The ALL meat diet

In a certain sector of society that is interested in diet, the “all meat” or “carnivore” diet has emerged as a fad diet that is both embraced and criticized. Not surprisingly, those that embrace and criticize the all meat diet, are missing a couple of key points that need to be understood.

Point 1 – For modern day people, it is difficult to conceptualize how difficult it was to acquire food in pre-modern times. For my entire life, handfuls of food have been readily available. The same holds true for my parents who grew up in the 1930s.

Before modern times, humans had to “exercise” for their food – foraging for vegetation or hunting animals of the land, water and air. If you were from the Arctic Circle, your food options would be entirely different compared to those living in Arizona, which would be different than those living in Florida, which would be different than those living in Peru, which would be different than those living in the Amazon, etc., etc., etc.

What I just described is the accurate nature of The Paleo Diet. Unfortunately, non-scientist “paleo” marketeers have corrupted the The Paleo Diet movement, which is why I wrote an article for Dr. Cordain’s website.

Point 2 – The mostly ALL fatty meat diet of the Arctic Eskimos is as “Paleo” as the more vegetation-rich diet of the Amazon jungle natives. If you live in the Arctic Circle, you would not have much vegetation at hand, so you would have to survive on fatty meats…it is that simple. Fortunately, humans are capable of adapting to a wide range of foods, save for a few.

Humans cannot tolerate a diet that consists mostly of refined sugar, flour, and oils, which is what the average American lives on at this time in history. Americans currently get almost 60% of total calories from sugar, flour, and refined oils. This is not compatible with good health. Equally incompatible is a diet of mostly lean meat. Steffanson made this abundantly clear over 100 years ago.

Lacking in the conversation today about the ALL meat diet is the history lesson we can learn from Steffanson, whom I described in The DeFlame Diet book and in the video embedded in this blog post.

The DeFlame Diet view is to eat foods that keep inflammatory markers in the normal range…now that is an easy way to look at diet and nutrition.