Some influencers have taken the meat trend to extremes by following a “carnivore diet.” “The best thing you can do is eliminate everything except fatty meats and lard,” Anthony Chafee, MD, who has nearly 400,000 followers, said in an Instagram post.
And I almost swallowed my broccoli When, scrolling through LinkedIn, I found another doctor interviewed that said “There is no scientific evidence to say that vegetables are needed in the human diet.” The doctor, who described himself as “90% non-vegetarian”, further said that what he had eaten the previous day was a kilo of beef, and that vegetables contain “anti-nutrients”, whatever they may be.
You don’t need to spend much time on social media to see such claims. “Traditionalist” influencer, author and psychologist Jordan Peterson has been promoting a meat-only diet since 2018. recent reviews Research into nutrition misinformation on social media found that the most dietary information is shared on Instagram and YouTube, and a lot of it is nonsense. So much so that the authors describe it as a “growing public health concern”.
What’s new is that some of this misinformation comes from the people who now lead America’s federal health agencies.. Kennedy, who led the Department of Health and Human Services in January, told a USA TODAY reporter that he was on a carnivore diet. “I only eat meat or fermented foods,” He said. He further said that the diet helped him “lose 40% of (his) visceral fat within a month.”
Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Martin Macri argued, “The government needs to stop spreading misinformation that natural and saturated fats are bad for you.” A recent podcast interview. The principles of “whole foods and clean meat” are “biblical,” he said. The interviewer said that Macri’s warnings about pesticides led him to “avoid all salads and completely miss the organic section in the grocery store.”
For the record: There is a lot of evidence that a diet high in saturated fat may increase the risk of heart disease. This is not wrong information from the government.
