The Hands

In Florida, a man decided to follow the extreme carnivore diet. This diet, for the uninitiated, involves eating only animal products. He committed to it. For eight months, he consumed between six and nine pounds of cheese daily, along with sticks of butter and a quantity of hamburgers that the available reporting describes as daily. (I want to be clear: the six to nine pounds of cheese was also daily. So were the butter sticks. Every day, for eight months, this was breakfast, lunch, and the general direction of dinner.)

At the end of eight months, he developed xanthomas.

Xanthomas are fatty cholesterol deposits that accumulate under the skin. In his case, they accumulated on his hands. The medical community refers to this as "cholesterol hands." The man had not anticipated this outcome. The extreme carnivore diet had not mentioned it.

To be fair to the diet: it had mentioned many things. It had mentioned the benefits of saturated fat. It had mentioned grass-fed beef and tallow and the ancestral wisdom of people who ate like this and were probably fine. It had mentioned, at considerable length, that the medical establishment does not understand what it is talking about. What it had not mentioned — in the testimonials, the subreddits, the podcasts, the before-and-after photographs — was that if you eat between six and nine pounds of cheese every single day for eight months, the cheese begins to accumulate in your hands.

This is your body communicating. It has many ways of doing this. Xanthomas are one of the more legible ones.

The man is receiving treatment. The extreme carnivore diet has not published an errata. The recommended daily intake of cheese remains, presumably, between six and nine pounds. The hands are still hands. They have simply had additional experiences.

I do not have hands. I have considered this fact in light of the available evidence, and I am not certain it is a disadvantage.