 There is a lack of guidance on the carnivore diet. On one hand, this makes things incredibly simple. Just eat meat. On the other hand, this creates a lot of variance in how people are following a carnivore diet, resulting in some people doing incredibly well, others not so much. I've personally been following a carnivore diet since late 2012, about six and a half years now. Before that, I was really into weightlifting in the gym every day, so I've been dieting for about 13 years. I've worked as a personal trainer and catering chef in the past. This has given me in-depth culinary knowledge, allowing me to apply my current understanding of vitamins, minerals, elements, and fatty acids to a variety of animal foods that some people don't even know about. This has not only allowed me to get all of the nutrients my body needs on a carnivore diet, it has given me the understanding that a carnivore diet is the most ideal diet for human health. Not only does it remove all inflammation, it gives us the most available form of nutrients, their animal form. Most people don't know that animal foods contain vitamins, minerals, elements, fatty acids in their most available forms. Not only that, plant foods don't contain a lot of these nutrients that our body needs. The carnivore diet has been commonly promoted as an elimination diet for reducing inflammation, and this is partly because Jordan Peterson and Michaela Peterson, two very famous people who popularized the carnivore diet to some degree, fixed their autoimmune issues on the carnivore diet. What they didn't mention was, if you do a carnivore diet properly, you will have the most energy and be an optimal metabolic function. What I mean by metabolic function here is, every process in the body requires nutrients, and if a carnivore diet is giving us nutrients in the most available form, it would make sense that we would feel, look, and be our best on a carnivore diet. What people are usually missing is one, the fat to protein ratio. Our indigenous ancestors, hunter-gatherers, obtained approximately 80% of their calories from an energy source, whether it be carbohydrates or fat, and 20% of their calories from a protein source. This can be skewed slightly depending on your lean body mass, maybe 70% fat, but generally speaking this is what almost every single indigenous group followed. Nutrient intake is often overlooked, and this is pretty hard to understand, we will go in depth later, but one ironic thing is, people constantly mention they feel better eating beef on a carnivore diet. This is for two reasons, sometimes beef is fattier, but usually it's because beef is much lower in omega-6 inflammatory fatty acids than pork and chicken. Although omega-6 isn't inherently inflammatory, when your ratio is off, that's where you run into issues. So if improving your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio by focusing on beef makes you feel better than eating pork or chicken, why not take it a step further and increase the overall food quality, you know, moving to grass-fed beef, wild caught fish, a lot of people try to dismiss those higher quality foods on a carnivore diet for that reason, but it doesn't really make sense when they're all eating beef. Allergens can be an issue on any diet, if you're allergic to eggs and dairy, this can really be your kryptonite on this diet in regards to food sourcing, because if you tolerate these two foods, it becomes very easy, if you don't, you gotta do a little bit of grunt work, and this ties into elimination, although I said the carnivore diet has been spouted as an elimination diet, elimination and reintroduction of foods is a very effective way to figure out your health in pretty much any aspect. If you're having an issue with something, removing it and reincorporating it can answer a lot of questions, especially eggs and dairy. Eggs for instance might be causing you issues because they're feeding the chickens corn and soy, therefore the eggs might be high on omega-6. Dairy might be an issue because it's pasteurized and homogenized, you might not even be allergic to dairy, it could just be modern processing. Electrolytes are commonly brought up, and we will go in-depth on this later, sodium-potassium magnesium usually being messed around with, it's not necessary in most cases. Digestion might be the first thing brought up, if you're eating meat, aren't you going to be constipated, well, if you're not consuming an ideal fat ratio, consuming too much protein can constipate you. If your omega-3 to omega-6 is off, if you're consuming large amounts of omega-6 fats, those don't digest too well. If you're overcooking your meat and fat, this makes the calories more available to your digestive system. When the calories are more available to your digestive system, your body can't produce enzymes and bile to digest it efficiently, so reducing the cooking temperature can drastically improve digestion for people. Instead of eating a well done steak, eat it rare. Not only will you be a normal person, you will feel better as well. Editors mean any plant foods that you want to incorporate into your diet. This can be something like coffee, ranging to black pepper, maybe even chocolate as a snack. This is very anecdotal, but if you're going to spend so much time, money, effort in committing yourself to a carnivore diet, you really want to remove