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Eggs as part of Vitamin A reduction
Oh oh, one more thing: I do think it is a sign of healing and better health to be able to eat more foods instead of less, a balanced "to taste" diet with less crashing/craving/metabolic symptoms, and to gain a clearer idea of what the underlying problems have been, whatever they happened to be, so that further healing can involve experimentation rather than crisis-mode interventions with severe macro restriction. I'm not saying I regret what I did 14 years ago (we were doing our very best to heal our family with the knowledge we had at the time!), and it's _definitely_ important to intervene when there's a crisis, and restricted diets can be necessary and therapeutic. I just mean that if I had it to do over I would do it differently (super carb restriction to start but for a much shorter time, for instance, combined with low vitamin A...), AND we are finally improving and can see glimmers of what life is like for humans with functioning guts that should cause us to be the adaptable creatures we can be, able to thrive on vastly different diets depending on geographic location, climate, season, availability, overall health and preferences, etc. etc. etc.
Similarly to @Tim-2, I no longer think the problems with SAD involve the total carbs per se, but the intensely processed nature of the foods. Modern processed foods that look like foods our recent ancestors ate but are SO different in countless ways - carbs, proteins, AND fats - are as close to drugs as any other.
Quote from Jessica2 on April 22, 2024, 7:41 pm@janelle525 I've not tried dessicated thyroid. It was expensive enough to be prohibitive at the time I contemplated it. Autoimmunity was a theory. I could be wrong. I'd sure love to get to the bottom of why my hair will not grow and sheds like crazy though. Goes through 6-8 week cycles of growth then massive shedding. My basic thyroid labs look good, only TSH was tested though. I've taken nascent iodine to no real effect.
My ALP is 29 on a 34-50 scale. It's been lower. I've supplemented with zinc for years before recently too. I didn't know that meant low stomach acid. Interesting. I wouldn’t say I have too many symptoms of low stomach acid otherwise. Who knows, I'm not always super tuned in to my bodys signals. Pretty sure the pipes in my home were copper too and we drank rusty tap well water that stunk of sulfur, ugh.
I've not gotten LDH tested before.
That's interesting LDH is not included on your CBC, it's a pretty big marker for tissue destruction and cancer if it's high. Yeah low stomach acid I think goes under the radar for a lot of people, it's one thing that really really improved my health, taking betaine hcl with meat. If zinc is low stomach acid will be low in a never ending cycle. Eating so much beef though you'd expect to be replete in zinc, but at least in Smith's circle many have had to take quite a lot. I'm not on that train, as I prefer to be au naturale, but I will absolutely optimize my body's own ability to absorb it from meat.
The hair shedding can be a sign of autoimmune thyroid problems. It can also be high prolactin. I'm not as well versed on how to deal with high prolactin, but I know for certain an imbalance in estrogen and progesterone can cause it as after pregnancy when progesterone levels significantly drop every woman goes through a period of hair shedding. Prolactin is the shedding hormone. Some women have so much prolactin they can squeeze out some milk from their nipples even when not breastfeeding. Stuff that increases prolactin while breastfeeding at least is oats and flaxseed, have you tried going off the evening primrose oil? It could be increasing estrogen too much causing the increase in prolactin.
Exactly. The devil is in the details, it's not about excluding food groups and macros.
I don't see vitamin A depletion as a fad diet when it's simply about minimization of the most common high vitamin A foods i.e. high fat dairy and orange vegetables. It's very scientifically based if serum retinol levels are not low, symptoms of Hypervitaminosis A are present and there is a history of consumption of high vitamin A foods.
@janelle525, I meant to say: yup, now I still eat lots of starch, lots of fat including saturated/animal fat, and much protein, although that's the one I kind of hafta make sure I make myself eat, because even after 14 years of meat eating, hamburger is not my favorite yet its the most affordable...
I wish I could find all my labs, but I posted the highs and lows of the ones I found (and gotta dig up my a1c too)
@jessica2
No being able to consume a regular omnivorous diet that includes grain implies gut and liver dysfunction. It doesn't raise questions about the safety of consuming grain, it's a regular staple for billions that don't suffer those symptoms.
Carnivore eating and veganism are both extreme fad diets where we don't even have populations to study that have eaten like that multigenerationally. They are modern inventions based on dogma, misinterpreted science and pseudo science. It's not reasonable to frame carnivore eating as a normal option and then ask for evidence to disprove it being healthy. It should be assumed to be problematic and then it should be studied to look for evidence of improved health and longevity.
Quote from Jessica2 on April 24, 2024, 5:59 amI honestly want you guys to be right about starches because it would be nice to be able to eat them again. But after 2 years on them (mostly rice admittedly, some quinoa, some wheat flours and pasta) and steady weight gain and what feels like inflammation, I had to do something about it. I've tried to eat organic white flour and it just does not agree with me every time I do it. I get painful joints and generalized fibromyalgia. My guts get messed up for weeks anytime I eat wheat. Perhaps its an allergy, I don't know.
