An Introduction to the Carnivore Diet

Discover carnivore nutrition, an ideal diet for building muscle and maintaining low body fat. In this video, Dr. John Jaquish provides an introduction to the meat-based regimen popularized by Shawn Baker, author of The Carnivore Diet.
Full Transcript

Those that have followed me for a significant amount of time, or even just started watching this video series, it’s pretty clear that I’m a carnivore, or close to it. And I’m going to explain why. Why did I land on meat? I came at this with a complete lack of bias.

When developing the world’s best strength training product,X3, when looking at how that product worked, I wanted to make sure people got the most out of it.

I wanted to discover what the process was of putting on the most amount of muscle in the least amount of time.

Most people have awful training practices that are completely ineffective or even counterproductive because they get injured while they train. Even chronic small injuries build into chronic, long-term, very painful injuries so they can’t even train at all. So the whole endeavor ends up being pointless.

But for those people who would train correctly, and the very first few X3 users, I noticed that some of them just didn’t seem to be growing muscle.

I’d ask them what they’d eat, and they tell me 50 grams of protein in a day. Even if it’s quality protein, these people didn’t weigh 50 pounds, they weighed more like 150 pounds, so they were way underfed on protein. So I’m looking at all the research in nutrition and trying to determine … I was trying to determine what’s the best way to go. And ultimately, I landed on carnivore, or 100% carnivore or close to it, because the majority of what you need to grow musculature is a very high amount of animal-source protein.

Also, I stopped seeing a lot of value in a lot of things that we had been told to eat. The two greatest drivers of long life … because it’s not just about strength.

It is about living a long, healthy, happy life in a strong body.

And coincidentally, the two greatest drivers of long life are low body fat and high levels of strength. So we’re not just doing this to look good, we’re doing this to be healthy as well. It’s very important to point that out.

Now, you have to focus on animal protein, or I should say the highest quality of protein because that’s not necessarily just animal. So how do we get this? We focus on carnivore nutrition.

Now, the first question people have is, how do you not have scurvy? That’s just an example. I get questions about other nutritional dysfunctions How do you not have all these complications based on the recommended daily allowances?

Now a friend of mine, Jason Calton, is a researcher. And in 2007, he put out a study that said if one were to eat just whole foods, so no supplements or powders or anything, how many calories would you need to consume to get just the essential vitamins that we’re told are required? And this was, in essence, a look at the merit of the recommendations.

It turns out that if you were to get those vitamins from eating whole foods, never mind where they’re from; you got to fly nut butters in from every continent of the world to get to that, or you may or may not depending on the food choices you make. But that never happened in human history, and humans have done pretty well at procreating.

So even after all of that, the answer of how many calories do you need is 27,000 calories a day you need to get to the level of vitamins you’re supposed to have. So obviously, given that, the recommendations are not that great and it’s understandable when you look at where the recommendations came from, they came out of the 1950s from expert opinion, which is the lowest level of medical evidence that there is. So, a group of doctors got together, and they kind of just made it up.

So I don’t pay attention to any of these things, and I don’t recommend anybody else does. Now, if you’re told you have low iron, that could cause a true medical problem. You respond to that. But look at your blood tests. Don’t look at what’s recommended. I take no supplementation of any type of vitamin whatsoever.

In the last four years, I put on an incredible amount of muscle. Never really had anything with concentrated vitamins, other than meat, and I’m as healthy as ever.

And there are, if you join the carnivore tribe on Facebook, which is a Facebook group, you’ll see tens of thousands of people with the same story that I do about their nutrition. And most of them do strength training also, so they’re continuing to develop their bodies and their health, and their lifespan by following this type of nutrition.

Now, I will not say it’s not for everybody, because I think to a degree, it can be. Now, if you get 70% of your nutrition from very high-quality sources. Now, it could be bacterial fermentation, or it could be eggs, or it could be just standard animal protein like steak, I think this is a very good way to go and the way to stay the absolute healthiest you can be.

I also want to show off one of my favorite consumer products. I have no financial deal with this company. I just love this company. This is a Cinder. I think it’s the best grill on the market. They don’t even know I’m making this video, so it’ll be a surprise to them.

But there are two cooking surfaces, and there’s a sous vide setting, so it warms the meat first, throughout. And depending on the thickness of the meat, when you close the lid, it measures the distance between the two plates and it’ll automatically calculate this, so it’s perfect. When cooked throughout, it’s just a very light cooking and then you turn it up to 450 and you sear it. It takes about 10 seconds to sear the steak, and it’s probably the best piece of meat you’ve ever had.

I outdo steakhouses. I’ll be on a date, I’ll take somebody to a fancy steak house. And then the next night, I’ll do the steaks, and I win every time. But it’s the Cinder that’s the star of the show because, without a Cinder, I can screw up a good steak. So it’s important to point that out, and highly recommend Cinder as a product.

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