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Eating beef heart
Hi, I'm from Germany and new to Grant's site and forum. I was wondering if any of you have been eating beef heart and experienced increased detox symptoms because of that.
This happened to me last weekend after eating 300g of it (nothing else except some butter) on Saturday and again on Sunday. Since heart is basically muscle meat but a muscle that works all the time, and it allegedly has relatively low VA, I believe this was not an intoxication but that the benefits of muscle meat in helping to detox VA are more pronounced in heart and thus eating it increases the detox. Heart has plenty of CoQ10, B Vitamins, Zinc, Taurin and all essential amino acids so it's kind of like a metabolism booster.
Can anyone say anything about this from own experience?
If it's indeed helpful then I will dry some more heart and eat just a little each day to improve detoxification but without overdoing it. I don't much care for another day or two of abdominal cramps.
Grant was mentioned in a carnivore diet video I was watching recently. I'm always open to new information and read his three books in three days, incidentally while I was incapacitated with abdominal cramps from eating the beef heart and unable to work, so I realized right away that it must have something to do with Vitamin A.
I find the information quite mind-blowing and it made so much sense right from the start. I've been researching healing and nutrition since 15 years and always felt like there's something very important missing. Well, VA toxicity is the missing element, no doubt about it.
Now I realize what mistakes I made when I tried all those different diets throughout the years and can finally and safely settle on a diet of exclusively grass-fed beef muscle meat, heart and fat, some additional fat source and water and see how that goes long-term.
Speaking of fat - can anyone recommend a good fat source that has only small amounts of VA and no other antinutrients?
I've basically just been adding butter to my meat but butter does have quite a lot of VA.
I was considering coconut oil since I'm aware of at least some anecdotal evidence that it helps with cognitive function and improves memory in Alzheimer patients. MCT oil would be another option but that's processed so it's probably not so good. Any ideas about this?
I've experienced some nasty hydrogen sulfide gas and diarrhea from supplemental taurine, and to a lesser extent from eating heart, and possibly also from eating turkey/chicken (which contains a fair amount of taurine).
If I had to make a bet, I would say it's the taurine that's causing your symptoms if you actually have Vitamin A toxicity. I think taurine binds directly to aldehydes (e.g. retinaldehyde) and could thereby increase Vitamin A dumping in a toxic person.
For fat, I would just stick with animal fat. There aren't a lot of studies that show accurate measures of Vitamin A in tallow, but there's one that was conducted on caribou that indicated pretty small amounts.
In my opinion, I would look for animal fats that have the lowest levels of beta-carotene, which seems like the most likely form of Vitamin A to accumulate in the fat of healthy animals. I've been buying grass-finished bison, beef, and lamb tallow for a couple years now. The bison tallow is by far the most yellow (loaded with beta-carotene), the beef tallow is much less yellow but still noticeably tinged with it, and the lamb tallow is consistently the whitest of the three (I'm pretty sure sheep are better at converting and eliminating beta-carotene than cattle and bison).
The pork lard I've made myself has actually been the whitest of all of them, but I'm not a fan of the taste of pork lard and I don't like that it's higher in unsaturated fats and possibly contaminants due to their monogastric digestive system.
I've played around with coconut oil, but since being mostly carnivore I can taste all the nasty plant chemicals in coconut oil and tend to avoid it for that reason.
@wavygravygadzooks It is an interesting observation that the fat of sheep are whiter than the fat of cattle. In terms of muscle meat, Figure 3 of the Egyptian/Japanese study on retinol in meat and liver shows that Japanese sheep meat has more retinol than Egyptian grass-fed cattle, although the percentage difference is not huge, especially compared to the much lower levels in Egyptian grain-fed cattle.
The fat of animals was not measured in this study, so perhaps lamb fat is indeed better than beef fat for retinol content (although you mentioned carotenoid content, which should be lower than retinol content).
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jvms/advpub/0/advpub_15-0287/_pdf
@wavygravygadzooks It could be the taurine, or it could be the CoQ10, or a combination of all nutrients in heart.
