A man who told doctors he ate nothing, but 6–9 pounds of butter, cheese and hamburgers every day for eight months ended up at Tampa General Hospital with yellowish lumps of cholesterol developing on parts of his body.
The backstory: According to JAMA Cardiology, a man, who is only identified as being in his 40s, told doctors that he got diet advice from the internet and began following an extreme carnivore diet.
For eight months, he only ate 6–9 pounds of butter, cheese and hamburgers a day. He stopped eating all carbohydrates, such as bread and sugar.
At first, he said he felt great. He lost weight, became more energetic and had more mental clarity.
But after about eight months, he started developing yellow lesions on his eyelids. Over the next month, the yellow lesions appeared on the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet and his elbows.
Doctors diagnosed him with xanthelasma, a rare condition that impacts about 1% of patients with high cholesterol.
Dig deeper: Xanthelasma is yellow raised deposits of cholesterol that appear under the skin because the body cannot process it.
I mean maybe like 5% of the advice on the internet is really good on amy given subject. If youre extremely discerning and lnow how to validate your findings and sources, then sure, the internet can be a great resource. The problem is when 95+% of the information is bullshit, thats not really validating when people say they ‘saw it on the internet’. If only 5% of an encyclopedia were true or accurate then you’d throw the whole thing out. Not to mention for a huge portion of the population, when they say ‘the internet’ they really mean facebook.
Yeah I agree that the term “the internet” is not really helpful.
If you want to take care of yourself with an active lifestyle and healthful diet then you’ll want to learn as much as you can, and you’ll probably source a lot of your information from “the internet” whether that’s in the form of subreddits or communities, scientific research, blog posts, podcasts, whatever. Obviously whatever you learn will be applied in concert with the advice you receive from your GP, personal trainer, and nutritionist.
Obviously this is not the same as reading a meme on facebook that said eating 4kg of butter every day helped someone lose weight and deciding to consume butter exclusively for 18 months contrary to advice from their GP and nutritionist.
The problem with nutrition advice from GPs is that it’s just not what they do. GPs prescribe treatments. That’s it. It’s like asking a carpenter for advice about painting.
The problem with nutritionists is that while they have a wealth of knowledge about nutrition generally, managing your macros is more about manipulating your personal preferences. That is to say a nutritionist might be knowlegeable but I’ve never found their advice to be very helpful for me personally.