Florida man eats diet of butter, cheese, beef; cholesterol oozes from his body

72 points
1/21/1970
4 hours ago
by nxobject

Comments


tiffanyh

I have a friend who went on the carnivore diet recently.

They lost 36-pounds in just 6-weeks time (and ate as much as they wanted, so never hungry).

But they did a blood test and it was panic time. The doctor told him he's on the brink of cardiac arrest and had to be put on medication and immediately introduce vegetables into their diet.

3 hours ago

isk517

I feel like a lot of the results from the carnivore diet can easily be reproduced by just completely cutting out processed sugar from your diet.

3 hours ago

tiffanyh

At the end of the day, it's all about calories.

The appeal of the carnivore diet is, you can eat as much as you want - so long as it's only meat.

The trick is, meat is actually fairly low in calories and protein (meat) is extremely filling.

So you're achieving a calorie deficit without being hungry.

3 hours ago

ASalazarMX

> The trick is, meat is actually fairly low in calories and protein (meat) is extremely filling.

What? Meat, from fish to chicken to beef, is one of the most caloric foods, rivaled only by nuts and oils. Meat usually is high in fat, it's very hard for it to be low-calorie. The weight loss doesn't come from a low-calorie diet, but from forced ketosis due to prolonged lack of glucose.

As others hace said, it's the carb deprivation that makes you lose weight, you could easily do a vegetarian diet and lose the same or more weight without abusing fat and rising your bad cholesterol.

2 hours ago

tiffanyh

210 calories - serving of grilled chicken

324 calories - serving of granola cereal

One of those is way more filling & less calories than the other.

https://www.eatthismuch.com/calories/one-grilled-chicken-bre...

https://www.mynetdiary.com/food/calories-in-breakfast-granol...

15 minutes ago

anotherhue

Eh, not quite. The microbiome is a quickly emerging and remarkably complex system.

The calorie values on food are 'bomb-calorific', which is about as far from what goes in your gut as possible.

'Bio-availabilty' is the term to look up.

2 hours ago

srid

I have been on carnivore diet for 5+ years now. Did a blood test and the doctor prescribed me statins due to high cholestrol readings. I declined to take them, of course.

3 hours ago

ASalazarMX

Carnivore as exclusively beef/pork, or do you eat bird and fish too?

2 hours ago

srid

Mostly beef, but occasionally eggs & fish as well. Chicken wings on an odd occasion.

I've written about my diet here: https://srid.ca/carnivore-diet

an hour ago

boppo1

Of course? I've pretty pro-animal foods, but I don't follow.

2 hours ago

SwiftyBug

What, why?

3 hours ago

Balgair

I don't know if this is a troll, but in case it isn't: Buddy, listen to your doctors. At least, please, go talk to another MD about your blood work and see if they recommend other methods. You don't have to listen to just one MD, but if 5 are telling you the same thing then you should probably listen.

3 hours ago

srid

> I don't know if this is a troll

This is a rather odd dig towards a non-anonymous user (using his real name) and is ironically coming from a pseudoanonymous account (with no real name associated with it).

29 minutes ago

2muchcoffeeman

The carnivore diet on the face of it looks suspicious. No one that tried it thinking “this is totally legit” worried about what doctors are saying.

2 hours ago

WorkerBee28474

To be fair, that uncommon situation is not in the dataset used to train doctors. We can theorize that he needs medication and vegetables, but we lack certainty.

3 hours ago

readthenotes1

That must not have been a very good doctor. If the man is on brink of cardiac arrest he should be in the hospital. He can do a simple Ultra fast CT scan to see the atherosclerosis impeding blood flow, or even an exercise treadmill test will give you some hints of it.

I believe the modern understanding of the cholesterol theory of heart disease is that it's not simply LDL that is the problem, but instead small dense LDL. SD ldl can be measured directly of course, but you can kind of get a sense of whether you're likely to have it based on having triglycerides over 115, and the high triglycerides are in turn usually caused by lots of sugar or simple carbs in your diet. Something a person on a carnivore diet won't probably have

2 hours ago

hiyer

Reminded me of this Junji Ito story - https://junjiitomanga.fandom.com/wiki/Glyceride

4 hours ago

ricardobeat

Is this the “holes” guy? His writing surely has… evolved

3 hours ago

krapp

It's a good thing there are no anime adaptations of his work, except for Uzumaki which only has a single episode.