everything besides meat, so you just have a baseline to work with. I know coffee is hard for some people to let go of, I will be doing a video on coffee in two days to burst your bubble. Body composition also improves drastically. Whether you want to gain weight or lose weight, if you follow these principles I'm going to advocate for, you will pretty much achieve your ideal body composition without having to restrict calories. This ties into some things we will talk about later, such as the order of satiation and food quality. But diet isn't everything guys. If you're not getting sun, adequate vitamin D3, if your water isn't free of fluoride and chlorine and other negative things, if you're not exercising or getting ideal sleep, the carnivore diet can only do so much. And hey, the carnivore diet might fix a lot of the issues you're having and get you going in the right direction, but it's important to be mindful of all aspects of health. This is what we mentioned earlier, 80% of your calories from fat and 20% from protein, 5% of that being from nutrient dense foods, likely because the nutrient dense foods tend to be protein based in a lot of cases. And you guys might be thinking 80% fat is a lot, but by weight, 6 pounds of protein and 1 pound of fat is 80% fat to 20% protein. So realistically speaking, if you had 2 pounds of rib eye steak and 1 third of a pound of butter, which is just over a stick of butter, that would be 80% fat, 20% protein. Fat has a very low water content, therefore making it very calorically dense. When protein has a very high water content. So this isn't as unrealistic as people make it out to be, it's as simple as having some steak with a few packs of butter. Moving on to obtaining nutrients, the quality is key here. When an animal is raised on high quality grass or pasture, that translates directly to the amount of nutrients in the flesh. People are afraid of eating farm raised fish, but they're not really opposed to eating grain fed beef. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Here are our vitamins, minerals, elements. We'll also go over a meal plan and how to obtain fat. We have to go into this with the mindset that we're deficient in these vitamins, because we've gone our whole lives without consuming enough quality animal foods. So in order to obtain those specific vitamins, we have to consume a food that has high amounts of them initially. Yes, you could drastically increase the food quality in your diet and slowly recover from these nutrient deficiencies to get closer to your optimal health, but that can be more expensive. People might not have access to those foods and who wants to take longer to feel healthy vitamin A. The only source really is liver. Liver has literally a hundred times the amount of vitamin A of any other animal food. I mean, as I said, you can increase the overall nutrient density of your diet, but there's many ways to make a liver tasty and not only is liver an excellent source of vitamin A, liver has literally every single vitamin, mineral, elements and fatty acid your body needs in pretty high amounts, substantial amounts. If you guys want to know more about liver, I did a video on it last week. Liver is a superfood. You would think people have enough vitamin B following a carnivore diet, especially B12, but folate, vitamin B9, folic acid can be low sometimes. By incorporating liver and oysters, we alleviate that issue. Vitamin C is not an issue as long as you are consuming fresh meat. I mean, if you're consuming well-cooked beef and preserved foods, that's where you might run into an issue. But, you know, people have been following carnivore diets for five, 10, 15, 20 years and scurvy is a non-issue. Vitamin D, of course, from the sun, but it's worth noting, wild squirt fish have vitamin D because they are obtaining it from the algae they are eating and pasture raised animals, if they are in the sun, they will have vitamin D in the flesh. So, if a chicken is out in the sun, its eggs will have vitamin D. This isn't really reliable. You can only obtain a few hundred IU of vitamin D from animal foods. It's a little bit, but you really need to be in the sun. You get thousands of times the amount of vitamin D in the sun compared to consuming animal foods. Vitamin E is obtained from quality fat. If the animal is high quality, its fat will contain vitamin E. You know, fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, K are stored in the fat. It makes sense. Eggs are probably the most popular food that you can get for vitamin E. It's also contained in high cholesterol containing foods like brains, fish, eggs. When a food has a very high cholesterol content, like liver, like brains, like eggs, they are incredibly nutrient dense. Really is nature telling us the importance of cholesterol in all of these vitamins in our body. Vitamin F, a.k.a. omega-3 fatty acids, most people know fish. Eggs have good amounts of preformed EPA and DHA. You can consume animal brains if you want to, as a source of EPA and DHA as well. If you're not consuming any preformed source of EPA and DHA, if the omega-6 content of your diet is low enough, meat does contain alpha-linolenic acid, which can be converted into omega-3. Granted, the omega-6 content in your diet is low enough, and that's a bit iffy, so it's safe to just get those high preformed omega-3 foods. Vitamin K, specifically