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Anosmia
Thanks for the well-wishes.
I'm am glad that you feel so much better, and I do not mean to down-play the importance of that.
However, I've been through several junctions where my digestion also seemed to improve markedly, only to dramatically worsen along with other symptoms in the long run, so I'm quite aware of how misleading short-term results can be. That is one reason why I keep trying to insert some reality checks for you to consider.
Something else I seem to notice is that people who are advocating for plant consumption are always down in the weeds, claiming that you need some particular component of some particular plant, and not another. If fiber was really the key to health, it shouldn't really matter what form it comes in, since it's not like humans had an Amazon store to pick from hundreds of different fibers that weren't also going to make them ill from plant toxins. If beans were the key to health, then nobody would be getting better without them, and everybody would naturally gravitate towards bean consumption. Instead, everybody gravitates towards meat consumption, and people who refuse meat on ideological grounds even try to mimic it with fake burgers, which I find absolutely hilarious.
The carnivore diet stands completely opposite to that whole nit-picky plant paradigm by saying, all you need to do is eat beef and maybe some salt. PERIOD. That's it. And the fact that there are such a wide variety of ailments being "cured" by such a simple diet is extremely compelling in itself, not to mention all of the other supporting evidence for why such a diet makes sense.
This is the concept of parsimony (aka Occam's razor) at work... If there are two competing models that have equal explanatory power, the simpler model (the one using fewer variables to explain the observed pattern in the data) is usually the one most closely matching reality. To wit, if people who avoid meat need to try extremely hard to get their nutrition by carefully choosing from a variety of plant foods and spending exorbitant effort processing them, whereas people who only eat meat can get all their nutrition just from beef alone, the more parsimonious of those models is the beef model (i.e. carnivore).
And as I've said before, there isn't just one carnivore diet, and clearly not every version of it leads to health in everyone. The one you tried was high in organs and fat. It sounds like you haven't tried any other versions of it though.
"There's more than one way to skin a cat", and hopefully you and @jaj and @lil-chick will eventually "skin your cats" the way you're going about it. In the meantime, I will continue to argue that there is a more efficient and effective way to skin the cat, based on a longer tradition of skinning techniques that are better paired with human anatomy.
@wavygravygadzooks I fully respect your choice of the carnivore diet. However, the idea that there is one diet to suit everyone is completely against everything I believe. My three years of nutritional therapy training were based on the Roger Williams concept of biochemical individuality.
There are many reasons why individuals may not do well on meat or may prefer not to eat much meat, such as:
They tend to produce porphyrins. This is a fairly common blip in the heme pathway due to genetics or epigenetics (heavy metals etc). These people require a carb heavy diet.
Peopke with a tendency to low stomach acid don’t digest meat well. Therefore a lot of meat makes them feel very uncomfortable.
Undigested meat enters colon causing protein fermentation (putrefaction) and dysbiosis. This results in the production of toxic metabolites that are negative for health.
The carnivore diet seems to really suit some and not others. Also for me it’s difficult to ignore the large body of evidence about the benefits of fruit and veg that I studied on my course. The one thing that most nutritionists agree on is that fruit and veg eating is associated with better gut health. Here is an interview between Rangan Chattergee and Tim Spector talking about Tim’s work on gut health.
I have no desire to get into a carnivore/not carnivore debate. It holds no interest for me. I don’t particularly like meat and I would personally never base my diet solely around it. Personal choice. I would just not live like that. I just feel the constant ‘one diet is right for all’ comments so against everything I think that I had to make one comment.
In summary, there is no one ‘perfect diet for all’ because we are all individual in many many ways.
@wavygravygadzooks, not so fast, my friend! You are presenting the carnivore vs. vegetarians debate here - not something I am willing to undertake as these are two sides of the same coin: dietary extremism. I thought this discussion was waning - but it doesn’t look like it is because I need to correct your errors or someone will think you are right. 🙃
I was a carnivore for 17 months, 12 of which were mostly steaks, some burgers and bacon - 100% meat. I also tried raw meat which made my throat tight- a familiar sensation when my thyroid was under treated. After a year I knew it wasn’t working but then I came across PKD and thought that under guidance of a medical practitioner I will do it right. You know the rest. From a fit grandma I turned into a weeping potato sack. My systems were basically showing me a finger and nothing was working. In the end I could only eat freshly killed lamb and in a small eating window.
I love traditional Chinese medicine and its well put together, comprehensive system of health that evolved over 5000 years. According to it, meat is warming and drying (I experienced both aspects very intensely on carnivore) and plant foods are cooling. Together they create a neutral diet. For some people, with ‘deficient and cold’ conditions (TCM terminology) -meat is very healing, for others - with hot conditions- vegetables are cooling, so occasionally one or the other diet should be used predominantly before the body returns to the neutral state - a state of health.
