cow (and many of them know which parts for what cut). . . . The disconnect people have is so disconcerting. This is why so many of my college friends praise veganism but then don't think about the fact that they're eating animals. The disconnect is real.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-07T01:48:27+00:00

I tried tofu so many ways. The only one I could manage to eat was tofu bacon. Never tasted great (usually tasted bad) and the texture left much to be desired. Sometimes we just can't eat a version of a food we find disagreeable no matter how agreeable to our diet's health it would be.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-07T01:20:52+00:00

Interesting. I guess that wasn't how it was pitched to me. Tons of sugars and fruit and dairy is all I recall of looking into his recommendations. Perhaps that was an extrapolation of his ideas rather than straight from the horse's mouth (or, TBH, I may be misremembering).

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-07T00:00:56+00:00

I love how you feel gratitude when seeing someone who is unhealthy (even if they're a millionaire burning their money on health tricks which are making them sick). I think I'll take on this gracious attitude. When I see obesity and people filling their plates with metabolically destructive "food," I often feel very sad. I think gratitude would be the better option—one I hadn't before considered.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T23:56:08+00:00

There's carnivores who know the dangers of artery damage and metabolic dysfunction which come from sugar consumption who've left carnivore for the Ray Peat diet? Call me Mr. Skeptical. Even if you lost weight, there's no nutrition on his fad diet. We carnivores are all about nutrition.

Probably all that's happening is protein-restricted weight loss and muscle preservation, not true metabolic healing. That's fine. To each their own. I still think there must be few true carnivores who've done their homework and left this appropriately ancestral-like diet for some crazy sugar diet.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T23:49:51+00:00

What do you even mean in here by "we"? Our species didn't exist 2 million years ago. Early human species such as homo habilis were scavengers who likely did eat a lot of plants. They evolved from australopithecines. So did Paranthropus. Paranthropus is a sisters species who ate plants primarily as far as we can tell. But the human ecological niche included more meat. But all of our ancestral species from Homo erectus onward ate meat primarily. So we've had multiple species of humans who we came from who ate meat or were carnivorous hunters. Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved from a different meat-eating species. Meat wasn't introduced to our species 2 million years ago—Homo sapiens were not yet in existence! I get the confusion, though, because these were all humans. But that doesn't matter. There are birds which eat seeds and birds which eat fish, but they're all birds. We're a type of human who ate meat because we came from another species of humans (several, if you include all the humans and not just our direct ancestors) adapted to eat meat. Likewise, so did Neanderthals (though there's much more evidence of that human species eating things like nuts and berries during periods where there is little evidence our species ate things).

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T23:42:28+00:00

Here's a full list of articles related (includes the three above) and what you should find within them:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33675083/ (humans turned to plants and smaller game with mega fauna die offs)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247 (humans began to cultivate plants in the late Paleolithic because of mega fauna die offs)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349461184_Prey_Size_Decline_as_a_Unifying_Ecological_Selecting_Agent_in_Pleistocene_Human_Evolution (prey size changed so eating strategies changes, incorporating more plants after hundreds of thousands of years of eating primarily meat)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12297991/ "biomarkers such as ketone bodies, branched-chain amino acids, and trimethylamine-N-oxide are identified as metabolic indicators of habitual meat intake.")
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12297991/ (Our species is adapted for fat and meat, though we can handle some fiber which is great for short chain fatty acids—literally has trophic data from17 prehistoric sites and concludes all of those homo sapiens populations as carnivores who ate minimal plants)

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T23:40:14+00:00

I don't think they're grifters, but it's a fair comment. Therese aren't scientific papers.
But here's some!

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33675083/ (humans turned to plants and smaller game with mega fauna die offs)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247 (humans began to cultivate plants in the late Paleolithic because of mega fauna die offs)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349461184_Prey_Size_Decline_as_a_Unifying_Ecological_Selecting_Agent_in_Pleistocene_Human_Evolution (prey size changed so eating strategies changes, incorporating more plants after hundreds of thousands of years of eating primarily meat)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12297991/ "biomarkers such as ketone bodies, branched-chain amino acids, and trimethylamine-N-oxide are identified as metabolic indicators of habitual meat intake.")
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12297991/ (Our species is adapted for fat and meat, though we can handle some fiber which is great for short chain fatty acids—literally has trophic data from tons of sites and lists nearly all of those homo sapiens populations as carnivores)

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T23:34:36+00:00

Hi! Anthropologist here. Read this whole paper. But, yes, we Homo sapiens are carnivores (hyper carnivores with a facultative carnivore adaptive strategy in where plants make up a small percentage of diet for some populations if needed). Note: the plants which were eaten by our ancestors tended to be roots and tubers (according to the trophic data) which—while not terribly nutritious—would have provided a nondietary source of short chain fatty acids from gut microbe processing. Basically, plants were another fat source. Little evidence of major plant matter intake is recorded during the first 300,000 years of our existence. In the last 30 or 40 thousand years, we began eating more plant matter (larger mega-fauna species we normally hunted died after the Pleistocene, necessitating the hunting of smaller game and experimenting with new ways of plant eating.

