Pleasures Of The Flesh

The 100 per cent carnivorous, veg-be-damned diet is the apex of new extreme-eating trends. Its followers claim that weeding out plant foods can rebalance our appetites, restore vitality and even reverse chronic illnesses – while its detractors say it’s deleterious.But could it work for you?

- Richard Godwin

This is a story about human carnivores – people who believe that the best diet is one comprised only of meat. No bread, no roast potatoes. No Caprese salads, no kale. Not even cheeseburgers. Just animal flesh. Or, in the case of Canadian psychologist Jordan B Peterson, 56, and his daughter Mikhaila, 26, just beef, salt, water – and the occasional glass of bourbon.

“I know how ridiculous it sounds,” Mikhaila conceded, when challenged about her eating habits by a reporter last summer. But she credits her diet with easing the debilitating autoimmune conditions, depression and fatigue that had made her life a misery since she was a teenager. Her father, too, claims he has lost more than 20kg since following his daughter’s lead and says he now feels magnificent, even if it’s as “dull as hell”.

This is also a story about science and ideology, carbs and fat, and the line between healthy scepticism and conspiracy theory. But it begins with a few people slowly coming to the conclusion that the standard nutritional advice – that you need fibre, your five a day, your daily bread – isn’t working for them.

“Those who were going carnivore 10 years ago did so because they’d been chronically sick,” says 51-year-old Shawn Baker. A former orthopaedic surgeon based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Baker now sells books and diet plans to would-be carnivores. He has recently noticed a surge of interest among men who aspire to his apex-predator physique – he’s built like a cartoon henchman – but he tells me that carnivory initially developed as a niche diet for people who found eating “normally” made them feel awful. “They’d usually tried everything. They had been vegetarian and vegan. They had been on all kinds of medication. This was the only thing that worked for them.”