The Forgotten History Of Carnivore Nutrition

What you’re getting yourself into

A look at the explorers, undertakers, and doctors who practiced and preached carnivore before it became vogue.

It’s 1797, and a Scottish army surgeon is prescribing what would, by today’s standards, get him struck off the medical register faster than you can say “calorie deficit.” His treatment for diabetes? Rancid meat, blood pudding, and fat. Lots of fat. No vegetables, minimal bread, and absolutely no apologies.

The patient recovered completely.

For the next hundred and fifty years, versions of this all-meat approach would be the gold standard treatment for both diabetes and obesity, recommended by the most respected physicians across two continents, tested on thousands of patients, and backed by consistent clinical success. Then, in the space of a few decades, it vanished from medical discourse like a magician’s assistant, rebranded as dangerous pseudoscience by the very institutions that had championed it.

This is the story of how humanity’s oldest and most effective dietary intervention became medicine’s best-kept secret, buried under seventy years of anti-meat propaganda funded by interests that had everything to gain from keeping you addicted to grain.

1797: When Meat Was Medicine

John Rollo, a Scottish military surgeon stationed at the Royal Artillery in Woolwich, made medical history when he documented his treatment of Captain Meredith in 1797. The officer had been “fallen away in fat and flesh considerably,” presenting with all the classic symptoms of diabetes: unquenchable thirst, constant urination, and rapid wasting.

Rollo’s prescription was uncompromising. Blood puddings made from suet and blood for lunch, old meats “as rancid as can be eaten” for dinner, with small amounts of milk and bread initially permitted before those too were eliminated. The reasoning was straightforward: diabetes involved excessive sugar in the urine, sugar came from plant matter, therefore plants had to go.

Within a month, Captain Meredith’s urine was sugar-free and he returned to active military duty. Not just improved. Cured.

Rollo’s dietary approach was widely adopted and empirically optimised over the next century. This wasn’t fringe medicine. This was mainstream medical practice, recommended in textbooks and taught to medical students across Europe. For patients who could afford meat and had the fortitude to maintain the diet, diabetes transformed from a death sentence into a manageable condition.

But history is rarely kind to pioneers. An 1824 Encyclopædia Britannica noted that while the diet successfully controlled the disease, patients often found the high fat content “intolerable.” Apparently, surviving diabetes was less appealing than a varied menu. Priorities, one supposes.

1863: The Undertaker Who Invented Dieting

Fast forward sixty years to London, where William Banting, a prosperous undertaker to the Royal Household, had become so corpulent he could no longer tie his own shoes or descend stairs forwards. At 66 years old and weighing over 200 pounds at just 5’5″, Banting had tried everything: Turkish baths, starvation diets, rowing on the Thames (which only increased his appetite), spa treatments, and various medical interventions. Nothing worked.

Then, seeking treatment for his deteriorating hearing, he consulted William Harvey, an ear surgeon who had recently attended lectures by French physiologist Claude Bernard on the liver’s role in diabetes management. Harvey understood that carbohydrates could be converted directly into glucose, potentially causing metabolic dysfunction.

Harvey prescribed Banting a diet remarkably similar to what we’d now call low-carb: meat, fish, poultry, game, and green vegetables, while strictly avoiding sugar, starch, beer, milk, and butter (which they mistakenly believed contained starch).

In 38 weeks, Banting lost 46 pounds and 12 inches from his waist. His hearing returned, his vitality surged, and he felt better than he had in twenty years.

Overcome with gratitude and evangelical zeal, Banting published “Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public” in 1863, distributing the first two editions (2,500 copies) entirely free of charge. He wasn’t trying to profit. He wanted to help people suffering as he had suffered.

The public response was extraordinary. By the third edition, the book had sold over 100,000 copies. “Banting” entered common parlance as a verb. For the next century, people didn’t diet: they “banted.” In Sweden, the word “bantning” is still used today to mean dieting for weight loss.

