The carnivore diet is the ultimate elimination diet — you eat only natural animal-based products, and remove anything that irritates your gut or causes inflammation in the body.
Because of the restrictive nature of the diet, it doesn’t include any junk sports supplement products with brightly colored labels and processed ingredients.
However, the reality is that the food we consume today is not as nutrient-dense as the food our ancestors ate due to modern agriculture, so there are some gaps to fill in even a perfect carnivore diet to achieve optimal health. Coupled with the fact that transitioning to a carnivore diet after years of eating grains and vegetables creates some side effects, there are some supplements that we do recommend.
Here are our favorite natural carnivore diet supplements. Remember, no supplement replaces real food, but these will make the diet easier if you’re new, and help improve your results.
To reap the full benefits of the carnivore lifestyle, your diet should be “nose to tail.” That means eating all parts of the animal — even the organs. Most people don’t like cooking and preparing offal, so the easiest way to get all the benefits is in the form of a pill.
Companies like Ancestral Supplements and Heart & Soil Supplements make a variety of different organ meat supplements, containing only desiccated (i.e., dried) meat from grass-fed cattle that preserves all the nutrients of the fresh organs.
We recommend starting with Ancestral Supplements Beef Organs. It contains liver, heart, kidney, spleen, and pancreas, which is everything you need for the ultimate carnivore multivitamin.
Electrolytes — No More Carnivore Side Effects
When you start eating only meat, you’ll likely experience some carnivore diet side effects, such as headache, diarrhea, and even heart palpitations. The cause of these is usually the same — dehydration and lack of electrolytes.
Reducing carbs means less glucose in your body, and less insulin being produced. This affects your electrolyte balance and your body loses sodium, causing what many people call “keto flu.”
In short, you can make your transition to the carnivore diet a lot easier by taking electrolytes. We also recommend them for anyone following the carnivore diet who does a lot of exercise.
Ox Bile — Digest Fat Easier
Switching to a high-fat carnivore diet takes your gut time to get used to. Many people used to eating a diet based around carbs experience digestion issues and bloating when they start eating only meat.
To help this, you basically need to strengthen your gallbladder and produce more bile to digest all that fat.
The first thing people probably asked you when you started eating only meat was “aren’t you going to get scurvy?”
Of course, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and the carnivore diet is perfectly safe. However, most of the sources of vitamin C in this diet are organ meats like beef liver. Therefore, if you’re eating mostly steaks and muscle meat (or cheaper grain-fed meat that has fewer nutrients), you might not be getting as much vitamin C as you need.
One option is to take a vitamin C supplement, and another is to transition to a carnivore diet with fruit or an ancestral diet once your body has experienced the healing effects of the carnivore diet.
The reason it’s on this list though is because collagen is also good for your gut microbiome, and can help heal “leaky gut.” This is a condition where your gut allows more particles than usual to enter your bloodstream, such as toxins and undigested food, causing an immune response and inflammation.
The carnivore diet is good for inflammation because it doesn’t contain any gut-irritating foods, allowing your gut to heal. You can speed up this process by supplementing collagen. Think of it as a long-term strategy — by healing your gut early, you’ll absorb more nutrients from food and see the benefits of the carnivore diet sooner.
Stearic Acid — Get 6-Pack Abs
The last supplement on the list is an unusual choice, but if you’re doing the carnivore diet for weight loss or body composition, it might be the best thing you can take to get results. When people find they’re not losing weight on the carnivore diet, it might be because they’re not eating enough fat and have the wrong carnivore diet macros.
Stearic acid is a long-chain fatty acid found in animal fats that has been shown to help reduce abdominal fat. The best place to get it is fatty cuts of meat, or cooking with animal fat instead of oil.
To give yourself an energy boost and really see the fat-burning benefits, we recommend a supplement that contains beef suet, like Heart & Soil’s Firestarter.
Alternatives to Carnivore Supplements
Although the supplements on this list are safe and effective, you might prefer to eat more of specific foods to get similar effects.
Sea Salt
Ideal to replenish your sodium levels, and a good alternative to taking electrolytes. The best salt for the carnivore diet is Redmond Sea Salt.
Beef liver Crisps
A good middle-ground between taking a beef liver supplement and eating fresh or raw beef liver. Many companies make beef liver crisps that are essentially like beef jerky, but more nutritious. The liver taste is still there, but more subtle.
Bone Broth
We recommend making your own carnivore diet bone broth, but if you don’t want to cook or keep all the ingredients on hand, you can buy ready-made bone broth from lots of companies.
Beef Tallow and Suet
It’s a good idea to cook using healthy animal fat, but if you really want to, you can add some tallow or suet to your diet on their own to get the benefits of stearic acid.
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