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Carnivore and Bile Acid Malabsorption
@wavygravygadzooks, if there is something to make bile work better, it sure would be good to know. It does seem like the bile is getting tainted? by the process of VA toxicity and detox.
Cleanses like coffee enemas and the drinking of large amounts of olive oi to bring on the runs have been discussed here at length. (makes a scared face).... Back when I was a wapfer I had one meeting here at the house. A handful of people arrived and TWO of them were taking coffee enemas and said it changed their lives. 1/3 of the local wapfers were doing coffee enemas, LOL?
I bet my "everything must go" nights (which I was experiencing at an increasingly frequent pace before Grant) were natural forms of detox of this same type. The runs I experienced were very acid. These have reduced greatly, and I have not had one for 6 months.
I'm not talking as much about the bumps on the back of the arms... (although I've had those my entire life it seems). Instead, I'm thinking of those little sty-like ones right on the eye margin. Those arose quite recently for both hubs and I, just before finding Grant's work. They appeared about the same time Hubs got rosacea. (it took hubs much longer to get rosacea on wapf foods, but once he did I really started to worry). I suppose that we were just getting older too (mid fifties).
His eye millia would get inflamed and develop into styes. He had to stop wearing contact lenses. I know I've seen here and there on the web people claiming that these are about poor fat digestion.
Regarding the backs of the arms, I had to go and take a look, LOL. OMG it's a miracle! My arms didn't even look like this at 12 years old!!! wowzer. It's magically fixed. Hey body lets fix the face next, LOL.
Maybe the eye millia need some sort of soaking. I once had an eye doc tell me that you could use baby shampoo on the eye margin. I wonder if that would help-- if these eye millia are about fats.
Maybe I got a little bit distracted, bottom line is I think you are onto something that could be universally helpful to know. Keep us posted! Right now, I try to keep fats to a level at which we're having good BM's that aren't runs and hope that time will fix things.
So glad about your arms @lil-chick !Our arms too are smooth and young and no more bat wings.
As for millia we got rid of them the Japanese way (Dr Masaru Maebashi) with lipophilic thiamine and clostridium butyricum (which boosts vit K, which the low A diet seems to do). Biotin should be added but we could not stand it, it speeded vA detox too fast.
@lil-chick After looking up milia again, I think I've had one or two of those show up around my eye and disappear in the past 9 months. I haven't read exhaustively about them, so I don't have much to add.
Coffee enemas seem like a terrible idea to me... When you drink coffee, the liver has to work hard to filter out all the harmful plant compounds that you don't want circulating in your blood. I think drinking coffee stimulates bile release in order to flush out those compounds. I'm not sure why you'd want to shoot it up your other hole?!
I was reading all the posts about liver flushes and gallbladder flushes on here recently. Personally, I don't think they're doing anything more than what happens when you just eat fat as a regular part of your meals, except you're packing the experience into a short time window, which makes it very unpleasant and stresses your body out.
Yes, I'm with you and don't feel like doing those cleanses especially now that I'm not up at night with my own private version of same.
Today I've decided taking B12 + B complex has darkened my stools, on charts I think I've gone up several shades, and it has been going on long enough for me to say it's a trend. Which could be about better bile happenings I suppose. It appears to me that my urine has become less toxic, and my guess is that toxins are going out in stool should have been all along. Someone said on another thread that VA is supposed to go out through the bowels and not the kidneys.
I've stated on another thread that it seems to me that older people (and cats?) might be running into an issue that the younger here are not. B12 is a special issue to those over a certain age. Your ability to absorb it just gets less. My elderly kidney-failure cat got a B12 and B complex shot about this time last year and it seemed to give him a new lease on life for a while.
I can imagine that a carnivore would be exposed to lots of B12 and that might be why they feel much better. However, it's not what you eat, it's what you absorb.
@lil-chick "it's not what you eat, it's what you absorb." One of the foundational arguments for the carnivore diet! Our digestive tract is built to maximize absorption of amino acids and fat from meat - long small intestine, short colon.
@wavygravygadzooks, I've got an intuition for you, and it is something that I've written about here before. I think that carotene and fat together create something new. I liken it to shellac. You could stain wood with this stuff. You see it when you wash the pots after making tomato-meat sauce. It stains your entire sink, the sponge you wash it with, your hands. I have written about how a relative of poison ivy is used to shellac wood in Japan.
Here is an interesting article that I ran across about getting these sorts of stains off of things. I think the ideas there are valid ( the non-poisonous ones). Alcohol, vinegar, baking soda, effervescence, lemon, salt, and NOT microwaving your fats. All of these things have also been considered healthful in moderation by at least some people some times!
Of course, you would also probably use a scrubby sponge on your stained plastic. I think the parallel to this is FIBER.
@lil-chick The environment inside the intestines is very different from the surface of tupperware. I don't think I would equate the physical or chemical effects of scrubbing tupperware with cleaning the intestines. The intestines are a living organ with a mucus layer that can slough off to help shed unwanted debris. I think fiber can cause or exacerbate inflammation in the intestines, which leads to increased mucus production - the mucus is what's solving the problem, whereas the fiber is just promoting unnecessary inflammation. It's certainly possible that surfactants have an effect on food passing through the intestines, but I think it's probably relatively minor compared with the natural abilities of the intestines to clean themselves.
It could be worth an experiment, if you get tired of your runs.
I'm not disaggreeing that the intestine is a difference surface from tupperware. What I'm saying is that carotenes and fats together create something quite durable. I've definitely seen effervescence create a problem in my gut for no apparent reason.
I might add molecules like clay and charcoal as being somewhat like the the sponge that turns orange when washing the spaghetti pan. I think fiber might be a bit absorbent too? and not just scrubby.
I think people might sometimes see things like this happening on the surface, for instance, on the scalp, leading to the use of detergents or coal tar in shampoo rather than just soap. Regular soap won't take off poison ivy oils (a combo of oil and carotenes). You need to scrub with a rough cloth, you need *friction* and soap. Sure regular washing will remove it. In a few weeks. ;(
@wavygravygadzooks I went through this thought process when my elderly cats were not doing so well on their carnivore low-VA diet. Maybe the natural fiber for carnivores is BONE (feathers, fur and other indigestibles).