‘Plants are trying to kill you’: why carnivore influencers claim we should eat only meat

Anthony Chaffee is dressed in a tight gray T-shirt that shows off his muscular physique. A registered medical practitioner, he works at a private practice in Australia that specializes in functional medicine, which is an alternative approach to healthcare, not formally regulated, that seeks to address the underlying cause of disease. He is telling me, as he tells many of his patients, that the solution to dealing with the threat posed by vegetables is to choose meat over almost all other types of food.

“Plants are trying to kill you,” Dr Chaffee says within the first few minutes of our first video call, quoting a favourite line he attributes to an old university professor. “We have some defenses, and that’s why some plants are edible, but they still cause harm with long-term exposure over years and decades,” he continues, comparing the long-term health impacts of eating salad to those of cigarettes and alcohol.

Chaffee is one of the leading exponents of the carnivore diet, the latest trend in the wellness universe, in which people claim they turned around their health – and their lives – by eating bowls piled high with ground beef and boiled eggs.

The diet has been platformed by Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. Peterson recently tried to evangelize about its magical healing properties to a circumspect Elon Musk.

I discovered the diet last year when my Instagram explore page began serving me videos of women biting into sticks of butter and men chowing down on huge cuts of steak for breakfast. “Here’s what I’m eating for dinner as someone who lost 60 pounds of body fat,” says one, username animalbasedtaste, holding up a wooden chopping board featuring beef short ribs, beef marrow bones, oysters and sardines fried in leftover beef fat, and an avocado.

Self-proclaimed carnivores eat mostly four ingredients: beef, bacon, butter and eggs. (Some incorporate other raw dairy products, selected fruits such as blueberries and seafood into their regimens.) Influencers share recipes for delicacies such as “beef lattes” (coffee, butter, beef protein, colostrum, cinnamon) and snack on “pup patties” from In-N-Out’s secret menu (unseasoned beef, so called because you can safely give it to your dog).

According to its fans, the benefits of the diet range from rapid weight loss to the healing of long-term chronic conditions including depression, polycystic ovary syndrome, acne, eczema, diabetes and psoriasis.

According to almost everyone else – including the registered nutritionists and doctors trying to treat people who have tried the diet for prolonged periods – a diet of only meat with no vegetables or grains is, at best, a form of disordered eating, and at worst incredibly damaging for its adherents, particularly in the long term.

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Many of the carnivore diet’s proponents are men who, when not shirtless, tend to wear vests emblazoned with slogans such as “my pronouns are car/nivore” or “make beef great again”. But there is also a considerable minority of women in the movement.

“​​It’s been a bit of an awakening, eating this way,” says Courtney Luna, a meat influencer who hosts a podcast called Eat Meat + Question Everything. Luna’s forthcoming carnivore cookbook includes a recipe for “carnivore crack”: melted butter topped with bacon sprinkles and frozen into a chocolate-bar-like slab.

“Why are they telling us that butter is bad, that meat is bad?” she asks me. “Follow the money trail. The higher-ups, they can’t make money off of us if we’re all healthy and thriving. There’s been proof of a lot of science being paid for.”

Luna has struggled with her weight and moderation around eating for most of her life, attending her first Weight Watchers meeting when she was 13. She says the carnivore diet has not only helped her with weight loss and mental health after a lifetime of “yo-yo dieting”, but has also given her “food freedom”. Her sentiments are common in the carnivore diet community, where many adherents have previously struggled with moderation around food.

Danielle Shine is a registered dietitian whose work with patients suffering from social media-induced eating disorders has led her to pursue a PhD in the impacts of nutrition misinformation on social media. In her view, adherents to viral food trends are misinterpreting the feeling of found community online for signals of better holistic health. “I have seen people that have come from binge eating, so they find a diet that is highly restrictive, and they find the community, and it helps.” But, she says, highly restrictive diets are “not sustainable”.

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“I’ve had people sit in my clinic and tell me they ‘feel so much better’, and I’m looking at blood test results with clinical signs and symptoms that are telling me the exact opposite, but it’s getting ignored,” Shine says.

One of Shine’s recent patients was someone following the carnivore diet who had been referred into her care by his doctor. “He walked in and he said: ‘I’m only here because I have to tick a box. You can tell me whatever, but I’m not stopping eating butter and I’m not going to stop eating steak.’”

