I needed to disable self sign-ups because I’ve been getting too many spam-type accounts. Thanks.
Hadza Hunter Gatherers
@rockarolla I am certainly interested to hear about people's experiences doing strict carnivore for years on end. I don't think it's natural to not eat any carbs, so it wouldn't completely surprise me if something went wrong with that way of eating. I went mostly carnivore 9 months ago to try to fix longstanding gut problems, and then I discovered I had Vitamin A toxicity and have been seeing how the carnivore approach works for that. I don't plan to be 100% strict carnivore for any length of time, but it seems to have resolved most of my gut problems pretty quickly. Because my health has been messed up ever since I tried carnivore, I have no idea what it's going to feel like when I'm actually healthy...maybe I will find that slightly higher carb intake feels better. I'm an endurance athlete who's only ever been fueled by carbs, so I'm VERY curious what my performance will look like on mostly fat.
Despite whatever I said before about the body not needing much glucose, there is no doubt that we have taste receptors for sweetness for a reason. To me, that is the best argument for the inclusion of some carbs in the diet.
I can barely carve out a moment to write, but I have been reading your discussion with great interest. I have been trying to figure out this puzzle for 17 years now, because my eldest child was INCREDIBLY picky, from literally the first bite of solid food. Food restriction has been an issue for three of my five offspring, so intensely that we had to spoon feed two of them for literally years. (My youngest just started eating yesterday, and it's amazing! He just EATS, at seven months old, and seems to like food! This is truly amazing, and I do attribute this to our lower A diet. I tried EVERY diet for the other kids prior to this...)
It does seem like many things can mess with our instincts, and I have become so inured to the stress of Food over the years that I can see this in myself: I am capable of developing symptoms if I eat something that I think I shouldn't eat, and I can make myself think I like something if its a food I think I should eat, and along the way my own urges have become Strange and it all can be quite confusing! I am heartened that my four younger kiddos seem to have an upper limit to their sweet teeth - and will say, "that's too sweet" after a spoonful of maple syrup on their pancakes. That is something I lost years ago: I could eat sweets till I made myself sick and still craved more, and cravings are difficult to tell apart from Wantings and Needings if you get my drift...
I tried a very low carb diet for a couple of years, and I wish I hadn't. I got worse and worse, and my hormones and thyroid got worse and worse, and i was sure healing was Just Around The Bend. I finally discovered that a lot of women find that super low carb doesn't work - although certainly not all women find this to be the case! I struggle now not with my macronutrient distribution (I have determined that lots of starch and fruit is good - but only in the context of lots of protein. I also desire much less fat than I used to), but with the intellectual determination: is white rice okay? What do I eat if potatoes are off-limits (one of my children gets very achy joints from them), and wheat causes reactions for half the family, including my nursing baby? I eat a lot of rice and beans and hope that it'll be okay! 🙂
I have never had weight problems, and have been very athletic and physically strong throughout this whole adventure, which is kind of a problem because first I was vegetarian and sometimes vegan (first 30 years of my life I never ate meat at all, and while I had terrible hypoglycemia, I was still strong), then I did GAPS for many years till I crashed, then I did Perfect Health sort of adapted, and then it's been evolving ever since, until 2 years ago nearly, when we went low A. I can't judge my results based on my strength...and my skin has been maybe a bit worse since starting low A, but not worse than it was when I was taking A supplements (I got all pale and awful looking). I feel like I can see just the corner of the puzzle, and wish I could see more!
Gotta go feed dinner to the family...
Thanks for the interesting ideas!
Like Sarabeth, I also flunked out of low carb as a mensing woman, it just wasn't enough to keep me mensing. And I've Jaminet'ed a bunch of fat pancakes into my pie hole and didn't get much benefit out of high-fat either. The square meal is quite enjoyable. Shwarzbein used it for her health overhaul. Why is it so easily taken for granted?
You know I have a theory about why Matt Stone has disappeared from the world of internet food discussions. I wonder if he might have come to the same conclusion I have. (shrugs) Calories are the main reason we eat.
I want to just chime in on the sort of debate that arose about whether carbs are somehow bad for you or that they lead to diabetes. They don't.
I think we are starting to know what leads to diabetes (of both types?): vitamin A! 🙂 Aren't you drinking the cool-aid, guys? Grant is going to be looking much more into that this year, according to his blog post.
Carbs can be high in CALORIES while low in TOXINS. It's a good combo. ;0
May I ask what each of you were eating on a low-carb diet? As I'm sure you know, there are many ways to eat low-carb and they can have very different effects. You can do low-carb by eating piles of leaves, nuts, and seed oils, and not eat much meat, and have a disastrous result. The low-carb aspect is only a part of the equation.
You have to ask yourself, why does it work for some women and not others? It's likely to be what you're eating, or it could have to do with your particular state of health at the time you tried it. I am certainly open to the idea that women do need more carbs than men, but the devil is so often in the details.
