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Carnivore and Bile Acid Malabsorption
I put that experiment on pause for now. At this point, I've only tried it for about a week. I stopped because I seemed to be feeling worse on it and I wanted to try tweaking some other things without piling on confounding variables. I do plan to go back and try it again, but at the moment I'm trying a betaine HCL + pepsin supplement to understand if I am not digesting my large intake of meat properly. Most people report the complete disappearance of intestinal gas on a carnivore diet, yet I've had quite a lot of gas every night for the past 2 years, and it seems like the most common fix for that is supplementing HCL and enzymes. I'd avoided trying that until now because I'd gotten some wicked awful stomach aches from taking betaine HCL in the past, probably because I was struggling with H. pylori or some other upper GI dysfunction before I cut out oxalates. Given my other nervous system issues, I've been thinking that Vitamin A and or oxalate dumping might be hindering my parasympathetic system, which could be hindering my ability to produce stomach acid properly, so I figured it's time to try the HCL again.
Hi. I am not using much salt. Especially when eating higher fat cuts that are cooked. I've never noticed a big difference with high or low salt intake.
Why aren't you eating raw meat at all? Due to parasites? I've switched to oxtail and other slow cooked collagenous cuts lately. Too soon to notice something. Could you describe a typical day of eating? =)
I have to ask again, is candida also caused by VA detox? Have you experienced it? If yes, what can I do to stop it? I don't eat any carbs so the thing lives off of fat and protein and probably helps detoxing iron. Can it become invasive tough? That would be pretty scary.
I still don't know how VA connects to iron overload. Could candida in this case even be protective agains heavy metal poisoning?
I've tried mastic gum lately. I feel like I can go to the bathroom more regularly and my poop is bigger and better formed. It is said to help with parasites and H. Pylori. It comes out the other end as it went in so it is not digested. It is also said to not be harmful to the liver as many other anti fungal/anti bacterial herbs are. Maybe you could give it a try. I am also thinking about introducing water kefir. To repopulate the biome consistently. I have a feeling that this whole VA detox thing destroys many of the beneficial bacteria. So Kefir could also help keeping certain fungi and bacteria in check. I am not sure though. Kefir is also high in certain B-Vitamins and electrolytes. Let me know your thoughts on that.
Also: I often get a fast heart beat after eating. Why ist that? Experienced it yourself? I cannot possibly have an allergic reaction to bone marrow, beef and lamb. Could it be that a lot of toxins being released at once are overwhelming the body?
I still use coffee/caffeine on occasion to help with focus. Still dealing with ADD. Does that go away at some point?
And I still get that red rash under my eyes. I thing it is candida too. Will upload a picture next time it occurs...
Yea that is probably it on my side.
I'm too worried about getting GI problems from bacteria in undercooked/raw ground meat, and I really don't think there's a huge benefit to eating raw meat. I do think you'll get more of some heat-sensitive vitamins, but probably not enough to make a big difference in the long run. Like I said though, I do eat my steaks relatively rare, so I think I'm kind of taking the middle road on this one.
I eat two meals per day, one of which I try to make steak, and the other is usually ground beef or some other non-steak cut of beef, lamb, or rabbit. I would eat steak at every meal if I thought I could afford it. I almost always add some amount of tallow to my food, usually lamb tallow because it appears to have less beta-carotene (and I don't think there's any more retinyl esters in it). Sometimes it's just a spoonful of tallow, at other times I eat over 100 grams (which to me seems like a ton of tallow..it's really dense!).
I don't know of Candida being associated with Vitamin A dumping, but I could imagine that damage to your body during the dumping could open it up to infection by Candida and other yeasts and bacteria. Candida does seem to be associated with oxalate problems and oxalate dumping though, and I've heard it is also associated with heavy metal problems. I do think I might have had some Candida problems a couple years ago when I first cut oxalates, Vitamin A, and went carnivore, but I don't think I've had major signs of it since then. People claim Candida becomes a bad systemic infection when it changes to its hyphal form, but I don't know if there's much evidence to support that, never dug into it much.
I have used Mastic gum several times in the past thinking I had H. pylori. I think it probably helped with that. I haven't tried it since my upper GI problems seemed to stop though...interesting to hear your response to it, maybe I'll give it a try and see what happens. I think a lot of these gums (including Acacia gum) tend to act similarly in the GI tract, they do tend to feed bacteria. Supposedly they feed "good" bacteria, but I wouldn't be so sure about their effect. But I guess if it makes you feel better, maybe stick with it for a while and then try removing it and see how your body responds.