Over the course of eight weeks, she was able to slowly find common ground with him, encourage him to read outside of his echo chamber and eventually get him off the diet. “I’d never seen cholesterol so high, and so bad. I have so much empathy for people that think it’s working, but I would challenge whether it is working for them.”

While some of Shine’s patients face potential long-term health problems, in other cases the risks seem more obvious. One influencer, Isabella Ma, who regularly films herself biting into sticks of butter, says she no longer needs to wear sunscreen because her skin doesn’t burn any more after she “[cut] out seed oils”. This myth is perpetuated by many in the movement who proselytize about the benefits of replacing “toxic, hormone-disrupting” sunscreen with products made from beef tallow.

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Chaffee tells me he trusts the anecdotal evidence he has seen in his practice and around the world for reversing disease through a carnivore diet. During our call, he refers to nutritional epidemiology as “nonsensical surveys”, claims there are “hundreds of studies” proving the carnivore diet to be the “optimal human diet” – among those finding health benefits he cites a Harvard study conducted in 2020, which said little had at that point been known about the health effects and tolerability of the carnivore diet – and tells me that much expert opinion and many dietary guidelines and scientific studies cannot be trusted because they have been corrupted by the food industry, the Seventh-Day Adventist church and “ideology”.

While he refers to some favourable science about predominantly meat-based diets, at the cornerstone of the carnivore diet’s dogma is the belief that human beings are not omnivores but are in fact “designed” to eat only “nutrient-dense, bio-available” meat in accordance with our “ancestral human diet”. Plants, on the other hand, are allegedly full of toxic chemicals, created naturally as an evolutionary defense mechanism, and from the chemical pesticides used to grow them. Videos of children not wanting to eat their broccoli are included as evidence that we are intuitively averse to vegetables and should therefore not be eating them.

“The versatility of our diet speaks to the fact that there is no single ancestral human diet,” says Dr Peter Ungar, a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist at Arkansas University. “​​I doubt there is a single human ancestor, from the time of the earliest primates, that was exclusively carnivorous. Even Neanderthals, which are considered to be the ultimate hominid carnivores – they have barley grains embedded in the dental calculus on their teeth. We know they ate plants, and we know they ate cereal grains. It’s just nonsense.”

But many carnivores are obsessed with flesh-tinted ideas of what life was like for the average American before the invention of industrial agriculture. They contrast their ideas of the diets of our grandparents with, as one company hawking tallow chips puts it, the “glum, zombie-like soy boys staring at their phones and avoiding eye contact in our big cities”.

In fact, meat-based restrictive diets are thought to have originated in 1856, when the German writer Bernard Moncriff spent a year living on only beef and milk as a personal experiment, arguing that “man, though entitled to eat, or use otherwise, everything he can take hold of, meets with a comparatively very small number of vegetables that suit him well”. Others with an interest in alternative medicine would follow suit. In the 1870s, Arnaldo Cantani, an Italian physician, prescribed an exclusive animal-based diet for his diabetic patients, and in the 1880s, James H Salisbury, a surgeon and inventor of the Salisbury steak, created the “meat and hot water diet” to treat troops suffering from diarrhoea and dysentery during the American civil war. The Atkins, paleo and keto diets are all variations on the theme, espousing low-carb, high-fat diets as the key to optimum health.

In each case, doctors have acknowledged the potential benefits of short-term dietary changes for some groups but have expressed concerns about the health impacts of restrictive diets over long periods of time. The short-term negative side effects of ketosis – the state the body enters into when it burns fat for fuel instead of carbohydrates – include dizziness, upset stomach, constipation, dehydration, headache, nausea and poor sleep. Longer term, it can lead to kidney damage, cardiovascular complications, low blood pressure, nutrient deficiencies and an increased risk of heart disease.

Even some of the founding figures of the present-day carnivore movement, Shawn Baker and Paul Saladino, are starting to qualify claims about the miraculous health impacts of the diet. Baker has said he has no idea whether people who follow the diet will live longer or if it might cause “some disease”. Saladino said the diet was causing him sleep issues, muscle pain and low testosterone.

