Dr Shawn Baker: Carnivore diet benefits could save your life!
Unfiltered sat down with Dr Shawn Baker, MD, author of The Carnivore Diet, to understand the main carnivore diet benefits and get his advice on whether you should follow an all-meat eating plan and what you stand to gain – or risk – if you do.
This transcript has been taken from our video interview with Dr Shawn Baker, MD. It has been edited for clarity and brevity. You can watch the full video interview here.
Should everyone be following the carnivore diet?
If you’re happy where you’re at, and you’re doing great, then good. Do whatever you want, right? But I am physician. My goal is to take care of sick people and make them better.
If somebody wants to do [the carnivore diet] for fun, or maybe for some athletic benefits, then that’s great. That’s fine.
But the primary goal in my view is [for it to be used as] a therapeutic tool. Maybe you do it for six months. Maybe you do it for three years. It all depends but it’s clear what it’s utility is.
It’s not a statement on the condition of humanity.
Humans are opportunistic omnivores. That’s clear. There are many people who eat nothing but plants plants and they’re still alive. I don’t think all humans should be carnivores. I’ve never said that.
But what I do say is it can be very effective for many, many people for various health conditions.
Whether the carnivore diet raises certain risk factors or not – which I think is debatable – you have to give people a choice”
Shawn Baker, MD
Who might get the greatest carnivore diet benefits?
Take food addicts. I see a lot of people with food addictions or binge-eating disorders. One woman I saw was 800lbs (55st or 363kg).
She went on the carnivore diet and she finally found the “off switch” to her binge eating where she couldn’t stop eating sugar and chocolates and candy and ice cream. She went carnivore and could suddenly, for the first time in her life, control her binge eating.
In 22 months she lost 500lb (35.7st or 227kg).
Now, are you going to tell that person that’s she’s making her health and her quality of life worse? Of course not. It wouldn’t make any sense.
Irrespective of whether the carnivore diet raises certain risk factors or not – which I think is debatable – you have to give people a choice.
I’ve asked this question dozens and dozens and maybe hundreds of times to people who interview who have gone on the carnivore diet.
They tell me that their Crohn’s disease is better. That their rheumatoid arthritis is better. They can finally get back to living a normal life. Even if I then said, yes, but your risk for cardiovascular disease is up 50%. Almost without exception they say I don’t really care. I would prefer to live this way without the miserable suffering they’d had.
Yes, you can sit there and suffer miserably and maybe eek out an extra three years of life because of the cardiovascular benefit. Or they can fix the problem that’s causing them pain and suffering. You have to give people that choice.
I think when you tell people maybe this is increasing your risk for cardiovascular disease, but your quality of life will be better, most people choose having a better quality of life here and now.
We are just wildly misaligned with what’s good for actual humanity versus what’s good for some corporate giant”
Shawn Baker, MD
Can you ever picture a world in which the carnivore diet benefits are more widely understood, appreciated and used?
The carnivore diet is a therapeutic tool and if people will approach it that way, and if more doctors were willing to use it, they would have a lot more success in certain cases, from immune diseases to mental health disorders. Gut issues, for sure. There’s so many [health issues] this diet has been very effective for.
I know people who are have been doing [the carnivore diet] for many decades – three, four, five decades – and they’re doing great.
I don’t envision a world where every human on the planet’s only eating meat. That’s never going to happen. People are going to eat what they want to eat.
Unfortunately the food industry puts out this hyper-palatable stuff that’s awful for everybody. It’s the cheapest dirt.
And people gravitate towards it because the main things that drive food-buying decisions is how much something costs and what does it taste like.
That’s what happens when 95% of people go to the store. That tastes good. And it’s cheap. That’s how they make their purchases.
But when you’re sick, when you’re suffering from a disease, like the early signs of Crohn’s disease, that’s the time to dial in your diet super-tight and fix whatever is the problem.
With any type of gut dysfunction, hyperpermeability is a big problem and you want to fix that right away early on. If you do you can save that person from years and years of suffering.
There’s some pretty expensive drugs you can take that a pharmaceutical company makes $60,000 a year from. We are just wildly misaligned with what’s good for actual humanity versus what’s good for some corporate giant.
