My original reply that no one but me could see:

To skim the papers

1. Kidney stones. This says incidence in the general population might be 8.8% your link says ketogenic diets give a risk for adults of about 7%. Why would we talk about that risk reducing when there are literally thousands of conditions that are fixed by carnivore? Just for me who was pretty healthy before I went carnivore to deal with food allergies have the list below fixed
2. Compares dietary fibre intake among people on the standard diet or other diets with enough people to appear in such broad statistics. We're not a big enough population to appear in those studies. We're not like those people. There's a big difference between a common low fibre diet (one eating a lot of processed foods and sugar) and a zero fibre diet
3. See 2
4. Micronutrients: it's already there, didn't you read the post before asking chatGPT to write this for you?
5. We're happy with cardio health following the research on LMHR people. I don't have the links handy but they're open. Search LMHR study. There are two of them.
6. We're happy with the cancer risk, especially with the Warburg (? spelling) effect where cancer feeds on sugar which we have little of, along with promising published anecdotes. That paper isn't comparing carnivore dieters. It compares undefined high meat consumption (which is worrying as that category often includes foods that aren't especially meat, such as pizza and hamburger (, fries, and a coke). If I have missed something here please correct me, but that looks like it is systematically reviewing crap epidemiology.

List of things this diet changed for me

• Lost visceral fat
• Feeling on my knee returned
• toenail fungus gone
• gout gone
• energy up
• Bicycling speed increased
• no reflux anymore
• allergies reduced
• don't need to eat as often
• no more staining on the toilet
• Mental clarity and stability improved

I recall seeing this set of studies before. I think I got that list from an LLM when I was trying to challenge my beliefs

If you try carnivore for 90 days it's hard to go back to another way of eating. So it felt so good - every health thing evaporated, my ability to do stuff went up, my ability to deal with adversity with a clear head is immeasurably improved

So I felt I needed to check myself. What if the mainstream advice was correct? So I asked an LLM for an assessment of carnivore and it gave me a list an awful lot like that and I was disappointed. Nothing was pertinent. All of the comparisons were normal diet versus bad diet that is characterised as low fibre, but is better described as high sugar; or ketogenic (lots of seed oils and coconut oil to treat mental illness) versus healthy people

I don't want to know about how bad versions of the standard diet are worse than good versions

I want to know about people on zerocarb compare to the alternatives

So far we only have the first LMHR study which compared carnivore dieters' heart health to matched controls from the general population and showed no harm from carnivore to heart health. The second LMHR study compared the carnivore dieters to themselves from a year before and found that the diet was not related to cardiac plaques

So the studies that say (unspecified) high meat intake causes whatever aren't convincing

There are too many bad epidemiological papers that define practically all junk food as meat and find (unsurprisingly) that a high junk food diet is unhealthy

There are too many studies that compare someone eating the standard diet, running on sugar, but also eating high fat and pretending they're like someone who eats no sugar and runs on fat. We're on a different metabolism.

Thanks for generating the list! Seems very organized. I welcome these discussions, just in the future could you break out each point into a individual post and make it into the community so we can have a detailed discussion. Throwing lists around tends to drown out the details and nuance. I've done my best below.

Could you add a section about kidney stone prevention?

Carnivore is not keto, the vast majority of kidney stones are oxalate based, without plants the oxalate levels will go down reducing the risk of kidney stones.

Could you include guidance on fiber supplementation?

Could you include guidance on digestive health management?

Fibre is 100% not required in human nutrition. Many people can eat fiber without issues, but it is not a essential nutrient. The only RCT I'm aware of on Fibre involves the total resolution of gut issues.

• Stopping or reducing dietary fiber intake reduces constipation and its associated symptoms
  slide on Fiber intake and constipation

  

Here is a case study one of carnivore's gut health

• The gut microbiome without any plant food? A case study on the gut microbiome of a healthy carnivore - 2024

Could you add a section on micronutrient monitoring?

Humans have been eating animal sourced food for at least 2.5 million years, we can derive all nutrition from that food. If someone is worried they can obviously monitor, but it isn't required.

• Can a carnivore diet provide all essential nutrients? - 2020

There is open debate about different required vitamin levels on a ketogenic metabolism.

Could you include cardiovascular monitoring recommendations? ... Meta-analyses show both processed and unprocessed red meat consumption are associated with increased CVD, stroke, and heart failure risk

I strongly, and politely, disagree with this entire premise. The majority of epidemiology against meat is done in a carbohydrate metabolic context, carnivore is a ketogenic metabolism, even then the associations are small and the relative risks are not clinically significant (HR < 2) https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/red-meat#heart-disease

However, that said, I would welcome all people on any diet to periodically (every 5 years?) get calcium monitoring to see if they have developed atherosclerosis - which is the real concern.

Could you add a section on cancer risk awareness?

Again - I disagree with the premise for the same reasons above.

The majority of epidemiology against meat is done in a carbohydrate metabolic context, carnivore is a ketogenic metabolism, even then the associations are small and the relative risks are not clinically significant (HR < 2)

https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/diet-and-cancer

This is a totally different metabolism, removing the single biggest risk factor for cancer - elevated glucose levels has a massively outsized impact greater then any of the weak associations indicated above.

As with most highly restrictive diets there’s lots of bloodwork and supplementation required

This premise isn't correct, humans coevolved for 2.5 million years eating meat - no supplementation is required.

Thanks for the feedback, I'm comfortable keeping my decision tree intact as is