The 10-seconds review: 5 stars, should read, hugely informative

P.S. the book review is a (potentially continuous) WIP, I will add notes and references as the book consolidates in my mind

In the video I do not go in the details of the content, just the book’s overall quality. The intent of that is to convince people to actually read the book and decide for themselves because I can only do a summary of it, which will miss most of the (hundreds of) references and actual technical terms. However, if you just want a quick summary as well as my overall impressions and take-home messages, continue reading!

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

There are anthropological, evolutionary and nutritional foundations for a carnivore diet
Always think in terms of evolution. What makes sense for a human to eat and what makes sense for a plant to have us eat
Nutritional studies are extremely difficult to carry on. Look at the methodology to understand their value (epidemiology is not good, interventional is good)

🎨 Impressions

The book is an incredible source and aggregation of studies on human nutrition, evolution and health in general. Although surely biased towards his side of the arguments, Paul Saladino shows significant and compelling evidence for all the claims. I was hardly ever left with the impression that a claim was unsubstantiated and left without any support.

Despite the bias and the sometimes sensational and controversial style of writing, I believe the evidence is reliable and there’s a lot to learn from the book despite possibly disagreeing with some/all the claims!

How I Discovered It

I gradually drifted away from Standard American Diet (never really my diet) and Mediterrean Diet over the years towards a paleolithic diet. I increasingly reduced the types of food I was eating as I was confronted with more evidence that they may be harmful for me.

Eventually, I had eliminated so many things that the only step between me and a carnivore diet were few types of vegetables. Still, I was skeptical about the carnivore diet and couldn’t believe it would be reasonable for anyone to follow.

However I started to follow Paul Saladino on youtube and found his considerations to be incredibly reasonable and well-articulated. Decided to read the book to educate myself on the topic and decide for myself if it was worth pursuing a carnivore-diet test instead of being held back by my concerns.

Who Should Read It?

Anyone interested in nutrition. Which, I would argue, should be everyone. More specifically though, people with chronic and autoimmune disorders as well as digestive issues should consider this as a basic education on the ways in which the diet influences the human body and can fuel inflammation.

Regardless of the decision to follow up with a carnivore diet or not, this book can educate on how to think about food in an “evolutionarily consistent” way. If you thrive on plant-based nutrition that is amazing! But it can’t hurt to be informed about the ways in which different plant-based nutrients and antinutrients are handled in the body. Not everyone is susceptible in the same way to different plants, but that doesn’t cancel the fact that the biochemistry in our system will still be the same for everyone.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I love coffee but coffee doesn’t love me back ☹️
I’m now that annoying person that looks at food and thinks “is it evolutionarily consistent?“. I’m annoying when having lunch with family, and cook liver at 8am in the morning (also, I couldn’t eat liver before)
I stopped taking food as entertainment and instead consider it as a fundamental part of my health. Huge paradigm shift
I just can’t look at broccoli the way I used to before

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

Well these are not necessarily quotes, there’s not many one-liners I can extract from the book since it’s packed with scientific references. But the take-home messages for me would be

broccoli doesn’t love you back
animal-based eating was what steered us as homo sapiens away from apes
plants want to survive just as much as we do. Having us feast on their leaves rent-free wouldn’t make much sense for them

📒 Summary + Notes

Anthropology:

The homo sapiens as a species started to drift away from apes when our nutrition started to have substantially more animal-based sources. The high amount of vitamin B is what caused our brain size to expand in such a significant way compared to apes.

Isotope studies of fossiles indicate that for millions of years our ancestors were primarily carnivore. Hunting for mega fauna was a better survival strategy compared to the high energy expenditure that comes from gathering roots/tubers/fruit, which are seasonal at best and do not have as rich of a nutritional profile as animal meat and fat have.

Evidence on fossils shows that the bone quality, number of cavities and height of the population started to deteriorate the moment we went from being hunters to the practice of agriculture

Evolution:

Bottomline is that all species want to survive. Animals don’t want you to eat them, and they have movement, strength and teeth to defend themselves. The animals that are not fast enough get caugth but that’s survival of the fittest, evolutionarily speaking.

Plants do not have those defense mechanisms in place but still would not survive if earing their leaves and roots was the best thing for animals to do. They then need chemical-based defenses in place. For example broccoli has two separate chemical compounds in the flowers, which get mixed together if parasited chew on the leaves. The resulting compound is a pesticide and this kills the insect trying to chew on broccoli.

For the most part, we can neutralize or mitigate the effect of many of these compounds through cooking and processing of the plants, but that is generally not 100% and in any way that also depletes the good nutrients.