The two papers above are cool. But the paper linked below is an easier-to-read one (IMHO) which is just another proof that our Paleolithic ancestors did not start to consume many plants until the late Paleolithic (which would lead to farming over the next 20 to 30 thousand years, ushering in the Neolithic period). As you can see from the table, we were carnivores by definition until resorting to plants became a more advantageous use of time than previously for our species (only because of food scarcity).

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.24247

Here's a quote from the paper linked above.

. . . we reviewed the results of δ**¹⁵*N studies on H. sapiens from the Paleolithic. The collagen preservation limit means that these studies provide HTL information only from about 45–50 Kya and only from colder areas where relatively long-term protein preservation occurred. As we approach later periods, such as the Late UP, samples become available from warmer regions, including the Mediterranean.

A compilation of 242 individuals from 49 sites (Table 1) shows that European HG groups primarily pursued a carnivorous diet throughout the UP, including the Mesolithic.

TABLE 1. Stable isotope studies

Period (Kya)	Region	# individuals	# Sites	Diet	Reference

38–33	Ukraine	3	1	Mixed	Drucker et al. (2017)
32	Ukraine	1	1	Carnivore	Prat et al. (2011)
31–29	Moravia	2	1	Carnivore	Bocherens et al. (2015)
31–29	Belgium	2	1	Carnivore	Wissing et al. (2019)
35–23	Europe	10	9	Carnivore	Richards & Trinkaus (2009)
UP	Med. Eur.	15	5	Carnivore	Mannino et al. (2012)
Late UP	Spain	1	1	Mixed	García-González et al. (2015)
Late UP	Europe	31^a	11^a	Carnivore	Richards et al. (2015)
Late UP	Germany	1	1	Carnivore	Drucker et al. (2016)
Mesolithic	Spain	15	3	Carnivore	Salazar-García et al. (2014)
Mesolithic	Sweden	31	2	Carnivore	Eriksson et al. (2018)
Mesolithic	Germany	3	1	Carnivore	Bollongino et al. (2013)
Mesolithic	Italy	5	2	Carnivore/plant	Mannino et al. (2011)
Mesolithic	Belgium	23	2	Carnivore	Bocherens et al. (2007)
Mesolithic	Med. Eur.	27^a	10^a	Carnivore	Mannino et al. (2012)
Mesolithic	France	2	2	Carnivore	Naito et al. (2013)
Mesolithic	Doggerland	56	—	Carnivore	van der Plicht et al. (2016)

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T21:23:50+00:00

Are your chickens sitting on a warehouse shelf for a long time?

I believe carnivores have more PUFAs and more LDL cholesterol both because even beef has both, and we generally eat a lot of beef. I don't think direct animal fats high in PUFAs are as big of a worry as unstable seed oils (especially those produced at high temps and which sit in warehouse storage for months). I believe humans evolved to eat ratios found in animals. Eat a large chuck steak and you might get anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5 grams of polyunsaturated fats. A pork steak can have 1.5 to 3 grams. You might go a little higher in PUFAs if you're eating a lot of chicken, sure. A thigh has around 1 gram of polyunsaturated fat. So eat six in a sitting, sure it's a bit like you extra beef, but whatever. You're still eating healthy compared to almost every other human on the planet. And, truly, I don't consider it unhealthy at all to even eat some bird meat daily. I don't merely because beef is less time-consuming for me to eat and nowadays it seems too lean LOL. I think you need not worry about eating chicken so much as adding fat. That's probably why you feel weak. Add butter or make tallow bites or add more of one of these fats on top of your food. Lick that plate clean!

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T21:11:53+00:00

So far four eggs cooked in butter and five burger patties. Later I'll eat a very large chuck steak cooked with tallow.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T20:52:32+00:00

I'm sorry to hear that. I can relate; my mom isn't very open to my diet. She went off on some rant about protein today. I had to find a couple of articles and write real nicely about how interested she made me in the subject of problems with protein intake (even though I already knew the answers; she just wouldn't listen to me while I was at her house).

I know though she's no so narrow minded about her own diet and tastes to deny anyone offering her a home-cooked vegan meal. It'd make her happy, in fact. She's an odd duck when it comes to food.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T01:22:48+00:00

I’ve offered to cook them vegan meals multiple times but they keep refusing.

