Carnivore Diet

Hello all, 

I have been eating the natural human dietary regime for over 47 years now. I do not eat anything whatsoever from vegetable sources. The only things veggie I use are spices. My diet is usually 60% fat and 40% protein by calories. I used to eat 80/20 when younger and about twice as much quantity of meat also, but that seems too much energy at my age, which is 71- even though I am very active. I think the body actually becomes more efficient with energy as you age, but I have no way of proving it true. Otherwise, my body today is very like it was at the age of 30. I figure most of what we call ‘aging’ is due to insulin damage to the collagen and other body structures. No carbs = no insulin. I don’t heal quite as fast when injured as I did as a youngster, however. But I have few wrinkles, and my skin is still strong and elastic. 

At this point I would like to point out that a zero carb diet does NOT cause ketosis. The body rapidly adapts within a few weeks and begins consuming the ketones from fat metabolism. A fully keto-adapted body excretes no ketones in the urine. A metabolic by product, ‘ketone bodies’ are actually a special kind of carb, and they substitute for glucose at the structures which use it. They have the added advantage of making you feel good- and well fed. 

The body cannot store dietary fat, there is no mechanism for transport across the adipose cell’s wall, nor can it ‘burn’ carbs, which actually are toxic in more than the tiny amount required by the brain and a few other structures.  The body converts dietary carbs (all convert to glucose as they are absorbed) into body fat. The conversion mechanism requires insulin which is very tissuedamaging. It is correct to say that dietary carbs are the base cause of both heart blockage and diabetes, (not a disease). 

I must warn all of you that it is very unlikely that very many will be able to eat as I do over the long term, or in fact, to follow any diet for long which is much different from the one you were trained to as a baby/child. This is because diet is learned much the same way language, dress and behaviour is, and is buried deep and inaccessible, a part of your acculturation/socialisation. The very thing which makes us human is that deep and almost instinctive complex of behaviour. 

It requires a powerful will and a determination to change, in order to succeed in adopting the ‘extreme’ diet which this website is based on. Even those who are morbidly obese, as powerful a motivation as any I can imagine will have ‘cravings’ for what I call ‘non-food’ (all vegetation and carbs) which will eventually prove irresistible. A few may manage to stay on the diet for years, but unless you are prepared to stick with it for maybe ten or more years, you will drift back into eating what I consider poison. For some reason my mum was not interested in forcing me to eat the veggies I hated so, and i was able to eat only what I liked- mostly meat, especially hamburger and the fat those at our table would cut from their steaks. Still I had massive struggles abandoning the ‘civilised diet’. 

I suggest that no non-food be taken home, none allowed in your fridge or pantry (out of sight is hopefully out of mind). Make a request when seated in a restaurant that the bread bin be removed (but please leave the butter), and when ordering, request that the vegetables be removed from the plate in the kitchen (just say you don’t like to see ‘good food go to waste’). 

Even during the years I was soundman for Grateful Dead, I stuck to my guns and remained totally carnivorous. I am restricted by the forums rules (as I read them) from telling about my essay on diet and exercise which is posted on my website. Basically it states that humans were totally hunting peoples until the end of the paleolithic age. No paleolithic archeological dig has ever produced any food residues from vegetables. Chemical analysis of bones from the digs indicates they are the same composition as the African 9 lion- thus, virtually no intake of vegetation. There were no ‘hunter-gatherer’ societies until the neolithic, even though some modern HG tribes still made and used typical paleolithic napped-stone tools. The so called Nearthin and Paleodiet thus are both nonsense, true paleolithic people were total carnivores and ate no veggies whatsoever. In the relatively short evolutionary period since the consumption of vegetables as food there has not been any real adaptation to such low grade low energy, difficult to digest foods. Because we have no adaptation to digesting or processing vegetables as food, they are all basically very bad for us. 

We evolved as an active, group-hunting animal. We have a high natural requirement for physical exercise and cannot live long or be healthy without a lot of it. 

I hope my post is of some help to others. Just persist. I show that it IS possible to overcome your dietary socialisation.

