Make no misteak — this is an unsavory obsession.
Florida tattoo shop owner Wendy Marshall is so fond of raw meat that she scarfs 2 pounds of it daily. Ground chuck, cold cuts, whole roasts, porterhouses, the bloodier the better — Marshall devours it all.
“I love ripping the flesh straight off the bone,” Marshall, 28, declared before popping a marbled chunk of steak into her mouth in a clip from Wednesday’s “My Strange Addiction” premiere, provided exclusively to The Post. A loud “raw meat burp” quickly followed.
Eating raw meat isn’t as rare as you might think. It’s a time-honored tradition in Ethiopia and among Arctic indigenous populations — even reality TV star Heidi Montag has been known to do it.
Many cultures enjoy raw meat dishes, such as the French delicacy steak tartare (finely chopped and seasoned raw beef) and the classic Italian appetizer carpaccio (thin slices of raw beef drizzled with olive oil, lemon juice and shaved parmesan).
Still, Marshall’s offal diet is extreme — and potentially dangerous. Experts warn that raw meat can harbor harmful bacteria, such as salmonella, listeria, campylobacter and E. coli, as well as parasites like trichinella.
And Marshall’s carnivorous customs do not seem particularly hygienic.
Early in Wednesday’s episode, she’s shown at a nail salon gobbling ground beef straight from a package pulled from her purse. Her nail technician was so grossed out that she refused to give Marshall a manicure.
“I do understand that it’s not socially acceptable to eat raw meat,” Marshall confessed. “People kind of gag or they look at me crazy, but I don’t care.”
The Liver King can probably commiserate.
Marshall said her sinewy propensity dates back to childhood, when she would chew the fat with her nana.
“That was actually a way for me and her to bond,” she explained in the exclusive Post clip. “She’d come over, and we’d talk about life and just eat the raw meat together.”
Marshall said her grandma died about five years ago from bladder cancer.
Marshall’s romantic partner, Robert, has not taken up the mantle. His family has beef with her addiction, going so far as to pick a bone with Marshall at a cookout at her home.
“I’m about to throw up,” Robert’s cousin’s wife warned as Marshall bit into a raw steak on the TLC series.
“It’s a little hard to accept someone who eats raw meat at the dinner table,” she added.
Robert’s family’s concerns prompt Marshall to meet with nurse practitioner Vanessa Cabrera about what’s at stake if she doesn’t chuck her habit.
Cabrera identified a chronic E. coli infection in Marshall’s colon from her stool sample.
Most E. coli strains in the gut are harmless and part of a healthy bacterial landscape, but certain strains can cause severe illness.
“It’s interesting because typically someone with that would have nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, all of that kind of stuff,” Cabrera told Marshall.
“In seeing that you don’t have any symptoms, it leads me to believe that it’s been there for such a long time that your body is adapted to it.”
Cabrera noted that the immune-compromising bacteria have “probably become resistant to almost every single type of antibiotic.”
“So if you were to get sick with any other type of illness coupled with that bacteria there, it would be very difficult for the antibiotics to work,” she added.
Marshall said it was “very scary” that antibiotics might not work in a life-or-death situation.
She promised to make “healthier decisions” moving forward and set some ground beef rules for herself.
“I’m not going to stop eating raw meat — I plan to eat grass-fed, only from a good source,” Marshall vowed on the episode.
“No more ground at all, not even if it’s grass-fed,” she continued. “For my health, to be here for my children, and for my husband and family.”
Marshall told The Post that she hasn’t consumed raw ground meat since the show filmed over the summer, “but I can’t say that I won’t try it again in the future.”
She said she has not experienced any side effects from her protein proclivity.
“Other than the medical diagnosis on paper, I have no symptoms of anything, and due to myself and my family eating raw meat for so long, I do not believe anything will happen to me or my family in the future,” she shared.
“If anything, it’s amazing there were no symptoms of E. coli, unlike people who don’t eat raw meat, they’d be deathly ill. We are immune.”
“My Strange Addiction,” which returned to TV after a decade-long hiatus, airs Wednesdays on TLC at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
