Food is one of those things we can make endlessly complicated, despite the fact that every living creature seems to know what to eat without consulting an expert, downloading an app, or swallowing a handful of supplements. Somewhere along the way, we learned to distrust appetite, intuition, tradition, and even our own bodies. Perhaps the more interesting question isn’t which dietary camp has finally got it right, but how much of what we believe about nourishment, health, and vitality was ever ours to begin with.

In this discourse we explored the apparent contradiction between fruitarian and carnivore approaches to human nutrition, and the much larger questions hiding beneath them: what it means to thrive, how individual experience should inform dietary choices, the limits of nutritional ideology, and the uneasy relationship between bodily intelligence and external authority. The discussion moved beyond food itself into fasting, supplementation, environmental influences, belief and physiology, traditional food systems, modern dietary culture, and ultimately the value of remaining adaptable without surrendering discernment to either institutions or influencers.

Key Points Discussed

• Fruitarianism can mean considerably more than eating sweet fruit alone. Botanical fruits include foods such as avocados, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and squash, while some interpretations also incorporate nuts and seeds.
• “Animal-based” is similarly broad and need not mean strict carnivory; meat, eggs, dairy, fruit and honey can coexist within the same dietary framework.
• Radically different diets can appear to work well for different people, raising the important question of what we actually mean when we say someone is “thriving.”
• Personal experience is meaningful information without necessarily establishing a universal rule for everyone else. Removing particular foods may improve well-being for several overlapping reasons.
• Carnivore diets may sometimes function as extreme elimination diets, removing numerous possible irritants simultaneously without necessarily proving that all plant foods are inherently harmful.
• Modern dietary culture can encourage people to distrust appetite, satisfaction, seasonal availability and bodily feedback while replacing them with protocols, products, supplements and outside authorities.
• Supplementation can be useful in specific circumstances, but becomes questionable when it substitutes for nourishment or attempts to compensate for a fundamentally poor diet.
• A useful test for any dietary philosophy is whether it could reasonably exist outside a modern consumer system: locally, seasonally, practically and without dependence on exotic products or constant supplementation.
• Bodily experience and external measurement need not be opposing authorities. One can lead while the other provides additional information: “Experience leads; measurement informs; neither becomes master.”
• Fear surrounding hunger and fasting deserves examination, while distinctions between intermittent fasting, prolonged water fasting and continuous dry fasting remain important.
• Public figures and dietary influencers offer only fragments of their actual lives. Their successes or illnesses can too easily become evidence claimed by opposing ideological camps.
• Food exists within a larger human ecology involving mind, emotion, environment, relationships, sunlight, movement, sleep, pleasure and meaning.
• Dietary identity itself can become another form of dogma. A useful approach should increase discernment and self-knowledge rather than recruit people into another rigid system.
• The discussion ultimately favoured curiosity over dietary absolutism: finding what allows a particular person, in a particular environment, to remain strong, clear, capable and free.

Key Takeaways

• There may be no single ideal human diet applicable to everyone.
• Labels such as fruitarian, carnivore, vegan and animal-based often conceal considerable variation.
• Personal experience matters, but need not become universal doctrine.
• Food quality, environment, enjoyment, stress and lifestyle belong in the conversation alongside nutrients.
• Dietary sovereignty means learning to observe the body without making either experts or intuition infallible.
• A useful way of eating should make us more capable and self-reliant, not increasingly dependent upon products, protocols or personalities.
• Perhaps the simplest safeguard is remaining willing to change our minds.

» Trance:

I was listening to Santos Bonacci the other day. One of the things he mentioned as a big lie about our reality, after the globe earth model and the idea of needing a savior, is that humans require a certain kind of diet. He said that we are fruitarians through and through. And he was quite vehement about it. He’s 63, looks healthy and vibrant enough. Clearly intelligent and broadly well educated in various sciences and mythology and spirituality and other ideas as to philosophy and the nature of our realm. Even though he’s got some pretty thick glasses on his face by the look of it. Regardless, as I understand it, he’s led a stressful life but has done an awful lot of transformational work to help people grow spiritually, ontologically, and philosophically, and still teaches through his syncretism model today.