The medical establishment’s response? They savaged him. Critics called his pamphlet “unscientific” despite providing no explanation why. Banting was an undertaker, not a doctor. How dare he presume to comment on medical matters? Never mind that his approach worked. Never mind that it built on established medical knowledge. The hierarchy had been threatened, and hierarchies protect themselves.

Banting lived comfortably at a healthy weight until his death in 1878 at age 81. His physician, William Harvey, was less fortunate. Despite publishing his own academic defence of the diet, Harvey was ridiculed by colleagues, and his medical practice eventually suffered from the controversy.

The pattern was established: clinical success versus institutional resistance. It would repeat for the next hundred and fifty years.

1860s-1880s: The Civil War Doctor Who Made Steak Medicine

While Banting was revolutionising obesity treatment in England, across the Atlantic Dr. James Salisbury was treating Union soldiers dying not from Confederate bullets but from dysentery, typhoid, and scurvy: diseases that killed far more soldiers than combat during the American Civil War.

Salisbury observed something remarkable: soldiers with access to beef recovered faster from everything. Wounds healed quicker. Infections cleared. Energy returned. Meanwhile, those subsisting on the standard military rations of hardtack biscuits, beans, and coffee deteriorated rapidly.

His prescription was radical by the standards of emerging nutritional science: minced beef three times daily, seasoned with onion and pepper, broiled and served with gravy. He recommended patients consume 2 to 4 pounds of lean beef daily with 3 to 5 pints of hot water for 4 to 12 weeks to cleanse the digestive system.

Salisbury believed vegetables and starchy foods produced poisonous substances in the digestive system responsible for heart disease, tumors, mental illness, and tuberculosis. His theory may have been imperfect, but his results were undeniable. Officers started specifically requisitioning beef for sick soldiers, and recovery rates improved dramatically.

In 1888, Salisbury published “The Relation of Alimentation and Disease,” documenting successful treatment of tuberculosis, rheumatism, mental disorders, digestive diseases, obesity, and gout. The Salisbury steak, before it became a frozen dinner punchline, was serious medical intervention.

The irony is thick enough to slice with one of Salisbury’s broiled patties. A food item now synonymous with cheap institutional meals and budget buffets began as a physician’s attempt to cure chronic disease through meat consumption. It gained further popularity during World War I when anti-German sentiment made “Salisbury steak” preferable to “hamburger.”

By the early 20th century, the Salisbury diet had become popular not just for illness but as a weight loss regimen in both America and the United Kingdom. Turns out people quite enjoyed eating steak three times daily while shedding excess weight. Revolutionary concept.

1906-1928: The Explorer Who Ate Like an Eskimo

Now we arrive at Vilhjalmur Stefansson, possibly the most compelling figure in this entire saga. Born William Stephenson to Icelandic immigrant parents, Stefansson studied anthropology at Harvard before embarking on Arctic expeditions that would span over a decade.

In 1906, when supply ships failed to arrive during an expedition, Stefansson was forced to live with an Inuit family, subsisting entirely on their traditional diet of fish and meat from seals, whales, caribou, and waterfowl.

By conventional nutritional wisdom of the time, he should have died. The Inuit diet contained virtually no vegetables, no vitamin C supplements, no whole grains, no dietary fiber. Medical experts predicted scurvy, heart disease, kidney failure, and vitamin deficiencies.

Instead, Stefansson thrived. After eleven years living as the Inuit lived and eating as they ate, his health hadn’t deteriorated: it had improved. He returned to civilization convinced that everything he’d learned about nutrition was fundamentally wrong.

The medical establishment was unconvinced. Arctic explorers were unreliable witnesses, prone to exaggeration, probably suffering from malnutrition-induced delusions. If Stefansson wanted to be taken seriously, he’d need to prove his claims under controlled conditions.

So he did.

In January 1928, Stefansson and fellow explorer Karsten Anderson checked into Bellevue Hospital in New York for a year-long experiment. Under constant medical supervision, with daily blood tests and meticulous monitoring, they would eat nothing but meat and water for twelve months.

