I requested this book for the recipes but half of the book is explaining about the carnivore diet (rich in meat and animal organs). This book was received as an ARC from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt - Mariner Books in exchange for an honest review. The path to optimal health and “kicking more butt”, according to the book, is a diet composed entirely (or almost entirely) of meat, organs, and salt. It goes on to review one study that concluded that “increasing saturated fat consumption had no deleterious effects on fasting and postprandial plasma ghrelin concentrations”.

That said, the effect isn’t very consistent across studies and the overall quality of the evidence is low, so we don’t think The Carnivore Code is completely out on a limb. The carnivore diet is proven to help people lose weight, decrease inflammation, and heal from chronic disease. Page 189: “If we are insulin resistant, higher levels of LDL may very well contribute to plaque formation and progression, but if we are insulin sensitive, higher levels of LDL are not associated with increased atherosclerosis and are likely protective. The book’s scientific claims didn’t fare very well overall, and we believe one of them is dangerous (the idea that high LDL cholesterol on a carnivore diet is neutral or even healthy).For the most part, the study is accurately described in The Carnivore Code, although it appears that the patients were only asked to eliminate A1 dairy rather than all dairy. It’s a paper reporting that in biopsies of breast tissue, calcium oxalate crystals are associated with lobular carcinoma in situ, a pre-cancerous lesion. And you know how frustrating and disheartening it is to cycle through diets, treatment plans, and prescriptions that provide little relief-and may actually add to your suffering.

In the first, a “J-shaped association” is reported between LDL cholesterol concentrations and heart disease mortality risk. Page 260: “Losing weight is about creating a caloric deficit, and the easiest way to do this is to eat satiety-promoting foods.The book presents evidence that insulin resistance may accelerate the impact of high LDL on cardiovascular disease, but none of the evidence it presents supports the idea that high LDL becomes irrelevant or beneficial in a person with high insulin sensitivity. This is relevant because humans did most of our evolving outside Western Europe, and even modern Western Europeans only share a minority of their DNA with the hunter-gatherers who lived there during the last ice age. I value the fact that the author uses only environmentally sustainable meat, and also that he advocates eating the entire animal, including the organs (nose to tail).