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Carnivore and Bile Acid Malabsorption
Quote from Beata on December 13, 2021, 1:18 pmIt is important to distinguish the soluble fibre (in beans, psyllium ) that prevents the bile reabsorption and insoluble fiber that bulks the stools. Having been a vegetarian
and a carnivore
I must admit that neither diet was particularly satisfying, although I sustained worse damage from the carnivore (with lots of fat and liver). Vegetarian diet made me swollen, always hungry and moody.
There is a balance that each of us has to discover.
Vegetarian diet is more stupid than carnivore or vegan. It has the worst from both worlds lol. You stop eating meat which doesn't give any problems to people and eat dairy and eggs which are very problematic for most people... I understand that vegetarian diet should be about not hurting animals, but in terms of health benefits it's very bad diet..
Our present nutritional knowledge is based on theories and one can find arguments supporting every side.
Trying to figure out what is the correct human nutrition seems to be similar to a question: “which church is the true church”, and I will give a miss in such a discussion.
I have spent 30 years trying every “a la mode” diet at a time, digging myself into a deeper hole at each turn.
Since my meat, beans and rice diet I am finally getting out of this hole but it is deep and it will take some time.
The good news is that I have clear signs of healing, of a better, stronger digestion which was what started it all.
My end goal is to enjoy a variety of foods while providing my body with raw materials to keep me healthy. I no longer want to be a freak who is looking at food through protocols, theories and scientific studies.
It is possible that the meat diet leaves little to be detoxed and the bile reabsorption is not a problem. But on another hand, living in the 21 century is pretty hazardous, food aside, with stress messing up hormones, toxins in water and air, etc. So, if you can function well, eating meat only and having your detox mechanism at high efficiency, wonderful!
For others it might not be so straight forward and a little help in clearing the toxic bile might go a long way. Others still might want to enjoy more of a gourmet approach to eating as many cultures still do with excellent results.
In the end, we need to remember that food is a small part of what it means to be human and it looks like our exaggerated focus on food is actually not all that healthy.
I've found that consuming enough soluble fiber does appear to stop my chronic watery diarrhea, which began almost 2 years ago when I removed Vitamin A from my diet. BUT, what if, by using fiber to bind up all the bile acids, we are silencing the signal that the body is using to eliminate Vitamin A (via bile acid malabsorption)?
I mean, how many times has the medical community, or the scientific community at large, thought that they'd identified a flaw in human biology and tried to "fix" it, only to realize years later that there was a damn good reason for the body to do what it was doing, and our attempt to "fix" it only made the whole system worse by halting the process the body had set in motion.
It's hard to find benefit in chronic, caustic diarrhea, but if it's caused by bile acids, what if those bile acids are (1) culling the bacteria that might otherwise encourage reabsorption of Vitamin A after freeing it in the intestines via beta glucuronidase, and (2) speeding colonic transit, which would also minimize reabsorption of Vitamin A in the colon? It looks like people with Bile Acid Diarrhea have been found to have lower bacterial numbers and diversity in their colons, which of course is considered by most to be a negative outcome despite the fact that there is mounting evidence to show that you don't need diversity to be healthy.
There's got to be some logical reason that the body rapidly changes the rate of bile acid reabsorption in response to such a basic dietary change as removing Vitamin A! What I wrote above is the only way I've been able to possibly make sense of it so far. I would love to hear any other hypotheses out there!
Thanks for the update. I tried psyllium husk for a couple weeks, it didn't make a huge difference but maybe I wasn't taking enough. I have found that the bouts of diarrhea have become less frequent the longer I been on a very low Vitamin A diet, but I still get instances every 10 days or so, esp if i eat a very fatty meal.
So you've been on a carnivore diet the whole time you've been low Vitamin A and you feel like you're making progress? How long has it been since you started?
I think I'm going back to carnivore, except I'll probably keep experimenting with fiber supplementation to see how well I can mitigate the diarrhea, but I want to try to keep the fiber intake well away from my meals so it won't affect digestion and fat absorption.
I have been doing strict carnivore for over 3 years and low Vit A for about 6 months now, other than ~10 days of meat and white rice, ~10 days of meat and white potatoes, and similar period of time with meat and supplementing psyllium husk, I have been purely carnivore the whole time. I eat mostly beef with a bit of pork and chicken. Since starting low Vit A my dry skin has pretty much gone although I get the odd flare up and my KP is much improved. The incidence of diarrhea have gradually lessened over time from ~3 times a week to about once every 10 days now. Its very slow progress but things seem to be slowly improving and im confident im heading in the right direction.
I just revisited this excellent video by Elliot Overton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjWSF8V1H00
After 9 months since I first watched it, I think Elliot is spot on in describing my problem.
My particular bile acid diarrhea is the result of an excessive bile acid pool. When you have too much bile acid, the body downregulates its intestinal reabsorption and enterohepatic recycling, and it winds up in the colon instead. The reason you keep making too much bile acid is because the FXR receptor in the liver is not being activated, which is necessary for stopping bile acid production. Elliot lists a few reasons this can happen, but for me and probably most people here, the most relevant is Vitamin A and Vitamin D deficiency.
Ever since I learned about the myriad ways plant compounds can mess you up, I've been convinced that beta-carotene was at the root of my apparent Vitamin A problems. I just realized that I have two BCO1 mutations that supposedly reduce the ability to convert beta-carotene to retinol by approximately 50%, which furthers my hunch that beta-carotene is actually causing Vitamin A deficiency problems like inhibiting activation of FXR.
It doesn't make any sense for the liver to keep cranking out bile acids in an attempt to absorb MORE Vitamin A when it's already overflowing with it, does it? What makes a lot more sense is that the liver thinks it doesn't have Vitamin A because of interference by beta-carotene, whether or not it does in fact have reserves of retinol.
What I'm really curious about is whether consuming preformed Vitamin A is actually beneficial when you've got beta-carotene overload, or whether it's just adding to the problem. I was reading through an old thread on here where someone tried reintroducing liver and said they seemed to feel better with it, possibly because the retinol was somehow displacing beta-carotene?
Interesting ideas @wavygravygadzooks
I’ve long been convinced that having BCO1 SNPs is unhelpful for vA toxicity. I have 4/5 homozygous, so a very slow BCO1. I’ve thought that this could make people ‘super absorbers’ but slow converters (so slow detox). This is not what nutritional therapy says but it’s what I’ve observed.
If they were low in Vitamin A to begin with, then it would make sense that they would absorb as much beta-carotene as possible even though they suck at converting it to retinol. I always baked my carrots in coconut or olive oil and usually ate any vegetables with fat, so unfortunately I have a major confounding variable in my own dietary history that makes it hard to tell whether the fat increased BC uptake or whether my body would have done it in the absence of fat too.
I actually already shifted my thinking since the last post...I've gone back to thinking oxalates are at the bottom of my own problems and are a much more likely explanation for most people's problems than Vitamin A toxicity. Stay tuned for a long post.
I’ll look forwards to that. I too think that oxalates are an issue for many. I have a problem with them. I think they are all part of the same toxicity picture with each making the others worse. I think I’ve become more of an endogenous producer while detoxing from vA (probably B1 and B6 deficiency?). I used to be able to tolerate high dose vC now I get extreme oxalate pain. Something has changed. I’m quite sure that excess vitamin A was the main issue causing my health problems in 2018 as so many things are better now after being low vA for 3 years. However, I don’t think it’s my only toxicity issue.