Nutritionists say a balanced diet is key to living a long and healthy life, but this American family have been eating nothing but red meat for almost two decades, and they’ve never felt better. Scoop has more:
It all began when Joe Anderson experimented with high protein diets in the mid 1990s. And when his wife Charlene was diagnosed with Lyme disease in 1998, the only food she could consume without having severe reactions was red meat. “This blew us away: fatty red meat, the very thing that had been demonized by the entire health community was giving her strength,” Joe said in a recent interview with a popular zero-carb diet website. When they first turned to a zero carb lifestyle, Joe said that they included non-meat foods such as eggs, cheese and whey.
They also ate various types of meat like fish, bacon, chicken and lamb. But they slowly began to notice that they never felt as good with other meats as they did with beef. “The more we ate beef, the less we desired other meats,” Joe explained. “I noticed that eggs and dairy gave me puffy eyes, frequent headaches and a stuffy nose.” They also stopped consuming animal organs because of how “inflamed” they felt the next morning.
Today, Joe, 57, Charlene, 42, along with their kids Charlie, 10 and George, 8, have only one large meal every night, consisting of beef – preferably the rib-eye cut. They ask their butcher for untrimmed rib-eye, which has so much fat that they don’t need to add additional fat to cook it. Joe eats about two to three pounds of beef, while Charlene and the boys stick to one or two pounds. “We all eat until we’re stuffed.