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Carnivore and Bile Acid Malabsorption
I imagine it is pretty hard to keep on weight on a low fat carnivore diet. Especially on a faster metabolism You guys must be eating like 4 pounts of meat a day? Even really big bodybuilders eat a little less.
Quote from Max on July 20, 2021, 7:15 amI imagine it is pretty hard to keep on weight on a low fat carnivore diet. Especially on a faster metabolism You guys must be eating like 4 pounts of meat a day? Even really big bodybuilders eat a little less.
Over the past 4 months I went from 185 down to 150 lbs. I'm 5'8" 36 y/o male. I put on the extra weight from all the shit that gets pumped out over the holidays and bulking on rice. I have leveled off at 150. I eat about 2 pounds of beef a day.
Been following this thread for a while now as I in a very similar situation as the OP. I have been low carb for ~5 years now and strict carnivore for over two. I have lost a tonne of weight and solved a myriad of issues during that time but a couple things that never resolved was very dry skin on my scalp and forehead and keratosis pilaris which covers the majority of my body. Highly encouraged by the nutrient density and low cost of organ meats I ate them with abandon, i would easily get through over a pound of liver, a pound of kidney, a whole Ox heart and at least 30 eggs a week. The dry skin and KP only seemed to get worse but I also started to develop BAM and diarrhea esp after eating higher fat cuts like lamb breast and short ribs. I normally eat OMAD around 11am - 12pm, then usually around the time i go to bed or a few hours into the night i would experience some nausea (although not always) and then bad diarrhea. This was getting progressively worse over the last 2 years, I tried every variation of carnivore known to man, high fat, high protein, high salt, low salt, eggs, no eggs, dairy, no dairy to no avail, but I was always eating a tonne of liver, kidney and heart (i know heart doesn't have a lot of VitA but there might have been a copper imbalance at play to). I also tried high dose Vit C, betaine HCL. lipase and other digestive enzymes none of them made any difference. It was only after seeing Amber O'Hearn talking about Vit A on Twitter and dry skin coming up as one of the main symptoms that it struck me. I have been doing a low Vit A carnivore diet for ~3 months now (although I was still eating some eggs at first) which consists mostly of 75/25 mince/ground beef (cooked and drained) and the odd bit of pork. although not completely resolved my dry skin and KP is much improved, I don't have to smother my face in moistener any more and my skin feels much smother and is less red. The instances of BAM also seem to be less frequent and less violent. Ill leave it there for now, I have a number of questions but i mainly just wanted to let you know there are others out there! and that Vit A toxicity does appear to lead to BAM on a strict carnivore diet, at least for us.
I'm starting to get the impression that those people who take B1 look less healthy than those who don't
Thanks for chiming in, I'm glad to have another person to compare notes with. I reintroduced white rice to my diet a couple months ago in an attempt to lower fat intake, and I'm still not sure if that's made a consistent difference in symptoms or detox. I definitely still get diarrhea. I'm now popping a wide variety of probiotics to see if I can correct what I believe is dysbiosis that resulted from too much bile acid reaching the colon on a higher fat diet. I'm about as sure as I can be that I was initially making good progress with a low Vitamin A carnivore diet, but once I started getting a lot of diarrhea, my colon felt really inflamed, which may have eventually slowed my progress down. It was probably also a mistake to start spooning tallow straight from the jar... I started getting giant undigested fat globules in my stool!
I remain convinced that supplemental thiamine speeds up some part of the detox, maybe the conversion of stored retinyl ester to retinoic acid, which then outstrips the body's ability to deal with that metabolic product and causes a bunch of damage. All the powder-form thiamine supplements I've looked at have had at least 800% of the RDA per capsule, so it seems really easy to overdo it unless you're carefully microdosing by opening the capsules (which I was doing most of the time).
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on September 21, 2021, 1:05 pmThanks for chiming in, I'm glad to have another person to compare notes with. I reintroduced white rice to my diet a couple months ago in an attempt to lower fat intake, and I'm still not sure if that's made a consistent difference in symptoms or detox. I definitely still get diarrhea. I'm now popping a wide variety of probiotics to see if I can correct what I believe is dysbiosis that resulted from too much bile acid reaching the colon on a higher fat diet. I'm about as sure as I can be that I was initially making good progress with a low Vitamin A carnivore diet, but once I started getting a lot of diarrhea, my colon felt really inflamed, which may have eventually slowed my progress down. It was probably also a mistake to start spooning tallow straight from the jar... I started getting giant undigested fat globules in my stool!