2 hours ago

mjamil

Goodhart’s Law in action. Targeting weight loss at the expense of overall health is a surefire way of guaranteeing early mortality.

4 hours ago

absolutelastone

A nonzero number of people will probably read this article and think "dangerous and gross.. but, exactly much weight loss are we talking about here?"

3 hours ago

slt2021

reminds me of obsession of some politicians with GDP as a single metric to optimize the economy (while offshoring jobs and local population deals with stress via drugs/opiates/antidepressants)

3 hours ago

hammock

Goes to show you that your body is capable of extraordinary self-regulation.

Maintaining your health should focus first and foremost on remedying the DYSREGULATION that is often caused by inflammation, infection, trauma etc

And maybe even exercising its capabilities Of regulation, e.g. sauna/cold plunge cycles (just the first example I thought of)

3 hours ago

_elf

This gentleman is turning himself into wagyu.

4 hours ago

casey2

Like it or not but this is what peak human form looks like

3 hours ago

ge96

delicious on toast

4 hours ago

qrush

These are called xanthelasmas for the curious - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthelasma

3 hours ago

profsummergig

Holy sh*t. My mother had that.

She was severely overweight.

Mostly vegetarian, but had strange ideas about nutrition. E.g. she believed (from reading in the media) that seed oils were "Heart Healthy™ ".

3 hours ago

qup

That's a superpower, I'm just not sure it's a useful one.

4 hours ago

Uptrenda

I seriously wonder how his hospital admission went. "Help me nurse... I think I'm turning into butter..."

3 hours ago

p_ing

The Kraft Mac&Cheese powder sauce comes from his hands!

4 hours ago

[deleted]
4 hours ago

dismalaf

People always go on these extreme diets... From raw veganism to stuff like this.

What's wrong with just eating a bit of meat, fish, vegetables, carbs and fats? Just nice, real food in moderate amounts...

4 hours ago

ender341341

While this is a particularly extreme example but I think most fad diets work because being so different from a normal diet people have to actually stop and think about what they're eating and make some level of plan around it which is easier to skip if you're just trying moderation where it's easier to grab something anywhere.

4 hours ago

bluGill

That is also why the second round of such diets fail. First round you are eating less. Second round you start be finding the recipes for the "whatever diet" brownies and those tend to be just as high calorie and so you don't lose. Nothing wrong with a brownie once in a while. Even if you are overweight - so long as most days you don't each such things and so are on a calorie deficit.

3 hours ago

oconnore

> What's wrong with just eating a bit

For one thing you won't get many likes, subscribes, retweets, or what have you.

4 hours ago

tobr

The case is being studied and reported because it’s unusual. I’m not so sure that ”people always” is the right take here.

4 hours ago

thisislife2

Health conscious, figure conscious people all of us experiment with our food to see the impact it has on us emotionally and physically. In fact, look at what the subject of our discussion himself said, "Since taking on this brow-raising food plan, he claimed his weight dropped, his energy levels increased, and his "mental clarity" improved."

But yes, as you pointed, there has been a real increase in "weird" diets in the past 3-4 decades. The internet is one factor. The other major reason for this, I believe, is the increased commercial competition in the food and agriculture industry. In the last 2-3 decades, we've all been bombarded with ads and PR campaigns about organic foods ("eat pure / natural / raw") and superfoods ("eat smart / right") or promotions of old-new crops ("eat what our elders ate") like Millets etc. etc. Then there's the PR campaigns from fast food and processed food industries and the PR campaigns from the instant cooking industry.

However much we would all like to think that we are immune from advertising campaigns, the reality is that it does impact us. So we shouldn't be surprised that people are confused and there has been a rise in eating orders - https://www.yandex.com/search/?text=rise+in+eating+disorders

3 hours ago

scottyah

Usually they are suffering from something that did not go away with a doctor's visit so they take matters into their own hands. Diet is obviously one of the first things to try to change. You should see the food list I was permitted (FODMAP, though there's a lot of different versions of it) to try to see what was causing my gut issues. Almost all normal vegetables, carbs, and fats are on the Avoid list.