The scientific committee overseeing the study read like a who’s who of American medical research: representatives from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, the University of Chicago, and the American Museum of Natural History. Their cuts included steak, roast beef, brains, tongue, and calf liver once a week. Fat comprised 78-85% of their calories, protein 15-25%, and carbohydrates a negligible 1-2%.

Stefansson became ill only once during the entire year: when experimenters had him cut out fat and eat only lean meat. He developed symptoms within two days. A meal of sirloin steak and brains cooked in bacon fat immediately reversed the condition. Protein poisoning, later termed “rabbit starvation,” proved that humans cannot thrive on lean meat alone. We need fat.

After 375 days on an exclusive meat diet, both men maintained excellent health. Weight remained stable, cholesterol and kidney function normal, no signs of scurvy or deficiency diseases, no hardening of arteries or elevated blood pressure.

The results were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry in February 1930 under the title “Prolonged meat diets with a study of kidney function and ketosis.” Medical science now had rigorous, controlled evidence that humans could thrive indefinitely on meat and fat alone.

The response? Virtual silence. Unfortunately, little came of Stefansson’s experiment. His findings contradicted emerging nutritional dogma, and emerging dogma had powerful friends.

1920s-1962: The Doctor Who Sent Patients to the Museum

While Stefansson was conducting his Bellevue experiment, Dr. Blake Donaldson was quietly treating obese patients in New York with an all-meat diet. After returning from World War I and working in a cardiac clinic, Donaldson had become disillusioned with conventional approaches to obesity and chronic disease.

His method was elegantly simple: 6 ounces of lean meat and 2 ounces of visible fat, three times daily, from either lamb or beef. No pork, no chicken, no fish, no eggs: only ruminant meat. He prescribed thirty minutes of walking before breakfast and exactly nothing else.

Donaldson’s philosophy? “During the millions of years that our ancestors lived by hunting, every weakling who could not maintain perfect health on fresh fat meat and water was bred out.” In other words, we evolved as hunters and our metabolism reflects that fact.

But Donaldson went further than simple prescription. He sent his patients to the American Museum of Natural History to examine fossilized remains and understand what early humans actually ate. Patients would return understanding that bread wasn’t the staff of life: it was a recent agricultural invention their bodies weren’t designed to process.

In 1962, Donaldson published “Strong Medicine,” documenting decades of clinical success treating obesity, allergies, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, and gallstones with his meat-based protocol.

The medical establishment’s verdict? Physician Morris Fishbein dismissed it as “hardly scientific,” while Frederick J. Stare classified Donaldson’s views as “food faddism” and recommended the book “ought not to be on anyone’s shelves.”

Donaldson died from a heart attack at age 73. His critics presumably celebrated this as vindication, conveniently ignoring that 73 was well above the average life expectancy for men of his generation, and that he’d maintained a thriving medical practice treating thousands of patients for four decades.

1958: The Psychiatrist Who Exposed the Calorie Fallacy

Richard Mackarness was a British psychiatrist who authored “Eat Fat and Grow Slim” in 1958, exposing what he termed the “calorie fallacy” and proposing a low-carbohydrate “Stone Age” diet of fat and protein.

The timing was perfect. Post-war Britain was experiencing an obesity epidemic, and conventional wisdom (eat less, move more) was failing spectacularly. Mackarness took influence from William Banting and met personally with four physicians who were using similar approaches: Ray Lawson from Montreal, Alfred W. Pennington from New Jersey, George L. Thorpe from Wichita, and Blake F. Donaldson from New York.

His argument was elegantly simple: not all people metabolise food the same way. He divided humanity into two categories: “Fatten-Easilies” and “Constant-Weights.” If a Constant-Weight eats excess carbohydrate, their metabolic rate automatically increases until the surplus is burned. Fatten-Easilies lack this mechanism: their bodies convert excess carbohydrates into fat instead of ramping up energy expenditure.

The solution? Stop eating the foods that make you fat. Mackarness advocated eating fish, meat, simple vegetables and roots while opposing consumption of cow’s milk, grain, soy and sugar.

