Is the All Meat Diet Good for People With Diabetes? was presented by Jessica Apple (gotta love her last name!) of ASweetLife.org, September 2018.
The all meat diet, also known as the carnivore diet, is exactly what its name suggests: a diet that consists 100% of meat. Think of the keto diet without any salads or low carb vegetables. Think of lions and cats or other obligate carnivores, and forget all those times you felt guilty for forgoing a kale salad.
As you might guess, conventional medical practitioners have not jumped on the all-meat bandwagon, and the evidence in favor of it is mainly anecdotal. There are those, however, who have overcome serious health problems while eating nothing but meat.
Bottom Line: Without scientific studies to back the safety of the diet, and without substantial anecdotal evidence about long-term success (Peterson has only been on the diet since December 2017), there isn’t really any way to say for certain if the all meat diet is good for people with diabetes. One thing it won’t do, however, is raise blood sugar levels. And that’s a good thing!
Carbs: It’s the Sources that Matter – Calorie density and the meaning of moderation, was reported by David L. Katz, M.D., MPH on MedPageToday.com, 12 September 2018.
In a recent study in Lancet Public Health, Sara Seidelmann, MD, and colleagues examined the association between total carbohydrate intake and mortality in over 15,000 adults in four U.S. communities over approximately 25 years. The sites were all participating in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study.
Their conclusion, that moderate intake (50%-55% of calories) of total carbohydrate is associated with lower mortality than either higher or lower levels could scarcely be more timely. Despite a years-long campaign to shift the focus of public health nutrition from nutrients to foods, a macronutrient preoccupation still generally prevails in both the scientific literature and the patterns of popular culture. Reaffirmation of the time-honored merit of moderation is particularly pertinent given the tendency for dietary debates, and fads, to go to extremes.
The authors address this topic only incompletely. Low-carbohydrate diets, associated with increased mortality risk, tend to be high in meat and dairy, and saturated fat from those sources, as they note in the paper. But a low-carbohydrate diet could be plant-predominant, or even plant-exclusive, and the current study cannot disclose how mortality would track with such a dietary pattern.
More importantly, the most nutrient-dense of all “carbohydrate” sources, vegetables, tend to be very low in calories, or energy-dilute. The paper makes no reference to energy density, but the matter is important and germane. To achieve a very high percentage of calories from carbohydrate depends on either an exceptionally high intake of highly nutritious, energy-dilute foods, or reliance on generally far less nutritious, more caloric alternatives, such as refined starch and added sugars. The latter practice accounts for most high-carbohydrate diets in modern societies and the cohorts assessed for this paper but tells us nothing about outcomes associated with the former. Other data sources suggest low mortality and morbidity when a high intake of carbohydrate is achieved with highly nutritious foods.
Read more: Carbs: It’s the Sources that Matter