Metabolic health:

80+% of American population is metabolically unhealthy. This means for example that there’s a huge pre-diabetic population that is unaware of this, a minority of which will evolve to being diabetic over time as an improper nutrition fuels insulin resistance.

All the types of food that are now in the recommended dietary advice are linked to some degree of low-grade but consistent inflammatory state. Leaky gut is widespread and for the individuals who are susceptible to that, many autoimmune conditions may arise.

All the metabolic and chronic conditions are on the rise and have been exponentially growing over the past 50 years, this is a civilization illness that was virtually non-existent before. While we eradicated the bacterial and viral infections that would kill humand a century ago, we are now having a third of the deaths coming from heart disease, a third from cancer and virtually another third from diabetes and metabolic dysfunction. All of which show remarkable improvements with a dietary approach.

Example: case studies of type 1 diabetes (no known cure other than lifelong insulin treatment) were able to get off insulin when the patient went to a carnivore code after the diagnosis. Cases of multiple sclerosis improved significantly with dietary intervention, autoimmune skin conditions like eczema can be addresses with diets that are low in inflammatory food. Insulin resistance improves with animal-based diets.

Nutritional studies:

The quality of nutritional studies is incredibly varied. If a study is based on epidemiology then it can show correlation at best, and should be used to form a hypothesis that is then validated with a controlled clinical trial. What happens instead is that we take correlation for causation and have inconsistent, faulty dietary advice being spread.

Unhealthy user bias comes from epidemiological studies:

example: in the western world consumption of red meat is generally not advised. People who disregard this advice are probably also doing all sorts of other unhealthy behaviors like smoking, not exercising et. al. and in fact we see that in an epidemiological study on western-world populations red meat is linked to unhealthy markers. However, in Asia red meat is often associated with high-status. Similar epidemiological studies in Asian populations highlight that red meat consumption is associated with a decrease in unhealthy markers. This is epidemiology, everybody

Biochemistry:

The molecules that we need for the correct functioning of our system are found both in animal and plant-based sources (except for B vitamins and carnitine and some animal-only compounds). However the bioavailability of those compounds in plant food is severely affected by antinutrients that reduce absorption and need to be expelled from our system.

The worst offenders to human health are lectins, highly linked to inflammation and autoimmune disorders, as well as oxalates (you can literally die eating spinach). However there’s more antinutrients and they can be found in basically all plant-based food because plants don’t have an evolutionary interest in you eating their leaves, they need them to survive

With regards to animal food, antinutrients are generally not present in the meat except for the ones that come from the animal’s feed (hence, better to eat organic and grass-fed). Eggs and dairy are a different story and can be triggering for people susceptible to autoimmune and or allergic reactions.

Looking at the studies (interventional ones), fiber both soluble and insoluble is not linked to any health benefit, and in fact is linked to a worsening of bloating and constipation. On the contrary, a carnivore diet is linked to remission of these conditions.

Red meat consumption has been wrongly associated with cancer cell growth, especially in the colon. But the study that originated the recommendation is based on a review of something like 400 studies, out of which 14 were selected (leaving out relevant interventional studies), out of which only ONE showed correlation between tumor and red meat consumption. And this study was financed and backed up by a religious organization in the US that disincentivized red meat consumption. Once again there was likely an unhealthy user bias

Environment & Ethics:

This is where I will drift away from science a little bit, and speak from emotion as well. There’s no way around it, eating carnivore means killing animals. Where your boundary and level of comfort is with this is up to your personal judgement.

However, few things that can be said on this topic are: Meat sources are not equal. Animals that are raised in industrial farming settings have a miserable life, are fed corn and grains and need to be treated with antibiotics due to the promiscuous living conditions.

Organic farming methods where animals are left free to graze and eat outdoors are less troubling to me solely based on my personal view and conception of life and death. To me, death is not something negative while bad quality of life is, in all regards. For this reason I can get myself to eat animals who I know live a dignified life.

Now on to the environmental aspect. Cow emissions are actually about 1% of the US footprint. Transportation and industrial waste rank way higher than that. Moreover, there’s a distinction between different types of carbon emissions.

A balanced ecosystem tends to be carbon-neutral. Cows emit methane which is then present in the atmosphere, is put in the soil through rain and plants then use it for their biochemistry. Cows in turn eat plants.

Different story is for burning fossil fuel and adding new carbon to the environment to process.

In farming, industrial farms are heavily carbon-positive and polluting. However evidence shows that rotational grazing and regenerative farming is carbon-negative thanks to the beneficial effect on soil repletion