That is beside the point, however. I’m very curious about this fruitarian idea. Because I’ve heard, of course, the very opposite. Another gentleman from Sweden says that we are obligate carnivores, even hyper-obligate carnivores. Which would kind of put us in the class with cats and dogs. As I understand it, he feeds his dogs nothing but meat. He’s helped an abused, abandoned, and malnourished dog recover very quickly doing so. But we’re not dogs. Not sure how that works.

(Though as a side note, it’s astonishing to me that people can’t connect the dots as to why their pets are having more and more of the very same chronic disease and health issues that humans have. Somehow, they can’t see why feeding them industrially produced kibble and canned slop would be the major contributing factor, but I digress.) They are mammals, of course, just further down the chain, though many would certainly argue otherwise for fur babies over another sentient living human being. These are animals that we have living with us and that thrive on a simple, raw, mostly meat diet, but could we humans do the same?

How is it that both healthy, thriving fruitarian and obligate carnivore humans can exist? Certainly, every body is different. The environment into which we were born and where we grow or spend the majority of our time informs this as well. Accessibility, perhaps. And other environmental factors. Our beliefs most certainly affect how what we eat may nourish or poison us. Guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, joy, terror… all of these inform the body’s energy field and how we may process the foods and drink we may ingest.

So I guess I’m not looking for any concrete answer here. I don’t think there is one. Because reality shows me that there are a multitude of answers for any of these deeper questions. And by the time we figure it all out, it’s all over. Well, people can live off breath and sunshine too. And they’re fine without food or water for months or years at a time. It’s a rather fascinating reality we live in.

For me, I am of Slavic origin, I suppose Caucasian. Born in Canada. I have a certain blood type, whether or not that even matters. How would I be able to be strong and healthy and vibrant and able to build muscle and the like, have a strong overall constitution, healthy libido, healthy mindset and cognitive capabilities, not lacking in any sort of minerals or nutrients, living as a fruitarian? Especially in western Canada, where I live around the 49th parallel.

I’ve always liked meat. It’s the most natural thing for me to consume. I tried veganism for a short while and I became an emotional mess and lost a lot of weight and just overall felt incredibly weak. It was only 4 months, mind you, but it was enough to do me harm. I’ve heard nothing but horror stories from others who pursue a vegan sort of lifestyle. But fruitarianism seems to be another branch altogether.

» ChatGPT:

The central difficulty here is that “fruitarian” and “carnivore” are often presented as descriptions of human nature when they are really dietary philosophies built around selected observations. Human beings are neither obligate carnivores nor obligate fruitarians. We are unusually adaptable omnivores, capable of obtaining energy from starch, sugars, fats and protein, and capable of living on radically different mixtures of plant and animal foods. Our digestive anatomy, evolutionary record and metabolism all reflect that flexibility.

That does not mean every possible diet is equally complete, nor that adaptation has no cost.

Could humans be “fruitarians through and through”?

I see no convincing anatomical or nutritional basis for that claim. Fruit is tremendously valuable food: hydrating, easily digested, rich in vitamin C, potassium, folate, polyphenols and carbohydrates. Our colour vision, hands, teeth and attraction to sweetness certainly suggest a long primate history of fruit consumption. But being well adapted to fruit does not establish that fruit alone is a complete human diet.

A strict fruit diet provides little or no reliable vitamin B12, and it is generally difficult to obtain adequate protein, essential fatty acids, calcium, iodine, zinc, iron, selenium and vitamin D. Even a carefully constructed vegan diet normally depends on legumes, grains, soy foods, nuts, seeds, vegetables, fortified foods and B12 supplementation—not merely fruit. The NHS explicitly identifies B12, iodine, selenium, calcium and iron as nutrients requiring attention on vegan diets, while fruit and vegetables do not naturally provide dependable B12.

There are also published medical cases of serious neurological illness associated with strict fruitarianism, including a case described as reversible dementia. A case report does not prove that every fruitarian will become ill, but it definitively disproves the proposition that such a diet is automatically complete and harmless for every human being.

