Why Carnivore Didn’t Fix Your Gut Issues

Añadido: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]All right. One of the offsided criticisms I see on a carnivore diet is the fact that it will lead to uh dramatic reduction in the diversity of our gut microbiome. And many people postulate that a diverse uh gut microbiome is important for our health.

[00:00:16]The truth is the gut microbiome is extremely complex. I think any conclusions uh drawn from its composition are probably you know somewhat premature. I mean we can look at clearly pathologic situations when someone is dealing with an infection and we often lose gut diversity when a pathogenic uh you know sort of subspecies takes over. You know we see that in things like cedvicil infections and things of that nature. But up to this point we don't have a lot of real data on carnivores. We have a lot of speculative stuff. People saying well you're not getting fiber and therefore you're going to lose all this diversity and all these you know supposed gloom and doom things are going to happen with the with the gut microbiome. Now, a couple years ago, there was a, you know, a little case series done where they had one carnivore amongst 30 or so people where they looked at the microbiome and they found in that one person nothing really negative. They had a fairly decent diverse microbiome. Another study a sort of a little broader view was taken. This was published in in a journal called microbiota and host uh it's called the long-term adherence to the carnivore diet and its impact on the gut microbiota. a crosssectional study le first author was Andrea Craasc which I think I think I've met him I think he's a doctor in Poland who actually does promotes carnivore diets in Poland and so good on these guys for getting some of this research done it was done uh I believe in Croatia at the University of Zagreb uh in their gut microbiome research lab and what they did is they collected samples from 10 people doing a long-term carnivore diet the average person had been on carnivore for three years. It ranged from anywhere from two years up to about 5 years. And so they've got, you know, pretty decent long-term carnivores, you could say.

[00:02:01]Anything over a couple years, we would argue is long term. And they have a sample on what to look for. And they compare that to a known population of about 800 or so omnivore people. Now, all people on both uh sides of this, you know, study were healthy people. They were people that were free of disease, that weren't taking antibiotics, that didn't have any known gut issues. So basically healthy people and my sort of supposition is healthy people have a healthy gut microbiome. That's pretty straightforward as you can go whereas other people like to kind of put the cart before the horse and say you have to have this particular microbiome in order to be healthy. I think that's a backwards way of looking at things quite honestly. And so what they found was first thing they looked at is something called alpha diversity. Now alpha diversity is basically just a generalized look at the microbiome and saying how diverse is it? Do we have lots of different species? Is is it predominated by just one or two types or is there a whole, you know, whole big wide variety of species in there? Now, the thought is that people that are not consuming fiber are going to lose a lot of diversity, right? So, they're going to have a low alpha diversity. And that's not what they found. In fact, they found basically no significant difference between omnivores and people on a carnivore diet when it comes to overall diversity of their gut microbiome. There plenty of all kinds of different species uh in both both sample groups. So that belief, you know, this study sort of puts holes in that in a little bit. Again, this is this is a case of 10 people, you know, we don't have hundreds and hundreds and thousands at this point is because there's not many people doing a carnivore diet, quite honestly. And again, funding these studies is not the cheapest thing in the world in many cases. So, but we do have, you know, that previous case series now this uh this cross-sectional study showing again and again that people on a carnivore diet do have in fact diverse gut microbiome. So that belief, there's no evidence out there that shows anything other than that. There's no other study that would contradict what's been published so far. Now again, caveat here. These are healthy people with healthy habits. They're not overweight.

[00:03:57]When you start put including obese people and people with health issues, then things get different. But for healthy people consuming a carnivore diet, it doesn't seem to negatively impact the overall diversity of the gut.

[00:04:07]Now, the next thing I looked at is something called beta diversity. And this is where they get into the actual qualitative uh what types of species are there? You know, does it have you know this particular type or that particular type? And in that particular regard, they did see differences. There were clear pronounced differences between people on a carnivore diet versus people on a omnivorous diets eating, you know, fibers and fruits and vegetables and so on and so forth. And some of the things are are things you would expect to see.

[00:04:31]you know, you saw more species dedicated to protein fermentation, more species that were involved in fat fermentation.

