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Carnivore and Bile Acid Malabsorption
@lil-chick Carotenoids are lipid soluble. Isn't the film you're talking about simply the result of carotenoids mixing with the fat? I've never had more difficulty removing the leftover fat from baking carrots in oil than removing fat from anything else. The difficulty in removing the fat depends on how saturated the fat is. Ruminant fat is way harder to clean off than chicken and pork fat because it's more saturated; all animal fat is harder to clean than plant-derived oils because the animal fat is more saturated. Some plant oils you can practically wash off just with hot water, but getting beef tallow off of something requires a lot more heat, soap, and scrubbing.
Not all carnivores are eating a bunch of bones, skin, hair, fur, and when they do I don't think it's benefitting their intestines (just as fiber is not directly benefitting human intestines). Avian predators regurgitate whatever their stomachs can't dissolve (not that birds are a relevant model for humans).
I hope I don't seem to be harping on you, the reason I keep participating in this thread is I think something is definitely going on in VA detox regarding fat tolerance, bile, lower GI, gas, etc that needs to be thought about. I think there are things we can do.
When my cats came down with kidney failure after a lifetime of me feeding them a high VA diet of very expensive so-called "thinking-man's" cat food and free range organic egg yolks and liver and muscle meat (a great diet -- until it wasn't!) I tried putting them on just raw muscle meat. For a while they were happy on it. But after a while they stopped wanting it. There was something missing. Also, they stopped tolerating higher fat meals. (could result in pale stools, sticky buts, etc)
I read a site, maybe I can find it, about caring for cats with kidney failure. One of the major points of advice is: KEEP THEM EATING. The vet concurred, you must keep food going through the system. One cat died during the phase where they became anorexic on the muscle meat. He seemed to have a heart attack. (just a guess).
The other had a slightly different track. He had been to the vet a few months before and received a shot of B complex and B12. He lived for several more months than the other. In hind sight I should have kept up these supplements for him. I think they ran down and led to his passing.
They were just nearing end of life for their breed. So who knows. They were 17 and I've heard 20 is possible.
I ended up putting the surviving one on what he wanted: a gourmet canned cat food (fancy feast) recommended on the kidney failure site. Whatever wasn't present in the muscle meat ... he seemed to think was there in the canned food? He ate it well.
I'm not so sure daily beans are the way to go. Seeds can be problematic. Our resident frutarian might have a good message for what is the easiest fiber for humans to tolerate. Stewed prunes were what my great-grandmother urged for regularity daily. I was told applesauce was always on the table too (and was always tolerated by my kids when they had tummy aches). Her daughters, my great aunts that lived to 100, believed in the apple cider vinegar drink. I sometimes wonder if my daily red wine acts similarly to that. I have a real penchant for peanut butter (a legume) but it does make me fart. 🙂 I think I'm going to pour off the peanut oil next time I buy it just to help keep fats lower. It could be that "easiest fiber" varies from person to person.
I'm considering adding seltzer to my daily routine because it seems to detox me. I'd rather keep that at a dull roar so I don't clear the party after a beer.
Staying hydrated was also a very important factor in keeping the kidney-failure cats alive.
If the pic I posted above doesn't tell you about the ability of this poison to get into the pores of a surface and stick hard, that's ok. For me the visual is powerful.
Staying hydrated is very important I think. If toxins are largely being excreted via the kidneys rather than via the gut due to cholestasis (induced by vA) then I’m guessing flushing them through quicker would limit damage. Sounds like your cats had a long & happy life @lil-chick
That is a good point @jaj. It is so easy to lose sight of the simple things.
Now, I wonder, isn't the low carb flu about loosing a bunch of water weight? Do the ultra-low carb have a somehow "less hydrated" state of being somehow? Just curious.
I had a very hard time with the low carb flu when I experimented with ultra low carb. I even ended up at the doctor. And I have to be half dead to go to the doc, LOL.
@lil-chick I'm glad to have your thoughts, sometimes they might spark a new idea for me to look into. I'm not sure I can make anything of your cat anecdotes here though. Like you said, they were getting pretty old when they died, so it's hard to know how much their age factored into their health issues.
Visuals are indeed very powerful! That's why we fall prey to all kinds of advertising and propaganda when it involves emotional imagery. It's not always a reliable way to make judgements...
My understanding of the "low carb flu" is that it is a rebalancing of electrolytes, which does involve changes in water retention and water weight, but it's not that a low-carb state leaves you dehydrated. A carb-centric diet leads to retention of water and water weight, which means you're using more energy to move your heavier body around and putting more stress on your joints. I don't think it means you're more hydrated because the intracellular concentrations of electrolytes should be the same on high-carb or low-carb, but it does mean you have different needs for electrolyte intake (you need more electrolyte intake all around on a high-carb diet as far as I know, along with more nutrients in general to process the carbs into energy).