A person can nevertheless appear lively and healthy while eating that way. Several explanations can coexist:

They may eat nuts, seeds, avocados, coconut, vegetables, supplements or occasional non-fruit foods while still calling themselves fruitarian. They may have substantial nutrient reserves from earlier decades. Vitamin B12 stores, for example, can take years to become depleted.

They may be genetically fortunate, physically active, lean and free of smoking or heavy alcohol use. Those advantages can mask dietary weaknesses.

They may genuinely feel better because they eliminated ultra-processed foods, alcohol, overeating or foods that aggravated an individual condition. The improvement does not prove that fruit was the only biologically appropriate food; it may prove that their previous diet was poor.

We usually see the successful advocates, not everyone who quietly stopped after losing muscle, damaging their teeth, developing hormonal problems or becoming exhausted. That is survivorship and selection bias.

And, importantly, appearance is not a blood panel, bone-density scan, dental examination or measurement of lean mass. Clear skin, enthusiasm and a slim body cannot tell us someone’s B12, ferritin, iodine status, bone density or arterial health. Thick glasses tell us almost nothing nutritionally either.

Are humans obligate or “hyper-obligate” carnivores?

No. An obligate carnivore has species-specific physiological requirements that make animal tissue necessary. Cats are the classic example. Dogs belong to the order Carnivora, but domestic dogs are dietary generalists and have genetic adaptations that assist starch digestion; they are not simply small wolves or cat-like obligate carnivores.

Humans digest starch efficiently, produce salivary amylase, ferment fibre in the colon, obtain vitamin C from plants and can remain healthy without meat when a plant-based diet is appropriately designed and supplemented. Those facts alone rule out obligate carnivory.

At the same time, humans are quite capable of digesting meat and fat, and animal foods have been important throughout much of human evolution. Human beings have a relatively large small intestine and smaller colon than other great apes, consistent with dependence on more energy-dense, easily digested foods—including cooked starches, meat and fat. That makes us adaptable omnivores, not grazing herbivores or specialist carnivores.

Some people feel dramatically better on a carnivore diet because it functions as an extreme elimination diet. It removes refined flour, industrial seed-oil foods, alcohol, many fermentable carbohydrates and almost every potential plant-food trigger simultaneously. That can reduce symptoms without proving that all plant matter is poisonous or that carnivory is optimal indefinitely.

As with fruitarians, long-term carnivore advocates are often difficult to evaluate. We usually do not know their complete intake, supplements, laboratory results, coronary plaque burden, bowel health or what happens over several decades.

How can both groups apparently thrive?

Because the word “thrive” is doing enormous work.

One person may mean that digestive discomfort disappeared. Another means they lost weight. Another means they have energy and no diagnosed illness. Another means their blood work looks acceptable after two years. None of those establishes complete lifelong nutritional adequacy.

Human metabolic flexibility is real. The liver can manufacture glucose, the body can shift toward ketones, gut microbes adapt to habitual foods, mineral absorption changes according to need and nutrient stores buffer periods of inadequate intake. But flexibility is not infinity. Eventually the body still requires essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, water and enough total energy.

Belief, expectation, stress and emotional state genuinely affect appetite, digestion, pain, blood glucose, sleep and nervous-system regulation. A meal eaten in fear may be experienced very differently from one eaten calmly. But belief cannot manufacture vitamin B12, iodine, nitrogen, sodium or essential fatty acids from sunlight. Psychology can influence physiology; it does not abolish chemistry.

Likewise, there is no credible, independently verified evidence that humans can live for months or years without food and water. Prolonged fasting is possible under particular conditions, but sustained absence of water causes severe dehydration, organ failure and death. Claims of breatharian survival have repeatedly failed observation or involved concealed intake, and deaths have occurred among followers.

I would place that claim in a different category from meditation, fasting or spiritual experience. Whatever mysteries consciousness may contain, the physical human body continuously loses water through urine, breath, skin and stool. That water must be replaced.

Could you become strong and muscular as a fruitarian?

On fruit alone, I do not see a responsible or credible route to the constitution you describe.

