Keto & Carnivore Have a Toxic Influencer Problem

The extremism taints all of us and is harming people's mental health — not exactly what we should be aiming for.

A growing number of highly influential carnivore diet proponents have begun to add plant foods back into their diets, and some well-known keto influencers have reintroduced more carbohydrates into their diets. This is a good thing, in my opinion, but it led to an interesting interaction with a client recently, and that interaction is what inspired this post. When my call with her ended, I was fired up with an energizing mix of rage, exasperation, and passion, and was tempted to go live on YouTube immediately, while my emotions were still running high. The better angels of my nature won out and I told myself to give it some time and see if this felt less urgent after I cooled down a bit. I’ve considered scrapping this post and a forthcoming video about this altogether, but there’s a little voice in my head telling me that someone out there, and more likely a lot of people, need this.

So here goes.

As I opened with, a growing number of highly influential keto and carnivore diet proponents are adding starches and plants, respectively, back into their diets. I applaud them for recognizing that their way of eating was no longer delivering the benefits they had experienced earlier on, and that perhaps it would be worth experimenting with reintroducing foods they had avoided for years. It takes courage to do this, particularly when your “brand,” your livelihood—and maybe even a large part of your very identity—seem inseparable from your chosen diet.

The problem is, these people didn’t just “avoid” these foods. They shunned them. They banished them to the furthest reaches of hell. They branded them, at best, as simply unnecessary for human survival, and at worst, as poisonous. Damn near deadly.

They made you think you were an idiot for spending money on them. A while back it was pretty standard for some of the carnivores to say—pejoratively—that lettuce is crunchy water. And don’t even think about eating raw spinach—crunchy water with oxalates! (*Gasp!*) The only thing worse than that is a handful of almonds: oxalates and phytic acid! You might as well go suck on your car’s tailpipe and inhale a nice, deep blast of carbon monoxide.^¹

They convinced many of their followers that everyone should avoid these foods. They made people afraid of food. They made people think they were inviting certain death and destruction if the slightest broccoli floret accidentally made its way onto their plate.

I repeat: they made people afraid of food.

The extremism among some very popular carnivore and keto influencers has tainted the entire community with the stench of lunacy.

There’s Enough Responsibility to Go Around

Now, we could argue that people watching videos, listening to podcasts, or reading blogs, should not assume that personalized advice is being given. Unless the host or author explicitly says something to the effect of, “I am telling YOU what to do,” then anyone watching or listening should not take it as a prescription intended for them, personally. Unfortunately, too often, people interpret it as exactly this. Sadly, critical thinking is on the list of endangered species skills these days. (It’s in good company, right near the top, with common sense.) So it’s not necessarily the content creator’s fault.

That being said, people whose platforms have large followings have (in my opinion, anyway) a fiduciary responsibility with regard to their followers. We could say this about any field—car repair, astronomy, quilting. Ideally, influencers provide sensible advice and tell the truth. But this responsibility may be even greater when it comes to health. When it comes to desperate people seeking answers. Vulnerable people looking for saviors. People who want easy, black-and-white answers when there might not be any.

There’s a fiduciary responsibility to not be so hyperbolic. If you have a large following, you might not like that people hang on your every word. You might not want people to do exactly the same things you do, but your followers DO listen to you. They respect you. You are a trusted authority in their eyes. This might apply to any popular influencer, but it’s even more relevant for those who are medical professionals. (Or, who, like me, are nutrition or dietetics professionals.) Having a following comes with responsibility because you know people are watching and listening. That’s the whole point of having a platform. If you didn’t want to influence people, you wouldn’t have a YouTube channel, or a podcast, or a book, or a blog. You wouldn’t be spending time creating content specifically intended to influence people! (Okay, here I’ll admit that many of the popular folks we know in the keto and carnivore communities might not intend to influence people. Their goal might be simply to educate—to provide information that the viewer, listener, or reader can do with as they please. But even though the intent might not to be influence, make no mistake, and like it or not: influence is occurring. And anyone with a platform knows it is. Plausible deniability left the room a long time ago.)

