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Is Honey Carnivore? Debate - MD Berry vs Saladino

3d 16h ago by hackertalks.com/u/jet in carnivore@discuss.online from www.youtube.com

In this extended, respectful discussion, Dr Paul Saladino & Dr Ken Berry discuss the Carnivore Diet and whether fruit & honey fit into a carnivore diet. Dr Saladino & I agree that meat/eggs should make up the majority of a Proper Human Diet, but we disagree on a few of the details...

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Core diet and labs

  • Berry eats mostly beef and eggs, with purposeful seafood and occasional pork or chicken.
  • Saladino's animal-based diet includes fruit and raw honey, high activity, and very low linoleic acid.
  • Berry's prior labs were fasting insulin around 2, C-peptide around 3, A1C around 5.3-5.4, LDL-C 250, total cholesterol 350, and HDL plus triglycerides in the high 60s.
  • Saladino's recent labs were fasting insulin around 2.9-3, LDL around 170 after an earlier 500 spike when honey returned, HDL around 65-70, and triglycerides around 75.
  • The core metabolic panel is A1C, C-peptide, fasting insulin, triglycerides, HDL, and waist-to-height ratio; fasting insulin below 5 is the working goal.

LDL, satiety, and calorie restriction

  • High LDL alone is not the decisive marker; low triglycerides, high HDL, insulin sensitivity, and waist-to-height ratio supply the practical context.
  • Calorie restriction fails because it asks mammals to stop eating before satiety; adequate protein and fat keep insulin low and make stored fat accessible.
  • Healthy fat is structural material for membranes, hormones, myelin, and repair, not just fuel; protein also builds and repairs tissue.
  • Weight loss means loss of excess stored fat, not loss of bone, muscle, connective tissue, tendons, cartilage, or vitality.

Sugar, grains, and seed oils

  • The first dietary steps are no added sugar, no naturally occurring sugar for many people, no grains, and no vegetable seed oils.
  • Seed-oil research is muddy because industry funding can bury unfavorable studies and publish favorable fragments.
  • Older human randomized trials replacing animal fat with corn oil are used as evidence that plant oils performed worse than animal fats.
  • Linoleic acid and its downstream endocannabinoid products, including AEA and 2-AG, are tied to hunger and fat-tissue dysfunction in the seed-oil model.

Carbohydrates, fruit, and honey

  • Carbohydrates do not create diabetes by themselves; they can fuel existing insulin resistance, while seed oils drive deeper adipose and mitochondrial dysfunction.
  • Fruit and honey are the least toxic carbohydrate sources, especially beside processed grains, breakfast cereals, juice, and high-fructose corn syrup.
  • Berry places most people between zero and 100 total grams of carbohydrate per day; Saladino's surfing, leanness, and muscle mass let him handle roughly 200-300 grams from fruit and honey.
  • People who are overfat, under-muscled, diabetic, or insulin resistant should not copy Saladino's carbohydrate intake.

Evolution, fruit, and honey

  • Tropical and equatorial food environments contain sweet fruit through the year, and Hadza experience shows honey can be easy to find and heavily valued.
  • Berry's counterpoint is that modern fruit has been selected for sweetness, many ancestral groups lack the old megafauna context, and current foragers live in constrained environments.
  • The Hadza food-ranking work placed honey as the favorite food and tubers as the least preferred fallback food.
  • Honey quality matters: raw, unfiltered, unheated, carefully stored honey differs from pasteurized or light-exposed honey.

Study disputes inserted after recording

  • The honey-versus-sucrose/HFCS study used Dutch Gold honey, which was not raw, and included glucose-tolerant participants with average fasting insulin around 8.6.
  • The fruit-rich NAFLD study grouped colored fruits, dried fruits, and "other fruits," which makes the food exposure unclear.
  • The processed-fructose versus moderate-natural-fructose trial is used as a counterexample where fruit in a calorie-restricted context performed well.

Seafood, ruminants, and animal quality

  • Ruminants are the cleanest animal foods because a multi-chamber stomach turns species-appropriate grass into high-quality fat and protein.
  • Seafood can fit some ancestries and environments, but heavy metals, microplastics, PFAS, and predator-fish bioaccumulation limit a seafood-dominant diet today.
  • Clean animal food means animals eating their species-appropriate diet, especially grass-fed ruminants from good land.

Personal testing and practical reset

  • The safest experiment with fruit and honey is 90 days with labs before and after: fasting insulin, triglycerides, HDL, A1C, C-peptide, waist-to-height ratio, testosterone, free testosterone, total testosterone, and SHBG.
  • People should track subjective response too: weight, sleep, cramps, libido, performance, and energy.
  • A fruit-and-honey animal-based trial can move glucose, insulin, triglycerides, A1C, and waist measures the wrong way, but it is less risky than experimenting with pea protein, soybeans, wheat, or plant oils.

Organs and basic principles

  • Organs are historically valued, and liver remains important because muscle meat and fat alone may leave low folate, high homocysteine, and hidden riboflavin concerns.
  • Eggs contain many building blocks, but they are not a full replacement for organ meat.
  • The simple base is no sugar, no grain, no vegetable seed oils, mostly ruminant meat, enough animal fat, butter if desired, occasional pork or chicken, and optional tested personalization.

References

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Fruit and Honey do not fit into zero-carb eating, even if some people wish they did.

You can reasonably say they are paleo, and lots of people can tolerate them well. But if you find yourself eating 350g of honey a day because it's "carnivore"...... you have to admit you are an addict.

I admit lots of zero-carb carnivores have coffee/tea (myself included) : so you have to pick what is working for you, and for many people coffee is well tolerated.

Adding carbs back into the diet, even paleo carbs, will drive hunger and cravings. One Zero-Carb I don't have any cravings and food noise. I don't want to give that up

Don’t eat honey if you have any consideration for carbs. Don’t even think about word honey, honey.