I needed to disable self sign-ups because I’ve been getting too many spam-type accounts. Thanks.
Carnivore and Bile Acid Malabsorption
Quote from Beata on April 9, 2022, 3:07 pm@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. ...
They do and plenty of it [meat] but it is always eaten with vegetables, salads and starches (breads, pasta, potatoes).
Thanks. I never heard of Diane Kochilas but she does have a book about Ikaria. I will say this about Mary Ruddick: she lived for six months on Ikaria, her partner (now husband I think) is Greek, and she seems brutally honest about all the cultures she visits.
The summery of the Ikaria book by Kochilas, linked below, doesn't mention meat (other than seafood) at all. This sounds super biased based on the Ruddick's observations. Ikaria is a rocky, mountainous island and they can't grow crops like wheat, rice and corn there and I don't know about beans. The terrain of Ikaria is good for small animals like sheep, pigs and goats. I didn't buy Kochilas's book, but if the book pretends like meat is a small part of the diet of Ikaria then I can only conclude that the author is a liar. She is probably marketing the book to Americans who want to eat a low fat diet.
Here is the summary of Kochilas's book on Ikaria:
The following is a quote from Mary Ruddick in an interview on the Western A Price Foundation's (I know our favorite group here) website. She talks about the small amounts of beans and bread being eaten and, unfortunately for us here, the high amount of organ meats. The link to the article is below the quote.
First of all, you almost don’t see any beans served. The Greeks, in general, eat very seasonally, locally and traditionally, minus the new influx of the squashes and the nightshades. Those are all new within the last 50 to 100 years, depending on the region of Greece coming from the Americas. They eat an enormous amount of organ meats from nose to tail. Everywhere I went, the liver was the first thing they give you, followed by a whole block of fried cheese, that’s an emote of olive oil, and they serve wine. Everyone at the cafe is smoking, no one exercises. Even the lifestyle things weren’t on par.
There’s this bakery he keeps talking about. I tried to find it. I was there for the bulk of the summer, which is the high plant season. Greeks eat a good amount of plants in the summer and very little in the winter. It fluctuates. It depends on what’s growing. It was completely different. I could not find these bakeries. There were only two, which were almost never open. I didn’t see people going in and out. They were tiny. They do the three-day ferments on that island like the French, the 72-hour ferments of bread, which is lovely, but I didn’t see many people eating it. While it was served at restaurant tables, it would usually sit there, not too many people would go for it.
The priorities at home and all the houses we went to were the cheese making, organ meat consumption, stews. They eat a lot of pork there. The pork head stew was a very big feature at the time and fresh fruits for dessert was what they would typically go for. It’s not the beans and rice. It makes sense. I had an inkling about that, having spent so much time in Greece because the island of Ikaria is full of rocks. That topography is inappropriate for raising cattle or for raising things like rice and wheat. The Ikarians are known for not trading with other islands or the rest of the world. They’re very local. It made sense that they didn’t have the abundance of those foods, but it was even more animal-based than I had thought it could be, honestly.
https://www.westonaprice.org/podcast/the-sherlock-holmes-of-health/
Aw, come on man, after all the things I've posted you still think I'm dumb enough to be pounding Mag Oxide? 😛
No, it's primarily been glycinate, but I've also experimented with malate, citrate, and chloride.
The reason I persisted in taking it was due to muscle cramps and spasms, and because I didn't see an obvious relationship between the amount I took and the diarrhea I was getting. Even taking 1000 mg didn't seem to guarantee diarrhea. But I'm pretty sure there's a lag time that's hard to discern, in part because the effect is not necessarily osmotic, but rather a shift in gut bacteria that then causes Vitamin A to be freed up in the colon.
I recently stopped my Magnesium Glycinate and all my weird digestive issues disappeared in a few days. I have perfect stools now. I don't think I'll take it again. No supplements right now and feeling no difference whatsoever.
Have you ever tried topical Magnesium? Maybe it could help with muscle cramps without causing gut distress...
@jeremy. I would prefer not to have our discussion here as this is wavy’s space to talk about carnivore and bile. And there is plenty of bile here for sure. 😎 Also, it is hard to discuss a book that you haven’t read but have strong opinions about. I think I will call it quits.
"The reason I persisted in taking it was due to muscle cramps and spasms"
this could be due to calcium deficiency.
I would say this "everyone should take magnesium, because is most likely deficient, but everyone has plenty of calcium" is another paradox in health community.. But if someone doesn't eat dairy than his calcium intake is probably low. So taking magnesium in this situation can low calcium even more. I believe that I was so miserable first couple of years of this "health journey" because I was taking and using topical mag chloride a lot.. Now I just take like 300mg of calcium citrate. I don't think that I need extra magnesium..
Quote from Beata on April 10, 2022, 2:33 am@jeremy. I would prefer not to have our discussion here as this is wavy’s space to talk about carnivore and bile. And there is plenty of bile here for sure. 😎 Also, it is hard to discuss a book that you haven’t read but have strong opinions about. I think I will call it quits.
Sorry for seeming to be rude. Just to close this off, I bought the book and glanced at several chapters. Despite the highly misleading summary on Kohcilas's own website, there is a chapter on meat and plenty of coverage of dairy. The first sentence of the chapter on meat says "The most telling aspects of the meat cuisine on Ikaria are that most meat was prepared as a festive or Sunday meal or consumed regularly or sparingly, more as a condiment than a main course protein."
