All Meat. All The Time. Any Questions?

The 100 percent carnivorous, veggies-be-damned diet is the apex of the new extreme-eating trend. Its followers claim weeding out plants can help you lose weight, build muscle faster and even reverse chronic illness, while dieticians have a serious beef with almost everything about it. Here’s our (no-bull) analysis.

- Richard Godwin

This is a story about human carnivores – people who believe that the best diet is one composed only of meat. No bread or potatoes. No salads. Definitely no kale. Just animal flesh. Or, in the case of the infamous Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson and his daughter, Mikhaila, just beef, salt, water, and the occasional glass of bourbon.

“I know how ridiculous it sounds,” Mikhaila says. But that’s how the carnivore diet began, with people like her concluding that the standard nutritional advice wasn’t working for them. Mikhaila now credits her all-meat diet with easing her debilitating autoimmune conditions, fatigue, and depression. Her father, too, claims he has lost more than 20 kilograms since he began following his daughter’s lead. He says he now feels magnificent, even if the diet is “dull as hell,” and he has turned into a vocal supporter of the plan.

When you mention this meat-only diet to an omnivore or herbivore, their reactions tend to fall somewhere between disbelief and anger. And understandably so: your BS detector is on high alert when it comes to celebrity-endorsed miracle cures, and Jordan Peterson’s “cow plan” sounds like the bullshit bull’s-eye. After all, if vegans are associated in the popular imagination with environmentalism, progressive causes, liberalism, and compassion, carnivores must surely stand for the opposite, right?

It sounds like a parody diet for climate-change-denying, coal-rolling, gun-toting, toxically masculine (ahem) meatheads. Such is the age we live in – nothing just stands for itself. And so, in a weird way, this is also a story about science and ideology, carbs and fat and the ever-fuzzy line between healthy skepticism and conspiracy theory.

The Carnivores Rise