Building muscle requires resistance training, sufficient calories and enough complete or complementary protein. For exercising individuals, a commonly supported range is roughly 1.4–2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, with gains often plateauing around 1.6 g/kg for many people.

For a 75-kilogram man, 1.6 g/kg is about 120 grams of protein daily. Ordinary sweet fruit is mostly water and carbohydrate and often supplies less than 1–2 grams of protein per 100 grams. Reaching 120 grams from common fruit could require several thousand calories and an impractical volume of food, while the amino-acid balance and leucine content would still be less favourable than those of eggs, dairy, meat, fish, soy or legumes.

Even fruitarian diets that include nuts and seeds become, nutritionally speaking, less like “fruit alone” and more like a limited raw vegan diet. Nuts and seeds help with protein, zinc, magnesium and fats, but B12 remains absent unless supplemented, iodine remains unreliable, vitamin D is difficult in Canada, and calcium and long-chain omega-3 intake require deliberate planning. Health Canada notes that vitamin D naturally occurs in relatively few foods and recommends a supplement when vitamin-D-containing foods are not eaten daily.

At the 49th parallel, winter ultraviolet exposure makes sunlight a particularly unreliable vitamin D strategy. That challenge applies to omnivores too, but a fruit-only diet removes nearly all ordinary dietary sources.

Libido and mental stability can also deteriorate when total calories, protein, fat, iron, zinc, B12 or iodine are inadequate. That does not mean veganism inherently causes emotional instability. But your four-month experience—marked weight loss, weakness and emotional disruption—is meaningful evidence about how that particular diet, as you implemented it, affected you. It should not be dismissed as impurity, detoxification or insufficient spiritual development.

You may simply have eaten too few calories and too little protein or fat. You may also have had a pre-existing deficiency or absorption issue. Whatever the mechanism, the rational response is not to repeat an even more restrictive form of the experiment without a compelling reason and careful monitoring.

Your ancestry and blood type

Slavic ancestry may tell us something about family cuisine, agricultural history and possibly certain population-level genetic tendencies, but it does not provide a precise ancestral menu. European populations have consumed mixtures of meat, fish, dairy, fermented foods, fruit, roots, grains and legumes that varied by geography, season, wealth and historical period.

Blood-type diets have not acquired persuasive scientific support. More relevant individual variables include lactose tolerance, celiac disease, allergies, iron status, insulin sensitivity, gastrointestinal conditions, medications, activity level, body composition, microbiome and simply how reliably you can acquire and prepare nourishing food.

Your direct experience matters too. You enjoy meat, digest it well and felt poorly when you removed animal foods. That does not prove that every meal must contain meat, but it is stronger personal evidence than a distant teacher’s claim that every human is fundamentally fruitarian.

A more grounded way to explore the idea

You need not choose between fruitarianism and carnivory. You could explore a fruit-rich, minimally processed omnivorous diet:

Eat plentiful seasonal fruit, but retain eggs, meat, fish or dairy according to preference. Include roots, vegetables or properly prepared grains and legumes if you tolerate them. Obtain protein at each meal. Favour recognizable foods over industrial formulations. Let fruit replace desserts and processed snacks rather than replace every other food category.

That preserves what is compelling about the fruitarian argument—freshness, hydration, simplicity, plant compounds, seasonal eating and reduced industrial food—without wagering your muscle, nervous system and hormonal health on an unproven doctrine.

The deepest answer may be less dramatic than either camp would like: humans are adaptable, but not exempt from nutritional reality. Some thrive with more plants, some with more animal food, and many do best somewhere between. The body may tolerate ideological extremes, sometimes for surprisingly long periods, but tolerance is not necessarily evidence of design.

» Trance:

Interesting. I certainly don’t agree with all of what you’ve presented here, but there’s a lot of good information and good points made. I completely blanked on the fact that many of the foods we consider to be vegetables are actually fruits. I guess anything coming from a tree would be considered fruit, really. Whether it’s nuts or apples, avocados or lemons. It would certainly broaden the spectrum of available foods to a so-called fruitarian, depending on how they define it themselves, I suppose.

