Carnivore Diet Mistakes to Avoid

The carnivore diet is trending and I have been asked lots of questions about whether I recommend it.

Well, first we should look at why people are eating a carnivore diet. This is likely because when they eat fruit or vegetables they either:

Gain weight
Blood sugar spikes
Bloat
Get gas
Get acid reflux

The problem isn’t the food, but their dysfunctional gut health and imbalanced microbiome. Please don’t take this personally, due to westernised diets, mass farming, processed food and environmental toxins, everyone’s gut health is suffering unless they’re making conscious effort to heal and nurture it!

Their guts may be imbalanced because of antibiotics, alcohol, birth control, NSAIDS, chlorinated water, fluoride from water or anything with any type of sucrlose or anything from the extended list of products or foods that you can put in your body that begin to wipe out good bacteria. From here, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and candida overgrowth can begin to occur.

When we increase the population of fermentable pathogens, many of that replaces our good bacteria. Then you experience overgrowth such as E. coli, Klebsiella or other forms of bacteria in our gut.

Candida commonly overgrows and this is a fermentable yeast, that feeds on certain carbohydrates, such as fructo-oligo, di, mono and polysaccharides.

These are just certain chains and come from fructose and lactose and many carbohydrates.

These are fermentable natural sugars that people with an overgrowth of pathogens will start to feel more bloating, gas and sometimes symptoms of IBS. Perhaps even Crohn’s or colitis.

Many of these issues are multifactorial, which means it can come down to multiple issues such as stress ,inflammation, IgM, IgG and IgA sensitivities to foods… there’s a lot to it, but what we do know is carbohydrates were never solely responsible.

This is why the carnivore-based diet is just a band-aid approach. You are masking the symptoms by avoiding the trigger, but not dealing with the underlying issue!

Some people call themselves biohackers, and their main motivation is that it’s the latest trend. Trends and fads are never the reason to start diets and potentially negatively impact your health!

It is completely understandable to me that people say they can’t eat carbs because they get migraines, painful joints, skin rashes, psoriasis, eczema, Hashimotos,, rheumatoid arthritis, MS and/or lupus. I get it, it helps manage the uncomfortable symptoms.

However, in the long term, just eating meat or a high-flesh food diet is not the answer. It is definitely not the answer to a long, healthy life.

You can look at a lot of the flesh-based populations like the Maasai and the Inuit and say there’s not as much dis-ease in the body. They have no processed foods really, but the interesting thing is that they live about 10 years less than even Americans, who have terrible food standards and overall health. This can be blamed on many different factors.

The long-term fix is never going and pushing too hard in any one direction. Keto pushes too hard towards fat. The carnivore diet pushes too hard towards animal protein.

Whenever we move too far or too hard for too long in one direction, we’re going to end up with certain negative repercussions.

Extremism is never the answer and is always dangerous! It is always about equilibrium.

The number one mistake anyone can make when going on a carnivore diet is making it a long-term solution without fixing the underlying root cause(s).

If you are doing a carnivore based diet:

Make sure that you don’t eat meat at three meals per day. No more than your lunch and dinner per day or no more than your breakfast and lunch per day.
Make sure you fast for longer so that your digestive system has more time to move all that protein.
Lean more towards wild-caught fish.