#48 Eating an ALL MEAT Carnivore Diet with Amber O'Hearn

Amber O'Hearn (0:00)

You might think that herbivores are getting most of their calories from carbohydrates, but it turns out that they're eating fiber which no mammal can digest, and they're letting the microbes in their colon turn that fiber into fat. So even herbivores have a high-fat diet. The only stuff that goes to the colon to rot is actually fiber, because we literally can't digest it, and we literally need bacteria to digest it, and that's what rotting means. Humans are unique among species in being able to become ketogenic without caloric restriction. You look outside your window, how many of those plants out there can you eat? None of them, probably, right? But we had a few that we found that didn't kill us, and we bred them extensively. But even those ones have some level of toxicity, it's just low enough that we can tolerate it.

SPEAKER_2 (0:53)

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Siim Land (1:01)

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Siim Land (1:06)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest is Amber O'Hearn. She has a master's degree in computer science from the University of Toronto. She's the founder of leastauthority.com and ketotic.org.

Her research includes experiments with ketogenic diets, and she follows an all-meat-based carnivore diet. Amber, I'm glad that you could make it to the show, and I'm very excited for you to have her here.

Amber O'Hearn (1:33)

Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here.

Siim Land (1:35)

You eat a diet that's based on mostly animal products. Can we maybe start off, why did you get started with something like that?

Amber O'Hearn (1:44)

Sure. Yeah, it's not just based on meat. It's essentially only meat. I do drink coffee, and I've been known to have maybe a bite of cocoa or a pickle here and there, but that's very rare. I essentially eat only meat.

I started on a more regular kind of low carb diet, and I did that for 12 years before moving to this kind of diet, which I've been doing for about 9 years now. So I have a lot of experience with a low carb diet that has vegetables in it, and maybe a little bit of fruit.

And I found a lot of benefits for me personally in removing all those plants and just sticking to meat.

Siim Land (2:26)

So did you have like any health issues or the weight issues that made you convert over to like a whole zero carb diet?

Amber O'Hearn (2:35)

Yes. So initially when I took on a low carb diet, I had been having weight issues and the low carb diet resolved all of those for me, I was in my 20s. But then over time, I had had a couple of pregnancies where I didn't lose all the weight even on a low carb diet. And then I started even gaining more. And so I was very frustrated because I had been researching about low carb diets for a long time. They had already worked for me and I knew a lot of the science behind it being healthy. And I couldn't figure out why the diet that I knew should be working wasn't working for me.

And so at a certain point, I just got so frustrated.

I saw some people online who were talking about going to a completely carnivorous diet. And I thought, well, I could try that for a little while and maybe that will help and then I can go back to the way I used to eat.

So that's why I tried it. I had other health problems, but I didn't have any idea that they had a dietary connection. I had had depression for a long time. Ever since I was 20, probably it started before. And what happened was when I tried this all-meat diet, all of my depression symptoms went away. And at first I thought maybe it was a coincidence and I didn't know if it was going to stay. But as I continued the all-meat diet, my problems with depression never came back. So that's why I've continued all this time.

Siim Land (4:00)

Yeah, it's like very interesting that a lot of people who tend to suffer from this kind of chronic inflammation, symptoms and depression and anxiety and things like that, most of it has to do with the nutrition aspect. And as they maybe go through many of these elimination diets, they end up with only an all-meat diet. And that's the only thing that's going to make them feel better. So I feel like that's what happened to you as well.