I tried water kefir many years ago and switched over to milk kefir. It's hard to know how much sugar remains undigested in water kefir. It also contains small amounts of alcohol and other byproducts of fermentation (so does milk kefir), which is going to tax the liver's processing a tiny amount, but maybe not enough to be meaningful. Milk kefir obviously has its own problems since it's based in milk, but I feel like it's way more potent and has more useful nutrients.
I think fermented meat would be the best thing, really, if you trusted you knew how to ferment it properly. So-called "high" meat. I haven't gone anywhere near that yet though...again, too freaked out about making something that's more harmful than helpful to the body. But the concept seems sound to me with enough indigenous groups doing it: make raw meat more digestible while maintaining (or even improving) the nutrient profile.
My resting heart rate has been elevated a lot at night based on my OURA ring, usually I can't actually feel it beating faster, but sometimes I can tell it's beating faster than usual. I don't usually notice anything around meals though Sometimes it feels like it's pounding really hard, but not faster than usual....that might be because the body is using a lot of its resources to digest a giant wad of meat and because my blood pressure tends to be on the low end of normal.
I'm going to put my reply to you in this thread I created years ago (Carnivore and Bile Acid Malabsorption) where I struggled to differentiate between the possibility of that yellow in the stool being bile acid vs Vitamin A. That way we don't clog up @jaj 's thread and you can look back through my thoughts on the yellow stool if you want.
Let me start by reiterating that I still lean toward the same conclusion you've drawn: that the yellow in the stool is Vitamin A.
However, as any worthwhile doctor would do, we need to run through a differential diagnosis and consider other explanations, and the primary alternative would be bile acid. The main reasons I have considered bile acids as an explanation are:
(1) it is common for people who have their gallbladders removed to experience yellow burning diarrhea;
(2) most doctors would probably first think of bile acid when you told them you had lots of yellow in your stools, and I'm pretty sure approximately zero of them would suggest Vitamin A as a cause;
(3) Vitamin A affects bile acid production through the RXR/FXR heterodimer and via FGF19, usually reducing bile acid production the more Vitamin A there is, presumably in an effort to protect from excess Vitamin A uptake, which bile acid malabsorption would also presumably accomplish;
(4) bile acid diarrhea seems to involve problems with RXR/FXR and FGF19; and
(5) my own experiences with burning yellow stools often coincided with paling of the stool and what appeared to be fat malabsorption, which suggests bile acid malabsorption may be involved. I also seemed to get more burning yellow diarrhea when trying even low doses of lactoferrin (less than 1 cap) after already having copious amounts of yellow diarrhea for over a year on a muscle meat carnivore-ish diet, and lactoferrin supplementation has been associated with increased bile acids in the stool in at least one study.
All that being said, I have found no direct connections in the literature between Vitamin A levels and bile acid dumping into the colon, so this is speculation on my part, and I believe I have made that clear each time I mentioned it. Thus, I currently side with the yellow being Vitamin A, but I keep the bile acid hypothesis in mind in case my experiences with yellow stool change.
Regarding time as a confounding variable, I don't really have to know what time period you're talking about because any amount of time passing is technically still confounding. However, the details you provided about when you started taking lecithin and eggs and the quantities taken are exactly the kind of details we need to see to judge for ourselves what may have been happening when you say you started pooping bright yellow more than before. It's quite possible you already posted that information somewhere else and I wasn't aware of it...sorry if I didn't see it.
Regarding my statement about Grant not being able to prove his recovery was due to resolving Vitamin A toxicity...any real scientist or layperson who understood science and was purely in it for the pursuit of truth would acknowledge exactly what I said. When he simplified his diet to lean bison, rice, and beans, he appears to have removed/reduced a huge host of dietary variables such as oxalates (which are strongly associated with kidney disease) and other plant compounds that have been linked with all manner of disease states. I'm not saying his n=1 experiment is worthless...to the contrary, he has shown that, under particular circumstances, the amount of Vitamin A and Vitamin C needed for health is minuscule, and I commend him for sticking with his experiment for as long as he has and making this forum available for discussion. My contentions are simply that there are too many confounding variables to draw a clear conclusion, he never tried reintroducing isolated Vitamin A to see what happened (who can blame him though, obviously), and he will never prove that Vitamin A is not necessary in small amounts without measuring how much he gets from eating bison and without showing us biopsies of liver and other organs that indicate zero presence of Vitamin A.
