the carnivore diet: extreme restriction and trad wives
online fad diet culture, gender essentialism, and our carb-hating world
If you spend about ten minutes on health and wellness Tiktok or Instagram, you’ll often find yourself overwhelmed. You’re given an influx of information from different creators, often do’s and don’ts that contradict each other. One person will make a video telling you that oat milk is better for your hormones. and the best option out there, then the next will tell you that oat milk is full of chemicals and should never be consumed.
One of the diets that’s gotten more prevalent in the last few months is the carnivore diet. If you’re unfamiliar, the extreme version of it consists literally entirely of animal products, specifically red meat. I’ve seen videos of people eating straight butter with bacon in it, people in “kale is bullshit” shirts, dudes chugging raw milk, and recipes for all-meat-and-dairy pizzas (there’s no crust. it’s unhinged.).
If you’re unfortunate enough to be familiar with Jordan Peterson, right-wing mouthpiece and incel apologist, you may know that he had a fling with the carnivore diet. There’s a two-part Maintenance Phase deep dive on it, but basically, he ate nothing but red meat for a long time, then had some strange reaction to apple cider, was put on Ketamine and maybe some other benzos, tried to quit them cold turkey, and ended up in a coma in a Russian hospital. (The deep dive is worth a listen.)
There seem to be two different camps when it comes to the carnivore diet. Some people are doing it to lose weight, seemingly taking the idea that protein = good and carbs = bad and running to an extreme with it. Then, there are these Carnivore Men who eat mostly red meat, lots of organs like liver and heart, and are doing it to maximize their masculinity. Meat has always had strange ties to masculinity, and as we’ll see later on, a lot of these carnivore men are obsessed with being perceived as hyper-masculine, virile, and strong.
As you’ll see in the TikTok above, all types of carnivores are serious about only eating meat. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a vegetable on their plates, though some do eat fruit. But often, the meals are sparing, consisting of a burger patty or steak, some eggs, and liver or other organs. It’s very much in this camp of people who believe food is strictly fuel. There’s no creativity or love in any of these meals, and as cheesy as that sounds, it’s true — and it bums me out.
Having such a restrictive diet in any capacity is not only dangerous because of the nutrients you’re probably lacking — or getting in excess — but it forces you to lose out on a lot of social situations. If you’re really extreme about a way of eating, you lose out on many restaurants, cuisines, or family gatherings where loved ones cook for you. Food should be more than the thing that you’re forced to consume to maintain a perfect body — it’s love, community, culture, exploration. But not to carnivores.
Carnivores also have a lot of overlap with people who’ve sworn by other fad diets in the last few years, too. That includes paleo/Whole 30 folks — and even vegans.
That might seem contradictory. But while carnivores and vegans seem like polar opposites, they really have a ton of overlap. Both have said things like, “This is the way humans are supposed to eat,” and “I get all the nutrients I need from this diet.” They both restrict an entire group of foods because of deeply-held personal beliefs. A lot of the people hawking raw milk now are the same people who would never drink dairy milk only five years ago because “it isn’t natural to drink another animal’s milk.”
And maybe those people would say, “Well, I just found out more information and changed my diet.” But you know if they heard people talking about raw milk in 2017, they would’ve thought it was crazy. But now that the carnivore diet is trendy and outspoken influencers are promoting it, it seems like a reasonable choice to make. It’s a fad, plain and simple.
We’re in an era of fad diets that demonize carbs and do so in ways that mimic past trends. In the 90s, it was fat we were afraid of. But all the diets that have popped up in the last five or so years are all about having way more protein and fats, because carbs turn into sugar and make you gain weight. Oh no!
I don’t think I need to say this but…carbs are very important and they are not inherently bad for you. Quick energy is good, actually! And if you look back throughout history, the food groups that diets promote or demonize are always changing. So the notion that this is the ultimate way to eat is misguided, and there’s nothing wrong with eating a bagel. I ate one for breakfast while writing this and it saved me from literally shaking with hunger. Thank you, bagel!
But here’s the thing…the way carnivores eat isn’t even the most alarming part of all this.
The weirdest thing you’ll find about carnivore diet people is that aside from swearing by raw milk and hating vegetables, they’re VERY into the traditional lifestyle, specifically when it comes to gender and family dynamics. This ties in with the desire to be hyper-masculine that a lot of the carnivore men have.