Beans might have a place as a detoxifying agent. Whether or not you agree with it, there are many reports of their detoxifying effects, my own including. My crazy high cholesterol, high liver enzymes, high uric acid, high thyroid antibodies and xanthelasma to boot on carnivore all went back to a reasonable level after introducing beans. (All blood test results available on request). So whether or not they are needed is a thing to discuss but they do have a place in trying to bring the body into health.
But as they say in Britain- the proof is in the pudding. We are our own experiments here and hopefully we will all stick around for a while to see the outcomes.
And once more: Grant has been eating beans, meat and rice for 7 years and he reports great success. If beans were so bad, would he be so healthy after being so sick?
My apologies for misstating the composition of your carnivore diet, I was under the impression from your previous posts that it had almost always included some level of organ meat.
If you truly were strict about that carnivore diet for 17 months and weren't taking pharmaceuticals or supplements, drinking tea or coffee, or adding anything else aside from salt, and if that bacon you were eating wasn't cured with anything aside from salt, then maybe it really doesn't work for you, and maybe @armin falls into the same category.
I'm going to stop debating this topic with you and @jaj. I'm obviously not making any headway. Best of luck to both of you.
Although, if we're trying to iron out the facts, my understanding is that Grant never ate that many beans. He's been eating mostly brown rice, which has about one fifth the amount of total fiber as beans, and almost all of that fiber is insoluble. Rice is also far lower in oxalates and other weird plant compounds than beans.
@wavygravygadzooks, Grant’s intake of food is copied below from his 7 years update. In my rough calculation, it is about 140g of beans per day (2 x 1/2 cup) or thereabouts.
Soluble and insoluble fibre have very different properties, and my discussion always pertains to the former.
I know that you are passionate about this woe. So, we will revisit this topic if we hung around for a few years. This is an experiment in progress. What fun!
Grant’s seven years update:
“Anyways, for those who are interested, my current diet is composed of:
- White / Brown rice – usually white rice for 2-3 days, and then followed by a day with brown rice
- Black Beans – organic canned
- Beef / Bison – usually ground – about 75% of the time I go with Bison
- Salt & occasionally some onion powder
- Black Coffee
My daily amounts are usually:
- Rice ~ ¾ cup (measured dry)
- Black Beans ~ 250- 350 ml ~ ¾ of a can
- Beef / Bisson ~ 300 – 400 grams”
Wavy, do you have difficulties believing/accepting that people can heal with non- carnivore diet? Surely, when the proverbial Fred went hunting, Wilma had some remedies in store to help, should he come to the cave with diarrhoea? Soluble fiber is a good binder and not only beans but psyllium has plenty of it. Also, clay and charcoal are amazing at binding toxins for excretion. Maybe you should try them? I hear you have some serious issues to deal with and it must be bloody inconvenient. Just a thought…and an idea that in no way strays from the carnivore way of eating, don’t you think?
This user post on reddit below, discussing study on why covid causes loss of smell (brain damage):
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2790735
The results here are pretty much in line with what we believe is the main driver of COVID-related problems - inflammation triggered by the virus, rather than directly from the virus attacking an organ, per se.
The most severely ill patients with rapidly progressing lung disease, pulmonary edema (fluid in the lungs), higher rates of strokes / heart attacks / blood clots, often have the first signs of these complications around 10-14 days after the virus first enters the body. This time period is usually when a surge of inflammation occurs and causes swelling in the organs.
In the case of loss of smell and taste, the olfactory nerve, which is the nerve that gives you your ability to smell, sits right across a thin barrier between the top of your nose and your brain. Tiny branches of this nerve feed into your nose to give you your sense of smell. Because of COVID's affinity for the respiratory tract and its tendency to cause blood vessel and nerve inflammation, its understandable why the olfactory nerve is an exposed target, and the loss of smell/taste is a now-well known symptom of COVID.
The olfactory nerve also travels along the underside of the frontal lobe of the brain which controls many of the "executive functions" like memory, planning, attention, and things we think of that make us "smart". I cant pretend to know if the closeness of the olfactory nerve and frontal lobe explains the association between COVID, loss of smell, and brain fog, but it certainly would fit.
To lay some other questions to rest, damage to cranial nerves (of which the olfactory nerve is one), the frontal lobe, or any other parts of the brain or brainstem is considered brain damage. This also includes strokes that can be triggered by COVID's extreme inflammatory effects, and heart attacks or respiratory failure that can lead to poor oxygen flow to the brain.
