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BeefWizard's progress report
It's been a while since I was active around here and, as I am approaching 2 years on a low A diet, I felt like sharing my results and experiences with the forum so far. I came from a mostly carnivore diet that I did for nearly 2 years and although the mental aspects of it were great and it made the blood work look pretty in a couple of ways, I was struggling with several skin conditions (keratosis pilaris, acne, seborrheic dermatitis, occasional eczema), digestive problems (bile acid diarrhea and countless food intolerances) and hashimoto's thiroiditis, things that didn't truly improve over time.
I am a male, soon turning 24, I took low dose accutane (10mg) for nearly 2 years in my teenage years and I never had an unusually high intake of vA in my diet, with the exception of a few months where I started to go ham on the liver in my carnivore days. However, my family was always obsessed with 'healthy eating' since I was young, i.e. we would eat salads regularly and rarely had red meat. I find this informtion valuable to share as I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's right before I started accutane, around the age of 16, so I can't blame it all on accutane alone.
Seborrheic dermatitis vanished within the first 6 months, same with eczema. Keratosis pilaris took over a year to heal completely. Acne still isn't fully gone and I still find it to be highly correlated with the amount of sugars and alcohol that I ingest. In spite of that, it's gone by about 80-90% of what I started off with.
My hashimoto's antibodies dropped to about a sixth of what they used to be at, getting me to levels that I hadn't seen in my blood work since I was initially diagnosed. Needless to say, I am off my thyroid medication. Unfortunately, even though the antibodies aren't that far away from the reference range anymore, the progress stalled on my latest blood work from 6 months ago. I shall report on this again upon my next blood work.
My digestion improved in several aspects, with now being able to tolerate various kinds of fruits and vegetables, occasional gluten and dairy intake, but I managed to develop new intolerances to onions and beans, which I didn't have when I started off. The bile acid diarrhea is mostly gone, and my bilirubin dropped into normal ranges for the first time in like forever (All the doctors were brushing it off as Gilbert's syndrome).
One notable thing I experienced was that, around 6 months into the diet, I started going to the gym again after taking 1.5 years off due to covid restrictions, time in which I became emaciated (mainly due to the carnivore diet and the lack of appetite I had on it, combined with numerous fasting experiments) and essentially lost most of my muscle mass, going from a BMI of 25 all the way down to 18.5. I had only trained for 1.5 years before taking the 1.5 year break, and my progress in that time was mediocre to say the least. In contrast, when I picked up the gym again, I gained back all the weight I lost in the first 6 months with more muscle mass and I was significantly stronger than I was before. And the progress didn't stop there, it kept going. I've now been back in the gym for just over 16 months and I am getting close to a few national powerlifting records without even touching steroids. I am not sure what exactly to attribute this change of training response to, but the improved liver and thyroid function most likely helped, while the carb depleted diet that I did before most likely didn't.
My diet consisted of the following, with A marking items I'd have on a daily basis to E being things I'd have only once in a while:
A: Beef muscle meat (10-15% fat), White Rice, White Potatoes, Bananas, Apples;
B: Chicken (5-10% fat), Oats, Sourdough Bread, Pears;
C: Tuna, Lean Pork, Honey, Dark chocolate, Sunflower Seeds, Raisins, Dried Figs, Energy Drinks (tried to avoid the ones that use carotenoids as colouring);
D: Mushrooms, Low Fat Yogurt, Cabbage, Peeled Almonds, Strawberries, Pomelo, Coffee;
E: Beer, White Wine, Rum, Restaurant Food (would go for dishes that should have minimal vA and I would have activated charcoal along with it);
It's a shame I cannot really eat beans anymore, as they were a staple in my diet for the first 6 months.
I dabbled with various supplements throughout this period, but I am now taking only the following: Megadose Vit K2 (mk4 + mk7) and molybdenum (& Creatine + Collagen as training supplemets); I also take psyllium husk with nearly every meal that doesn't have much fiber on its own, zeolite along with foods that I think might have too many heavy metals (such as Rice, Tuna, Dark Chocolate) and activated charcoal along with foods that have spices or I expect to cause me digestive problems.
Other notable supplements I took for a while and I reckon they helped were lactoferrin and taurine. I don't take taurine anymore as it now gives me some nasty sulfur smelling gas if I take it in any substantial quantity for several days in a row. Because of that, I suspect that I developed a sulfur intolerance which is also responsible for my intolerance to onions and beans. If anyone has any idea how I could have ended up with it or how I could fix it, feel free to share your ideas. Otherwise, you can ask me any questions.
Quote from Tommy on February 20, 2023, 11:40 pmIn what way are you intolerant to beans?
I would get enough gas to set my neighborhood on fire if I were to light a match.
The gas would smell foul and the stools would look off.
@andrei do you have amalgams? Did you have digestive issues as a teen before diagnosed with Hashimoto? Mercury from amalgams can make the colon leaky, can deplete your minerals like selenium, zinc etc. = acne, thyroid issues.. What is your ferritin after 2 years of eating high iron diet? Ideal number is under 100 more like 50 and under. If you have iron overload that iron can feed all kinds of bacteria. By taking accutane your body stopped making bile= you can't detox anything not even vit A.. I would start with liver flushes and donating blood if your ferritin is higher than 100. Btw gluten and casein from dairy is HUGE NO NO if you have hashimoto.. That is the first thing that you need to stop eating when you find out about it..
