Intro

Day 1 of this strange adventure. For at least the next year – and probably longer – I plan to live on meat alone. Well, a variety of animal products, really: meat, butter, eggs, cheese, and occasionally heavy cream. Some pure dried spices too, in moderation, but no vegetables, no fruits, and definitely no grains.


Why in the world would you do this to yourself? Won't you die of scurvy?

In short, I'm doing this because I have Crohn's disease. The idea of living entirely on meat may seem strange, but no, I won't die of scurvy. Or any vitamin deficiency disease, for that matter. Usually people associate "good vitamin source" with vegetables, but meat actually contains all the vitamins you need. When you think that a cow needed those vitamins too, it kind of makes sense. Between fish and beef, you can also get all of the essential (not made by the body) amino acids and lipids.

To explain a bit more: I'm not the first person to try this. Life Without Bread (amazon link: Life Without Bread: How a Low-Carbohydrate Diet Can Save Your Life) summarises Vilhjalmur Stefansson's 11 years with the Inuit's, a people who traditionally ate nothing but meat for 6 to 9 months of the year. To loosely quote from his reports, vegetation was what you ate when nothing else was available. When he returned to the states, he and a fellow explorer agreed to prove a 100% meat diet possible by living under observation for a year while they ate only meat. The two men completed the year in perfect health (1). As a side note, when Stefansson resumed a traditional Western diet, he noticed a marked decline in health. He soon returned to an all-meat diet, and lived that way for the rest of his life (2).


That's cool, but why should that make a difference with Crohn's?

There are a lot of new theories about what causes Crohn's, including that it's an overgrowth of bacteria in the intestines. Your body creates an immune response to the bacteria, and your own tissues become collateral damage. If you take away their food source – sugars – you kill the bacteria (bacteria can't perform beta-oxidation, so they can't live off of fat).


So what made you think of this?

Actually, I didn't. Recently, a blogger successfully did exactly what I'm going to attempt: In an attempt to put his Crohns into remission, he went an entire year eating nothing but meat, eggs, heavy cream, and lactose-free milk. I highly suggest reading his blog (Crohn's Carnivore).


Here goes day 1!


References
(1) McClellan, Walter S., and Eugene F. Du Bois. "The Effects on Human Beings of a Twelve Months' Exclusive Meat Diet." Journal of the American Medical Association (1930): 651-68. www.jbc.org. Web (PDF). .

(2) Allan, Christian B., and Wolfgang Lutz. Life Without Bread: How a Low-Carbohydrate Diet Can Save Your Life. Los Angeles, CA: Keats, 2000. Print.