That comment I made about newts was referring to a Bart Kay video on YouTube in which he was explaining to a young man named Joey Schwartz why Joey's self-diagnosis of scurvy on a carnivore diet was invalid. It's an obscure reference, I didn't really expect anyone to actually get it...it's funny that I got such serious responses. I was drawing an analogy to people's self-diagnosis of "increased detox, etc" here in the absence of any apparent differential diagnosis or hard proof. Hard proof may be hard to come by, indeed, but that doesn't justify people jumping to conclusions when there's more than one potential explanation. In Joey's case, he didn't even know what gingivitis was and didn't seek a medical diagnosis, and instead leaped to the conclusion that his bleeding gums were due to scurvy resulting from eating only cooked meat, and Bart retorted that he himself had been turned into a newt but was then cured by his all cooked meat diet, and nobody could prove otherwise. Point being, there's nothing wrong with speculation, but when you present your speculation as fact you best expect some pushback.
Misinterpreting something as beneficial when it's not carries big consequences when you're talking years of your life...I've already lost 5 years of my prime to oxalates and Vitamin A and I've become extremely cautious in the process.
There are oxalates in black beans, which is a staple in Grant’s diet.
I don’t see how his problems could’ve been be induced by anything but vitamin A?
Yes, there are oxalates in the black beans, but what was his oxalate load before he started his Vitamin A depletion diet? (I don't honestly know and would like to...I could be totally wrong. I wish there was a place to see a thorough chronology of Grant's diet and symptoms before and after he started his Vitamin A depletion diet. Maybe there is and I'm unaware of it.)
You can eliminate oxalates while continuing to consume oxalates if the amount you're consuming is low enough, and it seems like Grant's intake over the past 7 years has likely been low enough to allow that. In fact, the recommendation for removing oxalate from the body is to go slowly by continuing to eat lower amounts of oxalates for a while so as to prevent a massive "dump" from storage sites in the body and risk serious health problems from that...for Grant, a sudden release of oxalates could have actually killed him by wiping out his kidneys, serious stuff!
Oxalates appear to be a much more common cause of kidney disease than Vitamin A. Have you seen case reports or other publications showing the co-occurrence of Vitamin A toxicity and kidney disease? I'd be interested to see them...not that I've looked for them myself, I don't have kidney issues.
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on February 5, 2023, 9:23 pmI'm going to put my reply to you in this thread I created years ago (Carnivore and Bile Acid Malabsorption) where I struggled to differentiate between the possibility of that yellow in the stool being bile acid vs Vitamin A. That way we don't clog up @jaj 's thread and you can look back through my thoughts on the yellow stool if you want.
Let me start by reiterating that I still lean toward the same conclusion you've drawn: that the yellow in the stool is Vitamin A.
However, as any worthwhile doctor would do, we need to run through a differential diagnosis and consider other explanations, and the primary alternative would be bile acid. The main reasons I have considered bile acids as an explanation are:
(1) it is common for people who have their gallbladders removed to experience yellow burning diarrhea;
(2) most doctors would probably first think of bile acid when you told them you had lots of yellow in your stools, and I'm pretty sure approximately zero of them would suggest Vitamin A as a cause;
(3) Vitamin A affects bile acid production through the RXR/FXR heterodimer and via FGF19, usually reducing bile acid production the more Vitamin A there is, presumably in an effort to protect from excess Vitamin A uptake, which bile acid malabsorption would also presumably accomplish;
(4) bile acid diarrhea seems to involve problems with RXR/FXR and FGF19; and
(5) my own experiences with burning yellow stools often coincided with paling of the stool and what appeared to be fat malabsorption, which suggests bile acid malabsorption may be involved. I also seemed to get more burning yellow diarrhea when trying even low doses of lactoferrin (less than 1 cap) after already having copious amounts of yellow diarrhea for over a year on a muscle meat carnivore-ish diet, and lactoferrin supplementation has been associated with increased bile acids in the stool in at least one study.
All that being said, I have found no direct connections in the literature between Vitamin A levels and bile acid dumping into the colon, so this is speculation on my part, and I believe I have made that clear each time I mentioned it. Thus, I currently side with the yellow being Vitamin A, but I keep the bile acid hypothesis in mind in case my experiences with yellow stool change.
