More Tales from Carnivore History: the All-Meat Diet and Diabetes
We know a well-formulated ketogenic diet can put type 2 diabetes into remission. Can carnivore cure it?
Let’s start with a case study.
This one dates to the 19th Century, to May 3, 1870, when a 65-year-old priest, Nicola Cardinale, first visited the renowned Italian physician Arnaldo Cantani at his clinic at the University of Naples. Cardinale presented at the clinic with the classic symptoms of the disease—unquenchable thirst, profuse urination (technically polyuria), and considerable weight loss. He also had sugar in his urine, which in that era was the gold standard for diagnosing the disease. Cardinale had been experiencing his symptoms for two years.
Today, we’d assume Cardinale had type 2 diabetes and that he was losing weight because his pancreas had exhausted its ability to secrete insulin.
Cantani’s therapy was an all-meat diet—in a word, carnivore, albeit with 5 grams a day of lactic acid that Cantani prescribed to help with digestion. Cardinale had started the diet two months before he came to the clinic, but “not,” so Cantani believed, “with the necessary rigor.” As an in-patient in Cantani’s clinic, Cardinale could be “subject to the full rigor of the treatment.” Once he was, Cantani reported, his symptoms improved rapidly, but the sugar in his urine persisted.
While trying to understand why, Cantani and his colleagues remembered “that the patient was a priest,” which meant he was continuing to celebrate Mass.
It was clearly seen that the single wafer and that sip of wine, which at the beginning we did not think about because we did not even know he said Mass, were capable of maintaining these small quantities of sugar in the urine: certainly every trace of sugar completely disappeared after he renounced the Mass…
Cantani’s takeaway: dietary therapy for diabetes must “rigorously push the exclusion of every crumb of carbohydrate,” if they expected to cure the disease in advanced cases. If they could accomplish that rigid exclusion, as they eventually did with Cardinale, they could cure the patient. Not put the disease into remission, but cure him.
And by using the word cure, Cantani very clearly defined what he meant: The symptoms of diabetes remain absent and the urine sugar-free, even as these formerly symptomatic patients transition to a more moderate diet, to once again eating plant-based foods, grains, starches, legumes, and even sweets (albeit not to excess, not to the point of abuse, a concept we’ll have to discuss).
By October 1874, when Cantani did the final tally of his clinical experience, he had personally seen over 150 cases of diabetes, an enormous number for an era when diabetes in most regions was still a vanishingly rare disease. Cardinale had been Cantani’s case number 3. He would be one of 73, almost half of all Cantani’s diabetic patients, whom Cantani believed to have been cured by the carnivore diet.
So the obvious question(s): Is it possible that he was right? Did he cure diabetes with a carnivore diet? Could we?
At the time, still half a century before the discovery of insulin, such a claim could be taken at face value. Today, it teeters on the brink of unbelievable.
Skepticism is certainly in order (as it always is), but the possibility is worth discussion. Cantani was clearly a thoughtful physician and a good scientist. His obituaries in the British medical journals freely used the word “brilliant” to describe him, or at least his career. Meanwhile, no clinical trials have been published testing the safety and efficacy of carnivore diets as a diabetes therapy, and clinicaltrials.gov, the repository of trials planned or in progress, suggests none are in the works. So we can’t reject the possibility out of hand.
Let’s put Cantani’s experience in the necessary context, discuss his thinking and his clinical experience, and see where we stand.
