Eating only MEAT for 30 days – tips, tricks & updates on my cholesterol
When I was seventeen, I read a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn that I found on my twelfth-grade civics teacher's bookshelf. Quinn suggests that the biblical tale of Cain and Abel is an allegory for human division that began with the development of agriculture. Before agriculture, hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the laws of nature, but agriculture brought the desire to create and control life, a power that previously belonged only to the gods. Quinn believes that civilization has never recovered from this split.
This book blew my mind, and at seventeen, I was briefly a devotee of anarcho-primitivism, unaware that this was not an idea that originated with Quinn. Author Yuval Noah Harari of the book Sapiens suggests that inequality was an aberration that came with agriculture. While agriculture promoted population growth, it made individual lives worse than those of hunter-gatherers, as diets and daily lives became significantly less varied.
This argument predates even Harari, at least as far back as the Enlightenment. Discussing the authority of state power, Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggests a hypothetical "state of nature" in which humans were free, self-sufficient, and equal. Inequality, corruption, and disease were caused by an unjust state. Rousseau, in his Discourse on Inequality, says:
"The horse, the cat, the bull, nay the ass itself, have generally a higher stature, and always a more robust constitution, more vigour, more strength and courage in their forests than in our houses; they lose half these advantages by becoming domestic animals; it looks as if all our attention to treat them kindly, and to feed them well, served only to bastardize them. It is thus with man himself. In proportion as he becomes sociable and a slave to others, he becomes weak, fearful, and mean-spirited, and his soft and effeminate way of living at once completes the enervation of his strength and his courage. We may add, that there must be still a wider difference between man and man in a savage and domestic condition, than between beast and beast; for as men and beasts have been treated alike by nature, all the conveniences with which men indulge themselves more than they do the beasts tamed by them, are so many particular causes which make them degenerate more sensibly."
Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality is responding to Thomas Hobbes, who claimed that life in the "state of nature" was something "nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes thought that society was necessary to rescue humanity from its primitive condition, no matter how authoritarian it became.
But were things better in the past than they are now? I go back and forth a lot on the answer, and probably spend more of my free time thinking about this than I should. For example, as summer is nearly here, I am trying to gain a few pounds of lean muscle to impress my friends. I've tried everything: injections, creatine, counting calories, that rare fish diet, but nothing sticks. The web's decline in quality has made me skeptical of wisdom from top sites like Healthline, WebMD, or The New York Times, so I have started conducting all my exercise research via Instagram Reels, which have become my life line. Reels blur out all but my immediate interests, determining what restaurants I eat at, where I travel (and what I do there), what to read, and lately what to eat. But, it doesn't solve everything.
On reels, I am served diet advice from two opposing camps: one consists of disciples of The Carnivore Diet. These are sunburnt middle-aged men who eat fried ground beef, entire sticks of butter, and slurp down piles of cold, dilapidated, lard-soaked eggs. Author and athlete Shawn Baker, creator of The Carnivore Diet, became interested in an all-meat diet after finding success on Keto. After his divorce and the loss of his medical license (for suggesting that his patients eat only meat), he had a little more time on his hands to research the health benefits of meat. In an interview with Joe Rogan, he says he "studied Facebook groups like an anthropologist" and began to wonder if a meat-based diet was the key to vitality. In 2016, Baker decided to take his theories more seriously and tested a thirty-day meat-only experiment, posting photos and videos online every day. Each day, he consumed over two pounds of meat. Baker caveats that his evidence is anecdotal and not scientific, but you can see the picture below. The results are incredible. He looks fantastic.
Paul Saladino, advocate of the carnivore diet, says life in hunter-gatherer civilizations was not "nasty, brutish, and short". The reason why lifespans are shorter in these societies is due to higher infant mortality rates. In a hunter-gatherer society, if a child makes it past infancy, they will live to be way stronger and healthier. He notes, an "ancestral lifestyle" is not just about eating meat, but adopting more "natural" practices in all aspects of life. Meat advocate Brian Johnson, also known as the Liver King, says on his website that, "The key to unlocking a robust long life lies in our evolutionary past. Our DNA has evolved over the past 2.5 million years, and our bodies have adapted to extreme environmental conditions. The ways of our ancestors-the ways that Liver King has lived for the last 20 years-are better known as the 9 Ancestral Tenets". Those are - Sleep, Eat, Move, Shield, Connect, Cold, Sun, Fight, Bond."
Yes, on all-meat, your cholesterol might be high, but we're learning each day that cholesterol is not as important as we thought. The important thing is that these influencers look strong. They feel healthier than ever. They finally have some control over their diets, and their testosterone is through the roof. Experts are not sure of the cause, but they believe living more ancestrally works to raise testosterone in men. I interviewed my sister, a registered nurse, to see if we should be concerned about the declining testosterone levels we are seeing among men in modern society. She said, "I'm not sure why anyone cares. Seems like there could be a lot of positives about it."
The other camp, the diet camp opposed to the Carnivore diet, is spearheaded by celebrity Bryan Johnson (not to be confused with Brian Johnson, the Liver King). Johnson, a tech entrepreneur and biohacker and has garnered attention for his ambitious anti-aging initiative known as "Project Blueprint." He spends $2 million annually on a meticulously structured regimen designed to reverse his biological age. His daily routine includes waking at 4:30 a.m., consuming all meals before 11 a.m., and ingesting a complex array of supplements totaling more than 100 pills per day. His plant-based diet emphasizes nutrient-dense foods, such as lentils, vegetables, berries, nuts, and seeds, while excluding processed foods, added sugars, and animal products, except for collagen peptides. Johnson's lifestyle also incorporates rigorous exercise, red light therapy, and various biometric assessments. The aim of his project is "Don't Die", and his goal is to live forever using every tool modern science has at our disposal. His vision is a Hobbesian one, suggesting that even an extraordinarily restrictive lifestyle like his is preferable to the chaotic, degenerative force of nature left unchecked. This desire to live forever is, of course, an old myth itself. Here's a sign from a museum of archaeology from 200 BC I saw when I was in China last month:
Recently, I was laying naked in an octagonal sauna when it all came rushing back—the meat, Ishmael, Hobbes, the lunatics online, and that strange instinct for extremes I keep noticing in people I know in real life. For me, I'm no meat-eater (yet), but I do use wooden cutting boards (when the plastic one is dirty), avoid palm oil, sauna regularly with old ladies at the gym, and tan my vagina in the sun on the co-ed German patios because Shailene Woodley told me it would make me look healthier. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all disciples of someone, we've just glossed our opinions of state authority into opposing lifestyle fantasies.
In terms of what we ate in the ancient past, molecular biologist Marion Nestle argues that "knowledge of the relative proportions of animal and plant foods in the diets of early humans is circumstantial, incomplete, and debatable, and that there are insufficient data to identify the composition of a genetically determined optimal diet." We were probably just opportunistic omnivores. Whether we should be disciples of Hobbes or Rousseau, of this debate, Frederick Jameson says, "Both 'Tragic' viewpoints thus remain imprisoned in the ideological myth which opposes Nature to Civilization, so that whichever alternative is chosen, it perpetuates the feeling that there is some radical incompatibility between individual life and the social order. "
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