Kim Washburn says, "Is it possible to have all human nutrition needs met on an animal-based
diet?"
Yes.
I generally think that...
Oh, by the way so just to clarify, if I'm not going exactly in order, I'm generally
making sure that I answer every individual person's question once.
And so if I skipped over your question, I will get to it.
We still have plenty of time left, so, okay.
Kim Washburn asks, "Is it possible to have all human nutrition needs met on an animal-based
diet"?
I'm guessing you mean a carnivore diet.
I'm not sure if you just mean a diet that's predominantly animal products, but yes, to
both.
So I do think on a carnivore diet, there are nutrients that are harder to get enough of.
And I actually put out a guide to doing carnivore right.
I'm putting a note right here to include that in the show notes, but let me see.
All right.
So in Doing Carnivore Right: Vitamins and Minerals, which is a free nine-page guide
that I made, I listed vitamin C and folate as high-risk nutrients.
I listed manganese, magnesium, vitamin K, potassium and molybdenum as conditional-risk
nutrients.
And of course, how you do a carnivore diet is going to influence things.
So for many people, calcium is a problem, but that's less a function of them being on
a carnivore diet.
It's more a function of calcium is a problem for many people that don't consume bones or
dairy.
Now, in terms of the conditional-risk nutrients, manganese is very easy to get from muscles.
And you can certainly get enough if you eat certain select foods that are basically all
seafood.
So 300- to 500-gram servings of Pacific oysters, fresh water bass, trout, walleye pike, burbot,
drum, perch, rainbow smelt, sunfish and sucker, but it's pretty easy to be a carnivore who
doesn't eat mussels or any of those fish.
Then on magnesium, most carnivore foods can provide enough magnesium with three to five
pounds of food per day but some cuts of meat don't provide enough.
So you do have to be somewhat selective.
And many people don't eat three to five pounds of food.
So as with any nutrient risks, I think particularly women who tend to eat less than men, but just
anyone who doesn't eat a large volume of food, that definitely includes anyone trying to
lose weight, are often at risk of not being able eat enough total volume of foods where
each piece of that food makes a very small contribution to the diet.
And as long as you eat enough total food, you meet that.
So most of the time, three to five pounds of carnivore foods per day are going to give
you at least a baseline of sufficient magnesium, but then there's a handful of foods...
And 3.5 liters of Gerolsteiner mineral water will also do it.
And I'm pretty sure most carnivores would consider mineral water to not be against the
diet, given that it's not a plant.
And this gets a little tedious, so I'm not going to list them all, but I will link to
the guide, but I think if you just Google Masterjohn Doing Carnivore Right, the top
result...
Oh, there's three results that come up on top.
The first two are the carnivore debate part one and part two with Paul Saladino, both
of which link to the guide.
And then the third result is actually the place to get the guide.
So there it is right there.
And then I think one of the issues is with potassium.
You can certainly get enough potassium from lean meats, but I think it puts you between
a rock and a hard place where the only way to get enough potassium is to eat a lot of
lean meat, but the more lean meat you eat, the more collagen you eat or excuse me, the
more collagen you need to balance it.
And if you eat more collegen, you displace the lean meat that has the potassium.
You can reduce that effect by eating more fat.
But if you eat more fat then you displace the potassium.
When you eat lean meat, the other problem is you consume a lot of sulfur amino acids,
which are acidic.
Generally potassium is not alkaline itself, but it's extremely strongly correlated with
organic acids that have an alkalinizing effect.
And so it's a very good index of those organic acids.
And we don't have good databases of those organic acids.
So because lean meat and potassium are going to be so strongly correlated on a carnivore
diet, it might be hard to get enough potassium without...
Or it might be hard to get enough of those organic acids that correlate with potassium
to balance the lean meat.
And toward that end, I created a database of getting potassium on a carnivore diet.
You just Google Masterjohn potassium carnivore, that should come up, but I'll also put a note
to include the potassium carnivore database in the show notes as well.
Then molybdenum.
You can get enough molybdenum from 500 grams of cottage cheese or whole eggs, 3.8 cups
of milk, 2.5 pounds of beef or pork, but all those foods increase lean muscle, or sorry,
not lean muscle, but they increase animal protein, non-collagen animal protein, which
increases molybdenum requirements.
So my recommendation on carnivore would be getting 35 grams or 1.25 ounces of liver per
day, which takes care of it.
So now I put this as conditional-risk because I think molybdenum is going to be quite a
risk on a Sean Baker, steak-only carnivore diet, but it's not going to be at risk at
all on a Paul Saladino, nose-to-tail carnivore diet.
But at the end of the day, I put vitamin C and folate in the high-risk category.
I do think it's easy to get enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy on a carnivore diet.
I do think you have to be mindful of eating the right foods when you do a carnivore diet,
but I think it's very difficult to get enough vitamin C to hit 100 to 150 milligrams per
day, which is what I think you would need to maximize the protection against chronic
disease risk.
Granted, it seems like plasma vitamin C of 50 micromoles per liter is where chronic disease
risk bottoms out.
And Paul Saladino says that that's what his vitamin C levels are.
So I do think Paul Saladino's version of nose-to-tail, seafood-inclusive carnivore is the best way
to maintain your vitamin C status.
I think it's going to be radically superior to a Sean Baker-style, steak-only, carnivore
diet.
But I haven't seen enough carnivores' plasma vitamin C to be perfectly confident that that's
usually going to be the case for most people.
I don't know.
So I put vitamin C, at least for the time being, in the high-risk category.
And then folate.
Liver and kidney are good sources of folate.
And there is some data suggesting the RDA for folate could be reached by two eggs alone
if the eggs are from pasture-raised animals, but I'm not highly confident in that data.
And I do think that carnivore diets might reduce the need for folate by providing choline
and creatine, but big gray areas here.
I don't know that those things are true.
So there's lots of plausible hypotheses on how you could get enough folate on a carnival
diet.
But I think folate should be considered for supplementation on a carnivore diet.
So the short answer to your question is yes, but the longer answer to your question, as
I just went through, is it's quite complicated.
And then my final thought is, and I've said this with respect to vegan diets, I've said
it with respect to carnivore diets, I-
I've said it with respect to carnivore diets.
I think it's good to look at nutrition, kind of like an economic portfolio.
If you are very, very expert, you can know what you're doing in limiting the asset classes
you include in your portfolio.
So, really know what you're doing.
You can do carnivore or vegan, you can do it right or you can know whether you're not
the right person to do either of those things.
But, if you're not super expert and you're not willing to say, "Okay, this type of portfolio
isn't going to work for me and my risk level," the best thing to do is to diversify.
And you don't just diversify by eating different types of animal food.
You diversify your asset classes.
So just like no smart person who's not a massive expert should put all their retirement account
into real estate.
It's just much more robust to error to diversify your nutritional portfolio by eating a diverse
number of animal foods, diversifying across the animal parts, nose to tail, diversifying
across the species and doing the same thing with plant foods and thereby diversifying
across plant and animal.
All right Kim, I hope that helped.
Hope that answered your question.
Thank you for your question, Kim.