There is also no magic cure for this.
From other post covid user posts, sounds like smell can come back, can be weeks or months, or maybe longer... hopefully this is the case!
Interesting... Numerous times now, Grant has corrected people in the forums by stating that he ate predominantly rice, and that he decided to add in beans occasionally specifically to encourage bowel movements, but that he really doesn't eat them that much. Seems like there's some discrepancy in his reporting (wouldn't be surprising when someone is reporting on food intake from memory for 7 years).
I'm fully aware of the binding properties of clay, charcoal, and fiber. I've tried all of those things myself numerous times and would not be speaking about them so fervently without having tried them. They definitely never made me feel better, and usually they seemed to make me feel worse. As with everything else, it is difficult to figure out whether feeling worse was a part of the process of detoxing, or whether it was due to intestinal aggravation. But, given my decades-long "IBS" problem, the fact that more people with "IBS" find relief by removing fiber than adding it, the fact that charcoal is burnt fiber and clay is essentially microscopic pieces of rock, and all of the supporting evidence behind plant-free diets, I concluded that I did not need binders to detox from a chronic toxicity and they seemed to be either worsening the problem or just making it more miserable. My progress while not eating fiber is confirming that notion.
There's a huge difference between acute toxicity and chronic toxicity. If I was acutely toxic with something, I would definitely chug whatever binders I had on hand. Taking binders longterm for chronic toxicity seems like a dicier proposition because binders are indiscriminate in what they bind to, and if those binders come with other toxins alongside them (like beans), that seems none too bright to me. Cholesterol is extremely important to the body, and fiber is expert at flushing it down the toilet.
Chronic toxicities, nutritional deficiencies, metabolic disorders, and a pile of crazy nervous system diseases all develop over extended periods of time. They creep up on you without you realizing it. It took me years to wake up to the signs of oxalate and Vitamin A toxicity because they were slow-moving, "silent" accumulations. My "IBS" is no doubt primarily a consequence of overeating processed plant foods (carbs, oils), and that "IBS" no doubt predisposed me to the toxicities that followed. I now realize it's foolish to think you're going to recognize toxicity from plant consumption before it sets in fully.
Bottom Line: Plants fucked up my whole adult life. I finally woke up to that fact a couple years ago, and since then I've seen people all around me complaining about ailments that are doubtless the result of plant consumption...smart people who are nevertheless blind to what they are really putting in their mouths. As a scientist, I am ashamed it took me as long as it did to wake up to all the bullshit dietary information I'd been brainwashed with, and to recognize how worthless most dietary science is. I see the evidence all around me now, particularly when observing what children instinctively will avoid eating before they've been brainwashed to ignore their body's natural responses, and how my farmed rabbits refuse to eat most plants that are overtly toxic to their guts (all alliums like onion and garlic, many crucifers, most things high in oxalates, anything low in carbohydrates that also contains a fair share of defensive compounds - pretty much the faster it grows, the less defensive compounds it contains, the more the rabbits like it).
My own instinct as a kid was to eat tons of meat, dairy, and sweet things, never bitter things. The only vegetables I liked were sweet corn, sweet peas, and baked carrots. Raw carrots made me gag then and still do. Raw sweet peas/pods were almost as bad. I would try to make the tea at Chinese restaurants drinkable by adding sugar, but it didn't matter how much I added, it was always disgustingly bitter. It wasn't until college that I achieved the idiocy (the irony is thick) to force myself to eat salads. I never liked dressing, but I quickly learned why people used it...to mask the awful taste of the damn leaves so they could choke them down! I always took the lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickles off my burgers. I'd peel the fried outer part off of onion rings...the onion was disgusting. I've never understood why people eat onions when just the process of cutting them hurts your eyes.
Anyway, our instincts are not 100% perfect, especially in our deranged modern environment, but they're pretty damn reliable, and mine have always steered me first towards meat and dairy, then towards processed white starch, fruit, and sugar. Bitterness has never been welcome, and even if there is sugar with the bitterness, the revulsion to bitterness overrides the desire for sugar.
@wavygravygadzooks, I didn’t realise that yours has been a lengthy chronic issue. It is so obvious that you are suffering and knowing that plants caused your health issues, I am not surprised that you hate them and warn others of their dangers.
Interesting you mention disliking the bitter taste. For me it has always been the opposite - I searched bitter plants and still the only chocolate that I really like has 100% cocoa. I would buy various bitters and chew on a super bitter cassia bark just because I enjoyed the taste! I am sure there some biochemical individuality underlying this strong taste preference.
Once again, I hope that the carnivore diet will heal your health issues. I remember from my carnivore days there were people who recovered from their IBS like illnesses.