 The ketogenic and carnivore diet certainly have one thing in common. That is, they both go against everything we've been told our entire lives in regards to finding our true health. Consume a large amount of fat and eat all the animal foods you desire. Both of these diets can help us get closer to our optimal health. And they might even get you there if you follow them in a certain way. There are not strict enough guidelines in order for us to achieve nutrient density, the vitamin, mineral, elements, and fatty acids that our body requires on either of these diets. So although they can get us close to where we need to be, they're not specific enough to get us to that point. That is what I'm going to go over in this video. The pros and cons of the carnivore and the ketogenic diet and what you can do to optimize both of them. So the ketogenic diet is specifically a low carbohydrate diet, usually less than 20 grams of carbs. It is important to note here that ketogenic dieters subtract the fiber content from high fiber foods. So if you were eating something like green beans or broccoli, the carbohydrate content isn't pure so to speak compared to something like sugar. The protein is specifically moderate and the fat is high. There are fairly strict macronutrient requirements on a ketogenic diet whereas the carnivore diet is much looser partially due to all the sausage and hot dog lovers like myself that follow a carnivore diet. But the only thing they really advocate for is that you consume zero carbohydrates. Even this becomes a little foggy when you consider things like eggs and certain dairy products and even certain parts of the animal have small amounts of carbohydrates in them. The protein content is usually high and the fat content is usually moderate. And what I mean by usually is they don't state how much you're supposed to consume. The carnivore diet has a lot of mischief around it. There's no real concrete way to do it. We have people doing drastically different things from one another. One person might consume chicken wings all day and another person might be eating raw brains and liver. A huge variance there. The main pros of the ketogenic diet when compared to a carnivore diet is that you achieve optimal energy metabolism. About 80% of your calories from fat and carbohydrates combined. If you're not achieving that percentage, the body doesn't really like using protein as efficiently as fat and carbohydrates. And this number usually has to be between 70 and 80%. I mean, yeah, you could technically achieve that on a carnivore diet, but the keto diet specifically has this goal. The adherence, variety, and simplicity of the diet is really second to none. Even though a carnivore diet might be a little simpler, the reality is you have so many food restrictions on a carnivore diet that it kind of ruins it to some degree. If you just reduce your carbohydrate consumption to less than 20 grams and increase your fat consumption, you're likely going to get into ketosis of the state of your body burning fat for energy. So the adherence to the diet is fairly easy because there are a lot of cheat foods and things that you can enjoy on a ketogenic diet. And with that, there is a lot of variety because you're not eliminating plant foods. On a carnivore diet, the main selling point is that it is lower in inflammation. The removal of fiber and plant foods is the key thing here. Those can be inflammatory to certain people. The diet is even simpler, less tracking. You don't have to follow your macronutrients as long as you're eating foods from the animal kingdom. You are essentially good to go. Now, the primary goal of the ketogenic diet used to be for epileptic children. They used to have seizures and they noticed a ketogenic diet really helped these children. But now the ketogenic diet is used for weight loss. The carnivore diet is primarily used and has been used to fix health issues due to its low inflammatory properties. And some people do use it for weight loss as well. Now, on to the cons. So, the nutrient content of both of these diets is fairly questionable. Can you achieve the nutrients you need on either of these diets if you're following them in a certain way? Yes, but most people don't. If we go down the list of vitamins here, and I specifically chose some fat soluble vitamins as well as water soluble vitamins that I deem most important to our health. Well, the vitamin A content is usually not achieved unless you're consuming liver. And chances are you would be consuming liver on a carnivore diet whereas on a ketogenic diet you wouldn't. So where there's a red X here, you're most likely not going to achieve that nutrient. Where there's a blue minus sign, it's possible. Where there's a green check, you're most likely achieving the nutrient on that specific diet. So as I said, you might be eating liver, so you might be getting enough vitamin A retinal, the animal form of vitamin A. B vitamins, carnivore diet usually achieves a ketogenic diet. Probably does, but it might not. Vitamin C is almost always achieved on both diets as long as you're consuming fresh food. Vitamin D is almost never achieved. You have to either be in