This brings me back to the client call I mentioned at the beginning of this post. This person was overwhelmed with confusion and self-doubt. She had so much fear about so many foods; her anxiety was palpable, even through Zoom. (And she’s not alone. I see this all the time.) She even expressed anger. She was angry with some of her most trusted authorities. She resented them for eating foods they had spent years convincing her were downright deadly. She felt like they had misled her—like they had betrayed her trust.

I acknowledge that this was probably taking things a little too far. (Back to that whole critical thinking thing again.) Too many people have outsourced their health and abdicated their own personal agency to the point that they’ll trust a stranger on the internet more than they trust their own body. (Even if that stranger holds an MD or a PhD, they have zero experience in what it feels like to live in your body. As I often remind people: the world’s leading expert in your body is… you.) In my client’s defense, though, she was desperate and vulnerable, and I can’t blame her for wanting doctors on YouTube to be the answers to her prayers.

Before I go any further, let me pause here to say something in case it’s not clear. Thousands of people have improved their lives immensely because of things they learned from YouTube, or a blog or podcast. Some people get better medical advice information from free videos than they’re getting from their own doctors. I am by no means disparaging or downplaying the potential for social media to truly change lives. (In a group I coach, the norm, not the exception, is that members discovered for themselves—not from their doctors—how to get their A1cs into the non-diabetic range, or how to lose 50+ pounds without white-knuckling through hunger all day.) It’s actually because social media has so much … well … influence, that people who put themselves out there as authorities should be especially careful about what they say. You can tell people that saturated fat doesn’t cause cardiovascular disease, and that the association between red meat and increased cancer risk is ridiculously weak, without making it sound like fatty beef is the only thing that’s safe for humans to eat.

I’m not angry at anyone for making a change to their diet. Like I said earlier, kudos! If someone experienced a remarkable transformation in their health by following a certain diet, and they eventually reach a point where that same diet seems to be falling short—or maybe they just want more variety and that’s all the justification they need for broadening things a bit—I celebrate them for (finally) being flexible. I applaud them for not trying to “keto harder,” “carnivore harder,” or fast for 4200 hours.

What irks me is that these people spent years demonizing foods they now consume. Relegating them to the likes of anthrax, cyanide, or a live grenade. They’ve convinced legions of followers that there’s something acutely poisonous about foods billions of healthy, lean, active, cognitively sharp people all over the world eat on a regular basis.

Again, I acknowledge that food sensitivities exist. Of course they do. Some people do need to avoid nightshades, or dairy, or gluten, or any number of other foods or food components. But I can polish off half a jar of peanut butter, whereas someone else needs to keep an epi pen handy in case they accidentally smell some peanuts. Just because some people are sensitive to certain foods doesn’t mean everyone is.² This is literally all an influencer would have to say in order to not be a grade-A zealot.

I would have no problem with the backtracking if they had simply been a little more measured over the years. If they had explained that they were eating a certain way and it was working well for them at that point in time, but that not everyone else needed to eat that way, and that they weren’t certain it would even continue to work equally well for them six months or six years in the future. They could have delivered a little more context. A little more nuance. (Ah, good ol’ context and nuance. Two more concepts on the endangered list.) They could have said, for example, what I said in my video defending vegetables: that two things can be true at the same time – a carnivore diet can radically change someone’s life … and not everyone needs carnivore. A carnivore diet can give people relief from debilitating symptoms and help put into remission multiple conditions they were plagued with for decades, and for which conventional medicine had only lackluster treatments—or no treatments at all. And still, not everyone needs to eat that way. (The same is true for keto. I’ve built my career on low-carb and keto diets, and I have zero hesitation in saying that not everyone needs keto. I’ve had several clients for whom I recommended increasing carbohydrate intake, based on their specific situation and goals. And I’ve also recommended carnivore when I thought it was best! There they go again—context and nuance rearing their pesky heads.)

These popular influencers could have provided just as much education without making thousands of people terrified of asparagus and raspberries. They could have provided just as much good, helpful, life-changing advice without making it sound like anything besides steak from a grass-finished cow is poison, and like you need a friggin’ hazmat suit to go to the grocery store.

Seriously. That’s all they would have had to do. Just not be so damn extreme and hyperbolic about it. But they weren’t. They went off the deep end, and they took a few thousand people with them.

