Mental health – mood

As a young woman, Allie Morgan battled issues that ran the gamut from IBS, seizures, migraines to bipolar disorder. After a series of health setbacks landed her in the hospital, she reached out to an uncle who had been managing his diabetes with a low-carb diet, and after delving into the literature herself, she took the plunge implementing a carnivore-based diet—and has been thrilled with the results ever since. Besides shedding the extra pounds she had accumulated since high school, she was able to get off the copious amounts of medication that she had been taking for years. “I remember talking to a friend of mine, and looking her dead in the eye and telling her, ‘This is the first time in my life that I feel like I’m a normal person with normal moods.’”

Allie’s health transformation isn’t the only dynamic carnivore story she has to tell. The journey of her then 4 year old son’s autism and subsequent transformation is enough to make any parent sit up and take notice. Allie says that while her kids at home did eat small amounts of sugar and white flour, they were rare treats and mostly crowded out by healthy proteins and fats. At that time, she considered her son as having high-functioning autism—but everything changed when she went on a trip for ten days and left her kids with their loving (but high-carb/low-fat eating) grandparents.
When she returned, she found her son had completely shut down—rocking back and forth, unable to make eye contact and completely non-verbal. Initially thinking it was a typical meltdown, it wasn’t until she got back home that she realized that it wasn’t, and that he had regressed to being unable to function or communicate at all.

“I gave myself 20 minutes permission to just melt down and cry because I think every parent deserves to just have at least 20 minutes to react to a diagnosis. I chose the carnivore diet because I knew it was the complete way to eliminate everything that he could possibly be reacting to.”

After three days on the carnivore diet, her son started coming out of it, returning to the level he was functioning at before the visit. To make the transition slightly easier, Allie allowed her children a small almond and coconut flour cookie for dessert. She also designed her son’s meals around his favorite meats—eggs, bacon, sausage and chicken. The doctors had told Allie to expect significant developmental delays, but after just 27 days on the diet, her son potty trained himself, and has since started to learn to read all on his own.

“I was hoping to get back the child I had before, and what I got—doing a more restrictive diet—was an even higher functioning, happier, more social child…there’s a lot of times that you can see where he’s had some problems, but we actually have to tell people he’s autistic now— because they don’t even notice.” Now age 7, Allie’s son is enrolled in public school—happily learning in a classroom with regular students.

When asked hypothetically if she was encountered with a world where meat intake was restricted—Allie says the quality of her son’s life would be destroyed. “After doing the research that I’ve done, and just seeing what nutrition the body actually requires—and what the sources of those particular types of nutrition are—the only thing that I found that basically has every single component that you absolutely need are animal based products.”

Article by Jennifer McDowell