In her latest book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein writes that “conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong, but often get the feelings right”. When it comes to nutrition, it is hardly surprising that increasing numbers of people are harboring suspicions that the US food system has not been created with their best interests in mind, and that Americans are paying the price with poor health. Despite being citizens of one of the richest countries in the world, millions of Americans live in food deserts with no access to fresh, nutritious food or healthcare. Compared with the the UK and EU, the US uses a more lenient “risk-based” approach to food regulation that allows for greater exposure to potentially harmful substances, as well as a powerful culture of corporate lobbying created specifically to pressure governments into passing industry-favorable policy.

But this is not the result of a devious liberal plot to take meat away from Americans in an effort to feminize men. The idea that a plant-based diet is being pushed by the government through subsidies and tax write-offs is easily disproved. In fact, the beef industry enjoys substantial support from the USDA in the form of commodity checkoff programs that promote the consumption of beef without mentioning specific producers. Each year, the US government spends $38bn on meat and dairy industry subsidies – compared with just $17m on fruits and vegetables (0.04% of the meat budget). Without the subsidies that keep the cost of beef artificially low in order to encourage consumption, experts have estimated that a pound of hamburger meat would cost $30.

There is also evidence that the US beef industry has been working behind the scenes to create influencers and citizen activists to help counter growing attention to the environmental impacts of its production. Created by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), the Masters of Beef Advocacy (MBA) program is an online course promoting what the Guardian has called “misleading – but scientific-sounding – narratives” about beef industry sustainability via “appeals for students to engage proactively with consumers online and offline about environmental topics”. In a private Facebook group for graduates, the NCBA “also distributes infographics and industry talking points to deploy in online conversations”, such as false claims about the limitless possibilities of regenerative farming.

It’s not clear whether the beef industry has had a direct hand in the carnivore movement. Chaffee says he has no personal knowledge of people working with or being paid by the beef industry. I ask him if he thinks people inside the carnivore movement could be bought off in the same way that he claims doctors and government officials have been. He responds by telling me that he is doubtful this would happen as “there’s no real product” to push. “I’m sure you could get paid, but there aren’t really any industries behind that. There isn’t really a big meat industry. There’s the Cattlemen’s Association, I guess that’s the closest you could find, but that’s just sort of like a union.”

Estimates value the global meat industry at more than $1tn globally, and major players spent $10m on US political contributions and lobbying efforts last year alone, an all-time high. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the “union” Chaffee refers to, according to its own website, “represents more than 175,000 cattle producers and feeders. NCBA works to advance the economic, political and social interests of the US cattle business and to be an advocate for the cattle industry’s policy positions and economic interests.”

There are also plenty of products being sold by carnivore content creators: unregulated supplements, “carnivore snack bars” made of ground beef and tallow ($95 for six), liver crisps, slogan T-shirts that say “I have never seen a cave painting of a salad”, $300 water filters, EMF air purifiers, the animal-based “sunscreen” made from beef tallow, cookbooks, diet plans, one-to-one consultations, subscription-based online communities, tickets to “Hack Your Health” events and “meat-ups” – naturally, promoted with affiliate discount codes whenever possible.

Fueled primarily through engagement-optimized short-form content platforms like TikTok and Instagram, the carnivore movement follows in the footsteps of the dozens of other internet trends from the past few years, such as homesteading and “unschooling”. Together, they tell the story of a fallen nation corrupted by the vagaries of modernity and the complexity of life, whose salvation demands a retreat to an imaginary past – one that for some people seemingly rejects science, rationalism and community in favor of “tradition”, suspicion and isolation. This myth of palingenesis – the creation of the new through a revitalisation of the past – has been the cornerstone of recent populist movements from Donald Trump to Brexit. The medium might change, but the message remains eerily similar.

• This article was amended on 2 October 2024 to clarify that Anthony Chaffee, as well as being an alternative medicine practitioner, is a registered medical doctor, and to revise the description of functional medicine. Amendments also included adding reference to one of the scientific papers Dr Chaffee cited during the interview in support of a carnivore diet, and to make clear that his expression of trust in anecdotal evidence related to dietary results he said he had observed in his own patients and those claimed by followers of the diet more widely.