The year on meat alone

In 1928 an Arctic explorer named Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who'd lived for years among the Inuit eating nothing but meat and fat and claimed to have thrived, agreed to prove it under supervision. He and a companion checked into Bellevue Hospital in New York and ate only meat for a full year, monitored by physicians. They stayed healthy. The study was published, and it sat as a curiosity for ninety years until the carnivore diet revived it online in the 2010s: meat, organs, eggs and fat, nothing else, with beef as the staple.

I'll give you the honest picture, because this one needs it. Carnivore works for some people as an elimination diet: when every plant food is removed, people with certain digestive and autoimmune troubles sometimes feel dramatically better, and that tells them something useful about what they're reacting to. The long-term evidence for healthy people is nearly nonexistent, the online community has made claims far beyond anything tested, and the diet removes fiber, most vitamins C and K, and nearly every food that long-lived populations eat. Stefansson's year was two men, not a trial.

Vault Human holds it as a tool, not a way of life: a short, supervised elimination for someone with a specific problem, done with a physician, to learn something. Not a lifestyle.

Here's what I'd take from it for the Meaning chamber's table. Stefansson's story is really about trust in direct experience over received wisdom. He ate the way the Inuit ate and watched what happened to his own body. That's the Charvaka rule from day one hundred, pointed at a plate. The lesson isn't to eat only meat. It's to notice how you actually feel after what you actually eat.