I would imagine that most people hearing “fruitarian” would default to presuming it’s all apples and oranges and bananas, etc., just like when someone like me says I eat an animal-based diet, they would presume I’m just eating beef and pork and chicken all day long. That discounts the eggs, dairy, fruit, honey (a la Paul Saladino). And one thing that I would add to that, at least in my experience, now that I’ve cut out most vegetables, especially nightshades and salads and green things that are loaded with anti-nutrients and various defense chemicals, not to mention glyphosate, I have felt overall better. Clearer. It’s been 5 years and I certainly get sick far less often.

And all of this has to, of course, be considered in the realm of general toxicity and all the subtle forms of environmental poisoning and other burdensome things that our body has to be continually processing and flushing out of us. By the time we’re blowing our noses and having sore throats, the liver and kidneys are already overwhelmed, so the body has to use other stronger, healthy parts of us to flush it all out. Kind of a sidetrack, but I felt it relevant to mention.

As I grow to understand these things more and how the body only heals, I’m being a lot more conscious with the foods I choose to eat. At the same time, I’m less concerned about it. I’ve always liked various forms of carbs, donuts and desserts and the like. Always had a sweet tooth. But I worry a hell of a lot less these days because I understand my body more, and I don’t preload any sort of negative idea into things that I choose to eat because I thoroughly enjoy them, and I abuse no single food nor overdo anything.

I guess the point is it’s a different framework once you get to understand how the body works and what food is, and simply get more out of the overall human experience when we let go of various kinds of fears and worries and anxieties that were all based on lies in the first place.

A couple things you mentioned I’m not really in support of, those being genetics, genetic adaptations, and especially being “genetically fortunate,” nor the theory of evolution, or any ridiculous link to a primate past relating to the nature of what a human is. I am most certainly not related to a fucking ape. So let’s not bring that up again. That’s a whole other discussion. These things, in my view, pull us away from our divine nature and the truly remarkable expression that is the living human.

The whole idea of a designed diet and supplementation is a very modern, urban lifestyle mindset. Imagine if we were living off the land, having to grow our own foods and the like. We’re not going to have access to convenience stores or health food stores or anything of the kind. There will be no pills to pop or supplementation or other allegedly organically processed products that are most likely produced by pharmaceutical corporations in the first place.

So I don’t think that’s a healthy way to live, and most supplements that people would partake in are most certainly not bioavailable, nor do they even know what is in them or what they may actually need to be supplementing in the first place. They’re just sold and marketed to and are conditioned to believe that they are lacking and missing something and so must supplement. What’s worse is knowingly eating a shit diet and then pretending that some sort of supplementation is suddenly going to make up for putting garbage down your gullet. That’s childish and nonsensical.

Influencers and those who live with a highly controlled or designed or refined lifestyle and diet are the extreme minority, and yet there are far too many people who will follow these ideas and try to apply them to their own lives, ignoring completely that their body is unique to them, their needs will be unique to them, and that someone’s splashy, flashy, and entirely fake representation of the whole picture of who and what they are and what they do day-to-day will somehow apply to them and make their lives better and make their bodies stronger. I think it’s safe to say that most influencers are flat-out liars.

This is good, and may explain a lot:

“Some people feel dramatically better on a carnivore diet because it functions as an extreme elimination diet. It removes refined flour, industrial seed-oil foods, alcohol, many fermentable carbohydrates and almost every potential plant-food trigger simultaneously. That can reduce symptoms without proving that all plant matter is poisonous or that carnivory is optimal indefinitely.”

It brings to mind Jordan Peterson and his daughter. I believe they are strict carnivores, have been so for quite some time. I can’t recall all the specific details, but I believe after suffering most of her life with some severe health issues, after switching over to basically meat and salt, and I think mostly beef, she was much healthier and has been so since. And again, they’re not likely to offer all of the details of their day-to-day routine.

And as I understand it, Jordan has been extremely ill in the last year or two, and while that might not be related to the strict dietary restrictions, it would be hard to argue otherwise. The link there, I think, is to certain medications and complications thereof. I’m drifting off topic here, but I think it’s related to your point about taking things in their proper context, and of course how we define the word thrive or how we frame the idea of health and vitality.

