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Eggs as part of Vitamin A reduction
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.Â
The opposite. A carnivore diet is extremely unbalanced and is deficient in thiamine, folate, vitamin C, potassium, magnesium, vitamin E and vitamin K.
A lot of carnivore dieters are taking thiamine supplements which is an overcompensation.
Most carnivore dieters aren't eating much pork. Many struggle to eat pork regularly. Try feeding it to dogs every day, sooner or later they'll turn their nose up at it and go hungry, that's true for wild pork at least.
I'm pretty fussy about pork. I only enjoy bacon and roasted wild pork.
The body arguably needs even more nutrition to obtain glucose from protein than from starch.
It's not hard to obtain thiamine and other B vitamins from an omnivorous diet. You state that you don't do physiology. This makes it hard to understand why most deficiency symptoms seen in chronic illness are not due to a lack of nutrition in the diet. They are due to liver dysfunction affecting nutrient recycling and nutrient pathway metabolism. That's why taking megadoses of thiamine doesn't normally do much.
Quote from tim on April 24, 2024, 8:04 amSupplementation 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.
I'm glad you keep bringing it back to this. Just because it's hard to reverse disease doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I used to think I'd never heal my IBS, sure enough I just needed the right information. And it was hard to realize that for the yrs I had been avoiding fiber to not have IBS didn't mean I healed it, it was still there as soon as I ate whole grains, or beans or nuts it's back with a vengeance, I see the same problem with insulin resistance, people in ketosis are not healing their insulin resistance they are just avoiding the problem, if they eat carbs it's back with a vengeance just like me with my IBS. Now I'm not saying someone with super high blood sugar should just keep on doing what they are doing, they absolutely have to get their blood sugar down. Just like I couldn't just 'push through' my IBS, it didn't matter how many times I ate whole wheat I'd be pooping in the bathroom for 2 hours every 5 days. It required a plan of action.Â
Quote from tim on April 24, 2024, 8:34 amI 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.Â
The opposite. A carnivore diet is extremely unbalanced and is deficient in thiamine, folate, vitamin C, potassium, magnesium, vitamin E and vitamin K.
A lot of carnivore dieters are taking thiamine supplements which is an overcompensation.
Most carnivore dieters aren't eating much pork. Many struggle to eat pork regularly. Try feeding it to dogs every day, sooner or later they'll turn their nose up at it and go hungry, that's true for wild pork at least.
I'm pretty fussy about pork. I only enjoy bacon and roasted wild pork.
The body arguably needs even more nutrition to obtain glucose from protein than from starch.
It's not hard to obtain thiamine and other B vitamins from an omnivorous diet. You state that you don't do physiology. This makes it hard to understand why most deficiency symptoms seen in chronic illness are not due to a lack of nutrition in the diet. They are due to liver dysfunction affecting nutrient recycling and nutrient pathway metabolism. That's why taking megadoses of thiamine doesn't normally do much.
Tim, I like that you always give us your unique angle.   I guess I was just thinking that a meat-salt-water-only carnivore/tee-totaller  like Jordan Peterson is at least not wasting thiamine with booze, sugar, over-eating carbs and caffeine.  I agree that probably many don't eat pork and it might be because of anti-pork propaganda and the fact that they see themselves as health nuts who wouldn't touch pork.  And maybe that is why they get the urge for liver sometimes.
It's interesting that you mention dogs turning up their noses at a mono-meat diet. Â I've seen the same thing with my cats. Â They seem to want variety. Â Â I was "spoiling" my cat with free range local lamb (quite a luxury really) and he started turning his nose up at it. Â And not only that I've seen cats decide they prefer manufactured food to natural which really kind of pisses me off haha. Â But I can't help but wonder if there is something in there that might be deficient in the meat, be it fiber or ? Â And why isn't there pork cat food? Â My cat likes pork (I feed it cooked)
Regarding bacon, personally I like cured pork better than fresh, and I wonder if there is a reason for that. Â And is the reason hidden in the word "cured"? Â Â Not that I won't choke down a pork tenderloin with a fennel seed and garlic rub. Â But I think there is a reason that the ham sandwich and eggs-and-bacon are cultural icons. Â I don't tire of ham sandwiches and bacon and eggs. Â (As long as I don't start having trouble with too many amines, we'll see)
Although I can see that supplements might get people over a hump, I think single nutrients can be upsetting to the apple cart. Â I prefer the slow and steady food approach if it can be done. Â It doesn't seem like you should have to take any supplement forever, you should be able to get over humps and then your diet should run properly from there or else you need to change your diet. Â Â
"I don't do physiology". Â Thanks for pointing that out, I guess I don't, LOL. Â I do like a good high-level model that seems to explain things, the personal anecdotes, and the traditions. Â I've never felt my liver was doing poorly, nor my gut. Â For me it could be that I've been on a 40 year long mobius strip of high VA/low B1, with kidneys that have suffered.
For awhile I felt that the only way to heal everything was with diet - I realized that in certain dire cases like my child was in at the time, things are just SO out of whack that diet is the only thing worth focusing on - supplements are impossible because so many things are wrong that humans just don't have the knowledge to effect sustainable change in such cases by taking a pill or twenty (even though the hotshot super expensive autism doctors will often certainly try to convince parents otherwise).
