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Carnivore and Bile Acid Malabsorption
@arena, I stand corrected. My apologies if anyone got hurt.
As for Karen - I am not mesmerised by her as I can see vital mistakes she made in her protocols. However, as a mother I trust that she knew what was happening to her daughter. She talked about it in great details, about the poisoning, hospital visits, tests, her daughter ‘s poor state of health and then her recovery. We can deliberate till we turn blue in the face whether there is a causal relationship or not… It was a story of a mother recounting how she helped her daughter and not a scientific study. I believed her when she made a connection and then I applied her knowledge to myself and it worked. So, when someone tells me that no it didn’t, someone who knows me from a few posts here, I find it highly irregular 😉.
When I am up to it, I will try to find these studies. I was trying to find something to make sure Karen was correct before I embarked on her protocol. I read many papers about gallbladder and bile circulation, and indeed about bile reabsorption.
Edit: some time ago I posted an interesting article about bile circulation. Enjoy! Also, my own blood tests with many nasty markers on carnivore (liver enzymes, uric acid, thyroid antibodies, iron and cholesterol - the highest my doc ever saw and sent me for an emergency CAC scan) that came back into range when I added beans and rice is a proof enough that ***for me the beans work.
https://ggenereux.blog/discussion/topic/bile-formation-and-secretion/
@wavygravygadzooks, yes your arguments still stand…but how are they working for you?? And what if there is not one uniform, truth applicable to all? Your arguments stand propped by your trust in them. Make no mistake, I do wish they work for you! ❤️
However, for it to be cast in stone, you would have to show that everyone who eats plants cannot be perfectly healthy. Well, time for you to do some round the globe travels because what I saw on mine doesn’t support your standing argument.
Wrong. You're twisting my words again.
My point is that everyone should (allowing for the tiniest number of exceptions, because there are ALWAYS exceptions) be able to eventually reach a point of good health eating a diet almost entirely comprised of meat, because that is what humans evolved to eat, and that is what ALL of our genetics are best intended to manage. I say eventually because the process of correcting the body may not feel good and may take a while.
I also am NOT saying that you can't be healthy eating plant foods. It's abundantly clear that lots of people live long, healthy lives eating plant foods. But because agriculture is a relatively recent phenomenon in human evolution, there is a much greater variation in the genetics that enable some people to make better use of non-animal forms of nutrients in plants (example: the ability to convert beta-carotene to retinol), and to cope with plant toxins.
In other words, everyone should thrive eating meat, some people can thrive eating meat and some plants, virtually nobody can thrive (or even survive) eating just plants. Meat is the common denominator for any human diet and for human health, and if it is the common denominator for health whereas plants indisputably cause problems in some large proportion of people, then it makes no logical sense to argue that you shouldn't eat a carnivore diet to heal virtually any ailment and suggest that you should eat plants. This notion is being born out by most people who stick strictly to a muscle meat carnivore diet for a sufficient period of time. Salisbury apparently was seeing this born out over a hundred years ago, yet somehow that knowledge was suppressed or ignored.
On Greece, the longest-lived region is the Blue Zone of Ikaria. This video by Mary Ruddick indicates that the Ikarians eat mainly meat (pork and lamb), fish, dairy, unpasteurized wine and vegetables with the vegetables being seasonal although (my take) many are originally from the New World, like tomatoes and potatoes. There is no mention of beans. There is mention of pork liver at the beginning of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXy_Q0GqARg
The video closes with Mary swimming in a thermal bath full of radon!
Not on the video: An alternative explanation for the longevity of Ikarians is that the granite rocks Mary mentions make the local water full of orthosilicilic acid, which helps detox aluminum and other metals from the body. See this book by Dennis Crouse.
I did a quick internet search and it turns out that there is a medical condition called bile acid malabsorption, where not enough bile acids are being reabsorbed. Again, this is about bile acids, not the bile itself. The takeaway is that not enough reabsorption is taking place and sickness happens, rather than sickness happening because too much reabsorption is occurring.
Quote from Retinoicon on April 9, 2022, 2:03 pmI did a quick internet search and it turns out that there is a medical condition called bile acid malabsorption, where not enough bile acids are being reabsorbed. Again, this is about bile acids, not the bile itself. The takeaway is that not enough reabsorption is taking place and sickness happens, rather than sickness happening because too much reabsorption is occurring.
It is interesting that BAM is associated with fatty liver disease and gallstones.
"Bile acids are produced by the liver and stored in the gallbladder. A 2017 study that studied the files of 578 patients found that bile acid diarrhoea was associated with gallstones and fatty liver disease."
"Crohn’s disease, gallstones, coeliac disease, and other diseases of the digestive system may cause bile acid malabsorption. It can also disturb the delicate equilibrium of the gut microbiome in the colon."
Garrett Smith talked about this a bit yesterday during his video. The rapid, unbound bile getting shot out of the body in the form of diarrhea may be disrupting/killing parts of the microbiome, causing lowered vitamin K levels, thus increasing bleeding gums and other symptoms of scurvy.
@wavygravygadzooks - Ok, sure. Keep us posted about your health recovery. Best wishes.
@jeremy, the attached photo is from a book written by Diane Kochilas, an American Greek woman who went to live in Ikaria, studied their cuisine and then wrote a book about it. I lived in Greece and my personal observation is to me the only prove I need to know what was eaten by many Greeks I interacted with, some of them very old and very healthy. Whether or not beans contribute to their longevity- I did not study that. And I never said anywhere that they do not eat meat. They do and plenty of it but it is always eaten with vegetables, salads and starches (breads, pasta, potatoes).