the sun or taking a supplement. Food just doesn't have enough vitamin D3 even if you're consuming a high source like wild fish. Vitamin E is contained in any high quality fat. The diets usually do have enough vitamin E. Vitamin F, also known as omega-3 fatty acids, can or might not be achieved. This is really up in the air. You know, are you eating fish? Are you consuming eggs? High DHA foods? I would say usually people get enough DHA, omega-3 fatty acids on these diets. The bigger issue might be with high omega-6. Vitamin K2 is usually achieved on keto because people tend to eat a lot of cheese and eggs. But on a carnivore diet, if you remove cheese as well as eggs in your diet, you might not be getting vitamin K2. Each of these vitamins have very specific and broad functions in the body. So it's pretty hard to go into specifics in this video on what these vitamins are important for. But these are definitely things we want to keep in mind for overall optimal metabolism energy. And what I'm basically saying is, if you can't get these nutrients in your diet, you're not going to feel good. And we'll go into that later and how to fix these issues. The second set of issues ties into food quality on both of these diets. A ketogenic diet can contain inflammatory plant foods, junk foods, really food that you shouldn't be eating, and it can also contain plant fats, high in omega-6 fatty acids. The carnivore diet can still be inflammatory because of high omega-6 intake from foods like pork or chicken that have been fed like corn or soy. It drastically reduces the quality of the meat. So we can actually have inflammatory elements that we have to be aware of in both diets. Although usually that is a much larger issue with keto because you can be consuming 15 or 20 different vegetables that could be causing you gut issues. You could be having all these artificial sweeteners and things like that. Our next issue ties into how we perceive the food and how much we eat. Food powder ability is to my understanding and what I like to portray it as how the food tastes in regards to how much you can eat. The base food powder ability is a raw unseasoned animal product. Like you just killed a deer in the woods and you were eating that essentially. And the problem with the keto diet is we can get an artificial food powder ability. Foods like bacon although bacon some people do consume on a carnivore diet. When you add sugar, sweetness, seasoning, artificial things to a food, you over consume the food. The same thing can happen on a carnivore diet. Things like eggs, cheese, bacon, someone consuming those foods might consume drastically more calories than someone just consuming muscle meat and fat. So how do we fix these issues? We can incorporate nutrient density into both diets. We can definitely do that. For a carnivore diet, we can fix the fat percentage. So on a keto diet, what we're trying to do is increase the amount of high quality animal foods in the diet, specifically organ meats, high quality dairy, grass fed dairy, eggs, shellfish, seafood, wild squid fish, grass fed meats, all of that good stuff. And that also needs to be done on the carnivore diet, especially optimizing the Omega 6 levels. What increasing this food quality does and nutrient density does is not only give you the vitamins, minerals, elements, fatty acids your body needs, it also improves the Omega 3 to Omega 6 ratio, therefore reducing overall inflammation in the body. We do need to fix the fat percentage on the carnivore diet. Ideally, you should be getting 70 to 80% of your calories from a fat source. Ideally, high quality fat source, good Omega 3 to Omega 6 ratio. High quality whole foods on the keto diet. This means being much stricter with the foods you're choosing. Basically, if it wasn't grown on a farm, you shouldn't be consuming it. If you stuck to vegetables, quality animal foods, quality animal fats, there's no reason you would be healthier on a carnivore diet than a keto diet if you did this properly. And this ties into analyzing food allergies as well. If you're consuming dairy, but you're heavily allergic to it, whether you're on a carnivore or keto diet, doesn't matter. It's still incredibly inflammatory to your body if you have issues with it. Mindful of food choices, that's kind of what we just said. Make sure the food is super high quality and then streamline powder ability. This applies to both diets. So on this diet, as I mentioned, dairy, eggs, and bacon can be an issue. On this diet, there's way too many foods that can be an issue. There's a lot of things like fat bombs and keto desserts and stuff like that. And is that really an issue to consume those foods? I don't think so. I think those foods can be made healthy and consumed moderately. But there's a big difference between making a chocolate bar with raw cacao and raw honey versus putting a bunch of crappy artificial sweeteners into some Hershey's chocolate. That's a huge difference there. The inherent food quality and how good it is. So that's a pretty good general summary. I've really been pushed against in regards to my promotion of quality animal foods for nutrients in specifically the