But she soon writes "Today, the amount of meat that Greeks consume - and Ikarians are not different - never ceases to amaze me. The latest statistics, ...., state that per capita meat consumption in Greece is at an unbelievable (at least to this vegetable lover) 183 lbs annually, or about 1/2 pound a day." So by her own words she is a "vegetable lover" who finds eating 1/2 pound of meat a day to be an "unbelievable" amount.
Kohcilas also blames EU subsidies for having too many goats on the island! There are 8000 permanent residents and 30.000 to 50,000 goats. This is certainly an interesting wrinkle and could explain Ruddick's observations on the contemporary diet.
You have to get calories from somewhere. In the introduction to the book, she seems to indicate that current aged Ikarians were impoverished and eating a low calorie diet in their younger years. Maybe that is the secret, not the current diet, which seems to be more meat heavy than the diet of typical Greeks.
She does mention the tidbit that islanders used to grow crops on the mainland of Asia Minor, which now is part of modern Turkey. However, she doesn't mention that almost all Greeks were either killed or exiled from Turkey around 1922, so that source for crops couldn't have been part of the diet of most Ikarians alive in 2022, although it could have contributed to the diet in the youth of aged Ikarians in the last few decades.
The chapter on beans is extremely short in its facts about the Ikarian diet. I could find one relevant sentence: "People grow beans, and at least one species of legume, the ancient lupine, grows wild all over Ikaria..." This vagueness seems consistent with Ruddick's observation that beans are not an important part of the diet there, which I think is how we started this conversation.
Anyway, I will admit that the 2020 or so "meat, dairy, fish, vegetables" version of the Ikarian diet that Mary Ruddick studied may not be the same as the Ikarian diet from say 1925 to 1975, where the diet may have been low on calories although there are still some mysteries on what they were actually eating on a daily basis.
Anyway, I think the Ikarian book by the "vegetable lover" Kochilas is biased but is much less biased than I imagined from reading the summary on the author's website. Ruddick's observations on the contemporary diet are probably correct but, in terms of longevity analysis, confounded by contemporary issues like EU subsidies for goats and the increasing levels of income.
I'd like to coin a phrase now, LOL: the vegetable toxin FOOD CHAIN.
I believe that animals get toxified with veg toxins just like we do. I don't think animal flesh and its juices and fats are as "free" or "safe" as some white vegetable foods are. But I do believe we need to eat a good amount of animal foods for best health.
We get to choose to eat some low-toxin (white) veg foods directly, instead of re-eating what an animal has been eating it's whole life. I suppose you could think of eating white vegetable food as eating lower on the vegetable toxin food chain.
To me, these "low vegetable toxin" foods are suddenly explained. Why would they exist so prevalently in our European diet if they were so bad? Why would my Nana get to 99 years of age, eating SAD English muffins and cookies daily? Why are grape and apple the major juices? why is iceberg and cucumber and cabbage the major salads? why did we come to the howling wilderness and build grain grinders by each river? why did people in boats think they could subsist on crackers and limes and meat? Why is white rice considered a perfect food by many asian cultures?
I'm one of those here who has added a legume that used to cause pain and is fine now. Back when that legume bothered me, I was easily talked into the "fiber menace" ideas, but now I wonder if the ideas sprung from and were propagated by people who were having gut problems. I've been having a kind of renaissance in ability to digest :). Which is great.
But I hear Wavy when he says maybe he is actually detoxing hard, while maybe I'm just riding out the load I have. Those veggie poisons do poison you twice! Once on the way in, once on the way out! I'm on the slow boat, I'm too old to be on the fast boat, LOL. I agree that things that make you burn your fat stir things up. I think the body does slow housework though, and will get rid of veg toxins if not inundated with new ones at high rates.
Perhaps an example of people undoing VA poisoning with a (specific) carnivore-style diet is the Inuit women who came down with seasonal VA toxicity. (pibloktoq). I do wonder if the load of VA is less for humans and animals in the far north, given that VA is a veg pigment made to protect plants from sunshine.
Regarding taking magnesium, I have also had bad reactions to that, including *worsening* of muscle cramping and spasming. On another list someone said "modern people are often over-mineralized". My head exploded. That phrase fit me, in that I HAVE found that taking minerals just seems problematic for me. (I posted earlier in the week about how zinc and I don't get along either). I drink hard water, YMMV.
edited to add: I really do prefer sea salt to refined salt, FWIW, I think it might be the only mineral supply I need?
Yes, it seems conceptually appropriate to distinguish plant toxins from issues surrounding the macronutrient content in plants, like fructose, glucose and maybe fiber. You discussed the upside of avoiding some plant toxins (maybe not gluten) from eating processed plant foods (obviously English muffins are more processed than cabbage!).
Gabor Erdosi on Twitter likes to warn about the dangers of food processing. He says consuming refined foods speeds up the absorption of the food and elevates various incretin hormones to non-evolutionary levels, which leads to chronic disease over a lifetime.
The idea that the white plant foods you list could contain fewer plant toxins than meat is fairly interesting. At some extreme, it is obviously true. Table sugar is as white as you can get and is a fairly pure combination of only fructose and glucose.
Personally I don't have much of a sweet tooth but ... now I'm not averse to a little bit of the "white death" LOL. I've started to think that George Washington of US history probably had false teeth not because of eating sweets but because of eating VA... This morning I had a cinnamon bun *with frosting *...
I think the dangers of cheap food aren't necessarily because of the processing (it's surprising how much processing goes on even for home-grown foods) but rather because of the crap that goes into them: cheap fats, preservatives, non-foods, etc.
I guess my cinnabun should have been avoided after all... 😉