✓ Practiceby Lab 10 ◐ Get started ›

What the experts say

Brooke GoldnerMD · physician, board certification in psychiatry · nutrition programme founder

Remove every animal product, added oil, added sugar and processed food, and flood the diet with raw greens, seeds and water for a 4 to 6 week recovery phase

What it rests onChronic inflammation driven by dietary omega-6, saturated fat and arachidonic acid from animal foods and oils; two self-authored case series reporting rapid symptom remission and improved kidney function

Source: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ↗

Anthony ChaffeePhysician · strict carnivore, evolutionary framing

Eat a strict high-fat carnivore diet of beef and lamb at roughly 2 g fat per 1 g protein, excluding all carbohydrate, sugar and alcohol

What it rests onKetosis as the mechanism, ketones as the brain's preferred fuel and the building blocks of brain tissue, and removal of plant-derived carbohydrate as removal of the inflammatory input

Source: dranthonychaffee.com ↗

Overview

Goldner's published cases are three women with SLE and Sjogren's and two patients with lupus nephritis. Chaffee's protocol page is written for multiple sclerosis and says it can be used for any other neurological issue. Neither has trial data in the other's population, and neither has trial data in their own. They are not talking about the same patients, and both generalise.

Where they agree

Both hold that autoimmune disease is driven by chronic inflammation with a dietary cause; that the cause is something to remove rather than a drug to add; that removal must be total rather than partial to work; that people relapse when they stop; and, in their own written words, that this is not established treatment. Both publish a hedge about medical supervision, and both hedges live in a document rather than on a claim.

What would settle it

A randomised controlled trial in either population would move this, and Goldner's own 2019 abstract calls for one. Absent that, a prospective registry with independent outcome adjudication and pre-specified adherence measures would at least separate the effect of the diet from the effect of being an intensively coached, highly motivated patient, which is the confounder her own limitations section names.

Practice does not pick a winner here

You do, and your call is dated, kept, and yours to change. Follow the people you already trust and what they publish turns into a short daily practice.

• Record where you land on this, and change your mind later without losing the history
• Everything else these people publish, read and graded, in one place

Get started

Free to sign up and use. We do not ask for a card.