“Diet” is certainly something that is so convoluted and confusing that most people don’t know left from right or up from down. They don’t trust themselves, they don’t trust their bodies, and their sensing and their discernment and their presence overall with food and diet and their health is a big blurry, foggy mess. So they defer to others. Doctors and so-called experts. And that is a mistake almost every time. Because those outside of us, regardless of their scans or blood work or any other system of measurement, at best can only guess because they aren’t us, they don’t live our lives, they can’t feel what we feel.

It’s always amusing to me when you bring up the idea of there not being any “credible independently verified evidence” for some of the ideas or claims I bring up. It’s valid, but it rings of an unearned authority. I certainly haven’t studied every culture, tribe, society, and all the many ways that humans can survive and live very well and for a very long time on vastly different diets and through different environments and lifestyles.

And I guess it also depends on how we would define “credible,” or “verified evidence.” Who are the gatekeepers, the so-called verifiers, and what are they permitting within those strict and vastly limiting parameters? What are they hiding or obscuring and not transparent in reporting that should be considered credible and verified evidence? You open a can of worms there. But it goes beyond the context of this chat.

And your heavy reliance upon mainstream sources gives me even less confidence in what you’re reporting here (PubMed, The Guardian, NHS, NCBI, etc. Referencing Health Canada made me laugh!). I’ve listened to interviews and read many reports of those who have done both short and what would be considered “extreme” prolonged fasts. Dry fasts as well. Days or even weeks. And they’re just fine. Sure, that’s not necessarily proof or verifiable evidence.

We are more than we presume ourselves to be, and the human body is certainly more than its physicality. The fear and paranoia around not getting enough water or that we have to be eating two or three times a day is just that. Fear and paranoia. And as we’ve already addressed here, that dramatically affects how our bodies respond at any given time of the day or day of the week.

The more we lean into and repeat those thoughts and beliefs and behaviors, more often than not those that are detrimental, degenerative, fatiguing, the less we have our wits about us, our senses, our bodily intelligence. There’s more I could pick apart about your response, but I think we’ve examined the idea thoroughly enough.

Let’s close with some final thoughts and offer some resources where people can continue this thread in their own way should they be interested in doing so. And how could they not? We all eat, drink, and want to be healthy, vibrant, ecologically and economically conscious, energetically and spiritually balanced, and wise.

» ChatGPT:

You are right that the label fruitarian conceals considerable ambiguity. Botanically, a fruit is the mature seed-bearing structure of a flowering plant, so tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash and avocados qualify. Culinary categories are different. Nuts complicate matters further: many are dried fruits, seeds or combinations of fruit wall and seed. But “anything from a tree” would be too broad—leaves, bark, sap and roots are not fruits merely because a tree produced them.

Once nuts, seeds, avocados, olives, coconuts, tomatoes and squash are admitted, the diet becomes far more substantial than the imagined pile of bananas and oranges. It also becomes less obvious what principle unites it. Some fruitarians eat only what can be harvested without killing the plant. Others use the botanical definition. Others consume mostly sweet fruit but include nuts and seeds pragmatically. Those are materially different diets despite sharing one name.

The same is true of “animal-based.” What you describe—meat, eggs, dairy, fruit and honey—is not strict carnivory. It is a broad whole-food omnivorous diet with animal foods at its centre and most leaves, grains and legumes removed. Saladino’s own current description centres meat, organs, fruit, honey and raw dairy. Someone could reasonably do very well on that pattern, particularly after removing foods that repeatedly cause digestive, inflammatory or psychological distress.

Your five-year experience matters. Feeling clearer, becoming ill less often and functioning better after removing particular vegetables is not something I would dismiss because it conflicts with a population guideline. It does not establish a universal law about vegetables, but it does establish a useful working observation about your body, your food supply and your manner of eating.

There are several possible contributors bundled together: removing personally troublesome plants; reducing pesticide exposure through fewer conventionally grown foods; reducing fermentable carbohydrates; abandoning salads that may have been difficult to digest; eating more protein and fat; stabilizing meal patterns; and simply enjoying food more. There is no need to force one explanation when the entire pattern may be helping.