I found the website that had the cat kidney failure info. My idea is that cat kidney failure is cat VA toxicity, maybe you can find more examples of anecdotes here that might help you solve whatever is causing your runs. https://www.felinecrf.org/
Sometimes people here talk about wanting to try an animal experiment like Grant did. I guess I ended up with one, whether I wanted to be in one or not-- and kind of interesting because my cats had the same disease as Grant. Unfortunately, things didn't end the way I would have wished.
It was very stressful to me, and I bottomed out on B vities myself. B vities helped me recover.
(I've also lowered the amount of VA I give my chickens and put them permanently on organic feed. With the chickens I feel that there has been more progress. They seem to have less gleet, for instance. They are laying well, even though they are past good egg-laying age).
One of the tennets-- to just keep pushing food through the system-- might be opposite from what carnivore does.
I've read some stories about animals who end up so goofed up by, for instance, picking trash... that they can no longer tolerate their natural diets. And so it may not be that carnivore is "wrong". It may just be that you need something now to get over a hump, and you might not need it forever.
Today my hands are dyed with carotenes after weeding my garden... Even though I've scrubbed them hard and done some dishes by hand. We have a very tough opponent here.
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on April 15, 2021, 11:25 amI've got a strong hunch that many people doing low vA are going overboard on the fiber and eating too little fat, and they're running into bile acid insufficiency.
They do that just so that they avoid strong symptoms created by stearic or palmitic acid while their serum retinol levels are still high, though that's probably only necessary for the start. You could, however, supplement taurine to encourage bile production regardless.
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on April 15, 2021, 11:25 amAfter reading up on carnivore principles for a year and trying it for 8 months, here's my current conclusion: Humans can thrive on just muscle meat and fat for a very long time, probably indefinitely. I don't think they are missing any nutrients by doing that.
Keep in mind you rarely get to hear the poor outcomes as loudly as the good ones. I was on a strict carnivore diet for over a year, with just muscle meat and eggs for 98%+ of the time. After you get fully fat adapted, exercising feels the same on both zero carb and high carb. However, you put muscle on at an abysmal rate, which is likely due to the poor insulin response.
On top of that, my blood work showed several times throughout that year elevated alkaline phosphatase (with normal liver markers and abdominal scan) and low hemoglobin (with high iron/normal ferritin). The two likely showed a manganese deficiency that was manifesting as bone demineralization (leading to elevated aph) and folate deficiency manifesting as poor red blood cell formation.
A carnivore diet is, indeed, folate sparing, given the high amount of choline and creatine that it involves. On top of that, eggs do have a fair amount of folate too, and I consumed on average 4 a day. Their sparing effects were also visible on my homocysteine, which was a steady 6 for the majority of the time, but that still couldn't prevent a folate deficiency, or what was at least the beginning of one.
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on April 15, 2021, 11:25 amOn paper, plants sometimes appear to contain more of some nutrients than animals, but the problem is that what they do contain is not very bioavailable. It is either physically inaccessible behind fibrous cell walls, or it is chemically bound tightly to plant compounds.
My take is that we evolved consuming predigested food, whether it be plant matter or meat. This involves cooking, fermenting, aging, mincing, etc. The selection of foods we can consume in a raw state and assimilate much out of it is astoundingly small. Even meat would be challenging to derive nutrition from without pre digestion, especially when it comes to large ruminants. On top of that, I would draw attention to the fact that there are still several nutrients that are just as bio-available in plants as they are in animal foods, especially once cooked or fermented, and none of us gets to consume freshly slaughtered meat that might still have a good chunk of vitamin c and no oxidized iron. And even if you got your hands on some, good luck chewing that up.
I do believe that meat is at the forefront of our evolution, but to make it out as the only thing we need for good health and portray plants as inferior in every way is a pretty reductionist mindset imo.
Ok guys some anti HFD data for you 😉
High-fat diet-derived free fatty acids impair the intestinal immune system and increase sensitivity to intestinal epithelial damage:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31810607/
That's another mouse study... Doesn't mean we should completely ignore it, but mice aren't people, and lab mice aren't wild mice eating a wild mouse diet.
@rockarolla The study refers to Asian countries affected by "westernized" diets, which likely entails an increase in PUFAs, not just any kind of fat. Not to mention Asian cuisine uses PUFAs way more than western cuisines, so that's like adding gasoline to fire.