The Liver King comes by at least one thing honestly: his name.
Born Brian Johnson, the 45-year-old influencer is famous for eating large amounts of raw meat — including a morbid pound of liver every day — as well as lifting big weights and showing off his lifestyle on TikTok and Instagram. The star of the show are his comically gigantic muscles, bigger even than the ones our most beloved superhero actors struggle to create with all their airbrushing, weight cutting and extreme daily rock climbing.
"The Liver King tribe, we're doing bills. Skewer through the bill, and put it over the fire," Johnson said in a weird video of his family posted just today. "Mmm mmm mmm," he adds, as he devours an unidentifiable animal carcass.
Sure, that's gotta be a lot of protein. But according to an eyebrow-raising new GQ profile, actual fitness experts aren't entirely convinced by the Liver King's claims.
Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, told the outlet that eating a pound of raw liver each day is dangerous and unhealthy because of Vitamin A toxicity.
And Nestle isn't alone in looking askance at the Liver King.
"This diet suffers from a core assumption: that we know that all of our ancestors ate the same food," wrote molecular biologist Jonathan Jarry earlier this year in an excoriating essay. "It lumps together populations that had highly varied intake of animal meat and it is based on incomplete knowledge we have of their eating habits. Moreover, there is accumulating evidence that high consumption of red meat predisposes to cancer, and the apparent absence of fruits and vegetables from the Liver King’s diet can create deficiencies in micronutrients, phytochemicals, and fibre."
Even Joe Rogan, a man who gets paid millions to distribute COVID-19 pandemic misinformation on Spotify, isn't a believer.
"He has got an ass filled with steroids, is what that guy’s got," Rogan previously said of the King.
Some Liver King skeptics tried his diet for a week, and at least one muscled-up beefcake said the king's claims clearly aren't true.
"There's an established clear deception," the YouTuber said in his review of the diet. "His business partner... they're in cahoots with each other. Everything they're doing is marketing towards specific groups. I truly don't believe our ancestors were true carnivores."
All told, it's actually a little sad.
We know gender and body dysphoria don't only affect women, and Johnson is terrified to appear feminine in any way, according to GQ's reporting. His quest to unlock perfect masculinity has left him with a major blind spot, sort of like those guys who LARP'ed as militants and nearly starved because they forgot a can opener.
Any man who needs a chef to serve him raw liver wouldn't last a day in the wild — but then, maybe that's just our feminine side talking.
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