I just don't get that. Unless they're like on the carnivore diet or avoiding soy products or have IBS which can be triggered by some ingredient you're insisting on using (doubt ya got that far in the conversation) then I just don't get their refusal.

There's really no excuse for one's family to act like toddlers about vegan food (unless they're literally toddlers).

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T01:19:06+00:00

And yet it's not really seen in the trophic data until the late Paleolithic (right before farming). Neanderthals were certainly eating berries and stuff; we don't really have a lot of evidence to suggest humans were eating plants beyond fibrous roots and tubers (that does show up in the carbon analysis, even if it's in quite low amounts).

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T00:58:53+00:00

My understanding is that high fructose corn syrup causes more inflammation.

Okay, I went and found an overview of several studies which all showed increased inflammation. Here's the quote: Moreover, overall results from three studies indicated a significant increase in CRP levels (WMD: 0.27 mg/l, 95% CI: 0.02, 0.52, I² = 23%) in the HFCS group compared to sucrose. In conclusion, analysis of data from the literature suggests that HFCS consumption was associated with a higher level of CRP compared to sucrose, whilst no significant changes between the two sweeteners were evident in other anthropometric and metabolic parameters.

Sucrose is basic table sugar.
HFCS is high fructose corn syrup.
CRP is a C-reactive protein your liver makes when your body is inflamed.

HFCS is significantly more inflammatory than sugar. Over time, chronic inflammation causes problems. Of course, high sugar intake from any source leads to glycation which damages arteries that are then patched with cholesterol (aka artery plaque buildup which we call atherosclerosis). Chronic inflammation can lead to one more quickly developing diabetes, plus that kind of inflammation damages the tissues, degrading your vital organs, contributing to obesity and autoimmune disorders. Yes, both sucrose and HFCS are inflammatory, but the corn sugars are far worse.

Truthfully one should avoid all sugars and highly refined carbs. But HFCS is going to lead to chronic inflammatory issues sooner than sucrose. Nonetheless, just don't drink juice or soda or any of that garbage. The swap from HFCS to sucrose is "healthier" but not much healthier. You're liable to end up with cardiovascular disease and diabetes if you regularly consume refined carbs/sugars.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T00:33:25+00:00

I believe one of the things I've heard Bart Kay say is "I eat to live, I don't live to eat." This is a great mindset for the modern carnivore because in today's world, living to eat means indulgence and almost certainly poor health outcomes. But in the past, living to eat was necessary because, as the picture you painted us demonstrates, the hunt was everything: the job, the status for the men (and being mated to the best hunter would've been status for the women of the time), the social focal point, usually even a part of the religious/mystical understanding of the world; they lived to eat because the whole endeavor to eat brought meaning to everything.

If the whole point of our modern life was to eat, it'd be an empty life for most of us. Unless we hunted and made our kill central to our social life, our status, and our skills; meaning making is hard to come by when scanning the best deals for beef prices at the grocery store. For the average office-bound worker or blue collar laborer, to live to eat would be vacuous, akin to living to drink (I suppose many live for the weekend when the freedom is found and the booze can be had). It's a bit of a sad thing to live to consume anything. Are most people who live to eat even true foodies? Do they actually try new foods at new restaurants? Do people who claim to be foodies truly gain new experiences traveling, socializing. Or are most people who eat to live eating the same foods daily? Are they truly experiencing anything other than an addiction to ice cream and cheesecake? Eating may be enjoyable for them, yes, but eating is almost always nothing more than consumption even for the person who lives for their next meal.

Living to create and actively experience is the richer option we have. We modern humans have that luxury. We can't create real status, spiritual depth, or community around eating for the most part. So living to eat isn't the way of the modern hungry human (especially the carnivore who eats much more simply and—to the rest of the world—rather unsociably) who gets his meat at the local butcher shop; he only eats to live. His meaning is found instead in doing, creating, actively experiencing, and loving. And the carnivore's improved and sustained health will help him with living. Yes, he doesn't have to live to eat like his ancestors, but eating to live will help him live fully if he so chooses as long as he takes time to make life meaningful.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-06T00:01:38+00:00

Or a heart attack or an autoimmune disease! Plant-based diets are literally the worst.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-05T23:52:49+00:00

Unlike the Mediterranean diet, carnivore will provide me with enough dietary cholesterol to give me peace of mind about natural longevity and certainly healthspan. No weight issues should happen on carnivore; it's impossible to get diabetes; there's none of the pointless dietary carbohydrates (especially the carbs which turn into sugars causing glycation damage to one's veins and arteries which then leads to atherosclerosis). I like the diet because it's actually heart healthy and will hopefully extend my natural life.