Benjamin D. Stewart, of Sitka, Alaska, is a retired territorial commissioner of mines, now past eighty, who knew Romig in his middle years. I sent him for comment the Price interview of 1933, including the statement that Romig was a surgeon of great skill and that he was “the best loved man in all Alaska.” Mr. Stewart replied February 6, 1958:

“As to my first-hand knowledge of Dr. Romig, I can confirm all of the good things said of him in the extracts you sent ... I knew him well during the time he was in charge of the Railway Hospital in Anchorage and later when he was for a time practicing privately in Seward. In fact I called on him to help me recover [from a heart attack] ... I have always believed [that he] actually saved my life. Naturally I have always looked upon him as a highly skilled doctor ... There is no doubt he was widely beloved and that he was regarded as the outstanding doctor in Southwestern Alaska.”

The second letter on Romig is from the Reverend Henry H. Chapman, rector of St. Peter’s-by-the-Sea, Sitka, who wrote September 8, 1958:

“My father was a missionary of the Episcopal Church at Anvik, Alaska. I was born in Anvik, in 1895. The native people of that area are [Athapaska] Indians. My acquaintance with Dr. Romig dates from the years 1923-27 when I was in charge of the Episcopal Church at Fairbanks. Dr. Romig was my physician, surgeon and friend during those years. At that time the Episcopal Church maintained a boarding school for Indian boys and girls at Nenana, 65 miles south of Fairbanks. Dr. Romig used to visit the mission periodically examining the children in the school ... always without charge.”

This is the sort of man and physician it was who told Dr. Price in 1933 that “he had never seen a case of malignant disease among the truly primitive Eskimos and Indians, although it frequently occurs when they become modernized.” Confirming this to me in 1940, Dr. Romig further indicated, both then and later, that he looked upon cancer as nonracial in its selection of victims. He thought it certainly environmental in its cause, and probably nutritional.

Romig thought it interesting to compare malignancies with other troubles that were extremely rare, if found at all, among the primitive Athapaskans and Eskimos of southwestern Alaska around 1900. What some of these rare or missing diseases and troubles were we here set down alphabetically from two sources, the extended text of the Price interview [from which we earlier extracted the quoted remarks on cancer], and then the 1948 paper which Romig submitted in first draft as a contribution to our Encyclopedia Arctica. According to Romig, the very rare or missing nutrition-linked difficulties of the pre-Europeanization time were these, among others: appendicitis, arthritis, beri-beri, cancer, caries (dental), constipation, corpulence, diabetes, epilepsy, gall stones, gastric ulcer, hypertension, night blindness, pellagra, rheumatism, rickets, and scurvy.

One morning at breakfast, the autumn of 1955, my explorer-anthropologist husband, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, asked me if he might return to the Stone Age Eskimo sort of all-meat diet he had thrived on during the most active part of his arctic work. Two years before, he had suffered a mild cerebral thrombosis, from which he had practically recovered. But he had not yet succeeded in losing the ten pounds of overweight his doctor wanted him to be rid of. By will power and near starvation, he had now and then lost a few of them; but the pounds always came back when his will power broke down. Doubtless partly through these failures, Stef had grown a bit unhappy, at times grouchy.

My first reaction to his Stone Age diet proposal was dismay. I have three jobs. I lecture, in and out of town, and enjoy the innumerable extracurricular activities of our New England college town of Hanover, New Hampshire. Forenoons I write books about the arctic, “for teen-agers and uninformed adults,” to be able to afford the luxury of being librarian afternoons of the large polar library my husband and I acquired when we were free-lance writers and government contractors, which library now belongs to Dartmouth College. I take part in a course called the Arctic Seminar, and last winter was director. I sing in madrigal groups and act in experimental theater plays. Only by a miserly budgeting of time do I manage these things. “In addition,” I thought to myself, “I am now supposed to prepare two menus!”

But aloud I said: “Of course, dear.” And we began to plan.

To my astonished delight, contrary to all my previous thinking, the Stone Age diet not only proved effective in getting rid of Stef’s overweight, but was also cheaper, simpler, and easier to prepare than our regular mixed diet had been. Far from requiring more time, it took less. Instead of adding housekeeping burdens, it relieved them. Almost imperceptibly Stef’s diet became my diet. Time was saved in not shopping for, not preparing, not cooking, and not washing up after unrequired dishes, among them vegetables, salads, and desserts.