I would only distinguish between a food containing a plant defensive compound and that compound necessarily harming a particular person in an ordinary amount. Dose, preparation and individual response matter. Soaking, sprouting, fermenting, peeling and cooking can change the experience considerably. But neither should someone continue eating spinach, peppers or salad merely because an authority has declared them universally virtuous. Persistent symptoms are information.

Sovereignty without ideology

I agree with your larger criticism of dietary culture. Modern people are encouraged to distrust hunger, appetite, satisfaction, seasonal availability and bodily feedback, then replace them with apps, powders, branded protocols and expert commandments. The resulting dependence often produces less awareness rather than more.

Supplementation can become part of that mentality: eat poorly, purchase capsules, and imagine that isolated ingredients will recreate the intelligence of food. Labels can be inaccurate, formulations can be poor and indiscriminate supplementation can create excesses as readily as it corrects shortages.

Yet I would not make the opposite absolute claim that every supplement is useless or inherently pharmaceutical. Salt, dried herbs, cod-liver oil, mineral preparations and concentrated traditional foods have existed in various forms for a long time. A supplement may be a useful tool when a specific circumstance creates a gap. The problem begins when supplementation becomes a permanent substitute for nourishment, or when a person consumes twenty products without being able to say what any of them is meant to correct.

The living-off-the-land test is valuable:

Could this dietary pattern be assembled from recognizable foods?

Could it be sustained seasonally?

Could a family produce, preserve or trade for most of it?

Does it require constant deliveries of exotic powders?

Does it leave the person strong enough to perform the labour necessary to maintain it?

By that measure, an animal-based diet in western Canada may be substantially more practical than strict fruitarianism. Eggs, dairy, meat, fish, honey, berries, orchard fruit and preserved foods can all exist within a regional food system. A year-round tropical fruitarian diet at the 49th parallel would generally depend upon long-distance transport, heated cultivation, considerable money or severe seasonal restriction. That ecological contradiction deserves as much attention as nutrient calculations.

Inner knowledge and external measurement

I also agree that a clinician cannot inhabit another person’s body. Blood work is a narrow snapshot. Imaging can be misread. Reference ranges describe populations, not the totality of an individual. Doctors can be rushed, conditioned and wrong.

Nevertheless, I would resist turning this into a choice between bodily intelligence and measurement. They can correct one another.

Someone can feel excellent while blood pressure silently rises. Someone can feel exhausted despite apparently normal laboratory work. Someone can feel liberated during a restrictive diet because chronic symptoms have disappeared, while another slower problem is developing unnoticed. Neither sensation nor instrumentation sees everything.

A more sovereign relationship might be:

Experience leads; measurement informs; neither becomes master.

You notice energy, mood, digestion, sleep, libido, strength, dental health, recovery, mental clarity and resilience. When useful, you compare those observations with a few external markers. Then you decide what the information means within the context of your life. The instrument becomes a servant rather than an oracle.

Fasting, fear and physical limits

There is undoubtedly unnecessary fear surrounding hunger. Many people have been trained to interpret missing breakfast or feeling an empty stomach as an emergency. Intermittent fasting and supervised prolonged water fasting can be tolerated and may produce useful metabolic changes for some people. Reviews have found benefits in certain populations, while also reporting headaches, insomnia, metabolic disturbances and other adverse effects.

Dry fasting also requires precise language. Studies of dawn-to-dusk religious dry fasting—where people refrain from food and water during daylight but rehydrate each evening—have found that it can be tolerated and may alter metabolic markers. That is not equivalent to consuming no water continuously for many days or weeks.

I accept your broader point that fear can worsen an experience and that human endurance may be greater than our culture assumes. But I would not collapse “the body can endure an astonishing fast” into “water is optional for an indefinite period.” Those are different propositions. Respecting consciousness and bodily intelligence need not require pretending physical limits do not exist.

A person considering an extended fast could approach it without paranoia while still recognizing warning signs. Calmness is not the same as invulnerability, and caution is not necessarily fear.