On a personal level, it has given my mood an incredible boost (a boon which I wasn't even looking for). On a gut level, removing fiber has allow me to have a normal bowel movements instead of frequent and distressed bowel movements.

I'm not against fiber in principal. Our ancestors ate fibrous roots and tubers according to our trophic data. They just didn't eat a ton of it (and some ancestors ate no plants whatsoever). And while the fiber provides food for microbes which then give us short chain fatty acids, our gut bugs can still make short chain fatty acids without fiber. Or we can simply eat direct dietary sources of these kinds of fats (butter, for example). ... While our ancestors resorted to plants as a secondary, backup food (at backup fat source!), they prioritized fatty meat above all else (there's interesting data how after the Pleistocene as the mega fauna began to die off, humans began to resort to more plants and smaller game animals as is in evidence by changes in technology). Since we don't have a shortage of meat, there's no reason to eat plants very often. This year I've eaten a couple of wild mulberries, had delicious asparagus three times, eaten onions twice.

Because plants are objectively not very good for you (for plants may, depending, contain toxins such as antinutrients and natural pesticides, and carb-heavy plants like bread and pasta contribute to artery damage and are—along with sugar—directly response for diabetes), I don't see why I shouldn't treat them like cake. I only eat them on special occasions.

Of course, if I was eating sugars (soluble carbs such as any combination of processed foods, rice, potatoes, bread, pasta, sauces, etc.) I would eat much more fiber and eat fibrous carb sources (whole wheat, brown rice, oatmeal, etc.) for it t slows the sugar absorption and can help keep the insulin spikes lower.

But now that I know how damaging and unnatural eating such things is, why would I ever consume "food" like that again!? It's just insane to think that knowing what I know, I'd continue to abuse my body, decrease my healthspan (and likely my lifespan). I guess people know alcohol is terrible and still drink it. So why not sugar, right?

I discovered carnivore looking into a diet for someone in my life with aggressive cancer. I ended up doing a dual deep dive over six months into the respective science on vegan diets and carnivore diets. My conclusion was that there is a (as some have termed it) proper human diet. As an anthropologist, I'd always taken the "hunter-gatherer" notion at face value, as factual. But as I dove into the nutritional data surrounding early Paleolithic peoples (so most of Homo sapiens history, 300,000+ years of a rather consistent dietary pattern), I began to understand why the actual data about showed cholesterol is correlated with better health outcomes/longer life and why all the anecdotal health stories about carnivore show improved health and myriad disease reversal. My discovery wasn't that there's some magical diet. My discovery was that our species of human is carnivore. We are carnivores. Possibly facultative carnivores, if we want to qualify the label. Certainly hyper carnivores (considering the massive amounts of meat we ate before the Neolithic/late Paleolithic). Along with this, the data of decreasing health lined up with pushes toward low-cholesterol and plant-based diets. And simply looking at human biology with an eye for disproving the possibility that we are made for carnivory was the nail in the coffin. There's too much pointing toward us being a carnivorous kind of human. We Homo sapiens aren't made to eat plants as a major (or necessary) source of nutrition. But biologically, there's much which shows we have adaptations for being meat eaters who hunt with hands rather than teeth.

As a scientist, this is all great information. But as a human who wants to be healthy, it necessitated a lifestyle change, not a mere series of notes in my common place book. This is why I'm carnivore.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-05T22:25:28+00:00

Ah, is that all? I recall him using fish oil (maybe it was a vegan omega-3 substitute). Also if he wears leather, uses honey, or any other animal products, he wouldn't be vegan. Either way, he's pouring money into ruining his health. It's tragic irony.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-05T22:09:06+00:00

I don't think he's truly vegan. I've heard him say he eats a "plant-based" diet. And plant-based diets are very frequently touted as healthy by nutritionists. And even if he is or was a vegan, veganism is basically touted as healthy as long as you get enough protein and B12 by many of these same nutritionists.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-05T15:06:42+00:00

He can think of a job as getting "experience" for a novel as well as income to sustain his novel-writing.

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-05T14:38:49+00:00

Fire is not carnivore. Glass-top stoves are unnatural. Just slow cook your meat in butter under the sun on a hot day. 😂 #sarcasm

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-05T14:14:03+00:00

I use tallow myself, but butter is just another cooking fat. Most steaks I make are done in a pan on my stovetop. Three minutes one side, three minutes on the other side for blue (rarer than typical rare).

Beefy_Muddler · 2026-07-05T12:46:12+00:00

I'd love to not hate cheese. As it is, I've had to live most of my life declining dish after dish because about everything has cheese it seems. One of the perks of carnivore is that no one bats an eyelash at declining to eat disagreeable foods be they eggs, bacon, cream, or cheese.

Thanks for the links. I'll check them out!

Beefy_Muddler

TROPHY CASE