The Carnivore Diet for Mental Health? 4-29-19

video: CarnivoryCon 2019: Georgia Ede, MD — “The Brain Needs Meat: Mental Health Benefits of the Carnivore…

Carnivore Curious?

Last month, I had the pleasure of participating in the Boulder Carnivore Conference, the world's first meeting dedicated to the potential benefits of plant-free diets. For this special event, I created a new presentation exploring the nutritional differences between plant and animal foods, and summarizing the scientific arguments in support of all-meat diets for optimal brain health. Skeptical? You should be. This seemingly strange and extreme way of eating flies in the face of every piece of conventional nutrition advice we've been given, yet a growing number of people report remarkable benefits, including resolution of serious, chronic psychiatric symptoms. If you are curious about how this diet might help to correct chemical imbalances in the brain, please watch this video to learn more.

If you are completely new to the idea of all-meat diets, allow me to provide a bit of context, along with some additional links and resources should you care to dive a little deeper.

Interest in Plant-free Diets Takes Root

Have you heard? The so-called “carnivore” diet—a diet completely free of plant foods—has become something of a hot new micro-trend, thanks in part to several high-profile adopters who report that switching to an all-meat diet significantly improved their mental and physical health.

One of these ambassadors of carnivory is Mikhaila Peterson, a 27-year old Canadian woman who credits a meat-only diet not only for putting her juvenile rheumatoid arthritis into remission (no small feat, as JRA is a serious and destructive autoimmune disease), but also for her complete recovery from the severe depression and anxiety she’d suffered with since the fifth grade.

Mikhaila first became aware of the carnivore diet after hearing Dr. Shawn Baker talk about the benefits of his all-beef diet on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Dr. Baker is a California-based orthopedic surgeon and multi-sport elite athlete who actively promotes the carnivore diet on social media and explores its theory and practice on his popular Human Performance Outliers podcast.

Mikhaila’s experience inspired her father, well-known University of Toronto psychologist Professor Jordan Peterson, to try the diet in an attempt to alleviate his own depression. He has since reported alleviation of not only depression and anxiety, but also of a number of bodily ailments including psoriasis and gastric reflux, as detailed in this article in The Atlantic.

The Boulder Carnivore Conference was the brainchild of Colorado-based Amber O’Hearn, a data scientist, nutrition science writer and public speaker who has adhered to a carnivore diet since 2009. She produces thoughtful, meticulously-researched articles about the science of animal-based nutrition on her website Empirica and is writing a book dedicated to this topic. In interviews such as this one, she explains how her unusual way of eating seemed to resolve her symptoms of bipolar depression, including suicidal ideation, which psychiatric medications had failed to accomplish.

Carnivore Diets and Psychiatric Disorders

As a psychiatrist specializing in nutrition, I work with people to help troubleshoot, customize and optimize their diets to improve their mental health, with the goal of reducing or in some cases even eliminating the need for psychiatric medications. There are many different dietary strategies that can help people achieve this goal—removing processed foods, carefully supplementing a whole foods plant-based diet, ketogenic diets, etc. It's important to emphasize that most people probably don't need to go to the extreme of removing all plants from their diet in order to experience relief, and of course no diet, including a carnivore diet, will work for everyone.

All that being said, I have consulted with many people who report significant mental health benefits on low-plant and plant-free diets. While I am not at liberty to share the details of these confidential cases, numerous compelling, public first-hand personal accounts of psychiatric conditions resolving on all-meat diets exist, including this interview with 58-year-old West Virginia-born musician Brett Lloyd and this conversation with Andrew Graf, a young entomologist in Texas, both conducted by Boston-based host Scott Myslinski on his CarnivoreCast podcast. Dr. Baker curates a wonderful collection of mental health testimonials at meatheals.com, which contains 110 entries to date.

I count myself among the believers. In 2008 I reversed symptoms of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, migraines and IBS by gradually removing most plant food from my diet. As a psychiatrist, I was fascinated to observe that my mood, energy, sleep and concentration improved significantly as well. I share more about my story in this interview with Ivor Cummins. [I have since switched from a very low-plant ketogenic diet to a pure carnivore diet]. It was that extraordinary experience that called me to question conventional beliefs about food and health, gave birth to my passion for the study of nutrition science, and led eventually to my first public presentation in 2012 Little Shop of Horrors: the Risks and Benefits of Eating Plants.

As surprising and powerful as these stories are, they are just anecdotes…they do not constitute formal scientific evidence. Perhaps all of these alleged improvements could be chalked up to exaggeration, wishful thinking, or coincidence. It is up to you whether you choose to dismiss them, become genuinely curious about them, or feel inspired by them.

If remarkable stories of chronic mental illness being put into remission through all-meat diets are to be believed, we have to ask why. Why might a diet completely devoid of the plant foods we are told are so healthy for us be—at least in some cases— ostensibly healthier for the brain than one containing plants?

This is the fundamental question I address in my Boulder Carnivore Conference presentation.

Look Before You Leap

If you are inspired to try a carnivore diet for mental health purposes, and you currently take psychiatric medications (or medications of any kind), please read my article Ketogenic Diets and Psychiatric Medications first. Just as with a standard low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet, carnivore diets cause profound shifts in brain and body chemistry rather quickly. These changes are almost always positive and healthy, but they can have a major impact on medication levels, dosages, and side effects that require close medical supervision, particularly in the first month or two while your metabolism adjusts to your new healthy way of eating. It is very important to consult with your prescribing clinician before embarking on any low-carbohydrate diet.

Thank you for posting this!!!
Watching the video now.