in the form of K2, is known for being in fermented products. All of our native ancestors, hunter-gatherers, consumed lots of fermented meat. Vitamin K is also contained in liver, in egg yolks, cheese is a more approachable fermented food, but if you're not consuming large amounts of egg yolks, you have to really explore options, maybe even supplement to vitamin K, to get ideal amounts. The minerals and the elements are not things we should concern ourselves with too much, but people definitely want to hear about some of them. On the left here, we have the minerals. On the right, we have the elements. The left-hand column are the popular ones that people want to know about. Sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. There are no indigenous groups that consume extra calcium. It's not an issue. We need vitamins D and K to utilize calcium in the body. That's the main focus. Magnesium is commonly brought up, but the forms of minerals in animal foods are not inhibited by things contained in plant foods, like phytates and oxalates, that can bind to minerals and bring them out of the body. So the reality is, the amount of magnesium you're getting from an animal food is likely two to four times more available than the plant form. Potassium. Meat has 1,400 milligrams of potassium per pound. Sodium. Meat has sodium. Most people salt their food. You do not want to supplement any of these electrolytes. If you supplement potassium, it will deplete your magnesium. Your body can only absorb so much potassium and magnesium at once, and it's best at absorbing that from a whole food form at a slow pace. If you put, you know, 3,000, 4,000 milligrams of salt on your food, and then you try to consume a corresponding amount of potassium, you will actually get overdose of potassium, because a powdered form of potassium is incredibly unnatural. Phosphorus, sulfur, and chloride, these aren't really spoken about. They are contained in animal foods in small amounts. Here we have iron, zinc, copper, and iodine. People can be iron deficient on carnivore. Iron does require, you know, vitamin A to be absorbed. So if you do have low iron levels, I wouldn't really focus on just eating muscle meat. I would try to get foods like eggs, oysters, shellfish, liver into my diet to get my iron stores to where they need to be. Zinc and copper need to be kept in a certain ratio, approximately eight parts zinc to one part copper. The only way you can really throw this ratio off is if you ate like a pound of liver every day for three months. And I've done that before. Copper toxicity is not fun, but it's not usually an issue. Iodine can be obtained from, of course, fish, but guys, we are likely deficient in vitamins. You probably have to supplement iodine to get to baseline. And yet, even though eggs contain iodine, dairy can contain iodine, that maintenance dosage of iodine might not be enough to fix your deficiency. So keep that in mind with all of these nutrients. We need to fix a deficiency first before we reach maintenance. Manganese and fluoride, they are contained in foods in small amounts. There are two forms of fluoride. There's sodium fluoride and calcium fluoride, sodium fluoride being the one they artificially add to our water. That is not good. Calcium fluoride is the natural occurring one in water. Here is a pretty simple meal plan that achieves all of these nutrients. Free range eggs with raw cheese for breakfast, maybe scrambled eggs. Charcuterie from a local farm for lunch. This ties back to food quality. If you're consuming sausages, deli meats, and they're from incredibly high quality animals, there are nutrients in them. For dinner, maybe a grass-fed steak with some raw butter. And if you throw in liver once a week and fish once or twice a week, you're literally obtaining all of these nutrients. You know, you have overall vitamin A contents good because the food quality is there. You're getting plenty of B vitamins. You're eating eggs for vitamin E, omega, vitamin K. And if you throw in some liver and fish, you're just guaranteeing you're getting large amounts of all of these vitamins. So it's fairly easy to achieve all the vitamins, minerals, elements, and fatty acids we need on a carnivore diet. What can be an issue for some people is finding a good quality fat source. Since fat-soluble vitamins are contained in the fat and we're consuming the majority of our calories from fat, when we increase the food quality, we drastically increase our overall nutrient intake. As you can imagine, you're consuming 80% of your calories from a food source. You want it to be an ideal food source. I did this in order of what most people will have access to. Clarified butter, aka ghee, is butter that has had the milk protein removed. I have a video showing you guys how to make that. The problem with this is what we spoke about earlier. When you cook fat, it makes it too available to the stomach and digest too quickly. So you might not be able to tolerate clarified butter. You can't tolerate clarified butter. Fatty fish or fatty meat, it's very unlikely that you will find meat fatty enough. Fish, maybe herring or mackerel, if it's super fatty, meat, brisket, belly, as well as short rib, are fatty enough on their own to be 80% fat, 20% protein. Raw dairy, surprisingly, most people can get their hands on easier than grass-fed fat, marrow, and