Regarding time as a confounding variable, I don't really have to know what time period you're talking about because any amount of time passing is technically still confounding. However, the details you provided about when you started taking lecithin and eggs and the quantities taken are exactly the kind of details we need to see to judge for ourselves what may have been happening when you say you started pooping bright yellow more than before. It's quite possible you already posted that information somewhere else and I wasn't aware of it...sorry if I didn't see it.
Regarding my statement about Grant not being able to prove his recovery was due to resolving Vitamin A toxicity...any real scientist or layperson who understood science and was purely in it for the pursuit of truth would acknowledge exactly what I said. When he simplified his diet to lean bison, rice, and beans, he appears to have removed/reduced a huge host of dietary variables such as oxalates (which are strongly associated with kidney disease) and other plant compounds that have been linked with all manner of disease states. I'm not saying his n=1 experiment is worthless...to the contrary, he has shown that, under particular circumstances, the amount of Vitamin A and Vitamin C needed for health is minuscule, and I commend him for sticking with his experiment for as long as he has and making this forum available for discussion. My contentions are simply that there are too many confounding variables to draw a clear conclusion, he never tried reintroducing isolated Vitamin A to see what happened (who can blame him though, obviously), and he will never prove that Vitamin A is not necessary in small amounts without measuring how much he gets from eating bison and without showing us biopsies of liver and other organs that indicate zero presence of Vitamin A.
That comment I made about newts was referring to a Bart Kay video on YouTube in which he was explaining to a young man named Joey Schwartz why Joey's self-diagnosis of scurvy on a carnivore diet was invalid. It's an obscure reference, I didn't really expect anyone to actually get it...it's funny that I got such serious responses. I was drawing an analogy to people's self-diagnosis of "increased detox, etc" here in the absence of any apparent differential diagnosis or hard proof. Hard proof may be hard to come by, indeed, but that doesn't justify people jumping to conclusions when there's more than one potential explanation. In Joey's case, he didn't even know what gingivitis was and didn't seek a medical diagnosis, and instead leaped to the conclusion that his bleeding gums were due to scurvy resulting from eating only cooked meat, and Bart retorted that he himself had been turned into a newt but was then cured by his all cooked meat diet, and nobody could prove otherwise. Point being, there's nothing wrong with speculation, but when you present your speculation as fact you best expect some pushback.
Misinterpreting something as beneficial when it's not carries big consequences when you're talking years of your life...I've already lost 5 years of my prime to oxalates and Vitamin A and I've become extremely cautious in the process.
Thanks for the reply. I bumped into it without looking for it here. I don't get a lot of time to post here in detail, but if I can reply I will.
Sure thing. I should also say that I wasn't calling you out specifically in that other thread, you just happened to be the person who responded to me. So, just so you know, I wasn't trying to "hang it on you" in particular.
I also know that I have no editorial authority on this site, nor am I trying to police what people say or think here, I just wish some people took a more cautious approach in their attributing cause and effect and provided more details with which others might judge those cause and effect speculations.
Yeah every single thing said on here is theory as far as I’m concerned. Nothing is fact. Some people like to talk in a more in a ‘fact based’ way, but it’s still theory. It’s just one way of presenting ideas. Facts are just the best fit conclusions for the time period we live in. Facts change. I fully realised this when my genetics degree from the 1980s, which was full of facts, turned out to be wrong in many ways once the human genome project information unfolded. In a subject such as nutrition there are hardly any known facts, a fact (haha) which was shared with us by one of our excellent lecturers at ION, in one of the final lectures. People were appalled by what she said but I thought it was an excellent thing to say!
I hope on here I always present my ideas as theories and my personal observations as just that. Being a scientist and a (nearly) trained nutritional therapist, I may have some extra knowledge to share, but I don’t claim anything I say is the ultimate truth and I try to include a reference (but I don’t always because it’s just a comment on a forum, not a thesis). People’s experiences are very important to hear in this collective journey and we should be encouraging this. Also people have different areas of specialist knowledge and I’ve learnt such a lot from various people on here. Sharing and discussion are how we are going to get to the best understanding of all this. I think that arguments and rudeness put people off contributing, which is a shame (and possibly the aim of some people on here idk - those who only come to criticise and not to share experiences). Also I think not everyone can write a scientific piece on cause and effect, but it doesn’t mean their ideas and experiences aren’t valid. Everyone has something important to share imo and this is Grant’s way of looking at it too I think.