Is the carnivore diet healthy and good for weight loss?

Last Updated : 03 July 2025

Key takeaways

• While it’s tempting to believe that one strict diet holds the key to health, nutrition is more complex. The carnivore diet lacks the long-term evidence needed to recommend it as a healthy and sustainable diet strategy.
• The carnivore diet can cause deficiencies in fibre, vitamins and minerals, and increase the intake of saturated fat and cholesterol excessively. In turn, this is associated with increased risks of certain types of cancer, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other health risks.
• Rather than extreme restrictions, a more effective approach is embracing dietary balance – a variety of nutrient-rich foods from both animal and plant sources is generally recommended for sustaining overall health and well-being.

In a world filled with contradictory and confusing nutritional advice, it’s understandable to seek simple solutions. The carnivore diet has gained attention as an extreme way to eat – eliminating all plant-based foods and relying solely on meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products. The carnivore diet is a low-carbohydrate diet and an extreme form of the ketogenic diet. Some proponents claim it’s the ultimate diet for health and weight loss, but does the science support these claims? We’ll start with the facts, then look at the myth, and finally explain why the myth doesn’t hold up.

Fact: balanced diets, including plant-based foods, support long-term health and weight management.

The most effective diets for health and weight loss are balanced, incorporating a variety of food groups. Research consistently shows that diets rich in a variety of fruits and vegetables (minimum 400 g/day), legumes,nuts and seeds, and whole grains help lower the risk of chronic disease while also promoting healthy weight control. At the same time, it’s important to limit added and free sugars, total fats to below 30% of total daily calories, saturated fats to under 10%, and salt intake to no more than 5 g per day.¹

A well-rounded diet does more than provide calories; it supplies essential nutrients such as dietary fibre, which plays a crucial role in digestion, cardiovascular health, type 2 diabetes, and gut health and is exclusively found in plant foods. Insufficient fibre has been linked to higher health risks and studies show that most Europeans fall short of the recommended daily intake of fibre.²On average, intakes for adult males in Europe range from 18-24 g per day and for females 16-20 g per day, with little variation from one European country to another.

Building on the importance of fibre, completely excluding plant-based foods can lead to a reduced microbiota diversity and increase the risk of several nutrient deficiencies (e.g., vitamin C, folate, potassium, and calcium) and diseases like obesity, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer.^3,4 Moreover, studies suggest that transitioning away from typical diets high in beef and dairy products to plant-based diets could reduce all-cause mortality by as much as 19%.⁵

Beyond its potential health risks, the carnivore diet poses significant environmental challenges. In general, producing animal-based foods is more resource-intensive than plant-based foods, and has a higher environmental impact (such as land use, fresh water consumption and CO2 emissions per tonne of protein consumed).⁶ As global sustainability becomes increasingly urgent, adopting diets with lower reliance on animal products can play a critical role in preserving the planet for future generations.

Myth: the carnivore diet is healthy and effective for losing weight.

Despite the robust support for balanced, plant-rich diets, some proponents of the carnivore diet claim that cutting out plant foods improves health and accelerates weight loss. While extreme restriction might lead to short-term weight loss (often due to inadvertently eating fewer calories and water weight loss), there are no long-term, well-designed studies that confirm the safety or health benefits of the carnivore diet.

Moreover, a recent study found that research funded by the red meat industry is much more likely to report positive or neutral effects of red meat on heart health, while independent studies often show negative effects.⁷ This highlights the bias in industry-sponsored research and adds to the lack of trustworthy, long-term studies supporting the safety or health benefits of the carnivore diet.

One of the major concerns with the carnivore diet is the complete elimination of fibre. Fibre is essential for good digestion and the prevention of constipation, amongst many other benefits.^8-12Low fibre diets can lead to infrequent bowel movements, which in turn is associated with changes in gut bacteria, elevated levels of toxic compounds in the blood, inflammation, and decreased kidney function.¹³ Calcium is also a nutrient of concern on carnivore diets since it’s not commonly eaten in high enough amounts to meet recommended intakes.⁴

Additionally, the high intake of saturated fats from excessive amounts of (processed) meat can elevate cholesterol levels and is linked to increased risks of heart disease and colorectal cancer.^14,15 The absence of plant-based antioxidants and phytochemicals also removes key compounds that protect against inflammation and chronic disease.¹⁶

While high-quality long-term studies of people following a carnivore diet are lacking, currently available evidence in the form of a published case study highlights the potential risks of the diet.¹⁷ In this case study a man following a strict 8-month carnivore diet developed yellowish nodules on his body, a condition linked to excessive cholesterol levels (more than 6 times higher compared to the recommendation!¹⁸) from his diet rich in cheese, butter and fatty hamburgers. These fatty deposits formed beneath his skin cannot be reversed by simply changing diets again or taking cholesterol-lowering medication, underscoring the long-term health risks of an imbalanced diet overloaded with animal fats.

Fallacy: the illusion of simplicity and quick fixes.

One of the appeals of the carnivore diet lies in its simplicity. It offers a black-and-white solution: eliminate plant foods and supposedly gain health benefits. However, this is an example of the “false dilemma” fallacy – framing dietary choices as an either-or scenario when, in reality, a middle ground exists. Many dietary guidelines include both animal and plant-based foods. You don’t need to become vegetarian or vegan to enjoy the benefits of a plant-rich diet!

Carnivore diet proponents also argue that eating only meat is “natural” and that this diet mirrors the diets of our ancestors and therefore must be good for us. However, this argument is misleading in various ways. Ancient human diets were highly diverse and adapted to regional availability. While early hunter-gatherers did eat meat, they mainly relied on plant foods like fruits and wild tubers which provided essential nutrients that are absent or present in very low quantities in a meat-only diet, such as fibre, vitamin C, and phytonutrients.^19,20 Some hunter-gatherers even ate up to 100 g of fibre per day! Moreover, many of the animal meats eaten by our ancestors were also much leaner, unlike the types of meats common today.²¹ These differences help explain why hunter-gatherers often didn’t show signs of atherosclerosis and had lower cholesterol levels. In fact, the average cholesterol levels we now see in Western populations are almost twice as high as those of hunter-gatherers.²² High cholesterol levels are one of the main risk factors that increases our risk of chronic diseases.²³

Another misleading tactic is relying on anecdotal evidence. Supporters often share personal success stories of improvements in chronic medical conditions, general health, and aspects of well-being such as energy, sleep, and focus. Trusting individual experiences is not strong evidence because it's hard to control for other factors (how can you be sure those benefits come from the diet itself and not from many other possible influences, such as exercise, sleep, or smoking?). Moreover, even if supporters of the carnivore diet experience personal success stories, it's important to remember that you cannot feel heart disease progressing in your arteries over the course of multiple decades. The foods eaten on a carnivore diet, which are often high in saturated fats, increase the risk of heart disease.^24,25

Relying on personal anecdotes doesn’t replace rigorous, well-designed scientific studies. For example, a recent study of people following a carnivore diet showed high individual satisfaction and perceived health benefits of the diet but there are a few points to keep in mind when interpreting this study that make it less reliable.²⁶

The study recruited adults through social media groups and communities like the ‘World Carnivore Tribe’ who self-identified as following the carnivore diet for more than six months and collected self-reported data on various health outcomes. This study design in problematic because it didn’t include doctor’s check-ups, other objective health measurements, and people who experienced adverse health effects would have quit the diet long before the inclusion criteria of six months, skewing the results to only reflect more favourable outcomes. Therefore, it can’t be used as proof in favour of the diet.

Learn more about how you can include meat in your diet here