Welcome to my new website!

I've been blogging about ketogenic and carnivorous diets for a good 8 years now, but my history with both began long before then. I started a low carb diet in 1997, and had already been studying the ketogenic metabolism in my spare time for over a decade when I discovered in 2009 that a Carnivore Diet would give me a new lease on life. I've written and spoken about that history many times, and I won't repeat it here. You can find it in the empiri.ca archives, for example.

After this surprising health discovery, I started writing enthusiastically in various places around the Internet, mostly old fora, a format that thrived better in those days. I was writing primarily about the health properties of ketogenic diets, which were at the time obscure. However, my work was distributed all over in databases I didn't control (some of which have disappeared along with my writing). In 2012, Zooko encouraged me to write in my own space under my own terms, and bought me a domain for my birthday. We collaborated on work that we envisioned becoming a book.

At that time I was still reluctant to talk publicly about the Carnivore Diet and what had happened to me. For one thing, I had worked hard to establish a scientific approach in my own research on ketogenic diets. The amount of evidence for the benefits was already so great, that even in the 90s I assumed it would be mainstream medicine within a decade. I guess I was naive.

In any case, I didn't want to discredit my writing about ketogenic diets, which I thought was scientifically solid, by putting speculative articles about this crazy Carnivore Diet on the same site. So I created two blogs, one intended to be rigorous reporting, and the other to be personal and edgy. I never expected the Carnivore Diet to gain the immense popularity it has today, albeit in a tiny niche kind of way.

Eventually, I started being asked to speak at conferences and on podcasts about the Carnivore Diet. To my disappointment, more people seemed to be interested in hearing my freakish personal story than in the work I'd done on ketogenic diets, which was cutting edge interpretations of the literature at the time of writing.

It's been almost four years since I started speaking at conferences, and now I even have a conference of my own! The Boulder Carnivore Conference, AKA CarnivoryCon, started in 2019 to promote new research on plant-free diets.

So, the secret is up. There is no longer any point trying to separate my work into categories. For this reason and others, I merged my old blogs, and will be putting new work here as well. I hope you find it useful, or at least interesting.

Bear with me as I work out the kinks of the new site!

Cheers,

Amber