I remain convinced that supplemental thiamine speeds up some part of the detox, maybe the conversion of stored retinyl ester to retinoic acid, which then outstrips the body's ability to deal with that metabolic product and causes a bunch of damage. All the powder-form thiamine supplements I've looked at have had at least 800% of the RDA per capsule, so it seems really easy to overdo it unless you're carefully microdosing by opening the capsules (which I was doing most of the time).
I thought that there might be a problem in the B1 additive itself, for example, contamination with heavy metals as a result of the production process. Rice can cause problems due to arsenic. Although I have a problem with some other starches
I thought we were all surrounded by toxic heavy metals. And if we assume that we are descended from primates who ate meat and fruit - this is a fairly safe food. They probably did not receive even a 10th of the pollution that we can get with this dirty air, water, synthetic additives and clothing, can this cause problems for people? Overloading with vitamin A certainly does not make it all easier.
There is an interesting point about lead poisoning in Grant's new article.
@wavygravygadzooks I think addressing your gut is a really sensible thing to do. I’ve been looking at prebiotics as well as probiotics. I don’t know if you have gone down that path.
Interesting what you say about B1 speeding up the detox. I don’t have any great insight here but I was wondering about energy. B1 feeds into the the top of the energy production cycle from memory (Elliot Overton) and increasing energy availability could allow body to do more work, such as detox and repair. This is good of course but only if you’ve got the required nutrient building blocks.
I take B1 (100-200mg) to address my anxiety. Derrick Lonsdale did some work on the limbic system being very sensitive to low B1 and inducing panic attacks. My anxiety is worse if I don’t take so I think it’s doing something. It’s one of the nutrients that helps buffer aldehydes too, which could be related to my tendency to run short. Therefore I’ve seen B1 as a positive help. Always interested in hearing about negative effects. Most nutrients can potentially be both good and bad depending on individual variations.
Are you still doing psyllium husk for the soluble fibre to try bind some of the bile? do you also get any nausea prior to the diarrhea?and how long after eating does it usually occur for you?
Re tallow I had the same outcome when i was eating a lot of suet.
I am currently doing higher protein ~40-45% protein the rest fat, I will be fine for 5 or 6 days then it will flair up for a couple days then go away again, its frustratingly hard to discern any real pattern.
My most recent experiment with psyllium husk (whole, not ground) lasted 19 days. I was usually taking 1/8 or 1/4 teaspoon once or twice per day, away from food, typically once in the morning before my first meal, and then once in the afternoon between my first and second meals. I've occasionally taken some after my second meal (before bed) as well, and occasionally taken 1/2 teaspoon doses.
It definitely did bulk up the stool and changed my watery diarrhea to more of a loose stool consistency, sometimes even a normal stool consistency, but it didn't relieve the gut soreness and gas that I've been getting every night regardless of what I eat. So my impression is that it is bulking, and I suppose binding, but is not entirely protecting my colon. Maybe that is simply because I didn't take enough of it at once, or didn't take it with my meals though. Hard to say.
Lately, the timing of my diarrhea is all over the place. It most commonly happens in the morning after I drink a bunch of water, or after my first meal. Then I may get several more bouts going into the afternoon. Then it usually stops between 4PM and going to bed. Rarely, I will have diarrhea in the middle of the night.
However, when I first started my low VA diet, I was getting diarrhea primarily in the evening and the middle of the night. This made for a very interesting experience when I got gas in the middle of the night every night, because the diarrhea would randomly strike in the middle of trying to pass the gas. I became very, very careful about passing gas away from the toilet!
I rarely ever get nausea now, and I never lose my appetite for food, especially meat, although in the first week or two after going low VA I was getting bad enough nausea that I was reduced to nibbling on chicken breast, rabbit, and other ultra low-fat pieces of meat.
The apparent randomness of your diarrhea sounds frustrating! Early on in my diet, I think I had a similar pattern where I was borderline constipated for days at a time, then I would have watery diarrhea out of nowhere, totally unpredictable aside from the fact that it typically happened after eating, and more often after dinner.
I'm currently not taking psyllium, and am not really eating any fiber. I am taking AOR Probiotic-3, Seed Probiotic, RestorFlora Probiotic, and some old VSL#3 to finish off the bottle. The AOR stuff might actually be doing something...I wasn't getting anywhere with the other three of them though.
Hey @wavygravygadzooks . . . I was hoping you would be willing to connect with me to chat about adventures in VA detox carnivore style. I can't find many people doing it and you seem very knowledgeable. I am not able to figure out how to private message on here but if you're willing maybe you can email me at briannab@fastmail.com . I am not much of an online chat room person and much prefer synchronous conversation, would love to pick your brain!! Thanks, -Brianna.