Some of our friends say: “We would go on a meat diet too, but we couldn’t possibly afford it.” That started me investigating the actual cost of the diet. Unlike salads and desserts, which often do not keep, meat is as good several days later as the day it was cooked. There is no waste. I found our food bills were lower than they had been. But I attribute this to our fondness for mutton. Fortunately for us it is an unfashionable meat, which means it is cheap. We both like it, and thanks to our deep freeze, we buy fat old sheep at anything from twenty-two to thirty-three cents a pound and proceed to live on the fat of the land. We also buy beef, usually beef marrow. European cooks appreciate marrow, but most people in our country have never even tasted it, poor things.

When you eat as a primitive Eskimo does, you live on lean and fat meats. A typical Stefansson dinner is a rare or medium sirloin steak and coffee. The coffee is freshly ground. If there is enough fat on the steak we take our coffee black, otherwise heavy cream is added. Sometimes we have a bottle of wine. We have no bread, no starchy vegetables, no desserts. Rather often we eat half a grapefruit. We eat eggs for breakfast, two for Stef, one for me, with lots of butter.

Startling improvements in health came to Stef after several weeks on the new diet. He began to lose his overweight almost at once, and lost steadily, eating as much as he pleased and feeling satisfied the while. He lost seventeen pounds, then his weight remained stationary, although the amount he ate was the same. From being slightly irritable and depressed, he became once more his old ebullient, optimistic self. By eating mutton he became a lamb.

An unlooked-for and remarkable change was the disappearance of his arthritis, which had troubled him for years and which he thought of as a natural result of aging. One of his knees was so stiff he walked up and down stairs a step at a time, and he always sat on the aisle in a theater so he could extend his stiff leg comfortably.

Several times a night he would be awakened by pain in his hips and shoulder when he lay too long on one side; then he had to turn over and lie on the other side. Without noticing the change at first, Stef was one day startled to find himself walking up and down stairs, using both legs equally. He stopped in the middle of our stairs; then walked down again and up again. He could not remember which knee had been stiff!

Conclusion: The Stone Age all-meat diet is wholesome. It is an eat-all-you-want reducing diet that permits you to forget you are dieting–no hunger pangs remind you. It saves time and money. Best of all, it improves the temperament. It somehow makes one feel optimistic, mildly euphoric.

Epilogue: Stef used to love his role of being a thorn in the flesh of nutritionists. But in 1957 an article appeared in the august journal of the American Medical Association confirming what Stef had known for years from his anthropology and his own experience. The author of this book has also popularized Stef’s diet in England, with the blessing of staid British medical folk.

Was it with the faintest trace of disappointment in his voice that Stef turned to me, after a strenuous nutrition discussion, and said: “I have always been right. But now I am becoming orthodox! I shall have to find myself a new heresy.”

Evelyn Stefansson

April 22, 1959.

Traditionally, Inuit children were breast-fed for three to five years and sometimes into the sixth and seventh years. Prolonged breast-feeding was practiced by many precontact hunting and gathering populations to ensure the survival of offspring. Recent research has shown that prolonged breastfeeding inhibits ovulation, making for longer intervals between children. With the introduction to the Arctic of bottle-feeding in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the traditional strategy of birth control and birth spacing was disrupted. This, in turn, led to an increase in live births, resulting in a significant shortening of birth intervals.

WE TRAVELED FROM NOWHERE TO NOWHERE IN A WORLD ALL WHITE, eleven dogs, a long sled, a fur-clad Inuk and I. We had spent a week at the floe edge, the limit of landfast ice, and the hunting had been good. Jes had shot and harpooned eight seals. We had eaten well and our sled was heavy with meat - food for his family and dogs - and with seal pelts he would sell at the store. 

We felt the coming of the storm. The air was still and oppressive. Gulls, screaming, flew toward the distant land. The sky turned leaden black. We should have left hours ago. But a pod of narwhals was feeding close to the floe edge; the eerie stillness was filled with the plosive "pooff," "pooff," "pooff" of their breathing. Small plumes of exhaled breath hung briefly in the icy air, and a few times we saw the gleaming ivory tusks of the males. 

