Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Something strange is brewing in the weird wellness corners of the internet. Grown adults are religiously consuming raw carrot salads, claiming it's transforming their hormones, clearing their skin, and giving them "glass-like" complexions. The #rawcarrotsalad hashtag on TikTok has accumulated over 30 million views, and influencers are netting 100k+ views for videos about a single allegedly "hormone-balancing" recipe.

E-girls on X claim it's regulated their estrogen. The poaster known as Bronze Age Pervert explains that carrot salad "scrapes your poisoned insides." Carnivore Aurelius, another Health Twitter mainstay, posts a photo of a farm truck piled high with carrots, writing that this salad protects the liver and enhances cognition. One poster, attempting to sum it all up, said it feels illegal how well it works.

The recipe is simple and cheap: shredded raw carrots, apple cider vinegar, coconut oil, and salt. That's it. This concoction supposedly binds to excess estrogen in your gut and escorts it out of your body, solving everything from acne to anxiety. The trend traces back to Ray Peat, the deceased biologist with a cult following (Peat died in 2022, at 86) who spent decades promoting unconventional dietary theories. Among other outside-the-box ideas, Peat argued that naturally occurring sucrose (in honey, for example) could cure fatal injuries in animals and emergency room patients. He also believed essential fatty acids (omega-3 and omega-6) were harmful to human health, and argued avocados could cause cancer.