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Carnivore and Bile Acid Malabsorption
Thanks for sharing your experiences. My understanding is that the SpectraCell test works by testing cell growth or function of some white blood cells when all but one nutrient are given at a time. If the cell works as expected without the nutrient, your white blood cells must not be deficient in it. Does this explanation of how the test works jive with what you know and provide any explanation for your puzzling results?
@wavygravygadzooks What is your opinion on Bart Kay? Have you looked into him?
He seems to recommend this diet:
Eat 1-2 times a day
Only muscle meat, NO ORGANS
Protein and fat in a 50-50 ratio. This will avoid ketosis.
Yeah, I'm pretty well aware of how their assessment works. I kept asking the company for more details about the test and was getting some really lame responses. The principle behind the test is pretty thin. I still don't know the details of the study that supposedly verified their approach. They had to have collected a reference range of values for these nutrients, then told people to supplement based on the results, then measured the status of those people after some period of supplementation and compared the results to their status prior to supplementation. Without seeing a full description of their methods and results from such a study (the absolute basics of any science) it is impossible to know whether it is all BS.
It's quite possible that a large number of their clients feel better by random chance after supplementing based on their recommendations...if so many people really are deficient in a wide array of nutrients, then you would expect improvements from supplementing just about anything!
Yeah, I've listened to some of Bart Kay's stuff. I even paid $100 to him through Patreon to do a consultation, but he didn't really help with anything...he was very reluctant to accept that I had Vitamin A toxicity and basically just told me to do the Steak and Butter Gang program.
I think he has some good info to offer, but apparently nothing new for me, and I was surprised to find he is yet another one of those people preaching something without doing it himself! It sounds like he only recently attempted strict carnivore for just 90 days.
He's not opposed to ketosis, he just warns about being in ketosis for too long. I'd say that is the one new thing I might have gotten from him...I'd wondered why Amber O'Hearn was occasionally having electrolyte issues, which she claimed were associated with weight loss, and after listening to Bart I started thinking it might be because she's pushing the threshold of too much fat and too little protein. Her mental condition (bipolar?) is one that probably really benefits from ketosis, so she's likely attempting to stay in uninterrupted ketosis for too long and needs to eat bigger pulses of lean protein to get out of it more frequently.
All the warnings about the dangers of ketosis appear to stem from the early attempts to cure epilepsy by maintaining people in non-stop ketosis. Intermittent ketosis is great, but uninterrupted ketosis seems to be a problem. I think this is also reflected in a genetic quirk of the Inuits whose bodies resist ketosis despite their high intakes of fat...it sounds like that has led to survival problems in infants but the tradeoff is that the adults are able to survive on their extremely high-fat diet without problems.
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on April 25, 2022, 3:18 pmI think this is also reflected in a genetic quirk of the Inuits whose bodies resist ketosis despite their high intakes of fat...it sounds like that has led to survival problems in infants but the tradeoff is that the adults are able to survive on their extremely high-fat diet without problems.
The claim that Inuit on a traditional diet are not in ketosis could be only a measurement issue: the Inuit use ketones so efficiently that only minimal ketones are wasted in the urine or breadth. It would be interesting to measure blood ketones in the Inuit.
The Inuit reference I made comes from reading the Free The Animal blog a while back. It's been so long that I can't recall how they measured ketones, but I thought it was from the blood. Richard Nikoley was using that paper to argue that ketosis was bad, when it seems that it was just a genetic peculiarity to prevent uninterrupted ketosis in a group of people who would otherwise be stuck in ketosis for eternity.
Bart Kay just did a video on Paul Saladino.
He basically said Saladino failed on a carnivore diet because of organ meats, too little protein and too much fat, which leads to consistent ketosis, which then leads to electrolyte problems.
From my experience on the carnivore diet, I must admit that I havent ever tried Bart Kays version of a carnivore diet.
I was in ketosis too much because everyone said all the time how you should go 80% fat and how wonderful ketosis is.
But after a few weeks of ketosis my blood pressure went higher and higher. Seems like I just needed to eat more protein...
Also I always ate 2-3 meals a day, maybe I would have done better with one.
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on April 25, 2022, 3:33 pmThe Inuit reference I made comes from reading the Free The Animal blog a while back. It's been so long that I can't recall how they measured ketones, but I thought it was from the blood.
In the field, measuring the breath or urine would be much easier than measuring the blood. You wouldn't need any invasive methods that might annoy the Inuit living a traditional lifestyle. Also, I don't know if the US and Canada have many Inuit living traditional lifestyles these days, so the studies might have been done decades ago when there were not portable blood ketone meters. Back in the day, any blood taken would need to be analyzed in a lab in a city, which might not have been feasible for the blood of a large number of individuals.