When I developed my digestive issues in 2017 that included a sensitivity to gluten. I could still have a bit of soy sauce or whatever, but a piece of bread would make me evacuate my bowels. I tried some bread every half a year or so to see if anything changed but it was only after doing low vA for some time that I stopped reacting to gluten as violently. I still would get joint pain after eating bread but didn’t poop my guts out. Then in December 2022, I was visiting my sister while on vacation and caught Covid. After I got over it, I had a sourdough sandwich and had no negative reactions. So I’ve been eating bread since. Now, while I was on very low vA I was still not doing well, and another part of the puzzle was probably reintroducing eggs for a few months before trying the bread again. Also, did Covid clear out a lot of bile and toxins? I don’t know all the details that went on behind the scenes to lose my gluten sensitivity, but I’m happy I can eat it again with no repercussions. The point is these things can change.
I have bumped the old thread on B1 and want to cross post this little snippet that came to me while musing:
"I can't help but wonder, and Wavy mentioned this, but in his own way, if another reason carnivore works for some people is because it clears up B1 deficiency.
But I think possibly PORK was the way people managed to have the extra energy of white starches in their diets."
B1 deficiency and VA toxicity seem to be a bad-old Möbius strip of existence...
Poor old much-maligned pork... Which we as a society have veered away from in deference to (more expensive) chicken and beef.
We like anecdotes here on this site, and I'm full of them haha.
Well, I have now and then mentioned my wonderful neighbor, who is still a WAPF'er. She and her brother raise pigs each year and her freezer is always full of pig. As such, pork is a daily event for her.
She and her brother have more energy than God, and it appears she has managed to escape the dangers of cod liver oil and the over-the-top VA associated with WAPF living. They are both svelt.
And because this is the egg thread, I also want to mention she also raises eggs and eats lots of them too.
@jessica2 I found very similar: I couldn't tolerate wheat for about a decade, and even though I started trying once a year, nothing changed until I had been on this low vitamin A adventure for three and a half years (i.e. I was finally healing my gut, so that might need a different approach to do similarly for you if vitamin A is not your gut's issue). I used to think I wouldn't even be able to TOUCH grains again, because I had gotten so traumatized by all the ill health in my family and it seemed like carbs and starch must be responsible. But I now think it's a LOT of things that have damaged us: environmental toxins (including those like glyphosate which are sprayed on non-organic grain especially), vaccines and drugs, and of course, our food supply which is full of food that looks like food but is actually not (was it Michael Pollen who called these "food like substances"?? That's what our stores are full of, even the health food stores)...
Anyway, I totally think that restricted diets have their place too, and if yours is working for you now, then no need to change! But I find that along the way, I get these Nudges in my intuition, that something needs to change. I had hoped it would be wheat for so long, and it never was...until it did work. Adding starches back in (rice, mostly, but also tapioca and arrowroot and fermented cassava) was a really important thing for me, many years before I could tolerate wheat. And I used to think that if a thing was good, then a lot of a good thing was even better...or rather, I should just be able to eat whatever I wanted if it was "good" for me. But @lil-chick has talked about this, I don't think that any successful traditional cuisine had a gluttonous eat-whatever-you-wanted food tradition! There were social and cultural restraints, and it's sooooooo hard and challenging and sometimes exhausting and sad to sit alone in your own kitchen, trying to write down on paper and then satisfy all these appetites from our cold/sterile refrigerator.... all this is to say, you're doing a good job, and you're nourishing yourself and your family, and we do what we can figure out with the information we have and then we have to "bless our food," as my mom would always direct us to do when we were about to go out into the world and eat not-so-healthy options...
Okay, I think I had more comments but gotta go because many people are chatting to me...
I am currently exploring the possibility of supplementing manganese for those family members who still have significant issues with gum recession, ligament laxity, eyestrain, and other soft tissue abnormalities... wish there was an expert who would know exactly how and what to do in our specific situations and would tell me 😉 (this is why we do this, right? Because nobody knows our family's bodies any better than we do, and we're trying to turn the tide just in our small ways, since it sure ain't turning around in our lifetimes in the nutritional and medical communities!) xoxox
Supplementation of manganese is something I see having a lot of potential for harm while having little prospect of benefit. @janelle525 recently posted a Chris Masterjohn post about manganese. With liver dysfunction there is a tendency to accumulate it.
@jessica2
Most people harm not heal themselves with fad diets and supplements.
Nobody said it's easy to heal autoimmunity and liver dysfunction.
People on carnivore diets are typically only minimising symptoms of autoimmunity. The dysfunction is still present and that chronic dysfunction is causing a further slow deterioration of organ function.