Usually it's not just the diet, but it is an easy and even fun place to start.

3 hours ago

heresie-dabord

Eating in moderation and making informed, healthy choices is common sense, I agree.

It's just against the operating principles of a society with a massive industrial food economy. People are conditioned to eat on every occasion to the point that consuming food becomes the occasion.

3 hours ago

srid

That works if you have healthy gut flora, but not for others.

Including yours truly: https://srid.ca/carnivore-diet

3 hours ago

dylan604

My favorite extreme eating are the people that take the silver to the point of changing the color of their skin and act as if everything is fine.

4 hours ago

jncfhnb

The problem is that it doesn’t satisfy food cravings that have been fostered by shitty food.

3 hours ago

NotGMan

Because when your gut/body/metabolsim breaks this "balanced diet" approach doesn't work.

People like that need to into all the way into eg no fiber, no carbs or they won't heal.

3 hours ago

m0llusk

It's peculiar that so many think the carnivore diet is prime cuts of meat with butter and cheese. All of those are prime products with historically limited availability. Much of the diet would be tendons, tripe, organ meats and other such cooked together with vegetables for essential potassium. What we know of traditional carnivore diets is radically unlike what most nowadays think of which is based on a highly productive industrialized farming infrastructure that was not available for most of human history.

4 hours ago

Profan

Eating reams of butter and cheese is a hell of a lot easier to sell than "hey you wanna go on this organ meat diet?" even if that's probably a lot more technically accurate

4 hours ago

setgree

That, and probably a great deal of what we'd consider rotten meat:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/meat-rotten-putrid-paleo...

But I suppose that part of the paleo diet doesn't have mass appeal

4 hours ago

siliconc0w

And what muscle meat you'd get would likely be pretty lean - not a lot of nice USDA prime ribeyes in nature.

4 hours ago

absolutelastone

I think most popular modern vegetables came along after farming also.

Anyway they've found evidence of heart disease in mummified human remains so you can't trust ancient people either.

3 hours ago

dotinvoke

It makes no sense to go looking to the past for the ultimate health diet, ancient people had life expectancies of like 40.

3 hours ago

alvah

Mainly due to infant mortality. Life expectancy at age 1 in the past was a lot closer to the current day than you’d think.

2 hours ago

mvdtnz

Do a Google image search for Carnivore Diet. It's not at all "peculiar that so many think the carnivore diet is prime cuts of meat with butter and cheese" - this is exactly how it is marketed.

3 hours ago

jsbisviewtiful

I'm relieved the only included pictures were of hands :P

2 hours ago

leshokunin

Heart disease speed run any%

2 hours ago

bilbo0s

A bit off topic, but I thought this would be kind of a comedic fiction article a-la-Onion. I thought, "Oh here they go, unjustly skewering people from Florida again."

Then I read the article.

Sigh.

I've tried to agitate against the "Florida Man..." and "Florida Woman..." stereotype, but it's just gotten to a point.. I guess I don't know what to say anymore?

4 hours ago

jeroenhd

Normally the whole "Florida man" thing happens because unlike many other states, Florida has a history of relatively public documentation of legal cases and police arrests. Journalists can just pick any cases that stand out and make funny looking articles because of whatever stunt the local teenagers, drunks, or drug addicts have been caught doing now. It's unfortunate that something like public access to law enforcement documents is being used to ridicule the state so much.

This isn't one of those cases, though. This is someone speedrunning a heart attack.

3 hours ago

h0l0cube

Basically Poe’s law but not in the usual attribution

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

4 hours ago

ge96

Ohio as well and another one

4 hours ago

femiagbabiaka

He's got cheese.. body.

4 hours ago

[deleted]
3 hours ago

faithdefender

[flagged]

4 hours ago

k__

I did lose 10kg in 2 months on low carb and felt much clearer after a week of doing it.

But I couldn't keep it up for more than 3 months.

3 hours ago

mvdtnz

Are you still on this diet?

3 hours ago