The Inuit of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland; The Maasai People of Africa; Modern Carnivores – these people prove that you indeed do NOT need carbs to live. You do not need fruits, vegetables, or grains to live. I do not eat a carnivore diet myself, but there are many people proving it is possible – thriving while doing so.

Let’s start with the Inuit, living in cold, arctic areas with little to no vegetation. In the 1920s, a man named Vilhjalmur Stefansson studied the Inuit people, living amongt them, consuming their diet. They lived on a nearly all meat diet of fish, whale, seal, muskoxen, and polar bear. Their diet was nearly 75% fat….sound familiar? He found these people to be robust and healthy with no diet related disease. When he came back to the U.S., people did not believe his findings. So, he checked himself into the Bellevue Hospital in New York City, and was observed eating this all meat diet for a full year. The results after a year of an all meat diet showed Stefansson to be in perfect health – with no kidney issues, scurvy, heart disease, or gout as many like to say an all meat diet “should” cause. He had no ill effects from the diet and no vitamin deficiencies. Read a summary article about Stefansson HERE and the full Bellevue Study HERE. There are articles on the internet that will say that Inuit or Eskimo people have just as much heart diesease as people in the United States. Well, guess what, that is only after our lovely “Western Diet” or “SAD – Standard American Diet” has spread to their culture – full of processed food and carbs. 

The Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania were known for their traditional diet of raw meat, raw milk, and raw cow’s blood. Dr. Weston A. Price – dentist and nutrition pioneer – visited and studied the Maasai in 1935. He found them (like Stefansson found the Inuit) to be robust and healthy people free from diet related disease. What he also found and wrote about was that they had no dental decay or malformed arches which cause crooked teeth. Studies of 400 Maasai men found zero cases of heart disease. Read more about Dr. Weston A. Price HERE. 

Flash forward to 2019. Information on people thriving on all meat diets has been around since at least the 1920s. How has this information been ignored or critiziced for almost 100 years? There are now people like Mikhaila Peterson, Dr. Shawn Baker, Dr. Ken Berry, and Dr. Stephen Hussey shaking up the medical community with their carnivore diets. I have linked all their websites if you click their names. Please click away and tell me if you think any of these people look ill or malnourished – because I sure don’t. Their results and those of the thousands of other people around the world following carnivore diets simply cannot be ignored. Like I said, I do not currently follow a carnivore diet but I am definitely not against it when done properly. Like any way of eating, I feel one would need to do some research and educate themselves prior to starting. If nothing else, this carnivore movement (that really has been around for 100 years) is proving that, YOU DO NOT NEED CARBS TO LIVE.