Glucose tends to remain stable for people on the carnivore diet because the glucose the body is using is not being ingested it’s being produced mostly from protein, a small amount of fat, and a few other sources, such as lactate, via a process generally described as gluconeogenesis. In general, a carnivore diet tends to lead to improved insulin sensitivity over the long term. You can use a fasting insulin level with a fasting glucose level to calculate something called a HOMA-IR score, which is one of several reasonable measures of insulin sensitivity. It’s right up there with smoking, and it’s far more important than relative cholesterol levels. If you’re going to worry about heart disease, insulin sensitivity is one of the most important modifiable risk factors you can be concerned with. When you look at a blood glucose reading in isolation, you leave out a major part of the story of blood sugar control, potential diabetes, and other chronic disease risks. If you’re going to talk about glucose, then you definitely need to be aware of your insulin status. Glucose Glucose control is important, and generally speaking, a carnivore diet tends to lead to very well-controlled glucose numbers. I often suggest that people wait six months or more before getting routine labs after starting the diet, unless there’s a compelling reason to do it earlier, such as to address an illness. As I’ve already mentioned, it’s important that you realize that large energy shifts and weight loss can be responsible for unexpected numbers, such as higher than expected triglycerides, particularly at the beginning of a transition to the carnivore diet.
In general, higher HDL and lower triglycerides are thought to represent an improvement in cardiovascular risk, but this is not absolute, particularly regarding the HDL. Another common finding among carnivore dieters is a general trend toward elevated HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, and generally lower triglycerides.
(However, this assumption is likely false.) When we look at the lipid number for a carnivore dieter, we often see elevated total and LDL cholesterol this is not always the case, and often LDL/total cholesterol will be largely unchanged or even lower. Let’s assume that the numbers you get represent a daily average. Your total cholesterol on Wednesday may be remarkably different the following Tuesday. First of all, blood lipid levels are dynamic they can vary fairly significantly over a matter of even a few days. Blood Lipids Blood lipids probably cause the most concern for both patients and their physicians. With this in mind, I want to share some of the areas where labs for carnivore dieters can diverge from the general population. We truly do not have a good set of reference ranges for the populations who follow the low-carbohydrate and carnivore diets. Just as the nutrition science–based food recommended daily allowances were based on a population that was arguably sick from eating a high-carbohydrate, grain-based diet, many of the common laboratory reference ranges were based on that same population. So, trying to attribute any one particular laboratory reading exclusively to diet can be problematic. Lab values can be significantly affected by many things, including stress, sleep, illness, activity, exercise, weather, temperature, time of day, and time of year. For instance, blood cholesterol can change dramatically over a few days, hormones can change by the hour, and liver enzymes or inflammatory markers can go up or down based on recent activity or exercise levels. Many, if not most, of the things that can be measured in the blood can change on a weekly, daily, hourly, and even momentary basis. When you have your blood drawn, its contents are representative of what is being transported via your blood during that exact moment in time. Before I get into some of the common observations that I’ve made about carnivore dieters, let me put some things into perspective.
Blood testing provides some data and often can help to troubleshoot problematic health issues. Often when people follow some form of a low-carb diet, they focus on monitoring certain things through blood testing to get some insight into the effects of diet.