I use macadamia nuts to justify buying pecans and brazil nuts, still kind of pricey these days, but half as expensive as the macadamia.
My sister and brother in law have gone carnivore, after some years vegetarian, and then a few years vegan. I hadn't realized it had been that long until she posted it on facebook. Everything she posted about diet while vegetarian/vegan was about animal welfare, now that she's carnivore, it's 50/50 animal welfare through giving animals a more traditional life before harvest--grass fed, free range etc. and various posts about the health benefits of going carnivore...
Dr. Fung has an old video looking at calcium intake recommendations. There are groups that do fine on a few hundred milligrams of calcium a day, eat a couple of pounds of sirloin steak, it's not too hard to hit that. Then there's people in the states who are being urged to eat calcium daily in gram+ amounts that can scarcely be reached without resorting either to dairy, or to foods like spinach or kale that we're probably going to have poor absorption from anyways.
That same sirloin gives only 12 percent of the daily requirement for vitamin k. How was the daily requirement for vitamin k established?
Quote:
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Insufficient data were available to establish an EAR for vitamin K, so the FNB established AIs for all ages that are based on vitamin K intakes in healthy population groups [3]. Table 1 lists the current AIs for vitamin K in micrograms (mcg). The AIs for infants are based on the calculated mean vitamin K intake of healthy breastfed infants and the assumption that infants receive prophylactic vitamin K at birth as recommended by American and Canadian pediatric societies [3].
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We made it up. No differentiation is made between vitamin k1 and k2. I'm not against this, after all the way we discover deficiencies is when large groups of people started eating new diets that happen to be low in previously unknown required nutrients.
But you can see the obvious problem in claiming that a carnivorous diet must be low in a particular nutrient, when the requirement for the nutrient is made up from the average content of the nutrient in a mixed diet. We can argue that the Inuit collected lichen and berries, as if all Inuit, over the broad range of terrains they lived in, ate the exact same diet.
The argument is sometimes made that a meat based diet will give better delivery of nutrients, lower requirements for some nutrients, this is probably true. I think a stronger argument is this one, that DRI's are largely made up. For vitamin c for instance--actual established requirement is roughly 10 mg a day, not that hard to get from a carnivorous diet. This keeps getting upped, based on little more than the speculation that oxidation is a major driver of disease and aging, so more of any antioxidant must be better.
I'm not quite carnivorous, but most of my non-animal foods are things like nuts, not horribly high in vitamin c. I take vitamin c because it's included in a supposedly anti-macular degeneration formula that also includes lutein and vitamin e along with another couple of nutrients, but also because while I don't really think it's necessary on a carnivorous diet, I think the evidence that it's harmful is pretty weak, too.