Meet the Men Who Eat Meat

Paul Saladino, a physician and author of “The Carnivore Code,” said most plants are “inedible and even toxic to humans.” “Forget the leaves and fibrous tubers, let’s go hunting!” he commands in the book. (Since publishing “The Carnivore Code” in 2020, Mr. Saladino has reintroduced carbohydrates into his diet, with fruit and honey.)

However, as a 2023 New Yorker article detailing the carnivore craze points out, studies of Neanderthals have found that their diet included dates, tubers, and other leafy foods in addition to meat. According to Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University cited in the article, humans are “opportunistic omnivores” who “eat whatever is available, which is almost always a mixture of plants and animals (and honey )”.

The New Yorker also cited a study by biologists David Raubenheimer and Stephen J. Simpson, who found that high-protein diets had a detrimental effect on the lifespan of animals. “Our sexy, lean mice that ate a high-protein, low-carb diet lived the shortest,” the scientists wrote in 2014. “They made stunning middle-aged cadavers.”

Dan Buettner, an author who identified five regions of the world where people have particularly long life expectancies, said that a diet consisting primarily of whole foods, plant-based meals, among other practices, is what which leads to a long and healthy life.

“I don’t know of any long-lived culture in the history of the world that was primarily meat-eaters,” Mr. Buettner said by telephone from Italy, where he was conducting more in-depth research on the places he nicknamed “blue zones”.

To some, becoming a carnivore seems to be a facet of optimization culture that seeks to improve through so-called biohacking and other methods. For others, it may be about expressing masculinity and success by consuming beef steak, a luxury in much of the world. It is notable that online promoters almost exclusively post videos eating red meat, although fish is part of the diet.