Even if this way of eating did accomplish all of the supposed benefits being touted, I would think the long term adherence rate would be pretty low. I can't imagine how boring, not to mention expensive, an all meat way of eating would be. It would also have negative social implications, as far as family gatherings, going out with friends, work situations etc. I also don't know of any long term studies that have shown benefits from an all meat diet either. Just because some symptoms may improve over the short term, what happens after eating this way for 20, 30, 40+ years? Would the benefits still be present? Would this way of eating long term cause other health issues?

Interesting to think about though.

This forum has another thread called Zero Carb, the alternate name for carnivore, quite a bit of additional information since 2016. Long thread with many good podcasts and talks that Dr. Ede and Amber O'Hearn and others in the ZC space have given over the past three years. https://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=471960

Good new overview of what is known about it in this guide with more resources:
https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/carnivore

Fascinating is the collection of stories from people who have improved a variety of symptoms, e.g. digestion, autoimmune, but the mood/mental health improvements are legion. They are each only one person's story but when you have collected over 100 of them, time to take notice: https://meatheals.com

I think in all likelihood the "supposed" benefits are real, although the purported causes are questionable. There's so much stuff in a kidney bean for instance, besides lectins, that if somebody excludes them from a diet and improves, you really haven't narrowed down causation.

I did an experiment with very low fat food for a week once. Monodiets, beans or rice or noodle for a single day each. On lentil day, I was very paranoid that somebody--or me--would hurt me. So I thought maybe something in lentils. But I've gotten that same feeling from undereating my usual diet.


I find adherence to near-carnivore the easiest I've ever had. If anything, I'm adverse to eating off-plan foods, most of the time. I have the advantage of being schizoaffective bipolar with social anxiety. Going off plan, my life can become frankly hellish. Grocery shopping can be terrifying. High fat keto, with minimal fasting is the best I've come up with against social anxiety--and it's working very well. Are there risks? Maybe, but people take all sorts of drugs with all sorts of risks to deal with what I deal with. This is making me lean, and less likely to develop type II diabetes or insulin resistance, the exact opposite of what most psyche drugs do--and it can be very difficult to find a drug or drug mix that works for somebody like me, anyways.

I think there's room for debate over what types of food should be included. Seafood, to up certain minerals and other micronutrients? Problematic for me, because other than fish with fins, I'm allergic. Organ meats? Which ones? But there isn't really any evidence that we have a requirement for any nutrients that can't be found in some animal food. I remain skeptical that carnivorous is the "ideal" diet, just because out of the countless plants on the earth, many of them very low in digestible carbohydrate, odds are there's something out there that can benefit our health by regular consumption, whether that something is technically an "essential" nutrient or not. As to long-term--data is a little limited, but so far what we have is positive.

Personally I'm more interested in a ketogenic diet than in a carnivorous one, but leaning towards carnivorous makes it easier to stay ketogenic--less carbs means slightly more protein can be eaten without having as much of an effect against ketosis. A ketogenic diet, we also don't have much data on longevity with. But what we do have from rodents is positive, as long as the animals aren't fed a diet that's deficient in certain nutrients like choline that are needed for the healthy metabolism of fat.

I do take various supplements--because, while I think plant-free or low plant diets are probably just fine, I'm in this for the benefits I'm getting, not to prove any point about not needing a multivitamin. I think it's unlikely to be necessary, but also pretty unlikely to do any harm, so I see the vitamin as worth the risk.

That's about where I am at this time. More keto than carnivorous, but very close. Agree that there's not much data, and it will be a while before we have anything of substance on longevity, so all I can go by is how I feel and function during my n=1. So far, I feel great and function exactly according to the instructions that appeared at my birth.

My own experience supports the importance of meat, good quality meat, and not just chicken breasts, in getting rid of depression. As a former vegetarian, I did not eat a lot of meat, and very little red meat. Had mostly low-grade depression continuously for about 40 years! (despite medication). Over the last few years, as I've improved my diet tremendously and incorporated a lot of high quality red meat (as well as organ meat), my depression is completely gone!

I've met, and conversed on forums, with so many depressed people that say they "eat really well". If I ask them about their diet, they invariably say that they eat low-fat, not a lot (or any) red meat, skinless chicken breasts, diet sodas, egg white omelets, etc...and many are vegetarian or vegan. I'm sure they think I'm a nut pushing fat and red meat on them.

Dr Ede has written a number of short and simple articles for Psychology Today I share if the topic gets into reasons why red meat is good for the brain and vegetables have anti-nutrients that block other necessary components of neuro-transmitters. My favorite https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...r-brain-in-2018 is a short list of Top Ten Tips, with links to other articles for more detail.


In addition to Dr Ede's talk, Amber OHearn is publishing all of them from the first carnivore Conference. Dr Shawn Baker on The Plural of Anecdote is Data. Lessons from N1 = Many. https://youtu.be/LLKJerb9zTY

I eat mostly like a carnivore. I do eat some dairy products (cheese and butter). I enjoy eating nuts. I use coconut oil to cook with. I also use spices which are vegetable based.

I'm doing carnivore at present, mostly beef. Just switched from meat fat to butter to supplement my needed level of fat to protein. Been doing pretty well and don't know what effect that will have. I consider meat fat more ideal but the taste, which I don't care for, became too much.
Edit to add: I appreciate how Dr. Ede is willing to point out the potential less desirable aspects of consuming plants. I've never much enjoyed most fruits/veg, got unpleasant effects, etc., but until I read from Dr. Ede was forcing myself to eat them because everyone insisted they were so good for me.