Because of the nutrient density of heart I think it increases metabolism a lot more than just eating regular muscle meat, and without anything to hinder the release of VA from the liver and other tissues, such as carbs, dairy or any plant foods, the body will immediately start to detox it with a vengeance.
Fat eaten alongside heart or muscle meat may either slow down the process somewhat, or bind the toxins, or both, and thus decrease the severity of symptoms. I'm going to try that in a week or so, with another portion of heart and some tallow. When I ate the heart last weekend I added only about 30g of butter per day, when before I was eating about 200g butter daily + muscle meat, with zero detox symptoms.
That said, it is my belief that any additional carbs, dairy products except maybe butter, and any plant foods eaten with meat will slow down or even prevent this detoxification altogether, because all of them are more or less toxic to the body and will thus have to be eliminated first. Meanwhile the VA remains safely stored away. If this is practiced as a diet it will prolong the detoxification process, perhaps indefinitely, as you already mentioned in another thread. I fully agree that a diet of exclusively muscle meat (+heart) and animal fat is by far the fastest but also the most intense way to detox VA.
As a tip for people struggling with digestive issues or basically any VA toxicity symptoms - I highly recommend to use your own urine externally as well as internally. There is no better substance to heal skin, digestive and any other issues, especially while detoxing the cause of all of them.
You were eating 200g of butter? That's an entire cup, isn't it? There's a lot of Vitamin A in that! Over 100% the RDA by the looks of it, and we know the RDA for Vitamin A is already excessively high.
That might be why you didn't have detox symptoms...your body temporarily stopped dumping stores of it due to incoming Vitamin A that had to be dealt with (the dumping from storage in tissues seems to be where most of the symptoms come from).
It's certainly possible that CoQ10 increases detox as well, but in my mini-experiment I supplemented a good amount of taurine alongside muscle meat and got the same kind of reaction that I got from eating heart, which leads me to believe that it is the taurine (there's also more published evidence of taurine's effectiveness in detoxification).
I haven't looked into the urine thing you mention, but I've heard some reference to it in a talk I was listening to and it sounded pretty "out there". You should be aware that our kidneys also eject a lot of toxins in the urine, sometimes as a backup to the liver, so even if there is some legitimate reason to apply urine to yourself, it's probably not a good idea while you're heavily detoxing anything.
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on June 19, 2022, 11:16 amYou were eating 200g of butter? That's an entire cup, isn't it? There's a lot of Vitamin A in that! Over 100% the RDA by the looks of it, and we know the RDA for Vitamin A is already excessively high.
That might be why you didn't have detox symptoms...your body temporarily stopped dumping stores of it due to incoming Vitamin A that had to be dealt with (the dumping from storage in tissues seems to be where most of the symptoms come from).
It's certainly possible that CoQ10 increases detox as well, but in my mini-experiment I supplemented a good amount of taurine alongside muscle meat and got the same kind of reaction that I got from eating heart, which leads me to believe that it is the taurine (there's also more published evidence of taurine's effectiveness in detoxification).
I haven't looked into the urine thing you mention, but I've heard some reference to it in a talk I was listening to and it sounded pretty "out there". You should be aware that our kidneys also eject a lot of toxins in the urine, sometimes as a backup to the liver, so even if there is some legitimate reason to apply urine to yourself, it's probably not a good idea while you're heavily detoxing anything.
I was eating that much butter before I knew about the toxicity of VA. It didn't have any negative side-effects but I totally agree that it may well have prevented the body from releasing stored VA. That's why I'm currently looking into alternatives and will try out tallow as main fat source next.
In terms of detoxification I think it's probably not any one element alone but a combination of several that helps with detoxification, in particular those that are in muscle meat and here especially the heart muscle. Next experiment will be eating heart with copious amounts of tallow to see if my body reacts less violently than last time when I ate only little fat alongside the heart.
As regards urine - if you have any digestive issues try it. Don't overthink it. It absolutely does not matter what's in the urine. It could be a toxic soup of blood and pus and consuming it you would still be healed.
@carnivore How do you distinguish:
- Beef heart has vitamin A in it can causes symptoms from excess vitamin A
- Beef heart helps detox vitamin A and causes symptoms from fast detox