Indra Ottis, 23, and Angela Absalon, 22, are both young Estonians, whose backgrounds and lives are similar in many ways. Both work as trainers at the gym, carefully watch the food they eat and have sizeable followings on social media. Absalon also runs the much-criticized #Ajuloputus (brainwashing) social media movement, which, among other things, spreads conspiracy theories about the harmfulness of vaccines, tap water and even rapeseed oil.

Ottis and Absalon say that for a number of years, they suffered from severe eating disorders and sought help from mainstream medicine, with no success. That is, until they discovered the meat, or carnivorous diet.

"If you go slowly, step by step, as I did with fruit, berries and dairy, the change isn't that drastic. Those who go from their junk food to a full carnivore diet straight away, [eating] only meat, eggs and dairy for example, can have digestive problems in the first few weeks, which causes fatigue – the body starts to cleanse itself and reprogram itself, so to speak," Absalon wrote.

"I was very, very weak for a month – I couldn't go to the gym, I was tired, but I was just so desperate to find a solution to my health problems. After that, I said I'm going to endure it and eventually you get over this feeling of not feeling well and it's a bit of a rebirth. My mind is a lot clearer, I have a lot more energy, I feel better, and my stomachaches went away," said Ottis.

Seeing how a meat diet could improve sleep, and well-being and help get rid of excess kilos, Kevin Sarapuu and Rauno Liiva also began experimenting with being carnivorous. They cut out all fresh produce - fruit, vegetables, and root vegetables – from their menu, stopped eating cereal products for a day and introduced a zero-tolerance approach for carbohydrates of all kinds, including sweets. Instead, they eat only animal products like eggs, butter and raw milk, which is sourced from the market, and often directly from farmers.

"We have breakfast, lunch and dinner the same some days - we don't eat butter for breakfast or anything like that, everything can be egg, egg and egg sometimes," Kevin Sarapuu said. "The time advantage we have is wild. When you're making different dishes, you often have to put so much time into it," said Rauno Liiva.

When ETV show "Pealtnägija" paid a visit, the carnivorous couples had just been shopping at the market. Among other things, they brought back beef, beef liver, mutton, minced meat, raw milk and eggs. Angela Absolon and Rauno Liiva's family go through a liter of raw milk and ten eggs every day.

Indra Ottis confessed that it had been very difficult for her to tell her family about her new lifestyle. "My family is rather of a different faith, a vegetarian faith, which caused a lot of conflict in the beginning. In the meantime, it has come to that, but somehow we have a common understanding that you do what suits you and I do what suits me," said the carnivore.

A completely separate issue, which divides even the most experienced of carnivores into two camps, is the eating of all kinds of internal organs raw. While Kevin Sarapuu and Indra Ottis say they are still beginners on that front, while Angela Absalon consistently teaches people how to eat raw kidneys or other organs in her online video diary on social media. "The main thing I like is beef liver," she said.

Ottis has been on a meat diet for two years now, while Angela and the young men have been for a little over a year. All say that their lives have improved considerably, claiming blood tests confirm it. However, family doctor Le Vallikivi, who was asked by "Pealtnägija" to look into the youngsters' stories, is not convinced.

"In their twenties, people can indulge in practically anything – all kinds of consumption habits, staying up all day and all night, listening to loud music, partying hard, and having practically any kind of extreme diet. The results of all this will probably only be felt years or decades later in any case," said Vallikivi.

According to Vallikivi, the problem with the meat diet lies in the over-consumption of protein and fat as well as the lack of carbohydrates. In addition, the consumption of unprocessed meat carries the risk of ingesting dangerous bacteria. Thanks to the body's ability to adapt, young and healthy people especially may not even notice that a serious health problem is developing for a year or two.

"Bladder infections in women, prostate infections in men and fungal infections, which are common in people with compromised immunity. These are probably the first things where a person might start to notice something different," said Vallikivi.

"It's one thing to talk about the theory, but it's another thing to put it into practice," believes Angela Absalon. "When you still have people, real people, who have been on the carnivorous diet for over a decade, and they have had no worries, you know them personally, then theory is one thing, and practice is another," she said.

"In addition, the doctors we follow online have been doing this for 20 plus years. This doctor looks very good. I think if you do all these things right, make sure you're eating fat and protein and exercising, I don't think there's anything that can go really wrong," added Kevin Sarapuu, who says he gets all the vitamins he needs from red meat.

"We haven't had a problem with it. I've never really taken any vitamin C myself, I've had tests and there's nothing wrong," he said. However, family doctor Le Vallikivi stressed that you can't get vitamin C from meat.

Indra Ottis is not worried that by eating carnivorous food she may be causing harm to her health. "It's so good right now, I don't feel like I need to change anything. I think that after a year or two, our blood tests would have already shown if something were wrong," she said.

In short, the advice from the experts is not necessarily for everyone to begin a carnivorous diet.

Some Western media outlets have published articles featuring doctors and scientists who praise carnivorous diets, or a milder version in the form of a paleo diet. According to Vallikivi, it is only a matter of time before the movement catches on in Estonia, as people look for ways to solve their stomach and digestion problems.

"All the doctors are going absolutely crazy because of the bulging and bloating stomachs of young and middle-aged people, where in 90 percent of cases we don't find any measurable abnormalities in their blood tests or in the stool samples. People are chasing after some kind of mysterious intestinal parasites," Vallikivi said.

"For the individual person, these complaints are real. They cannot choose the nature of these complaints and they cannot choose to ignore them – to get up and not be bothered by their stomach growling one day. Instead, it's the kind of thing that sustains itself and [so, people] try a million different things that are supposed to make it better," she said.

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