And for all this ranting, I should probably be grateful. The worse this gets, the more people will be seeking sanity. Looking for a voice of reason and temperance. (Which is funny, because I’m a wine lover.) In fact, I coined my “Keto Without the Crazy” motto a few years ago, and I could not, in my wildest imagination, have predicted how prescient that was. The landscape was so much less insane back then, but the crazy was already brewing. (See this post for the full story on the origins of Keto Without the Crazy.)

Doing More Harm Than Good

I often say that keto (or carnivore) is supposed to improve your life, not take away from it. These diets should improve your health—and that includes your mental health. But owing to the current social media landscape, where algorithms reward sensationalism, and context doesn’t get clicks, I see some of the most prominent voices making people anxious, obsessed, and scared. What is the point of having a 4.9 A1c, or visible abs, or a 0.5 triglyceride-to-HDL ratio if you live in constant, low-level panic, convinced that food is out to get you?

Obsessively focusing on diet, particularly at the extremes, has a point of diminishing returns—and a lot of people are already there. Unfortunately, they rarely realize it until things get so bad—the fear of making a misstep, the constant doubt and second-guessing—that they have no choice but to dial things back a bit because the anxiety is crippling them.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

When I’m working with a client who radiates the palpable anxiety and food fears I mentioned earlier (and I work with a lot of them), I ask them if they know someone who eats fruit, or vegetables, or beans, or grains, or meat from CAFO animals, who is in great health. Who has good energy, is cognitively sharp, maintains a weight they’re happy with, doesn’t plan their day around their medication regimen, etc. And the answer is always yes. Always. I have yet to hear someone say no, there is no one—absolutely no one at all—in their life who eats fruit, or starches, or grain-finished meat, or any plants at all, and is in good health.

Grains are poison? Okay, but that would probably come as a shock to the 90-year old woman in Japan who’s eaten rice almost every day of her life, or the 85-year old man in Italy who eats pasta multiple times a week. Stop being so ridiculous, wouldja?

Are there people who have sensitivity reactions to gluten? Yes. Are there people who are overloaded on oxalates? Yes. Does that mean no one anywhere, ever, can consume a slice of baguette or a spinach salad with beets and goat cheese without keeling over and dying? No.

Unfortunately, the people on the “lunatic fringe,” as Robb Wolf used to call it, make us all look insane. If I specialize in low-carb and keto diets, I’m instantly categorized as “one of them.” One of the crazies. One of the nutjobs who thinks they can make themselves immortal by avoiding fill-in-x-food they’ve labeled as toxic this month. (And which they will confess to having reintroduced next year!)

An Oasis of Sanity

If you’re wondering if there’s a place for you—a place free of diet dogma, hyperbole and extremism… A place free of food policing and shaming… A place where it’s safe to ask questions and get help with keto and carnivore and also safe to talk about eating vegetables, fruit, and even starchy foods, like potatoes, beans, and – *gasp!* – even grains, then I invite you to join my Patreon. There’s a live call once a week for Q&A, help troubleshooting, encouragement, cheerleading, and a (virtual) kick in the butt when you need it.

If you’ve been looking for a soft place to land—an oasis of sanity amidst the crackpots, then the Patreon group will be a great fit. There’s no long-term commitment – you can join for a month and see if it feels right. I have reconfigured what I offer, and the new weekly calls are starting on Tuesday, January 6 at 7pm ET. The calls will be recorded and replays will be available for patrons only. See here for details. I’d love to have you there.

(N.B. This post was not an advertisement for my Patreon. I’m simply letting folks know that yes, there is a forum for people to talk about food, health, weight loss, and related topics in a sane, non-judgmental space.)

1. I am not denying that oxalate toxicity exists. But making it sound like everyone is overloaded with oxalate and that an occasional spinach salad is a kidney stone waiting to happen is exactly the kind of hyperbolic claptrap that inspired this post.

2. And just because a food contains compounds that can become problematic when consumed in large quantities over long periods of time doesn’t mean it needs to be completely eliminated from your diet. Almonds can cause issues. So maybe don’t drink a quart of almond milk in your raw spinach smoothie every day for 6 months, m’kay? But a sprinkling of toasted, sliced almonds over green beans, or a nice trout almondine once in a while? Bon appétit!