If you’ve been following me for a while now, you know I’ve been on a carnivore style meal plan for over 6 months. Transitioning from a keto meal plan, I truly noticed the difference by cutting out all vegetables. This included increased energy, better performance in the gym, better digestion in all areas and better sleep, just to name a few.
A truly strict carnivore diet consists of consuming almost exclusively red meat (and usually this is just muscle meat, not organ meat). I personally think this meal plan can work for a lot of people. However, in my opinion, there are ways to optimize it.
So I keep an eye out for articles related to the carnivore diet because I’m always looking for ways to improve myself. This is how I came across Mark Sisson’s article. He goes over the basics of the diet, which I agree with, and he offers some tips to optimize the carnivore meal plan, four of which I will go over here.
First tip, incorporating eggs. If you know me, then you know I LOVE MY EGGS! I eat my eggs a dozen at a time. Any meal plan that limits the amount of eggs you can have is not a meal plan for me. In my opinion, they’re one of the most nutritious things on the planet. If you can afford it, buy pasture-raised eggs, as they have a better nutrition profile.
He also recommends consuming organ meats, specifically liver. This is something I recommend as well. Liver is one of nature’s multivitamins. It contains a vast array of vitamins and minerals that are found in their most bio available form including choline, folate, copper, iron, vitamin A and vitamin C. Therefore, our body absorbs them more readily than any pill or supplement.
There are many reasons to incorporate fish into your carnivore diet. One of the biggest would be to increase your omega-3 content. I personally eat a can of sardines everyday. Again, I treat these as a natural multivitamin similar to eggs, mainly for consumption of omega-3 fats, trace minerals like selenium and manganese along with calcium found in the bones of the fish.
He recommends implementing some sort of fasting program. I also do this. For many reasons, fasting is extremely healthy. I do intermittent fasting with a feeding time of 6 hours a day, and fasting for 18 hours, and I also like to incorporate an extended fast of 1-3 days at least once every other week.
Grass Finished VS Grain Finished
Mark also touched on buying meat that you can afford. Some people really think you need to buy pasture-raised organic meat in order to reap the benefits of the carnivore meal plan. I don’t agree with this. If you have the extra income, have a moral issue with the ethics around factory farming or like the taste of 100% grass-fed beef, then I think you should eat that. But if money is tight, then I believe you can reap all the benefits of the carnivore meal plan by eating grain-finished meat. All cattle is grass-fed for most of their life, 80%+ of their diet is still grass for their entire life, even if they’re grain finished. Grain-finished cattle is brought to a feed lot for the last few months of their lives and allowed to eat dessert all day, in the form of corn and various grains, to fatten up a little bit before slaughter. From the research I’ve done, the only considerable nutritional difference seems to be the omega 3 content and, by extension, the omega 3 to 6 ratio. 100% grass-fed and grain-finished cattle seem to have very similar omega 6 content, but the grain-finished cattle appear to have less omega 3 content. It’s not a huge difference, but it’s there. Our article on natural fats gives a deeper dive into the difference between omega-3 and omega-6 fats.
To Collagen Or Not To Collagen
The only part of his article that I’m not on board with is his recommendation to consume a collagen supplement. This seems unnecessary to me because, every fiber of meat that you eat is surrounded in collagen. Our small intestines are perfectly capable of absorbing the dipeptides hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine that are used for collagen synthesis in the body. So if you’re eating enough meat, which everyone on the carnivore diet is, then in my opinion, you’re already getting enough collagen. No need to supplement with this one.
Overall a very good article!
Here’s a link to the article if you’re interested in checking it out: https://www.marksdailyapple.com
Very interesting information. Great research!!