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this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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Is it dosage related or is any amount of red meat bad? And by red meat is it beef in particular or does it also include lambs and camels?
From a health perspective you can simplify it to mammals = red meat. Birds, fish, reptiles, insects etc = not red meat.
And yeah it's dosage based. Generally speaking you want to stay under 350g (by cooked weight) red meat a week. More than 500g a week is when it starts to be consistently linked with higher health risks. If you want to be really technical it could be said 0g is better than 350g, but in this range the increased risk tends to be near insignificant.
A minority of us, but a growing minority, look at the data and come to the conclusion that the meat isn't the problem. It's the sugar and carbohydrates people eat with the meat that are the problem.
If you cut out all of the fructose, glucose, and carbohydrates from your diet. Your health outcomes are going to be amazing regardless of your meat consumption
What data are you referring to?
If you want a bunch of paper references I recommend
https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/science every statement has a number, and those numbers directly linked to the scientific articles to back the statement
If you prefer to listen to a medical lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDJsxw0uMLM
Or if you'd rather read a detailed medical textbook https://shop.elsevier.com/books/ketogenic/noakes/978-0-12-821617-0
The nut of it is, most of the modern non-communicable diseases are based in sugar and carbohydrate consumption. The world has about a billion people with type 2 diabetes documented, and that is strictly because of excess carbohydrate consumption.
Of course there's more nuance, inflammation plays a significant factor, and combining fat and carbohydrates at the same time create cellular inflammation due to the Randall cycle (not a cycle) cross inhibition.
There's excellent work going on about the impact of constantly elevated insulin levels, and how that causes most of the manifestations of metabolic disease. And insulin levels are directly driven by carbohydrate consumption, persistently snacking all day means all day elevated insulin.
Most people would be better off eating a whole food diet, no processed foods, nothing from a factory. That eliminates most of the easy sugars, most of the carbohydrates. If somebody wants to eliminate even more, they could try out a low carb, or even a ketogenic diet or even a zero carb diet.
Most recent studies of long term ketosis show accelerated aging markers, and some potentially harmful increases in LDL and VLDL cholesterol. Some propose periodic resets out of ketosis to avoid some of the accumulated long term issues, while taking advantage of some of the short term benefits for overall insulin sensitivity and obesity.
The human body has many, many ways to meet its nutritional needs. We're omnivores and we have lots of anthropological history of different cultures surviving primarily on carbs, primarily on animal products, and all sorts of in between.
There are plenty of issues with people on carnivore diets, too, so I would caution against trying to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. I've never seen anything suggesting that there's a statistically significant delta between a high carb whole foods diet and a low carb whole foods diet. And even within those frameworks, it's entirely possible that the qualitative differences between one whole food still makes a difference compared to another whole food, like the observed studies regarding red meat being bad, fatty fish being good, legumes being good, fermented vegetables being good, etc.
Nutrition science is pretty incomplete. We're only recently learning bits and pieces about the role of the microbiome, and haven't even finished accumulating the information we started learning in recent decades about endocrine feedback loops in nutrition and metabolism. It'll take a lot of data and analysis to have confidence in what people are saying, and I personally take it all in with interest but skepticism.
That is interesting, what study was that? What were the markers they used?
Potentially is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The only group following keto which see a increase in LDL is the lean-mass-hyper-responder phenotype. There is some interesting research being released on this group Paper - Plaque Begets Plaque, ApoB Does Not: Longitudinal Data From the KETO-CTA Trial - 2025. However, Cholesterol is not a disease - its essential for life - the concern has never been cholesterol but atherosclerosis - if someone has elevated LDL, undamanged and unglycated (as on keto) and they are concerned they should get a CAC score so they can see their actual plaque burden.
I'd like to learn what those problems are, I'm currently following a carnivore diet and as far as my reading has gone there are not any downsides.
This study shows inflammatory markers are increased on a ketogenic diet: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6922028/
This rat study shows increased senescence in heart and kidneys in long term ketosis: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado1463
What you're asking for is being studied. Here's a meta study from 2013:
Their results:
Along the same lines, here's another study with arterial measurements that shows reduced blood flow and arterial function for those who stuck with a high protein diet: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000331970005101003
Look, none of these studies are, standing alone, enough to really change things. But it seems to me, from the outside that you're cherry picking your own results to justify carnivore diet.
The high carb versus low carb discussion is complicated and has a lot of factors at play. But the evidence for animal versus plant based low carb suggests that animal product diets are more harmful than plant product diets of similar macronutrient profiles.
Moreover, the overall trends show that those who eat a lot of whole grains (which are, by their nature, high carb plant based foods) have lower mortality than those who don't. The same is true of those who eat a lot of fruit (again, high carb plant based food).
Trying to tease out which of a million variables is truly responsible for cardiovascular health isn't easy, but a lot of the overall trends can be seen:
Now, you can quibble with confounding variables, but at a certain point trying to argue that minutiae starts looking like religious apologetics, really cherry picking examples in favor while ignoring examples against. Coming up with a coherent theory of "fiber not important" or "the foods our genetic ancestors ate are somehow bad for us now" is an uphill battle, and I'm not convinced that the carnivore diet is anything more than a scam designed to sell books.
Side note, I had a couple of high blood pressure readings recently, and was considering using one of the injectable drugs for weight loss. But after talking to a doctor, I thought I'd try watching the food that goes into my "pie hole" first.
That was a few weeks ago when I saw my doctor. Since then, I've been eating much fewer processed foods, and more fruits and veggies. I was surprised at the difference of caloric intake and carbs from snack foods compared with regular fruit as a snack. "Tortilla chips: serving size 5 chips!" And eating the processed snack always leaves me wanting more. I also added some moderate walking exercise.
So after 4 weeks I'm down 8.5 pounds, about 3+% of my body weight. I already feel a big difference. Now I'm thinking I don't need to inject expensive chemicals into my belly. Maybe I can just eat healthier foods and walk a few miles per week.
The injections work by causing your brain to want to do the things that you're describing. Adherence to a plan is the hard part, and the drugs tend to make people naturally want to stick with that plan, by literally making it more desirable than not sticking with it.
I highly recommend getting a home blood pressure cuff, and recording your blood pressure readings in the spreadsheet. It'll be great for you to see trends over time. And your doctor will like it too if you can bring the spreadsheet into next visit.
I had very high blood pressure, I did keto for 6 months and completely resolved it. And I have the spreadsheet documenting the entire journey. It's gratifying to look backwards at
https://www.dietdoctor.com/
lmao. no time for this. enuf grifting...
Thanks. Much appreciated.
Problem is, these foodstuffs are cheap and easy to preserve and distribute. So a lot of what you're suggesting boils down to "if you buy more fresh produce" which ultimately means "if you spend more money on groceries that spoil faster".
Even that doesn't address the relative health hazards of chronic high consumption of red meat when compared to white meat. But, again, we're talking about an enormously subsidized beef industry even compared to fish and chicken (where it seems we're intent on raising prices through ecological destruction/abysmal hygiene). The game still boils down to having this avalanche of surplus ground beef that's practically being given away next to healthier options that are far more expensive.