DEREK Nance is a butcher.
Before that he was an electrician. But it’s been a natural transition – given he eats a diet of exclusively raw meat, VICEreports.
He lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and fell into the raw meat thing about five years ago when he was in desperate search of a cure-all diet for his ailing digestion.
Having tried just about everything else, Mr Nance turned to a raw meat diet concept conceived in the 1930s. He started off by slaughtering two goats he’d been keeping for milk. He ate the pair, and never looked back.
Mr Nance didn’t go straight for raw meat; he’d extracted wheat and dairy from his diet, tried the Mediterranean diet, then a vegan. Then he spun 180 degrees.
“I’d been sick for such a long time that I was willing to give anything a try,” he told VICE.
“Half of the problem with my digestion was actually just lack of enzymes. My body just doesn’t produce enough enzymes to digest starchy foods.”
To counter this digestion issue, Mr Nance’s diet partly consists of rotten meat – which he saw contains “probiotic bacteria”.
There are other wrinkles to this diet, according to Mr Nance, including:
• Organ meat and connective tissue: They contain vitamin C – so he keeps jars of the stuff to stave off scurvy;
• Lamb is his favourite, then beef, but pigs are a “no no, because they shoot them full of hormones”;
• His friends are cool with him bringing his own food over for dinner;
• He now craves the taste of raw meat: “About three weeks in I noticed this real strong blood-like taste in the back of my throat… the idea of cooked meat no longer appeals. It just tastes burned.”
Oh, and here’s the best part: his girlfriend is a vegetarian. And she’s fully supportive of his diet.
Sadly, though, not everyone’s a fan of Derek’s raw lifestyle change.
“My family thinks I’ve lost it. They literally think I’m off-the-deep-end insane and I don’t know why. Eating raw meat is just something they can’t accept. My father has a master’s in biology and tells me that if I eat raw meat, I’ll get some sort of pathogen.”
He says he regrets feeling like an “outcast”, but now that he’s healthier and happier than ever he’d never consider going back.
And now that he’s in the butchering trade, he gets plenty of take-home freebies.