MANY OF THE videos on Isabella Ma’s TikTok page feature the same approximate thumbnail: a grinning Ma, with razor-sharp cheekbones, stick-straight black hair, and flawlessly appointed eyebrows, her mouth wide open, poised to take a bite out of a giant stick of butter, as if it were a freshly peeled banana. Sometimes, she’ll be poised over a giant bowl of ground beef, or a baking sheet covered in ribs. But the butter is the star of the show.

“People want to see me eat butter,” she tells Rolling Stone. “When I take a bite out of that stick of butter people will just go so crazy. I think it’s because nobody really does that. It’s the first time they’ve seen a girl eat butter before.”

Ma, who goes by the apt handle SteakAndButterGal on social media, is one of a rapidly growing cohort of female influencers embracing what is known as the carnivore diet. Generally summarized as a high-fat, high-protein diet, carnivorism encompasses a pretty wide spectrum: some will primarily eat meat but will supplement with other foods, while others, like Ma, stick to animal-based products, and will abstain from other foods in general.

On social media, the carnivore diet is rapidly growing in popularity: there are more than 111,000 videos with the #carnivore hashtag on TikTok alone, over the past year, searches for the term have increased by 79 percent, peaking at almost 200,000 searches between Dec. 2023 and Jan. 2024, according to Google data. Influencers like Ma claim that the carnivore diet has helped improve their skin, their mental wellness, and their gut issues; there are even those in the community, she says, who claim it has helped them cure cancer. (There is little evidence to suggest this is true.)

In the past, the carnivore diet has primarily been promoted by male, largely conservative figures, such as the influencers Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. One of the chief proponents has been Paul Saladino, otherwise known as Carnivore MD, an influencer with more than two million followers who has advocated for an animal-based diet (and recently went viral for advocating against the use of toilet paper after pooping).

Recently, however, the pendulum has swung slightly, with many female influencers promoting the diet. One such influencer, Ashley English, a former model who says she struggled with an eating disorder before adopting a high-protein, high-fat diet, went viral with a February 2024 TikTok titled “What I Eat In a Day as a girl who eats raw meat,” showing off her breakfast (orange slices, smoked oysters, raw milk, and a raw ribeye) and dinner (more raw ribeye, with sauerkraut, chimichurri, bone marrow, and gruyere), mixed in with shots of her sun-drenched face and her enjoying a juicy kiwi in a garden. (English did not respond to a request for comment, though as many commenters on her video note, consuming raw meat and raw milk significantly increase the risk of contracting food-borne illnesses.)

With interest in the diet increasing, the trend of female carnivores has had the effect of universalizing its appeal. The fact that many of these influencers are beautiful, slender young women does not hurt. “I totally get the whole thing of, ‘Wow, a fit, pretty woman [is] eating these shockingly large, strange ingredients,’” says Ma, who within the past year has almost doubled her subscriber base, from 123,000 in March 2023 to 243,000 in March 2024, according to data from the analytics app SocialBlade. “It’s going to catch people’s eye.”

While male carnivore influencers tend to focus on getting “ripped” and maximizing their masculinity, the trend is very different among female influencers, with them primarily focusing on weight loss, skin conditions, and autoimmune disorders, says Derek Beres, cohost of the Conspirituality podcast and coauthor of Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. “What I see almost across the board with the female carnivore influencers is this sense that the Western diet is toxic, Western medicine is toxic, and we have found something that will bring you true health,” he explains, noting that much of this may stem from a longstanding tradition of medical sexism and women’s justifiable mistrust of Western practitioners.

The medical experts who spoke to Rolling Stone, however, are highly skeptical of the carnivore diet, claiming that the majority of research shows increased consumption of red meat can lead to cardiovascular issues, as well as an increased risk of certain types of cancer, and that any individual benefits influencers cite might be misleading.

“It’s not something that I would recommend to any of my patients,” says Dr. Rabia Delatour, assistant professor of medicine and gastroenterologist at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “We have robust data proving the diet that is the best for her health and longevity is the Mediterranean diet, which is all about balance — having a healthy amount of protein, less fats and less carbohydrates, with less pressure to eat one food in excess.”

Isabella Ma showing off a healthy serving of meat. COURTESY OF STEAK AND BUTTER GAL

On the surface, influencers’ accounts of how the carnivore diet has changed their lives sound incredibly appealing. Ma spent six years as a vegan prior to switching to the carnivore diet, learning about it on YouTube while studying piano performance at Juilliard in New York City. “It was really stressful, and I started feeling a negative impact on my mental health, on my ability to focus and practice for long hours, and my skin was getting worse,” she recalls. “So I started searching what happens if vegans aren’t really healing, or if they’re not feeling good. And these videos popped up of vegans not only eating meat again, but specifically, vegans going directly into carnivore.”