Book

Facultative Carnivore

Publish date:

January 1, 2020

The Facultative Carnivore

How choosing a diet of exclusively meat–not plants!–can restore your health.

(A hypertext book-in-progress [with 5 completed chapters so far as of late 2020])

Some low carb dieters are turning to an all-meat, “zero-carb” diet, claiming it can take your health to the next level. This book explains why that’s not actually crazy, whether and how to try it out, and what the science really says about meat and plants.

Even before the Atkins Diet heyday in the 1970’s, many popular weight loss plans have leveraged the fat burning power of ketosis to enhance results. Nonetheless, misplaced concerns about the health effects of animal fat and protein have led to a movement toward more plant-based approaches, even within the low carbohydrate diet community. Moreover, there is widespread misunderstanding of the metabolic state of ketosis itself, leading to fears about long term effects.

It may come as a surprise then, that a growing number of people, dissatisfied with the failures of conventional medicine and meeting only partial success with low carbohydrate diets, have found astonishing health benefits from eschewing plants altogether in favor of a diet consisting of exclusively meat and other animal sourced foods. While the necessary research required to verify the robustness of these results has yet to be carried out, the number of anecdotes is too large to ignore, and includes numerous reports of full or partial remission of common conditions considered incurable, such as arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and recurrent depression.

In this book, I describe my own journey from my mostly vegetarian and eventually vegan beginnings to my current carnivorous lifestyle. In an unexpected turn of events, a whimsical foray into eating only meat eliminated not just my excess weight, but all symptoms of my then-progressing bipolar disorder. Faced with this perplexing result, I turned my study from mathematics, linguistics, and cognitive psychology to the subjects of nutrition, physiology, biochemistry, and anthropology. Drawing from these fields, I will show how:

Recommendations to eat a large and varied amount of fruits and vegetables are based on inconclusive and questionable science
Heavy reliance on animal sourced foods, including animal fat, was critical to the evolution of our brains
Ketosis is not only natural, but is normally involved in human brain development before and after birth
Evolutionary forces shaping plants have resulted in some less than savoury health effects
Removing plants from the diet altogether may improve your health

But first, I will walk you through the basics of a carnivorous diet of the type I have thrived on for a decade: how to start, what to eat, and what not to worry about.

Authors

Image	Author	Author Website	Twitter	Author Location
	Amber L O'Hearn	http://www.mostly-fat.com	https://twitter.com/KetoCarnivore	Boulder, Colorado

Topics

	Meatritionist	A doctor or medical professional who studies or promotes exclusive meat diets
	Paleopathology	The study of diseases suffered by the dead and discovered through looking at their remains, mostly bones. Nutritional deficiencies, chronic disease, and pathogens are visible on bones.
	Human Predatory Pattern	Killing animals larger in weight than humans - a rare occurrence for carnivores. Generally means hunting mammoths and other large fat megafauna.
	Hunting - Hominid Evolution	Active hunting by hominids on prey
	Scavenging - Hominid Evolution	All about theories connected to scavening meat from carcasses, such as percussion to access marrow or using cooperation or projectiles or smart brains to outwit other carnivores and steal kills.
	Obesity
	Facultative Carnivore	Facultative Carnivore describes the concept of animals that are technically omnivores but who thrive off of all meat diets. Humans may just be facultative carnivores - who need no plant products for long-term nutrition.
	Scurvy	Scurvy is a disease resulting from a lack of vitamin C (ascorbic acid). Early symptoms of deficiency include weakness, feeling tired and sore arms and legs. It can be treated and prevented by eating fresh meat and vegetables.
	Science
	Evolution	Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.
	Nutrition
	Anatomy	The discovery of features of the human body's anatomy and how they relate to diet and evolution.
	Anthropology	Anthropology is the scientific study of humans, human behavior, and societies in the past and present. It is a broad discipline that encompasses various subfields, including cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. Anthropologists seek to understand the full range of human diversity, from our biological origins to our cultural practices and social structures.
	Hormones	Hormones are chemical messengers produced by various glands in the body. They play a crucial role in regulating and coordinating various functions and processes within the body. Hormones are released into the bloodstream and travel to target tissues or organs where they exert their effects.
	Carnivore Diet	The carnivore diet involves eating only animal products such as meat, fish, dairy, eggs, marrow, meat broths, organs. There are little to no plants in the diet.
	Ketogenic Diet	The ketogenic diet involves eating high fat, low carbs, and moderate protein. To be in ketosis, one must eat less than 20 grams of carbohydrates per day.