Every rigid diet is an elimination that forgot to end.

Watch the diet tribes fight long enough and you notice something strange: they all get results, and they all contradict each other. Carnivores thrive with zero plants. Vegans thrive with zero animals. The Ray Peat crowd thrives on the sugar the others swear is poison. If any one of them were simply right, the others would be sick. They're not, at least not in the short run.

The resolution is unflattering to all of them. Every rigid diet is an elimination protocol that forgot to end.

Cut to what they share instead of what they argue about, and it's the same move every time: they delete industrially engineered food. Carnivore does it by removing all plants. Whole-food veganism does it by removing all animal products. Each takes a sledgehammer to the modern food environment, and the sledgehammer is most of the benefit. Then the ideology takes the credit ("it was the meat," "it was going plant-based," "it was the sugar"), freezes the elimination into an identity, and goes to war with everyone whose elimination came out looking different.

The tell is that they can't agree on the details that supposedly matter. Take sugar, the fight that confused even me for a while. Carnivore purists say fruit is unnecessary or harmful. The "eat natural" camp says eat the fruit. The Peat crowd says fruit sugar is pro-metabolic. Who's right? The honest answer dissolves the question: it's the matrix, not the molecule. Whole fruit lowers type-2 diabetes risk. Fruit juice raises it. Same sugar, same cohorts, opposite result, because the fibre and water around the sugar in an intact fruit change how your body meets it. Carnivores are wrong that whole fruit is harmful. The pro-sugar crowd is wrong that juice is fine. Strip the matrix and sugar turns on you; keep it and it doesn't. Nobody arguing about "sugar" was asking the right question.

So here's the honest version of each camp, stripped of its religion:

• Carnivore: a real, blunt elimination diagnostic. Run it time-boxed for a few weeks, fat and organs included, to find what you react to, and not at all if you're pregnant, or have heart risk or kidney stones, without a doctor. Don't live there forever: zero fibre, a calcium gap, and LDL that climbs.
• Vegan: genuinely workable, with a smaller margin for error and supplements that aren't optional. B12 exists in no plant.
• The Peat crowd: right that whole-food sugar isn't the villain added sugar is, and dangerously wrong that you should self-dose thyroid hormones off a blog.

Take each one's kernel. Refuse each one's absolutism. The thing that healed you was the subtraction, not the flag you planted afterwards, and you can keep the subtraction without joining the church.