The Carnivore Code
This book challenged a lot of my personal beliefs about diet, but in the end Dr. Saladino convinced me that a carnivore diet may be a very good idea for improving health. So much so that I’m going to adopt a least a version of it (the carnivorish diet) to find out for myself. Dr. Saladino backs up what says with extensive reference to scientific studies, which I really appreciated. He shows that for most of our evolutionary history we were primarily hunter-gatherers. Actually we were primarily hunters and meat eaters. He also cites archeological evidence that when we adopted agriculture over hunting, we became physically smaller and showed more evidence of disease. This evidence has been cited by other authors such as Weston Price, Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari. Diamond states that “the adoption of agriculture…was in many ways a catastrophe from which we never recovered”. Weston Price showed that hunter-gatherers who substituted grains and sugar and other processed foods for their native diets of meat and seafoods showed significant degenerative and genetic problems in a single generation.
How could this be? Aren’t vegetables good for us? Maybe not as good as we think. That’s because plants have developed defenses for survival in the form of toxins so they won’t get eaten. Other authors such as Dr. Stephen Gundry have discussed the health problems caused by lectins, one of several toxins produced by plants. Dr. Saladino goes into great detail about lots of other plant toxins including oxalates, phytates, salicylates, flavonoids, sulphorane, isothiocyantes, and more that can negatively impact our health. These toxins can produce stones, impair thyroid function, cause digestive problems, inflammation, and immune reactions.
Meat is by far the most nutritionally dense food we can consume, and has nutrients not found in plants such as B12, carnosine, choline, creatine, and carnitine. These are crucial nutrients for both our bodies and brains. He also debunks the idea that eating a lot of meat will cause heart disease and cancer with a careful review of scientific literature. By eating what he calls “nose to tail”, Saladino shows that a carnivore diet can supply all the important nutrients we need to thrive without risking harm from plant toxins. This means including organs like tongue, liver, heart, kidneys, and marrow along with muscle meat.
I have to admit that I initially dismissed the idea of a carnivore diet as an extremist fad when I began hearing about it a few years ago. Dr. Saladino has convinced me that it is not extreme and is worth considering. He discovered the carnivore diet as the only thing that worked to heal his severe eczema, and many others have reported using it to heal autoimmune conditions, Type II diabetes, colitis and other chronic digestive disorders neurological conditions like dementia, depression, brain fog, and demyelinating nerve disease.
I recommend reading this excellent book, and then decide if the carnivore diet might be something you want to try out for yourself.