Take a look at this twitter account Carnivore Aurelius. Scrolling through, you’ll find that this person touts strangely fundamentalist Christian ideas about marrying, having as many kids as possible, not masturbating (to keep your testosterone levels up, obviously), abstaining from weed, alcohol and porn, and living off the land. Additional non-Christian things they’re into: Sunning your genitals and…semen retention?
Carnivore Aurelius is a flat-earther, too. But that’s kind of beside the point. Or is it?
He’s not the only person in the carnivore space, if you will, to share these beliefs, but he’s been coming across my Twitter feed as of late. (I’m assuming this person is a man based on their extremely heteronormative beliefs and their talk of finding a wife.) But the larger dream of these carnivore folks is to get married, move to a farm, raise animals together, have ten children, and live life separated from the ills (sins?) of society at large. They write against casual sex, and say things like, “It’s pointless to have sex with someone you don’t see a future with.”
The thing that makes me personally uncomfortable about this whole thing is another idea they tout: That women are built to have children, and by doing so are fulfilling their biological design. Sound like a familiar argument?
Carnivores talk about how incredible it is that women are able to grow life inside of them, and that it is their ultimate purpose to do so. They are also very avidly anti-birth control, and say that men who are attracted to women on birth control have lower testosterone.
Now, I will be the first to admit I have my own personal reservations about hormonal birth control, and it’s often prescribed as a catch-all for all people who have any trouble with their periods, with little focus on the root cause of reproductive issues (like PCOS, endometriosis, etc). But we are also living in a post-Roe world, and for anyone — especially a man — to be discouraging people from using birth control for any reason is a highly irresponsible thing to do. And frankly, it’s nobody’s business what birth control methods anyone uses, and it’s not for anyone else to judge.
Additionally, it’s a very gender-essentialist idea that women — who are all inherently female, in their minds — are born to give birth. It’s also obviously TERF-y rhetoric, and I have a feeling people like Carnivore Aurelius would be opposed to gender confirmation surgeries and people taking hormones. They definitely have posted weirdly homophobic and transphobic content, saying that men who drink oat milk are “feminized” and are attracted to “fake women.”
To give them an ounce of credit, they do have some kind of based ideas about anti-capitalism (though they wouldn’t phrase it like that) and critiques of the rise-and-grind lifestyle — rejection of the 9-5 workday, promotion of spending more time in nature, that’s all cool. I also hate corporations. But running away with your white* family is not the answer, it’s a recipe for weird cult shit. *White noted because he only ever posts photos of white families.
Also, the idea of rejecting capitalism by running away — rather than staying to fix things — is a very privileged and often white mindset.
The whole thing is truly just fundamentalist Christianity with a slight edge, which is a highly restrictive diet. It’s gender-essentialist, meaning that females and males are the only two sexes, they correspond with the genders of women and men, and they are fundamentally different and serve different purposes. It’s an old-fashioned, Western way of looking at humans and gender and sex. Saying women (females) are born to give birth and be nurturing wives and mothers is some antiquated bullshit. Plenty of women do want to do that, and that is very cool! No one should take that away from you! But plenty don’t, and it’s weird that some guy on Twitter is saying that’s how it should be. It’s giving incel.
But back to the diet.
I know it’s probably a small proportion of people who are fully committing to the carnivore lifestyle. But the overall message it sends, which is very communicable via TikTok, is that protein is the most valuable thing you can eat. Carnivore, along with paleo and Whole 30 and keto, have raised a generation of people that is afraid of pasta. They promote the idea of extreme restriction, which is harmful almost no matter what you’re purporting to restrict. The rise of diets like these are harmful. And while there is probably some truth to certain aspects of them — like, liver is probably good for you — it’s the overall message they promote that needs to be considered.
I just hope that these extreme carnivore folks stay contained to their corners of the internet until this all blows over, or until they get tests taken showing crazy high cholesterol or something. Until then, I will be eating bagels and worshipping pasta.
Xoxo, The Girl with the Spaghetti Tattoo.
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It's been so interesting to watch the alt-right flock to the same stuff my New Age-leftie mom was into in the mid-aughts - organic food, supplements, 'living off the land' - horseshoe theory at work, honestly. There's a whole lot to be said about the online wellness-to-right-wing-fundamentalism pipeline (Aubrey and Michael knocked it out of the park: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3KGTXG3xm9jfxPUUiuU4Gh?si=9b9ba1f64d23407c ), and as someone who works in public health (vaccine hesitancy, currently) I think we need to start paying A LOT more attention to where people are receiving their health info. People are getting led to some dangerous conclusions.