[00:04:40]There were several species that were sort of unexpected in there. There were species that were involved in carbohydrate digestion, believe it or not, you know, and and the thought was, well, there's no carbs, so where that where's that coming from? Well, it's postulated that the carbohydrate digesting species are coming from the breakdown of mucin. Now mucin is part of that mucous layer in our gut and is primarily carbohydrate. Basically the bacteria are eating that you know that extra mucus that's there. So they're they're still developing that carbohydrate uh you know capacities. You know the interesting thing is they saw like I said different subspecies. One particular species known as acmensia mucinophila which is by folks like Dr. Sabine haze and talking about that is the key microbe in your gut that is related with younger guts, healthier guts. And what they found in the carnivore diet population was no decrease in that particular subspecies, which is kind of interesting to see. Uh, you know, just taking a glance at the chart here that's in in the paper, you know, it shows that, you know, on the positive side, you know, obviously plenty of alpha diversity. uh you know there were increases in B12 production, Bri increases in vitamin K producers, decent amount of carbohydrate degradation, decreases or increases in what would be known as fructose intolerance which is not surprising. Now surprisingly gut barrier function was considered to be very robust in this in this particular the microbiome associated with a robust gut barrier was was associated with this which is again things that would many people criticizing carnivore diet would say that can't be true because we don't have the specific species of bacteria but apparently we do in this case um we saw obviously like I mentioned higher amounts of of protein fermentation um on the negative side there were species that were associated withreased increasing inflammation and and cytotoxicity. Again, these would be considered negative aspects of this. And so, sort of the overall picture here is it's kind of a mixed picture. Some things are much more beneficial than we would have thought before. You know, the ability to continue to break down carbohydrates, the ability to have a robust uh gut uh barrier, um you know, obviously things we'd expect like increased B12 production, K uh vitamin K production, all increase. So all these things are are thought to be good but then in the negative side potentially higher rates of inflammation at least according to the micro microbiome that was analyzed. Now again there weren't confirmatory tests to say were the people truly inflamed. Now my experience with people on a carnivore diet is they don't tend to have high inflammation markers but the gut data doesn't necessarily show exactly what's going on in the body but it's one of these things where we have these sort of speculations around this. Um the other things that were you know kind of interesting here and I'll read a little bit from the discussion. This is you know what what they had said and basically this is the author's word says based on the current scientific understanding one would anticipate that individuals following a strictly animal-based diet lacking plant fiber polypheniles and other prototypical prebiotics would present with signs of pronounced disbiosis.

[00:07:44]Surprisingly our results do not support this assumption. The carnivore subjects did not exhibit significantly reduced microbial alpha diversity in comparison with the omnivore controls. Nor did they show significant alterations in essential commensal taxa including acromancia muc mucinophila and lactobacillus groups or microbial pathways related to butyrate metabolism.

[00:08:08]Although certain disbiotic associated taxes such as proteobacteria were increased, regression modeling suggests that these changes are probably not causally attributed to the carnivore diet itself. This raises the possibility that certain components of an animal-based diet nutrition may exert prebiotic like effects and preserve the alpha diversity instead of dietary fiber as seen in earlier studies. And again, this, you know, there's a study out there I mentioned a couple times over the years. You know, uh my friend Tommy Wood and some of the other researchers uh looked at the gut and and made the proclation that the gut is extremely metabolically flexible. And so we have a whole range of different mechanisms by which to um achieve the beneficial effects that are thought to be brought on by fiber in the diet. Right? So again, you don't have to have fiber in the diet to have, you know, butyrate uh, you know, producing or dependent microbiome. You don't have to have fiber in the diet to have a thick gut barrier, which is this study seems to indicate.

[00:09:08]Whenever I see people speculating on a carnivore diet and saying this is going to happen or that's going to happen and it there's no studies that have been done, I always take with a grain of salt. Again, we don't know unequivocally what the long-term results of a carnivore diet are. uh we can say that we are observing people that are getting better on a carnivore diet. I see it all the time. It's one of the reasons I support that. That doesn't mean everybody needs to do a carnivore diet or everybody will benefit from a carnivore diet. But for many people, particularly those suffering with diseases, this could be a very viable and for some people a sustainable tool to utilize. So think about that. We are just at the beginning of this. Um if this were a drug, you know, like like a GLP1 drug and remember that acia promotes GLP production in the gut. So, we have those bacteria in there. But if this were a drug like a GLP-1, you would already have hundreds studies, hundreds of studies on this. But because it's not, you know, it doesn't have the potential to make in hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars like these drugs do. Nobody wants to talk about nobody wants to study it. But anyway, you guys know better. Uh, keep sharing your stories. You know, we're moving the needle from a grassroots level. And this is what, you know, I'm excited to see. There's more research in the works coming. So, little by little, we can sort of find out what the truth is. You know, some of the criticisms may be true, some of them may be false. We don't know. Only way to only way to know that is to is to study this better and hopefully more and more scientists will take it upon themselves to conduct these desired studies. I mean, if you know, you ask me what what what studies do I think are important or a lot of you guys would say, "Hey, let's study these diets and see how they can affect disease."

[00:10:38]Anyway, thanks for listening, guys.

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