Fast forward several years, lots of things were more stable, but lots of things were not, and I had literally no dietary stone left unturned. I hadn't heard of vitamin A toxicity, and I had tried every diet I had ever heard of that sounded like it even might help. For the next several years, I experimented mostly with supplements, and found some life-altering (or rather life-improving!!) therapies. At that point, I reasoned, I was using bioidentical substances as drugs (as opposed to most prescription drugs which are molecules that are generally foreign).
Now, I focus on maintaining a nourishing diet as far as I can with my limited knowledge and many gaps...AND I search for possible short term therapeutic tweaks, either dietarily or using supplements. I look for people trying things either clinically or personally that have a novel way of connecting the dots - so that when I read what they're trying, I relate my own or a family member's experience to theirs. For example lately, I am curious about:
The potential connection between ligament laxity and overall constitutional health:
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-many-dangers-of-spinal-surgery?utm_source=publication-search
The potential for manganese supplementation to be something to try (but is it toxic as per Chris M??? I also read his article, @Janelle and @Tim-2 ...but this is compelling in that I don't know what else to try for the exact (and somewhat bad) symptoms outlined in this piece for which the doctor has found every-other-day-manganese to be often quite effective (and for which nothing I've tried to date has worked):
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-hidden-link-between-hypermobility
Still more "natural" food toxins, and the therapeutic potential of avoiding a particular class of them:
Why Many Sulfuric Foods are BAD for You: Veggies and More to AVOID
I'm always up for hearing opinions or other ideas of things to try... (For example: high dose thiamine supplementation was super useful for some family members, and seemed to jumpstart VERY important things that weren't working well over a period of only a couple of months. When we discontinued taking the thiamine, the benefits remained. That's the sort of protocol I like: temporary and effective!!)
Oh oh, @Jessica2, I keep forgetting to say: I also had high folate in one of my labs. And I have recently learned that high folate can sometimes mask deficient b12, or be caused by it (I can't remember the details), and I have had crazy bad reactions to supplemental folate before. Not sure it's relevant, but I sometimes wonder about the significance if any... Did your kids have any midline defects or neurological/cognitive/behavioral issues (no need to answer if I'm being nosy!)?
I am generally repelled by pork, though most of my family loves it and I mostly attribute it to my former vegetarianism. But I enjoy chicken and turkey and lamb, and generally beef...so I don't know if that's it. Cured pork is even more repellent. Sometimes I make myself eat it but mostly I don't. My two-year old suddenly developed a severe and itchy/bleeding rash on his lower back that we finally realized was from pork, by eliminating and trialing it multiple times: definitely allergic to pork (he didn't eat any for a year and we tried it recently; sure enough, within 12 hours the rash popped out). I read that a high percentage of people allergic to pork are also allergic to cats, but not the other way round (one family member is allergic to cats but seemingly not to pork, and we haven't had a chance to test whether the pork-allergic child is cat allergic, but I wonder!)
With liver dysfunction it's common for B vitamin pathways to be affected alongside a whole lot of other physiology.
So say an enzyme involved in thiamine metabolism like transketolase is affected. A deficiency could exist despite a normally sufficient intake of thiamin. Mega doses of thiamine may improve thiamine status while it is being taken but the liver dysfunction and the causes of it will not have been addressed.
Often other deficiencies will be present such as riboflavin, magnesium, choline, folate and B12. Why megadose with just one cofactor?
It makes far more sense to take low dose B complex (without pyridoxine and folic acid) for liver support temporarily, especially if one can't eat foods high in B vitamins like legumes. But even that can cause issues for some. I'm growing increasingly skeptical about even that let alone megadoses of one B vitamin.
People often perceive benefits from supplements that are actually harming them. An example is iodine supplementation. Iodine supplementation often causes so much harm but there are thousands that passionately advocate for it.
@jessica2
The effects. That's not necessarily addressing causes.Â
It can take many weeks or months to deplete thiamine from a point of sufficiency.
Many that start taking thiamin mega doses do so after researching thiamin. They are likely to deliberately choose more thiamin rich foods after ceasing thiamin supplementation.
Benfotiamine is a drug. It's not even water soluble like thiamine is.
for one thing it's far from clear to most people what you even need to do to increase liver function. for another even if that's your goal there are many different people, personalities, and doctors and diets telling you different things on how to do it.
I've been researching this for a while. Just because you may not understand doesn't mean I don't. My research process is rarely about listening to influencers and trying out different fad diets. It's about independently researching causes and studying liver and gut physiology and then doing a lot of meditation on how what I've learned fits into my existing knowledge.
It's cliche to say but when it comes to these if you know; you know. They are subtle but magical.
People say this about caffeine and nicotine too. I'm not completely discounting what you are saying though. If someone benefits from taking thiamine then they had an insufficiency of it. If they had an insufficiency of it they either weren't consuming enough (or producing enough in their gut) or they were not metabolizing it well. If one is always striving to improve gut and liver function as well as consuming a balanced diet naturally rich in B vitamins they will hopefully attain thiamine sufficiency at some point. If they don't then they will also have a range of other micronutrient imbalances and physiological issues.
If someone has not been successful in improving their health naturally it may be that it is very difficult for them to do so. That being the case, supportive molecules such as forms of thiamin may improve that person's situation.
A lot of the time though I think healing is possible it just hasn't occurred yet due to a lack of understanding and knowledge. The most basic aspect of this is understanding the natural laws governing optimal diet and lifestyle. If one moves away from those laws in an attempt to avoid symptoms it can make healing more difficult.
@jessica2 btw people like to say "carbs are not essential" but what happens if your blood sugar drops and and stays low. You will die.. That can't happen from "low fat level in the blood..."