Will check your links. Thank you.
I don’t doubt that there is such a condition but there is more to bile than just bile acids. I didn’t have time to search for studies about the bile circulation but once I find something interesting, I will post it here. I am not here to insist about how the body works or doesn’t. I trusted someone who already did study that, but she might be wrong. 😼 At least wavy thinks so.
PS. This isn’t a bad piece of information about bile. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4091928/
There are many components in the bile, including toxins, cholesterol, drugs etc. that need to be carried out. My journey on fiber-less meat diet brought my cholesterol to insane levels which went down when I introduced beans. So, the theory that soluble fiber carries out at least some of the bile components seems to be correct.
I started this whole thread to discuss the insane diarrhea that began when I adopted a low Vitamin A diet. Since then, I have largely come to the conclusion that it was more likely to be the result of caustic unbound Vitamin A in the colon, than it was to be from bile acid malabsorption, although both are possible and not mutually exclusive.
Initially, the watery diarrhea was highly sporadic and interspersed with near constipation despite a relatively consistent diet of mostly meat. This pattern does not lend itself to the diagnosis of bile acid malabsorption. I had been eating lots of fat before then without issue, and bile acid malabsorption shouldn't just turn on and off to that degree like a light switch. Additionally, Vitamin A toxicity results in downregulation of bile acid production (presumably to avoid absorption of more Vitamin A), which means there shouldn't be much bile acid transiting the intestines in the first place.
What makes more sense to me is that my liver initially began to flush out Vitamin A in pulses. The liver eliminates Vitamin A primarily via glucuronidation, and I think secondarily by binding it directly to Taurine. Both of these conjugates are susceptible to degradation by gut bacteria. When degraded, I expect the unbound Vitamin A (likely retinoic acid and retinaldehyde) to then irritate the intestines and result in inflammatory diarrhea, very similar to the way bile acid diarrhea happens. These bacteria should also be creating gas as a byproduct, which is what I experienced more and more as the diarrhea became chronic.
The one supplement I never entirely stopped during the past several years was magnesium. I found a rat study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7551274/) that indicated a diet high in magnesium led to greater prevalence of sulfate reducing bacteria, which are known to produce hydrogen sulfide gas, which I started getting from foods and supplements containing higher levels of taurine. There were other apparently undesirable bacterial strains that flourished along with SRBs in that study. Rats are not humans, but there's good reason to believe that the mechanism that caused the dysbiosis in rats would be similar in humans (most likely alkalinization of the colon from unbound magnesium). Alternatively, the SRBs may have flourished even in the absence of magnesium if there was sufficient Taurine (bound to Vitamin A) and other sources of sulfur to feed them.
I just recently started cutting back on my magnesium intake and have seen the diarrhea rapidly diminish. If my hypothesis is correct, I expect the gas problems I've been having should diminish as well, although I wouldn't expect these things to entirely disappear until my liver stops dumping Vitamin A as fast as it can.
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on April 9, 2022, 3:35 pmI started this whole thread to discuss the insane diarrhea that began when I adopted a low Vitamin A diet. Since then, I have largely come to the conclusion that it was more likely to be the result of caustic unbound Vitamin A in the colon, than it was to be from bile acid malabsorption, although both are possible and not mutually exclusive.
Initially, the watery diarrhea was highly sporadic and interspersed with near constipation despite a relatively consistent diet of mostly meat. This pattern does not lend itself to the diagnosis of bile acid malabsorption. I had been eating lots of fat before then without issue, and bile acid malabsorption shouldn't just turn on and off to that degree like a light switch. Additionally, Vitamin A toxicity results in downregulation of bile acid production (presumably to avoid absorption of more Vitamin A), which means there shouldn't be much bile acid transiting the intestines in the first place.
What makes more sense to me is that my liver initially began to flush out Vitamin A in pulses. The liver eliminates Vitamin A primarily via glucuronidation, and I think secondarily by binding it directly to Taurine. Both of these conjugates are susceptible to degradation by gut bacteria. When degraded, I expect the unbound Vitamin A (likely retinoic acid and retinaldehyde) to then irritate the intestines and result in inflammatory diarrhea, very similar to the way bile acid diarrhea happens. These bacteria should also be creating gas as a byproduct, which is what I experienced more and more as the diarrhea became chronic.
The one supplement I never entirely stopped during the past several years was magnesium. I found a rat study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7551274/) that indicated a diet high in magnesium led to greater prevalence of sulfate reducing bacteria, which are known to produce hydrogen sulfide gas, which I started getting from foods and supplements containing higher levels of taurine. There were other apparently undesirable bacterial strains that flourished along with SRBs in that study. Rats are not humans, but there's good reason to believe that the mechanism that caused the dysbiosis in rats would be similar in humans (most likely alkalinization of the colon from unbound magnesium). Alternatively, the SRBs may have flourished even in the absence of magnesium if there was sufficient Taurine (bound to Vitamin A) and other sources of sulfur to feed them.
I just recently started cutting back on my magnesium intake and have seen the diarrhea rapidly diminish. If my hypothesis is correct, I expect the gas problems I've been having should diminish as well, although I wouldn't expect these things to entirely disappear until my liver stops dumping Vitamin A as fast as it can.
What form of magnesium are you taking? Magnesium oxide is basically a laxative.