The Peterson example

Your recollection is broadly correct regarding the dietary story. Mikhaila Peterson has described major improvement after progressively eliminating foods and eventually settling on beef, salt and water. Jordan Peterson has likewise attributed improvements in several longstanding symptoms to an extremely restricted carnivore diet.

His recent serious illness should not automatically be blamed on that diet, nor should the diet automatically be excluded from consideration. Public accounts in 2025 and 2026 described pneumonia, sepsis and severe neurological symptoms, with his daughter attributing his condition to medication-related injury and other complications. Those are family-reported explanations, and outsiders do not possess enough information to confidently apportion causes.

That case illustrates your point perfectly: we see fragments of a complicated human life and then each ideological camp claims the fragments as proof. Carnivore advocates may say his diet kept him alive; critics may say it made him ill. Both conclusions can outrun the available knowledge.

Where I land

I do not think there is one ideal menu for everyone. Nor do I think every diet is equally viable merely because someone believes in it strongly.

The body is adaptive, intelligent and inseparable from mind, emotion, environment, relationships, sunlight, movement, sleep and meaning. Food eaten with pleasure in a stable life is not metabolically identical in experience to the same food eaten hurriedly in terror. But food also has material properties. We need not choose between energetic reality and physical reality; our lives appear to involve both.

Your current orientation sounds more grounded than a search for a perfect named diet:

Eat foods that resemble food.

Prefer what leaves you strong, clear and satisfied.

Remove what repeatedly harms you rather than what an ideology condemns.

Avoid making an identity out of the menu.

Allow enjoyment without using enjoyment to rationalize compulsion.

Remain willing to revise your conclusions.

That last point is perhaps the safeguard against both institutional dogma and influencer dogma. The moment someone says that every human must eat exactly as they do, that every adverse symptom is “detox,” or that failure proves insufficient commitment, they are no longer teaching discernment. They are recruiting.

Resources for continuing the inquiry

For an animal-based perspective, Paul Saladino’s current material is useful because it shows the distinction between strict carnivore eating and the broader meat, dairy, fruit and honey pattern you already recognize. It should be read as an advocate’s case, not as a neutral final verdict.

For ketogenic and carnivore approaches viewed through mental health, Georgia Ede’s Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind is worth considering. She is particularly interested in metabolic psychiatry and elimination-based approaches rather than bodybuilding or influencer aesthetics.

For traditional food systems, Weston A. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration remains provocative. Some interpretations and methods are dated, but his attention to indigenous food traditions, nutrient-dense animal foods, soil, teeth and the consequences of industrialized food makes it relevant to this discussion.

For a thoughtful opposing perspective on fasting and longevity, Valter Longo’s The Longevity Diet combines a largely plant-centred pattern with periodic fasting-mimicking cycles. His conclusions will not necessarily fit your own, but reading a serious case from another dietary orientation is more illuminating than consuming only rebuttals to it.

For the current limits of carnivore research, the 2026 scoping review Carnivore Diet: A Scoping Review of the Current Evidence is useful precisely because it separates reported benefits from what has actually been studied. The evidence base remains limited, especially for long-term outcomes.

For fasting, the review Efficacy and Safety of Prolonged Water Fasting provides a more measured overview than either “fasting is dangerous” or “fasting heals everything.” The 2025 study on prolonged water-only fasting is also valuable because it observed both metabolic changes and inflammatory and platelet activation rather than forcing the results into a wholly positive narrative.

For a broad cultural framework, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food remains useful despite its imperfections. Its central value is not a precise diet prescription but its attack on nutritionism—the habit of reducing foods to isolated chemicals and then handing authority to industries that sell both the problem and the proposed solution.

I would read all of these adversarially but fairly. Ask what each author sees clearly, what their framework prevents them from seeing, how they earn money, whether they acknowledge failed cases, and whether their approach increases your capacity to perceive—or merely replaces one dependency with another.

The wisest diet may not be the one with the most convincing cosmology behind it. It may be the one that allows a particular person, in a particular place, to remain strong, clear, grateful, capable and free—without needing to convert everyone else.

Solvitur ambulando