If you’ve spent any time reading about health and nutrition online in the last few years, you’ve encountered this bloody and organic school of thought about healthy eating. The food’s what you might expect to find on the grocery list of an old-time strongman: eggs, organs, red meat, dairy—preferably raw—and sometimes oysters, fatty fish, fruit, honey, and sourdough. It’s not vegan in the least, but it is farmers market-adjacent. It’s also restrictive: no vegetable oils, and almost nothing from boxes. It's not yet as popular as the standard salmon-and-vegetables protocol, and it has been written up in diet books—but mostly gets publicized now through TikToks, tweets, and Instagram memes. It has also become increasingly inescapable in places where people are talking about masculinity and self-improvement, like black-iron gyms or Joe Rogan-adjacent podcasts. You could call these diets “ancestral” or “esoteric.” A unifying theme is a naive longing to return to an idealized past, so “trad” fits nicely.
The advice on how to incorporate trad food into your life can feel deranged, especially to people accustomed to hitting Sweetgreen and calling it a day. Raw liver for breakfast? Illegal dairy consumption? Handing waiters ax-grinding cards about cooking fat? The outsiders behind this nutritional movement tend to require adjustment periods. They’re also not exactly the same. Holistic accounts, like Georgie’s Gardens and Peyton Elroy, like vegetables and don’t feel out of step with what’s on Goop. Anonymous bio-maxxers, like Carnivore Aurelius and Sol Brah push holistic-trad lifestyle advice that discourages tap water, takeout, and casual sex; each sells liver supplements. Accounts like the Liver King—who took $10,000 worth of steroids a month—and Paul Saladino—”Carnivore MD”—also sell liver pills. They’re more post-paleo and promote a hunter-gatherer kind of diet. Many accounts focus on vegetable, or “seed” oils, like Seed Oil Scout, a restaurant app that maps out the places which don’t use the stuff, and Seed Oil Disrespecter, who sticks to memes.There’s a college rower who eats so much butter that he’s begun to review it; at the fringe there are posters like Raw Egg Nationalist, who mixes racism with cogent nutritional and lifting advice (and has been featured on Fox News by Tucker Carlson).
There are bad vegan jokes—too many to list; lots of these guys used to be vegan—and there are political posts, which tend to veer right of center. (Their politics, when displayed, tend to sync up with the new right described by James Pogue for Vanity Fair.) The crowd leans anti-vax. There’s not always empathy for people still figuring out how to nail down their diets. After a while, you can pick out a trad health account when you see one.
No one should be expected to gloss over some of these posters’ politics, and many specific claims about health and nutrition take the bro-science path of cut corners, motivated reasoning, and hazy correlation. But these accounts have clearly struck a nerve—and I should disclose here that I personally keep a vague version of this diet, which I began trying out after reading some books for a different story I was reporting. The main point of the trad health posters’ narrow message about food is not as extreme as the shirtless selfies and anti-sunscreen conspiracy theories suggest. As a group, they’re acknowledging, loudly, a reality that many of us tacitly know, and which the nutritional establishment more or less acknowledges: Our food system is broken and is making lots of people quite sick.
The tendency to get the big picture right (even if the details don’t always gel) is clear when considering trad health food’s biggest bogeyman, seed oils. These processed, polyunsaturated fats refined from corn, soy and other seeds were invented a century ago—Crisco came early on—as cheaper alternatives to butter and other animal fats. Over the past several decades, these oils have become very prevalent in just about all processed foods, and are used at most restaurants. While academics haven’t reached a conclusion regarding how much harm they actually cause, in the trad health space, it’s cut and dry: seed oils are poison, and very tough to avoid.
Seed Oil Disrespecter, a practicing physician in Kentucky named Brian Kerley, explained it a bit ago in a meme: 98 ears of corn go into five tablespoons of corn oil. He describes seed oils to me as “hyper-concentration of marginally edible foods,”—more than anyone can normally eat. Kerley began getting radicalized before medical school, having gone down “diet rabbit holes” after getting into paleo; he began making memes about it during his residency, in 2021, “because that's what people do.” Eating this many ears of corn a day, every day, leads to what Kerley—speaking as a doctor—calls “metabolic consequences in the long-term,” which he links to obesity and other health problems down the line. By Kerley’s definition, more than just trace amounts of a seed oil contains “too much polyunsaturated fat,” to be healthy.
Among nutritionists, the seed oil debate is less cut and dry—and not very new. (Studies on seed oils go back to at least the ‘60s.) According to Dr. Marion Nestle, emerita professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and author of a number of books on nutrition, the debate over seed oils is “an old story,” which “has to do with the structure of fat and the difference between omega 3 and omega-6 fats.”
For Nestle, the premise is more that extra large fries are to blame than the oil they’re fried in. “The food industry’s job,” Nestle says, “is to get people to eat more of whatever it is they're making. The collateral damage from that turns out to be obesity and its consequences.“
According to Nestle, there’s more food now, and it’s served in bigger portions, and it’s everywhere. It’s structural: industrialized food producers who produce most of what we eat became incentivized to super-size portions and introduce ultra-processed foods that taste very good and are very unhealthy. Tax breaks and a reliance on shareholder value corporatized the food landscape, Nestle says, and made more food get sold in more places. Over time, “healthier foods became relatively more expensive,” since they “increase in price more than ultra-processed foods” over time.
But even if the trads and the PhDs tell different stories, they agree on the broad practical consequences—you should very much avoid eating ultra-processed foods, and the modern world makes that extremely hard. Nestle’s books chart how big food took over, and how unhealthy it is. Accounts like Kerley’s get this information across in an immediate way, and explain how to work a seed-oil free diet into your life. At their best, the shirtless doctors, raw-milk drinkers, and Greek statue meme accounts show how bad things have gotten, and propose a way to react that’s not peer reviewed, but is probably better than the status quo.
The diets are also not theirs. Most of the reels, tweets and stories are, like Nestle says, not anything new. There’s an argument that seed oil avoidance goes back to early work by Dr. Ray Peat, an outsider biologist whose work had to do with cellular energy. Many posts about red meat-heavy diets tease out sentences and conclusions from key esoteric nutritional books, like Dr. Weston Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, from 1939, and Dr. Cate Shanahan’s Deep Nutrition from 2017. Both make a case that diets built around nutrient rich animal foods—like meat on the bone, organ meats, saturated animal fats—along with fresh and fermented vegetables, are the healthiest. Lots of the posters’ exercise and diet advice is straight out of 1970s lifting, and much of the trads’ skepticism (about the food economy and for-profit medicine) and passion (for fresh, normal foods) wouldn’t sound out of place if they came came from long-time lefty nutrition heroes like Dr. Andrew Weil or Michael Pollan.
To be sure, it’s understandable if someone can’t swing trad food because of the politics that hover around it. But these posters didn’t invent this way of eating; they’re just posting their groceries. It would be deranged if the left (or center, or whoever else) left eating tripe, raw milk and pickled greens to a certain political wave that has showed up late to the party and thinks it’s early. All foods have their politics, and these groceries can be expensive and hard to find. But we all have to eat, and we might as well eat pretty healthy.
The memes aren’t double-blind studies, and any advice that comes packaged as a strict rule is worth treating skeptically. Not everything the shirtless doctor, the Roman coin guy or even the butter kid says should be taken at face value. But the root of their appeal is getting the big thing correct: Unhealthy, ultra-processed foods are everywhere now, and are making us sick. And so the best way to get healthy is to go back in time.