brains. So these two are more of a concern if you can't tolerate. So someone like me who is allergic to butter, who can't tolerate eggs, use egg yolks for more fat, can't tolerate raw dairy, I have to source suet, which is kidney fat, pure fat of the animal, marrow fat, which I have from time to time, just the fat of the marrow bones, and brains, animal brains, achieve pretty much, vitamin E, vitamin K, vitamin C, and brains also have omega-3 fatty acids. So depending on what your allergies are, what your tolerance is, what your food access is, this is going to be the biggest issue for most people. Because if you don't have a low omega-6 source of fat, you're compromising the integrity of your diet, what's the point of following a carnivore diet if you can't get an ideal omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, and not only that, as I said, you're optimizing the nutrient density as well. This will make or break your success on this diet. Your fat source, the nutrient density of this fat source. If you can't afford these quality foods, if you can't afford quality fat, what you could do is, you could check out my budget video on how to supplement these things, and even if you don't have a quality fat, you can still make up for the lack of nutrients by possibly consuming more things like organ meats, shellfish are super nutrient dense, especially oysters, eggs, even though eggs can be high omega-6 if they're fed corn and soy, you really want to make the best of it. You want to get an ideal amount of nutrients while minimizing omega-6. Maybe you have to consume some low-quality eggs to make that happen, but you want to make it happen. You know, if you only have access to grain-fed conventional liver, getting vitamin A from that grain-fed liver is better than not getting it at all. That's something very important to keep in mind. The order of satiety determines how much food you should be eating. Your body craves three things, nutrients, protein, and fat. If you have adequate nutrients, say you eat plenty of liver, if you have adequate fat, say you eat plenty of raw butter, and you have adequate protein, your body will not be hungry. So, the way I implement the order of satiety is when I sit down, I'll eat some liver till I don't want it anymore, I'll eat some quality fat till I don't want it anymore, then I will move on to protein. Until you fix all of these nutrient deficiencies and get adequate fat in your diet, your appetite will not be fixed. If you have appetite problems, if you can't lose weight, if you're running into issues, if you're eating too much, you have to fix something here. 100%, and the order of satiety is a way to do that. If you're craving a certain food, generally it's your body telling you that you need something. So, whether you want to gain weight or lose weight, your body composition will improve drastically on this diet. You will lose fat and gain muscle like no other diet. If you want to gain weight, I suggest you incorporate resistance training, aka weightlifting. If you want to lose weight, I suggest you incorporate resistance training, aka weightlifting. Regardless of whether you want to gain or lose weight on this diet, the routine will be relatively similar. I would say if you want to lose weight, after you fix your nutrient stores, maybe do something like intermittent fasting or have one meal later in the day. And if you're trying to gain weight, maybe eat one large meal in the morning and one large meal at night. Before you guys jump into a carnivore diet, definitely check out some of my Day of Eating videos, as well as my supermarket video, where I went into a supermarket and basically said, okay, this is how you do this with foods that everyone has access to for the most part. I also have a video last week how to add fat. Honestly, guys, if you spend a couple hours watching my YouTube videos, you will get a pretty good understanding of all of these principles and how to apply them to a carnivore diet. If you would like to read a book, The Fat of the Land, by William Stephenson, is about an arctic explorer. And if you read the first half of that book, that will give you a pretty good understanding of what you should be doing. RealMilk.com is a great resource for sourcing raw dairy. And if you guys would like to support me, as well as buy some high-quality animal products, you can check out FrankiesFreeRangeMe.com. Within a month or two, I will be selling literally every single thing you need to adhere to a carnivore diet, whether it's nutrients, whether it's fat, protein, fish, eggs, raw dairy. Guys, we are looking to do a lot of things with FrankiesFreeRangeMe, even non-perishable travel foods. We ship internationally. So if you guys want to see what high-quality, nutrient-dense foods we have available and learn more about our mission and what we are looking to do in the future, go to FrankiesFreeRangeMe.com. Thank you guys for joining me today. This video was way longer than I wanted it to be, but unfortunately, I had to cover this much information to give people a baseline. I do offer private one-on-one consultations. If you guys would like to reach out to my email, frankatufano at gmail.com. Outside of that, if you guys can please like, subscribe, hit that bell icon. It's right next to the subscribe button and share the video if you can. You guys enjoy the rest of the week.