- Food diary by TikTok influencer @healthwmac has racked up 4million views
- In it, the student claims her eating habits – like snacking on raw liver – are healthy
Bad news for sensible eaters: the Carnivore diet is still having a moment.
The eating plan, which includes mostly meat, animal-based fats and virtually no carbohydrates, remains popular, with videos about the diet gaining more than 1 billion views on TikTok.
The trend was popularised by internet personalities such as Jordan Peterson and podcast presenter Joe Rogan, who have touted the benefits to their army of followers.
Supposedly, eating as Hunter Gatherers did – without cooking materials – is how humans were designed to fuel themselves. Therefore, going back to basics, and eating only barely cooked or raw animals, can counter the ill effects of western diets on our bodies.
And on TikTok, young advocates of the diet are shocking viewers with their increasingly odd nutrition patterns.
On TikTok, a wellness influencer posting under the name @healthwmac shares clips of her bizarre diet – which includes pieces of raw liver for a snack
The latest is a young US-based wellness influencer who shares videos to the platform under the name healthwmac.
‘Mack’ – whose real name is Mackenzie Elliot, often reveals snippets of her diet to her 70,000 TikTok followers, which make for difficult watching.
In a recently posted video, which has been viewed more than 4 million times, the physiology student detailed a day in her life – including what she eats.
Highlights included a coffee made with a large chunk of butter, a breakfast of sliced beef and raw liver and a ‘snack’ of bone broth – made from chicken feet.
In another video, Elliot demonstrates how to make an ‘optimal’ protein smoothie that she claims boosts her brain power. She adds to the blender three eggs, a ‘generous scoop’ of chicken fat, a knob of butter, kefir, as well as honey and cocoa powder for flavor.
She also puts in a tablespoon of ‘gelatinous’ remnants of chicken stock: ‘if it jiggles, it’s good,’ she says.
Elliot then eats this alongside a small bowl of raw liver. She claims this unusual diet gives her the brain power she needs to get through her studies, and is the key to a strong, fit body.
But, experts have warned the public against the influencer’s recommendations.
Research has long linked diets high in red meat to an increased risk of a host of life-threatening diseases, including cancers, heart disease and kidney disease.
Jacob Mey, a nutrition scientist and dietitian at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center, told The Daily Beast: ‘We would typically not recommend the carnivore diet… we have other diets that have decades of research that do very well, so why would we recommend something that’s so new and different and unproven?’
Eating raw liver is not advisable, he added. ‘ I am a fan of appropriately cooking and making sure we’re not risking any bacterial or food contamination issue.’
But perhaps the most concerning risk he points to is scurvy. This severe vitamin C deficiency is best known for affecting 18th-century sailors – and causes a range of nasty symptoms such as fatigue, muscle weakness, bruising, bleeding gums, and skin rash.
British pop singer James Blunt admitted that he was diagnosed with the condition after eight weeks on an all-meat diet while studying at university.
While meat is high in macronutrients like protein, it lacks vital vitamins and minerals, including vitamin C.
‘Is there a concern of things like scurvy popping up?’ said May. ‘I think so.’ He is not the first dietitian to issue warnings about this type of diet.
‘It’s extremely difficult for me to see a silver lining for this eating pattern,’ Cara Harbstreet MD, a registered dietitian, told Healthline.
‘Even one of the seemingly obvious “benefits” of better blood glucose control through the elimination of carbs should be scrutinized with nuance, as there are people who still experience variability in their blood sugars after reducing or eliminating carbs.’
In 2021, high-profile doctor and author Dr Joel Fuhrman made headlines for stating that influencers and celebrities who push the carnivore diet should be ‘put in jail’.
‘You’re getting a lot of bad information that’s killing people,’ he said on Mark Bell’s Power Project Podcast. ‘And those people should be put in jail…they should be stopped. We should silence them.’