hen Melody first scrolled across TikToks from influencers promoting an only-meat diet, she remembers thinking to herself: These people are out of their minds. The videos of people eating huge quantities of steak straight off the cutting board — sometimes still bloody rare — had initially seemed “insane.” But as this kind of content kept reappearing on her “For You” page, she grew curious. “People were claiming to be able to heal their gut, clear up their skin, and improve their energy — just from eating meat,” says the 36-year-old from Toronto. Though these claims aren’t backed by any scientific research, Melody says “it felt like it was worth a shot.”
So last October, Melody began a “carnivore diet,” consisting solely of meat, seafood, eggs, and dairy. After the first six months, she introduced some herbs from her garden and avocado into her daily meal plan. “I don’t crave vegetables,” she says of her current diet, “so I just don’t have them.” Despite the expert warnings that this eating regimen is in fact not healthy, Melody claims that she has seen improvements in her energy levels, her eczema has cleared up, and she’s feeling more full — or, as she puts it, “I no longer get hangry.”
Melody started a TikTok account to document her journey, from how she handles social gatherings on an all-meat diet to “what I eat in a day as a carnivore.” In just six months, she’s gained 34,500 followers. This month, Melody posted a video announcing her plans to restrict her diet even further, by undertaking the “beef, butter, and tallow challenge,” consuming just these three types of foods for 30 days. “I have autoimmune healing to do and I’m optimistic this will nourish me on the path to healing,” she wrote in the caption.
Until recently, “meatfluencing” has been thought of as a decidedly male corner of the internet. All-meat diets have been promoted by the likes of Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and Jordan Peterson. One of the most famous meatfluencers, Liver King, has amassed over 6 million followers on TikTok for promoting an “ancestral” masculine lifestyle and advocating for the consumption of raw meat, a diet criticized by experts as dangerous. These men have helped fuel the popularity of all-meat-eating regimens within the manosphere where a push to eat more meat is bound up with climate denialism and a view of vegetarianism as literally and metaphorically feminizing (see the soyboy panic).
But Bella Ma, a 27-year-old meatfluencer in Seattle with 319,000 YouTube subscribers who posts under the moniker Steak and Butter Gal, says it’s a “misconception” to think of this community as mostly men. “If you really look deeper, it’s predominantly women. Around 60 percent of my followers are women. I’m a female content creator, so I think naturally I’ll have more women. But looking at the community in general, there are tons of women thriving on this lifestyle.”
Ma describes herself as a “high-fat” carnivore: For the past nearly six years, she claims to have consumed a diet of just fatty beef, butter, eggs, and seafood. In her videos, Ma is typically seen chomping on sticks of butter as a snack, hunks of steak, or eating a dozen eggs in one sitting. She claims similar improvements in her health to Melody while also claiming that the carnivore diet has helped her sleep and given her increased “mental clarity.”
Prior to going animal-based, Ma was vegan. “I’d gained a lot of weight as a freshman,” she explains. “I did a search and saw a lot of influencers touting a diet of raw fruit and raw plants. When 4 p.m. hits, you eat whatever cooked carbs — like starches, rice, oatmeal. They were saying it’s excellent for losing weight.” Ma claims this particular vegan diet “wrecked” her metabolism, “tanked” her hormones, and left her feeling more hungry compared to how she now feels on a carnivore diet.
Similarly, Melody was vegetarian for two years prior to following an all-meat diet. In one TikTok, Melody stitches a “before” video of herself, with the caption “From vegetarian, oatmilk and celery juice >>>” with an “after” video of herself filming the mirror, captioned “rare steak, eggs and butter.” “My health suffered because of [being vegetarian],” she says. “Now that I’m out the other end, and I’m thriving, I can see through all the smoke and mirrors.”
Of course, Lauren McNeill, a plant-based dietician and author of The Simple Vegan Kitchen, sees things differently. McNeill stresses that there is no evidence to support the claim that a carnivore diet is good for our health. There is, however, ample evidence showing the benefits of a plant-based diet for supporting health, including a lower risk of developing coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes, and increased longevity.
(Also, there’s the devastating impact that eating meat has on the environment. Meat consumption is responsible for between 11 and 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and is a constant drain on the planet’s water and land reserves.)
As McNeill sees it, it’s unsurprising that people like Ma might have struggled to achieve a balanced diet while vegan. “If people are following vegetarian or vegan diets, they naturally might be eating fewer calories than someone who is eating an omnivorous diet, because those plant-based foods are naturally lower in calories,” she says. However, the solution to this isn’t to up our meat intake, McNeill says, but to consume larger portions of plant-based food.
