The Carnivore Code: Unlocking the Secrets to Optimal Health by Returning to Our Ancestral Diet

Product Information

The Carnivore Code cites references suggesting that our probable ancestors used tools to butcher animals around 2. We believe there are people who have benefited from the carnivore diet, but we don’t know how representative they are of the typical person who might be interested in trying the diet. On page 183, The Carnivore Code states that high LDL is not a risk factor for cardiovascular or all-cause mortality in the elderly, and in fact higher LDL is “protective” in this age group. Does high LDL cholesterol have a different impact on people eating a carnivore diet than on the general public? There are actually more photos of live animals (always in Utopian looking happy scenes) than of the recipes made with them, which is a little odd.

The paper does say “if we were to attribute the soil C sequestration across the chronosequence to only cattle, MSPR beef produced in this system would be a net sink of −4.So it’s not clear how relevant these ancient menus are to modern people of European descent, and they don’t seem very relevant at all to people of non-European descent. My dad was a big game hunter and fisherman and we made our own butter as we lived on a farm with many animals for food. Some evidence supports the claim that dietary fiber is not helpful for constipation, but the weight of evidence weakly suggests that it’s helpful, at least for adults. The Carnivore Code also states that “epidemiology studies of women, Canadian and Russian men, Maoris, and Asians do not show associations between total cholesterol and or LDL levels and incidence of heart disease or all-cause mortality” (p. The Carnivore Code argues that this is because modern-day hunter-gatherers live in marginal environments, but two studies of this idea didn’t support it.

Case series are at much higher risk of bias for several reasons, which is why they’re usually viewed as a way to generate hypotheses rather than test them. A key piece of evidence presented by The Carnivore Code is a publication from the Framingham Study, including two graphs of its data on pages 187 and 189. It was accurately described by the authors as a “pilot study”, in other words, good for generating hypotheses but not a rigorous test of the idea. The paper cites other papers in which calcium oxalate crystals have been associated with lobular carcinoma in situ. It’s a review paper that discusses the cardiovascular and brain impacts of ApoE, which is involved in the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.This would be consistent with the data from ancient tooth plaque and feces, which together provide evidence for an omnivorous dietary pattern.

Our scoring method assigns low scores when we have little information because it’s not clear that the diet is beneficial, and there could be unknown risks. Now, I'm leaving the polemics aside, and just judging what I would use from this book, taking no sides in the whole argument of who's right and who's wrong.Importantly, the study doesn’t provide support for the book’s argument about saturated fat (and also doesn’t refute it), which was the main argument being made in the passage. Although it wasn’t a randomized controlled trial, the Virta Health study was a high-quality non-randomized controlled trial that reported that a very-low-carbohydrate (ketogenic) diet plus intensive support is helpful for managing type 2 diabetes. The argument is this: how could LDL be a major cause of heart disease if the correlation only shows up in some types of people, but not others? It argues that people eating a carnivore diet are immune to this effect, and in them, high LDL may actually be beneficial. It also lists immune system problems and anatomical abnormalities as other possible contributing factors.