“I just want to thank you for staying wild… You’re a falconer… I just think it’s so cool to have someone who walks with nature.”
That was Dr. Paul Saladino—better known as Carnivore MD—marveling at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a recent interview posted to his massive social following. Traditionally, interviews with the Secretary of Health and Human Services center on topics like cancer research or Medicaid policy.
But in this one, hosted by the shirt-averse Saladino, the conversation covered nutrient-dense eating, swimming in Costa Rican rivers, and “talking to God or the universe.”
To many Americans, the idea of a presidential contender and health official legitimizing someone like Carnivore MD borders on heresy. An uppercut to Western medicine and a stab in the back to the “scientific consensus.”
Rest assured, eyes rolled and expletives flew among the upper ranks of the American Heart Association and the professors at Harvard’s nutrition school as they heard the two men did raw milk shooters in the White House.
Wild times.
How did we get here? How did shirtless influencers wind up at the table with our top health officials?
To make sense of this surreal moment, we have to look back at how America screwed up nutrition. Once you understand the decades of dietary deception we’ve endured, the rise of the carnivores doesn’t just make sense. It was inevitable.
American scientists made major strides in the 20th century by curing communicable diseases through vaccines and antibiotics, while also pioneering life-saving procedures like the Cesarean section and appendectomy.
Life expectancy shot up 30 years. “No previous era saw such an acceleration of understanding,” said Nobel-winning immunologist Sir Peter Medawar. But as medicine zeroed in on acute care—curing infections, performing surgeries—it lost the plot on chronic disease.
Industrialization waltzed into the kitchen, boxed up dinner, and sold America the future: shelf-stable, industrialized food for every home. Goodbye butter. Hello margarine.
Food got weird. And so too did our health. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity became as American as Lady Liberty.
And it’s not that health officials ignored food. Far from it. The mid-century was the definitive era for nutritional science. But the institutions studying food approached it like they did acute medicine: one cause, one cure.
Enter Ancel Keys and his infamous diet-heart hypothesis: one villain (saturated fat), one biomarker (LDL cholesterol), one disease (heart attacks), and one pharmaceutical fix (statins).
Meanwhile, voices warning that chronic disease stemmed from broader lifestyle dysfunction—smoking, poor sleep, chronic stress, processed foods, sedentary habits—were sidelined or silenced. Red meat and whole milk, staples that had nourished humans for millennia, were suddenly cast as dietary villains. And while ancestral foods were vilified, the Food Pyramid told Americans to eat up to eleven servings of carbohydrates a day—lumping quinoa and Twinkies into the same blessed category.
Today, 40% of American adults are obese.
For those of us in the health world, reversing this mess felt borderline fatalistic. The “fat is bad” narrative had too much momentum, and the dangers of new foods were downplayed. It felt like the only people standing up to Big Food—and exposing the government’s role in jacking up how we eat—were conservative homeschool moms and socialists.
Mainstream advice—like the media’s obsession with the Mediterranean Diet—wasn’t moving mountains. “Healthy” came to mean bland, boring, and easy to mock.
Yes, there were doctors like Mark Hyman and journalists like Nina Teicholz offering thoughtful critiques against the prevailing nutrition model. But thoughtfulness isn’t exactly trending in today’s rhetorical landscape. What we lacked were voices that could cut through the noise and reach the average American.
Then came the carnivores.
When I first heard Paul Saladino—a former vegan turned carnivore apologist—in 2020, I was floored. His all-red-meat protocol took nutritional orthodoxy to the woodshed. It was brash. Unapologetic. He wasn’t just a fan of red meat and skeptical of vegetables. This was war. Kale was “bull***t”
It felt… sacrilegious. Why can’t we all just focus on corn syrup and artificial dyes? I remember venting to my like-minded health friends. But while many of us in the health world were either dismissing or recoiling from Saladino’s radical take, a quiet food revolution was beginning. And he was leading it.
Saladino harnessed the power of the algorithm, understanding it blesses a spectacle. And he played this game brilliantly. A ripped, shirtless doctor telling you to eat raw beef liver? Hard to beat. But it wasn’t just shock value. What Saladino was presenting struck a nerve with people who were overwhelmed, confused, careless, or mad about the American food system.
Guys my age—the kind who usually couldn’t care less about food quality—were suddenly concerned whether their beef was grass-fed or corn-fed. And then came the tidal wave of transformation stories: people losing hundreds of pounds, reversing autoimmune issues, getting off medications—all by going carnivore.
His following exploded. And so did the conversation around real food. The sensationalism was a catalyst for a national awakening I never thought I’d see. The general public had begun to see that wonderful foods like butter aren’t the problem.
Now, Saladino’s own nutritional worldview has evolved. He’s moved from preaching an all-meat carnivore gospel to something that not only includes raw honey, fresh fruit, and single-origin coffee, but something altogether bigger than a diet. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a culture. A new (or perhaps very old) way of living that emphasizes not just real food, but real life: hanging up and hanging out, earthing, sunlight, knowing your rancher, and swapping Lululemon for organic cotton.
Is the carnivore diet the singular way, the truth, and the life? I don’t think so. But through his twenty-first century hunter-gatherer pageantry, Saladino has pushed the conversation toward real food and real living more effectively than almost anyone else.
Many Americans are fascinated by the vision, if not convinced. Discerning this, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has astutely welcomed Saladino—and his legion of followers—into the conversation.
Of course, there are detractors—the critics dismayed by the bravado of it all. But as someone who was once among them, I’ve come to see that the rise of the carnivores wasn’t just inevitable. It was necessary.
The rise of the 'carnivore' was needed and has created a change in eating that was definitely required for the health of people. Is it the magic bullet that everyone needs? Probably not, but it does remove those ultra processed foods that are creating a health crisis..I highly recommend it in many versions. The main takeway is to find something that is sustainable for your lifestyle for the long term positive health benefits.
Paul helped me realize a lot of nutritional errors, lobby for a statue of him in DC while you're out there with the bureaucrats