McNeill dismisses the claim often made by meatfluencers that an all-meat diet is the key to “healing the gut.” “When we’re following the carnivore diet, we’re really limiting that diversity that we’re feeding our gut microbiome, and that can lead to a whole host of negative effects,” she says. “So things like constipation, bloating, and stomach upset, then just increasing risk for other diseases as well. If we’re having a lot of saturated fat in our diet and not a lot of other types of fiber-rich foods, we increase the risk of bad cholesterol levels, which can lead to cardiovascular disease and increased risk of all-cause mortality.”
While Melody and Ma are planning to stick to an all-meat diet long term, others are adopting a different approach. The “carnivore challenge” or “carnivore 30” has emerged as a popular trend on TikTok and sees people undertaking the carnivore diet usually for a month.
Alexandra Kay, a 35-year-old lifestyle influencer, says she went on the carnivore diet to address her low energy, low mood, cellulite, and thinning hair among other symptoms she was experiencing. Initially, Kay had planned to do the diet for 14 days, explaining her reasons for going on the carnivore diet in a video hashtagged “two-week transformation.” She decided to extend it to 30 days after she’d completed the first two weeks. “I’m doing these 30 days to heal and to get answers,” she says. “I believe mind and body are connected [and] I’m excited to keep going to see if this is helpful for my physical and mental journey.”
Kay believes that taking this more moderate approach will allow her to work out if the carnivore diet is right for her. “There is definitely a learning curve to making sure this diet fits your lifestyle,” she says. “But I’m open to seeing what happens.” When we next speak, Kay’s 30-day trial is over, and she says the carnivore diet helped her to lose weight (seven pounds in total) and that she received comments from her followers about her face looking less inflamed. “I now want to see if this can be a sustainable lifestyle for me,” she says.
Of course, not everyone is reporting positive outcomes from the carnivore diet. Last October, Aylene Tocher had been talking to a friend about suffering from irritable bowel syndrome and feeling generally “exhausted and bloated a lot.” Her friend recommended that she try the carnivore diet, having been on it herself for about a year.
Tocher, 27, took her friend’s advice and began to eat a diet of just meat, eggs, dairy, and fish. Within a few weeks, she says, she lost seven pounds. “At first it wasn’t so bad, but as the months went on, everything made me bloat and gassy,” she says. “I had a loss of appetite, stomach cramps, nausea, and headaches. I even gained all the weight back that I had lost and then some extra weight on top of that. I felt truly awful.”
The symptoms Tocher experienced from the carnivore diet aren’t surprising. Higher meat intake has been linked to headaches — a.k.a. a “hot-dog headache” — upset stomach, nausea, and weight gain. Research has also shown that diets that are higher in animal products can result in worse menstrual pain — another side effect Tocher says she experienced while being on the carnivore diet. After six months of eating just meat, Tocher decided to reintroduce vegetables. “Once I started adding back in broccoli, onions, radishes, and zucchini, I felt way better,” she says.
While most meatfluencers claim they want to help their followers reap the so-called benefits of an animal-based diet, a good chunk of the content does appear to be produced for rage-bait views. A recent viral TikTok by Ma, claiming that she no longer needs to wear sunscreen because she’s replaced all seed oil with animal fats, was flooded with comments berating her for spreading misinformation. Meatfluencers have also spread conspiratorial thinking, such as dismissing the link between eating meat and cancer.
Education surrounding nutrition is sorely lacking, which partly explains why meatfluencers have been able to plug the gaps with misinformation. Similarly, McNeill sees the rise of the carnivore diet as linked to a frustration with the health-care system. “It makes people tend to want to go in the complete opposite direction or to see things in black and white. But there’s a lot of value in the gray area,” she says. “You can eat a nutritious diet without having to go to one extreme or the other.”
Tocher says she still enjoys the staple meal of her carnivore diet — ground beef and scrambled eggs — but now realizes this more extreme approach is not for her. However, meatfluencers like Melody insist that being carnivore isn’t about restriction, rather following what feels good. In a video responding to a TikTok user’s comment asking whether she ever has “cheat days,” Melody says that she simply doesn’t crave bread, crackers, or cookies anymore. “If you want to have something off plan, then just do it,” she says. “Just be prepared for the consequences, that’s all.”
