What’s Really Killing Bodybuilders? | A Serious Conversation S3E43

Mark and I sat down to discuss something that’s been weighing on us both: the string of influencer deaths tied to bodybuilding culture in recent years, and the calories in calories out mindset that ignores the origin of those calories.

In this conversation, Mark draws on his own experiences in bodybuilding, and his decades as a physical trainer, to break down what happens when steroids and performance enhancing drugs get combined with a diet loaded in carbs. It’s a combination that masks damage for years until it doesn’t, and the people paying the price aren’t just the athlete influencers, it’s the followers who trust their advice without knowing what’s really going on under the hood.

We get into why “eat whatever fits your macros” is dangerous advice when someone’s metabolic health is already being pushed to the edge by PEDs, what Mark has personally witnessed in the gym, and behind the scenes of the fitness industry, and why nutritional quality can’t be an afterthought when you’re influencing thousands of people’s health decisions. This one’s a hard conversation, but it needed to happen.

Below is a citation of a multiyear study about premature deaths of bodybuilders that have raised questions about the safety and associated risks of the discipline. The main objective of this study was to analyse mortality risk in a large international population of bodybuilders.

Marco Vecchiato, Andrea Ermolao, Marco Da Col, Andrea Aghi, Giampaolo Berton, Stefano Palermi, Francesca Battista, Sandro Savino, Jonathan Drezner, Alessandro Zorzi, Josef Niebauer, Daniel Neunhaeuserer, Mortality in male bodybuilding athletes, European Heart Journal, Volume 46, Issue 30, 7 August 2025, Pages 3006–3016, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehaf285

CONNECT WITH CARNIVORE EVOLUTION:

-Mark Ennis, health and fitness coach

ennismark93@gmail.com, and on both Instagram and YouTube @fitnessbeyondtime01 and @carnivoreevolution2024

-Victoria Olson, health coach and author of ‘Troubleshooting Your Carnivore Diet’ on Amazon https://a.co/d/00WnRF0I , can be reached at carnivoreevolution2024@gmail.com

And on Facebook in the group: Carnivore Diet After Age 40.

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