I love your user Avatar, makes me laugh every time!
Sounds like you have hydrogen sulfide gas problems, which is something I've struggled with off and on for a long time. When you've got sulfur reducing bacteria (SRBs) in large enough quantities in your colon and there is sufficient sulfur (from food) and hydrogen (from bacterial fermentation of food and maybe other substrates) in the colon, those SRBs reduce sulfur for energy and produce hydrogen sulfide gas as a byproduct, which smells very potent in even tiny amounts. This is different from "sulfur intolerance", which usually describes endogenous sulfur metabolism problems, not problems in the GI tract, although I'm pretty sure it's possible to have both issues at the same time.
For me, vegetables that contain sulfur have always been the main cause of my H2S gas. With rare exceptions, meat and eggs never caused it...that's because many of the sulfur compounds in vegetables are secondary compounds (like sulforaphane) that are meant to damage the body and they get shunted to the colon for elimination in the feces. Sulfur compounds in vegetables are not very bioavailable in general, partially because of the presence of fiber. Cruciferous vegetables are probably the worst offenders, followed by legumes.
I've experimented with a taurine supplement and often wound up with horrible H2S gas and diarrhea from that. I occasionally get the same H2S gas from eating meats high in taurine, like heart and tongue, but not every time. I recently heard Bart Kay, who's been doing a carnivore diet for a long time without issue, say that he'd tried a taurine supplement at the suggestion of Harry Serpanos and would up with horrible H2S gas as well.
My best guess at this point is that:
(1) a carnivore diet or any other diet high in meat and low in fermentable fiber can create a hospitable alkaline environment for SRBs in the colon via ammonia production from nitrogenous waste. However, this isn't a problem unless you have sulfur entering the colon, and most people on a carnivore diet don't have enough sulfur entering the colon to cause H2S gas because they absorb all the sulfur in the animals foods they consume.
(2) high taurine intake from a diet high in meat encourages liver detoxification mechanisms whereby taurine binds directly to toxins in the liver (potentially including excess Vitamin A), and because these compounds are meant to be eliminated in the stool, they have to pass through the colon. In the colon, SRBs deconjugate them to access the sulfur in taurine, resulting in H2S gas and irritation of the colon by both the H2S and the unbound toxins. Taking a taurine supplement in addition to eating a good deal of meat results in a huge pool of taurine for the liver to use for detoxification and therefore more taurine gets sent to the colon in the form of taurine-conjugated toxins, feeding the SRBs.
(3) supposedly, a more acidic environment in the colon prevents colonization by sulfur reducing bacteria, and fiber fermentation generally leads to an acidic environment, so eating a certain complement of fermentable fibers would seem to be one solution, although I'm not sure if you'd have to limit meat/taurine intake long-term to keep the SRBs away.
(4) based on my personal experimentation, it may also help to supplement with glycine if your pool of bile salts is dominated by taurine-bound bile acids. By having more glycine available, you might generate a greater proportion of glycine-bound bile acids, and then any bile salts that reach the colon are more likely to be glycine-bound than taurine-bound, reducing the chances that taurine-bound bile salts bypassing enterohepatic circulation would feed the SRBs (glycine doesn't contain sulfur and therefore doesn't feed SRBs).
SRBs are real SOBs!
Quote from Jiří on February 21, 2023, 1:07 am@andrei do you have amalgams? Did you have digestive issues as a teen before diagnosed with Hashimoto? Mercury from amalgams can make the colon leaky, can deplete your minerals like selenium, zinc etc. = acne, thyroid issues.. What is your ferritin after 2 years of eating high iron diet? Ideal number is under 100 more like 50 and under. If you have iron overload that iron can feed all kinds of bacteria. By taking accutane your body stopped making bile= you can't detox anything not even vit A.. I would start with liver flushes and donating blood if your ferritin is higher than 100. Btw gluten and casein from dairy is HUGE NO NO if you have hashimoto.. That is the first thing that you need to stop eating when you find out about it..
Nope, no amalgams. Never even had any dental work. My teeth were always healthy, even though I assume it's mostly because my parents gave me fluoride pills when I was young, but God knows in what other ways those pills messed me up.
My serum copper to zinc ratio is actually too low atm at 0.085, that's why I'm wary of supplementing zinc. I may have had good enough zinc already from doing carnivore for so long.
My ferritin dropped considerably, from around 277 to 84 , even though I eat about a pound of beef on a daily basis.
I will try to avoid gluten and dairy more rigorously to see if the last bit of antibodies drops that way, even though I didn't pay much attention to the Hashimoto side of things once I was healthy enough to drop the medication.
I know I have leaky gut since I did a stool analysis back in december 2021, where I had sky high zonulin and low IgA, so there's that. I think accutane didn't really hurt my bile ducts as much as it destroyed my gut lining (since I don't think I'd have had bile acid diarrhea otherwise).
@andrei " I think accutane didn't really hurt my bile ducts as much as it destroyed my gut lining (since I don't think I'd have had bile acid diarrhea otherwise)."
yeah it looks like in your case accutane damaged your intestines. I my case it was mercury toxicity.. Btw I would be careful with foods high in oxalates as well. Potatoes, nuts, seeds, grains, cacao etc..