Rose Rimler

So you get ammonia built up in your body, which is toxic.

So, yeah.

So after a few days of this, the researchers eased up on Stephenson.

So adding more fat to the diet brought down the protein, just because the percentage of protein got lower, because the percentage of something else got higher.

And so he got a lot better.

And then in the end, both of these guys stayed on the diet for a full year.

If these guys were going to get scurvy, they would have got it.

Not as far as anyone could tell, which is interesting.

Well, for scurvy, so one hypothesis is that if you eat a lot of meat, you get a lot of this nutrient called carnitine.

And maybe carnitine does some of the same stuff in our bodies that vitamin C does.

And so that would mean we would need less vitamin C. That's a hypothesis.

It has not been tested as far as I can tell.

And we also know that fresh meat actually does have a bit of vitamin C in it.

In fact, studies have found that some of the traditional meat foods that are eaten up north by people native to that region, like whale skin, they're surprisingly good sources of vitamin C. But most people on the carnivore diet, I mean, including this Stephenson and Anderson, right, they weren't eating whale skin, were they?

No, they were probably eating organ meats, though, like liver, which does have a little vitamin C in it.

And it has other micronutrients like folate.

But another explanation for why these people were okay is that maybe if you don't eat any carbs at all, your body can adjust in these really interesting ways.

Like how?

So, for example, with folate, even if you are a carnivore dieter who's like, ew, I don't want to eat liver, what we have seen is that people on really low-carb diets, their gut bugs start pumping out more folate.

So in some ways, the body can kind of adjust in certain circumstances.