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Zero carb/no plant food

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ghost_whistler

Well-Known Member
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I've seen a lot of people talk about this as well as advocate it. There seem to be two arguments:

1. meat and animal products contain enough to effectively render eating veg superfluous
2. plant food is actively bad for you or at the very least much less efficient a source of said nutrition.

I have yet to find anything to support this, but I am intrigued from the persepctive of finding out just how much nutrition is in meat - not even necessarily organ meats as many ZC enthusiasts claim to eat just plain muscle meat. Given that supplementation seems to be required (at least according to the consensus) for LCHF/keto (specifically electrolytes) I am curious to know just how true this is because having to buy Mg supplements isn't cheap and losalt is filled with additives.

However I should add that nothing i've seen from web searching meat nutrition listings tells me that, unless you eat several kilos of meat a day, you'll get enough.
 
Interesting idea.
It is contrary to the theory (which may or may not be true) that farming meat consumes more of earth's resources than farming plants. There is a number often quoted as the amount of plants a cow needs to eat to produce 1kg of meat ... it is far more than 1kg plants. But that does not consider the nutrition you get from the plants or meat.
 
Peter Ballerstedt has an interesting talk debunking a lot of the vegan based myths of how bad grazing ruminant animals are for the environment:


Also worth watching is Dr Alan Savory:

 
I'm not seeing how one can get enough from meat/animal products alone, even with organ meats.

What about folates or phytonutrients?
 
All seems a bit academic to me - I like my steak with a little fried onion, mushrooms, sweet pepper and a humongous salad - followed by berries and really thick cream, and coffee with just double cream - I just don't see any reason to alter anything at all - and it seems to be doing me good.
 
ghost_whistler said:
I'm not seeing how one can get enough from meat/animal products alone, even with organ meats.

What about folates or phytonutrients?
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I have no signs of folate deficiency after almost 2 1/2 years eating only meat while taking no supplements. I very rarely eat organ meat (it's probably been more than a year and a half since I did). I doubt we need phytonutrients, which are toxins that protect plants from germs, fungi, bugs, etc. I think we're better off without them in our diet.

And you forgot to ask about vitamin C.
 
NoCrbs4Me said:
I think “meat only” is the way to go, both for my health and for the environment. No supplements needed.
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Meat production globally is inefficient. As a rough rule of thumb it takes 10kg of plant material to produce 1kg of animal flesh. This is a huge loss of available energy and makes meat a luxury product if global energy economics are taken into consideration. Having said that there are some places that will not grow plant crops that can be fed to humans e.g. high altitude where sheep can find grazing and desert regions where goats can find forage plants that humans cannot consume. These farming examples support a limited number of humans only. You may only want to eat meat but this could not work for the current population of the world.
Also, unless you are an Inuit you are not adapted to survive without a dietary source of Vitamin C. Scurvy is not fun!
 
Dr Snoddy said:
As a rough rule of thumb it takes 10kg of plant material to produce 1kg of animal flesh.
Click to expand...

But how much nutrition is there in that 1kg of animal flesh compared to the amount of nutrition in 10kg of plant material?
Is it a like for like substitution? I think not.
And is the plant material dense enough nutritionally for us to not have to eat unreasonable/impossible quantities for us to get the same amount of nutrition as in meat?
Would we have to eat more than 10kg of plant material to gain the same nutrition as 1kg of animal flesh, thus nullifying the perceived gain in eating plant material?
what is meant by animal flesh?
Is it the edible meat part?
Does this include the plant material humans cannot eat anyway, but animals can eat and use to grow meat?

as ever, the terms used in defense of an all plant diet are neither clear nor accurate. I look forward to more clarity on this statement

Yours truly, Daughter of a Hill Farmer
 
Remember you MUST eat veg, OR fat, otherwise will become very ill. Therefore a meat only diet has to have fatty meat.
 

Once you take into account long-term loss of soil etc from turning the soil over to plan crops, along with the benefits of "mob grazing", it becomes possible we could grow the 10gk of grass on the same land as we grow 1kg of wheat. It is not as clear-cut as it looks at first......
 
What about overeating protein?
 
 
Producing 1kg of animal tissue includes the production of bone, hair, teeth, connective tissue and all the other parts of an animal that we find difficult to digest unless very highly processed. So the amount of available muscle tissue is less than 1kg. Growing grain, maize etc to feed to livestock is very wasteful in terms of the energy of those plant crops as those or similar plant crops could be fed directly to humans. This is not the same discussion as regreening of marginal or desertified lands in which animals are being farmed by extensive methods to return fertility to soils and to boost crop production.
This thread started with someone advocating an all meat diet. It would be impossible in terms of the global energy budget to feed all the people on earth a diet based solely on meat and in first world countries we are very fortunate to be able to consider this as an option.
Meat is certainly more energy-dense per kg than plant material but is a great deal of energy is lost in the production process whether in natural ecosystems or in meat production on farms.
 
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Possibly, an interesting idea. Intensive farming has brought some unforseen problems!
 
ringi said:
Remember you MUST eat veg, OR fat, otherwise will become very ill. Therefore a meat only diet has to have fatty meat.
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I don't agree or disagree with you. Just needing some scientific proof for your statement. I don't know enough to know if this is true or not and just was wondering where you have this information from.
 
Couple of things.

Firstly a lot of us here are on no grain diets so feeding grains to animals isn't depriving us and eating them directly is not an alternative. The traditional plant based staples for the masses are the carbohydrate stores such as grains and tubers (otherwise known as a chip butty). Not good for most T2 diabetics. I suspect that feeding the world on non energy dense foods (think of all the energy dense wheat, barley, corn, potatoes, rice grown to feed humans) would still be a very hard task.

Secondly we may be able to survive well on all meat, and also survive well on all plant, but check your teeth.
They aren't all ripping teeth (check a cat of you have one and you are brave).
They aren't all grinding teeth (put that sheep down!) and we don't have a rumen to aid digestion of cellulose.
We have a mixture of cutting and grinding teeth because we evolved as omnivores, able to survive on whatever we could find growing or catch running.
Trying to live as a pure carnivore or vegetarian may be possible (perhaps with supplements for some) but it is more of a moral choice than a pragmatic one.

My Low Carbohydrate High Fat diet is heavily reliant on animal products, including dairy. I am lucky to be able to add in some grain based products (for example Lidl rolls) but much of the common plant based food stock is not good for me.
 
Hotpepper20000 said:
I don't agree or disagree with you. Just needing some scientific proof for your statement. I don't know enough to know if this is true or not and just was wondering where you have this information from.
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I think Volek & Phinney cover this. An all protein diet is bad and is also not natural to races/tribes with little or no plant material. Fat is an essential part of the diet. I think after a certain point the protein you don't need for muscle replacement gets broken down into bad stuff.

No references, but I have read in several places that you can starve to death eating rabbit (North USA and Canada back in the wild days) because it it almost all lean meat and doesn't supply all the nutrients you need.
 
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