I suffered from plaque psoriasis all over my body… doctors kept prescribing me steroids but a diet swap changed my life

Switching to the carnivore diet transformed a man’s skin from being covered in psoriasis plaques to clean and clear.

MMA fighter and YouTuber Chad Mendes had suffered from painful plaque psoriasis since childhood on his legs, scalp, ears and sides of his torso. Despite trying numerous conventional treatments like prescription creams and pills, he found them ineffective or harmful to his immune system during training. 

Then, he turned to Dr Paul Saladino for help transitioning to an extreme diet made up only of foods derived from animals, excluding or heavily minimizing plant-based foods.

The diet was popularized by Saladino, a former psychiatrist, who began as a prominent advocate of the strict carnivore diet consisting only of animal foods. However, he eventually evolved this into a more nuanced framework that he calls the ‘Animal-Based Diet.’

The diet emphasizes meats including beef, pork, lamb, venison, poultry and organ meats such as liver, heart, kidney and brain. It also favors animal fats like beef tallow, lard, duck fat, butter and ghee over vegetable oils. The diet also includes fruit, raw dairy and honey.  

Psoriasis is a chronic, recurrent, and incurable autoimmune disease in which the body mistakenly attacks its own tissue, causing the body to overproduce skin cells, which form plaques on the skin. An estimated 7.5 to 8 million Americans live with psoriasis.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that the excessive consumption of certain pro-inflammatory foods, including alcohol, dairy products, high-sugar foods and gluten, can exacerbate psoriasis.

Health experts and proponents of the animal-based diet posit that by eliminating gut irritants like grains, dairy and vegetables, it reduces gut inflammation, one of the underlying factors contributing to psoriasis.

Previous research has shown that people with psoriasis tend to have poor dietary patterns. 

Their diets are often high in unhealthy fats, refined carbs and sugar, while low in protein, fiber, vitamins and healthy fats. They commonly use cooking methods like frying and baking that may worsen inflammation. 

Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory disease. The condition is driven by a malfunctioning immune system in which specific immune cells called T cells become overactive and mistakenly trigger inflammation in the skin. 

This causes skin cells to multiply up to 10 times faster than normal, leading to the buildup of thick, scaly plaques. 

Unhealthy fats and refined carbohydrates also trigger the body to produce inflammatory chemicals known as cytokines. These specific cytokines are the very same ones found at high levels in the blood and skin of people with psoriasis. 

Mendes said on a podcast that he was told by doctors for years that diet had little to no effect on his psoriasis flare-ups, a notion that has lost weight in recent years as evidence that a poor diet drives inflammation has built up.

‘But both of [my doctors] wanted to prescribe steroid cream,’ he said.

‘Finally, about two years ago, I was like, you know what? Screw it. I’ll do [the animal-based diet] for a month. Within like, two weeks, it was so much better.’

Just as inflammation linked to processed foods loaded with sugar, refined carbohydrates and fats can exacerbate psoriasis and cause flare-ups, lean proteins and fruits have been shown to mitigate those flare-ups.

Saladino said: ‘If you look at pictures before and after he made dietary changes, they are striking.

‘I’ve seen Western medicine firsthand failing patients just like this.’

Western medicine often treats plaque psoriasis with topical steroids, immunosuppressants or biologics that calm the immune response and reduce visible plaques without addressing why the immune system is overreacting in the first place.

Patients are often not given structured dietary guidance, like an elimination diet, as a first-line treatment. They may be told that diet has little evidence or is not essential, missing a potentially powerful, low-risk intervention that could induce psoriasis remission.

There are drawbacks to an animal-based diet, though. Diets made up largely of red meat have been shown to increase inflammation markers in people’s blood.

But a 2022 study proved that people can safely incorporate more of it without massively driving up inflammation. The main finding is that higher intake of total red meat, especially when it includes processed meats like bacon, sausage and deli meats, is linked to a slight increase in an inflammatory marker called CRP.

Eating red meat did not affect other common inflammation or fat-cell hormones in the body, though. Unprocessed red meat alone, such as a steak or pork chop, was not linked to higher CRP. The signal seems driven by processed meats or mixed diets high in both types.

When choosing animal protein, choosing lean poultry like chicken or turkey is often a smarter option than red meat.

Although chicken and turkey are not anti-inflammatory powerhouses, they have a much milder effect on inflammation than beef or pork. For the best choice, stick with white meat from chicken or turkey, which is also naturally low in saturated fat.