Jes wanted a whale. His entire hunter's spirit was focused on those whales, wishing them closer, closer. He was the perfect predator, quietly poised in total concentration, the ultimate Arctic hunter, as his people had been since the dawn of time. The whale meant food and life and glory, the primal thrill of being, and at that moment nothing else mattered. 

While Jes's soul was in that strange mystic sphere that links the hunter to his prey, I sat apart and nursed my white man's worries. I had spent far too many years in the Arctic not to know that the coming storm would be hell, the trip home utter misery and, if the ice broke up, exceedingly dangerous. It was 60 miles (96 km) back to the village. 

The storm struck, and Jes did not get his whale. He rose slowly, reluctantly. The tension seeped out of him and then he smiled a marvelously boyish smile, shrugged, and said: "Ayornamat. (It can't be helped.)" An Inuk does not rant and rave; his language has no swearwords. He does not rail against God or Nature, but simply accepts adversity. He does his best; the rest is fate. 

We lashed the load upon the long pliant sled with utmost care, passing the bearded-seal thong back and forth, pulling it tight with all our strength. Jes called to the dogs. Normally they would have leapt into a joyous gallop. Now they moved without enthusiasm, their tails, usually cockily curled, drooping sadly. Like me, they feared the storm. 

At first, brief lulls alternated with vicious gusts. Then the storm became steady and we traveled into a hissing, roaring avalanche of snow. The dogs hated it. The wind-lashed ice spicules hurt their eyes, and they tried to veer away from the wind. Jes beat them, coaxed them, directed them. There was only snow, the screaming wind, and nothingness; we seemed suspended in time and space. But Jes was guided by sastrugi, snow ripples created by prevailing winds, and by the knowledge of a thousand trips since he had first gone to the floe edge as a small boy with his father. 

We traveled for hours, our faces seared by the wind, our fur clothing plastered with snow. The ice changed, became rugged, hummocky. We were in a tidal zone, close to a coast. For a moment I saw a cliff and then it vanished again in the whirling white. Jes walked ahead now, leading the dogs through a maze of ice blocks. Near the base of the cliff he tied the dogs securely to a stone upon the ice. "Come," he said. We clambered up an incline, perhaps a beach in summertime, walked past a house-high rock, squeezed through a triangular hole between the rock and the cliff, and were suddenly in a spacious cave. Jes laughed, delighted by my amazement, the magician who has performed the perfect trick. 

Jes unharnessed and tethered the dogs, then cut up a seal and fed them. They rolled into balls, noses tucked under bushy tails, and soon the snow covered them with an insulating blanket. I lugged our sled load into the cave, shook the snow out of the bedding furs and my clothing, and made supper: a big pot of seal meat boiled on a Primus stove. 

After the elemental chaos of the storm, the cave felt calm and secure. It had obviously served as sanctuary to other Arctic hunters for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. In the back were low sleeping platforms of pebbles and flat stones. Soot streaks along the walls and roof showed where seal-oil lamps had burned and flared. The cave floor was scattered with bones, remnants of past meals. Bone, stone, and ivory shavings and splinters marked places where men had sat and made or repaired tools or hunting weapons, and broken toys spoke of children who had once played in the cave. 

We ate the steaming seal meat; drank the fat, scalding broth; and glowed with marvelous warmth. Jes made tea, boiled it until it was coffee-black, and we drank it syrupy-thick with sugar. We were safe, warm, full of food, relaxed and utterly content. Long, long ago, said Jes, Tunit had lived in this cave, a giant people but stupid, and the Inuit had killed them. His stories - part myths, part ancient oral history - - spanned the ages. The Primus hissed, and outside roared the storm. 

We spread our furs on the ancient sleeping platforms and, minutes later, his deep, even breathing told me that Jes was sound asleep. Cozy in my furry cocoon, I looked at the soot patterns on the cave wall, listened to the eldritch screeching of the storm, and thought sleepily about my other life: our pleasant, book-filled home in Montreal; my wife; our children. It was early May. Maud would be working in the garden. The boys should be home from school. The first tulips would be blooming. As I drifted off to sleep, it seemed part of a dream.