carnivore diet realm, but the ketogenic diet as well. People don't really recognize that if food is high quality, the nutrient content is much higher and that is what we need to be in optimal health. It's really a combination of things. People don't want to spend money. They're already doing something so unorthodox. They don't really want to go a step further. Basically, they don't understand it. They don't know how important it is. If you've actually eaten a high quality piece of grass-fed beef fat or you've taken a vitamin D3 supplement or have been in the sun for five hours straight, you know how good those things make you feel. If these people aren't open-minded to trying new things and switch things up in their diet, as we said earlier, you could have someone eating raw brains, raw liver, salmon roe, fish eggs every day, if you own like a million bucks, you know, like the Roman statue himself, or you could have someone eating grain-fed ribeye all day and moping around Mr. Lethargic on e-microffee. There's a big variance there in diets and we have to understand that. And I'm explaining here why people have those issues specifically. I haven't really involved myself too much in the ketogenic community, but the same thing here. You can have someone that's consuming low quality, crappy food, processed food for every single meal of the day. You could go to McDonald's every meal of the day and follow a ketogenic diet, but you're not going to feel so good. To put it simply, we need to increase our food quality and be mindful of our vitamin intake. Increasing the quality of plant foods in the diet mainly reduces inflammation, consuming heirloom and properly grown plant foods makes them less inflammatory due to herbicides, pesticides, raising the micronutrient content slightly, making it closer to things we used to consume in the past. And increasing the quality of animal foods increases the nutrient density. That's how we achieve our vitamins, minerals, elements, and fatty acids in their ideal forms. If you guys are unfamiliar with my YouTube channel, one major thing I always talk about is nutrients from animal foods are more available and what we need in the body. We don't assimilate nutrients properly from plant foods. The next thing to be mindful of is really vitamin D. The sun gives light to so many things on this planet. Human beings are one of them. If you're not getting vitamin D3 through a supplement, through the sun, I even have a video on tanning beds, you won't feel good. This is a huge element that people forget and just by taking a vitamin D3 supplement, that's the most significant thing you can do for your health with the least amount of investment. And seeing as we are consuming large amounts of cholesterol, fat soluble vitamins, our bodies can assimilate vitamin D3 much better than any other diet. So down here are the main concerns. Vitamin D3, as we just explained, iodine is also a concern. Most people don't consume enough seafood. You can use an iodine supplement. Seaweed has a very high variant in iodine content, so it's not really a safe bet, plus it tends to be polluted. Vitamin A, really just getting some liver in your diet to replenish depleted vitamin A stores. It's safe to assume everyone is vitamin A deficient, although you don't necessarily have to consume liver. If you have incredibly high amounts of quality animal foods, most people do need to eat liver in some form to fix their initial deficiency. Omega-3 fatty acids, EPA, DHA. So we want to make sure to either be eating some animal brains, I mean, more approachably some fish, just a preformed source of EPA and DHA. Yeah, you could supplement all of these things. What I'm basically saying is, if you fix these nutrients on both of these diets, you're going to be good to go. You know, if you take your vitamin D3 supplement, take your iodine supplement, eat a little bit of liver, and get your omega-3 fatty acids in, you will be ahead of 95, probably even 99% of everyone else following these two diets. So hopefully this has helped you guys with anything you might have overlooked on a ketogenic or carnivore diet. Thank you guys so much for joining me today. Please like, subscribe, hit that bell icon, it's right next to the subscribe button, and share the video if you can. If you guys would like to support me further, just check out some of the videos I'm going to link at the end here. Recently, I just launched Frankie's Free Range Meat. My goal is to provide you guys with high quality, nutrient-dense animal foods. Right now we have super high quality, awesome fatty, grass-fed beef. We're selling some salmon raw. We have some organ meat, some off cuts. So whether you're on a ketogenic or carnivore diet, no excuses, boys and girls. And if you're international, we do have non-perishable options. So, you know, if you guys aren't, you know, placing an order from Frankie's Free Range Meat, you might, you know, get a, you know, personal visit from Frankie Boy, and we might have to have a little discussion about the importance of animal foods if you catch my drift. Again, thank you guys so much for joining me today. Check that out at frankiesfreerangemeat.com.