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Eliminating carbohydrates from your diet means eliminating vegetables from your diet. I'm highly skeptical of the claim that any such diet can ever be healthy in the medium to long term. I fail to see how malnourishment isn't a certainty under such circumstances.

The fact that humans can fast for weeks or months isn't evidence in favor of:

> The amount of carbohydrates you need in your diet to survive is exactly zero.




You can go from a normal Western diet to eating nothing but lean and fatty meat for a year with no ill effects.

http://www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.full.pdf

> Two normal men volunteered to live solely on meat for one year, which gave us an unusual opportunity of studying the effects of this diet. The term “meat,” as used by us, included both the lean and the fat portions of animals. The subjects derived most of their calories from fat and the diet was quite different from what one, who uses the term “meat” as including chiefly lean muscle, would expect.

...

> 11. In these trained subjects, the clinical observations and laboratory studies gave no evidence that any ill effects had occurred from the prolonged use of the exclusive meat diet.

People in the Arctic circle like the Inuit always lived almost entirely off of meat and Mongolians and other steppe pastoralists come very close, adding dairy.


This is a one hundred year old study which literally states on the first page:

> These studies were supported in part by a research grant from the Institute of American Meat Packers.

Inuit populations suffering lower incidence of heart disease is a myth.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12535749

> The mortality from all cardiovascular diseases combined is not lower among the Inuit than in white comparison populations. If the mortality from IHD is low, it seems not to be associated with a low prevalence of general atherosclerosis. A decreasing trend in mortality from IHD in Inuit populations undergoing rapid westernization supports the need for a critical rethinking of cardiovascular epidemiology among the Inuit and the role of a marine diet in this population.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25064579

> Most studies found that the Greenland Eskimos and the Canadian and Alaskan Inuit have CAD as often as the non-Eskimo populations. Notably, Bang and Dyerberg's studies from the 1970s did not investigate the prevalence of CAD in this population; however, their reports are still routinely cited as evidence for the cardioprotective effect of the "Eskimo diet."

They don't have lower incidence of ischemic heart disease than white westerners, they don't have lower levels of atherosclerosis, and these have actually improved as their diets have become more western and less traditional.


> I'm highly skeptical of the claim that any such diet can ever be healthy in the medium to long term. I fail to see how malnourishment isn't a certainty under such circumstances.

No malnourishment in the linked study or in Inuit populations.

> Inuit populations suffering lower incidence of heart disease is a myth.

I never claimed they did. I was responding to your claim that you don’t see how a long term all meat diet can be healthy and that malnourishment is certain with an all meat diet. If the Inuit incidence of cardiovascular disease is not lower I presume it’s also not higher or it’d have been mentioned.

The claim was not that an all meat diet was healthier, but that it was roughly as healthy. If their incidence ischemic heart disease and atherosclerosis is no lower than white westerners but they don’t get diabetes because they don’t eat carbs that’s (incredibly weak) evidence of health benefits.

Again, I’m not saying the diet is healthier, I’m showing evidence that it is healthy in the long run and that malnourishment is not a certainty.


Vitamin and other supplements could probably close the gap? Vegans do this when they lack certain vitamins largely/only present in animal products and I don't see why the opposite can't be true.


It's not a gap, it's an absence, and the deficiencies incurred by eating zero fruits and vegetables are not analogous to a b-12 deficiency (which most meat eaters also suffer, just to a lesser extent than vegans). These deficiencies aren't going to be made up for in pill form. Not to mention consuming no fruits and vegetables means you are essentially on a very low fiber diet, which has huge health implications on its own and is probably a bad idea.

This is a lot of work to go to in order to hang on to a pet diet that is shown to cause arterial injury and doesn't lead to greater weight loss than less harmful diets.




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