90% of Americans believe at least one conspiracy theory

Do fad diets count as conspiracy theories?
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Anthony Chaffee is dressed in a tight gray T-shirt that shows off his muscular physique. He works at a private medical practice in Australia that specializes in functional medicine, an umbrella term popularized in the 1990s to describe unregulated alternative medicine.

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,” Chaffee says within the first few minutes of our first video call. “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…….

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……..

“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 sunscreenbecause 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.……..




https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/sep/12/carnivore-diet-meat-plants?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other