The book sold over 1.5 million copies. Clearly, people resonated with the message that obesity wasn’t a moral failing requiring superhuman willpower, but a metabolic issue requiring the correct nutritional approach.

The academic response was predictably hostile. Dietitian Margaret A. Ohlson described it as “another book on diet, based on a minimum of fact but supported by many chapters of what can only be described as propaganda based on badly digested series of half truths and some outright errors.”

Translation: How dare a mere psychiatrist comment on nutrition. Never mind that his approach worked. Never mind that thousands of readers were losing weight while eating liberally of fat and protein. The guild had spoken.

1972: The Cardiologist Who Became a Bestseller

Robert Atkins was a New York cardiologist with a private practice, focused on finding alternatives to the amphetamines other doctors prescribed for weight loss. Like Banting a century before, Atkins tried a low-carbohydrate diet himself, lost weight, and became an evangelist.

In 1972, he published “Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution,” telling readers to not count calories, eat as much steak and butter as they wanted, and remember that carbohydrates are “poison.” The writing style was bombastic, the claims were bold, and the diet was essentially Banting redux with a 1970s marketing upgrade.

The book became a phenomenon. Atkins eventually sold over 15 million copies worldwide. But unlike his predecessors, Atkins had the misfortune of publishing just as the low-fat dogma was cementing its stranglehold on nutritional science.

The medical establishment condemned Atkins’ recommendations as “unscientific, unbalanced,” and “potentially dangerous.” This despite the fact that his diet was functionally identical to approaches that had been standard medical practice a century prior.

The backlash had teeth this time. Atkins wasn’t just ridiculed: he was professionally attacked, his medical credentials questioned, his clinical data dismissed. The machinery of institutional nutrition science had learned from previous battles. They weren’t going to let another Banting happen.

1921: The Discovery That Changed Everything

We need to rewind a moment to understand why carnivore nutrition went from medical orthodoxy to dangerous fringe practice. The turning point wasn’t new science disproving meat-based diets. The turning point was new medicine that made dietary treatment unnecessary.

On July 27, 1921, Frederick Banting and Charles Best successfully isolated insulin from dog pancreases at the University of Toronto. By January 1922, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson became the first person to receive an insulin injection as treatment for diabetes.

The results were nothing short of miraculous. Leonard, who had been dying in a Toronto hospital, made a remarkable recovery. What had been a death sentence became a manageable chronic condition.

News spread like wildfire. By 1923, Banting and John Macleod received the Nobel Prize. Eli Lilly began large-scale production, and soon there was enough insulin to supply the entire North American continent.

For diabetic patients, insulin was unquestionably life-saving. But it had an unintended consequence: it made dietary treatment of diabetes obsolete. Why torture yourself with dietary restriction when you could inject insulin and eat whatever you wanted?

Before insulin, physicians like Frederick Allen and Elliott Joslin used extremely low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diets to control blood sugar: essentially starvation protocols that bought patients a few extra years at most. These approaches were harsh, unpleasant, and often ineffective for Type 1 diabetics who lacked sufficient insulin production.

Insulin changed that calculus entirely. The drug worked, it worked reliably, and it made patients feel better immediately. Pharmaceutical treatment became the new standard, and dietary intervention was relegated to a supporting role at best.

More importantly, pharmaceutical treatment was profitable. You can’t patent telling people to eat meat. You can’t charge recurring subscription fees for dietary advice. You can’t build a billion-pound industry around “stop eating bread.”

But insulin? That you can patent. That you can manufacture. That requires ongoing prescriptions, regular doctor visits, continuous monitoring, and lifetime patient management. From a business perspective, insulin was infinitely superior to dietary treatment.

The incentive structure of medicine had fundamentally changed. Doctors trained to prescribe drugs, patients expected pharmaceutical solutions, and dietary treatment began its long descent into historical footnote status.

1977-1980: The Dietary Guidelines Kill What Insulin Merely Wounded

If insulin made dietary treatment of diabetes unnecessary, the US Dietary Guidelines made low-carbohydrate diets heretical.

In 1977, the US Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, led by Senator George McGovern, published “Dietary Goals for the United States.” The recommendations were revolutionary: reduce fat intake to 30% of total calories, reduce saturated fat to 10%, and dramatically increase carbohydrate consumption, particularly from whole grains.

The scientific basis for these recommendations? Largely the work of Ancel Keys, whose Seven Countries Study purported to show that dietary fat caused heart disease. Never mind that Keys cherry-picked his data, ignoring countries that contradicted his hypothesis. Never mind that correlation doesn’t equal causation. The machinery of institutional science, government policy, and food industry interests aligned.

In 1980, the USDA published the first official Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Fat was the enemy. Grains were the foundation. The food pyramid was born, with bread, cereal, rice, and pasta forming the base: six to eleven servings daily.

What happened to low-carbohydrate approaches? They were branded as dangerous fad diets, dismissed as unscientific despite a century and a half of clinical success. Medical students were taught that high-fat diets caused heart disease, that ketosis was pathological, that humans needed carbohydrates for brain function.

The irony was spectacular. The dietary approach that had successfully treated diabetes and obesity since 1797 was now “extreme.” Meanwhile, the food pyramid, recommending eleven servings of grains daily, was “moderate” and “balanced.”

Food manufacturers rejoiced. Grain producers received massive subsidies. Low-fat processed foods flooded the market, with sugar added to compensate for flavour lost when fat was removed. The obesity epidemic that followed was blamed not on the guidelines themselves, but on people failing to follow them properly.

For seventy years, this narrative dominated. Doctors who prescribed low-carbohydrate diets risked their licenses. Researchers who questioned the lipid hypothesis struggled to get funding. The institutional consensus was absolute: fat causes heart disease, carbohydrates are essential, and anyone suggesting otherwise is a dangerous crank.

2020: The Return of the Carnivore

Something remarkable has happened in the past decade. The internet, that great disruptor of institutional gatekeeping, has allowed the silenced voices to finally be heard.

Thousands of people are now eating carnivore diets, documenting their results, sharing their bloodwork, and reporting improvements in everything from autoimmune conditions to mental health. They’re not waiting for institutional approval. They’re not seeking permission from dietitians. They’re conducting n=1 experiments on themselves and comparing notes.

The results are forcing academia to pay attention. Research on ketogenic diets has exploded. Studies are finally examining what happens when you remove plants from the diet entirely. Clinical trials are grudgingly acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, the low-carbohydrate physicians of the past weren’t completely insane.

Professional organisations are starting to shift. In 2019, the American Diabetes Association finally acknowledged low-carbohydrate diets as a valid medical nutrition therapy for diabetes. Diabetes Australia followed suit. The tide is turning, glacially slow, but turning nonetheless.

The irony is almost too perfect. The dietary approach pioneered by John Rollo in 1797, championed by William Banting in 1863, clinically validated by Blake Donaldson in the 1920s, and experimentally proven by Vilhjalmur Stefansson in 1928, has taken seventy years to claw its way back from exile.

It was never disproven. It was never shown to be ineffective. It was simply buried under institutional inertia, financial interests, and the hubris of nutrition science convinced it knew better than two hundred years of clinical experience.

The carnivore diet isn’t new. It isn’t extreme. It isn’t dangerous pseudoscience. It’s the oldest continuously documented medical intervention in the treatment of obesity and diabetes, with a track record that predates antibiotics, X-rays, and germ theory.

What’s extreme is the idea that humans evolved for millions of years as hunters but suddenly require six to eleven servings of grain daily for optimal health. What’s dangerous is a nutritional paradigm that has overseen the worst metabolic health crisis in human history.

What’s pseudoscience is ignoring two centuries of clinical evidence because it contradicts the opinions of committees funded by agricultural lobbies.

Read My Previous Article – Why The RDIs Don’t Matter On Carnivore

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