You are describing the concept of overnutrition that is a huge part of the modern epidemic of metabolic disease. Carbohydrates per se are not bad, they do not appear to cause insulin resistance and disease in isolation, and they are not deleterious in the context of an appropriate diet. However, they are integral to the symptoms of metabolic disease. If you have insulin resistance but you don't eat carbs, you don't exhibit most of the symptoms of insulin resistance. It looks like PUFAs are one of the biggest culprits. Vitamin A toxicity certainly contributes to metabolic disease, but it doesn't look to be the primary cause.
My earlier point about carbs is that they should be considered a supplement to saturated fat as the primary source of calories. Some people may get away with eating all their calories as carbs, but it seems like there are many more risks to getting calories from carbs rather than saturated fat. A light bulb went off when I learned that thiamine is required in much greater quantities to process carbohydrates into energy, and yet there doesn't appear to be correspondingly greater amounts of bioavailable thiamine in high-carb foods to enable the conversion to energy without leading to thiamine deficiency. Plant foods that contain significant thiamine either require cooking to eat safely, which destroys over 50% of the thiamine, or you should only be eating small quantities of them because of the secondary plant compounds and the scarcity of access on a non-agrarian landscape.
Saturated fat from healthy animals is even higher in calories and lower in toxins.
I think one of the worst problems with special diets (of all types) is that they end up low calorie. I was a WAPF type of low carber. Eating lots of organic local foods including my own. Loads of butter, eggs, cream, cheese, ground beef from old dairy cows, bacon, sausage, veggies etc etc. I would guess that YOUNG animals might have low VA in their fat, but maybe not older ones. Older ones are probably much like us here on the list with VA-infiltrated fats. That is what I've seen when eating my own chickens.
I will give you that low carb people can have a sort of a grace period where they look really good. Like Butter Bob. Jordan Peterson got really attractive until he got sick...
One of the mistakes people make is thinking that overweight/obesity is from calories. Low calorie will force your body's hand and make it open up all the places it's hidden away the toxicity.... But is that smart?
I didn't have much fat to loose, and highly VA toxic when I went low carb and then ultra-low carb. I probably was about 106 lbs when I began. Got horrible low carb flu, ended at the docs for that. Lost about 10 pounds over 3 months or so was down around 95 pounds. Hormones got out of whack, I would say low estrogen, high testosterone.
I think eating higher in fat would have gone better if I wasn't detoxing VA 24/7. IMO the bile already has it's work cut out.
I do agree that being low vitamin B's will goof up anyone in the long run. But high VA burns off the B's. If a person lived a lower-VA lifestyle they'd have less B deficiency.
Butter Bob disappeared from the internet after a bad case of vertigo. Hopefully he is OK. He seemed like a great guy.
I think one of reasons "why aren't people getting well faster" on lowered VA diets is that they are just plain already harmed. (i'm not saying there isn't hope, just that healing is hard). And they might have many more years of detox ahead. It might be a longer haul than we realize. I spent 58 years putting all of this VA in here, LOL.
I will give you that once you have insulin resistance (type 2) or your pancreas stops making insulin (type 1)... it might be smart to then ease back on the carbs. I get that. Not everyone has these conditions.
I think that Grant has a pretty good case for showing that "eczema" of almost any organ can be accomplished by VA toxicity. I can totally see how that could result in type-1. I think in the case of type 2 it could be that your VA-upset cells aren't able to listen to hormones very well (like insulin or thyroid) .
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/neanderthals-carb-loaded-helping-grow-their-big-brains
A new study of bacteria collected from Neanderthal teeth shows that our close cousins ate so many roots, nuts, or other starchy foods that they dramatically altered the type of bacteria in their mouths. The finding suggests our ancestors had adapted to eating lots of starch by at least 600,000 years ago—about the same time as they needed more sugars to fuel a big expansion of their brains.
Some questions that I don't immediately see answered when scanning through the published research article (https://www.pnas.org/content/118/20/e2021655118):
- What was the temporal and geographic distribution of the Neanderthal samples? Did they all come from the same time and location? Sample size was only 13 plus 4 from previously published research.
- How much starch does one have to eat for this starchy bacteria signature to appear in the dentition, and how frequently would you have to eat the starch to have that signature? Could you eat primarily animals but still have that signature by eating the occasional bit of starch, or does starch have to constitute a significant portion of the diet for the dentition to have that signature?
- How does this signature compare with earlier hominids? It looks like they compared them with modern humans but not with earlier hominids. If earlier hominids have a similar signature but were not cooking food as much or at all, then the bacterial signature would not be a strong indicator of the quantity of starch consumed.
I may have missed the answers to these, but I didn't find them at first glance.
Sorry, I have a massive number of weeding chores plus children constantly making me feel guilty for weeding (there is a moral in there somewhere!), meant to respond to say: my low-carb diet was a series of experiments, each making me feel worse than the last (plus I was menstruating, and then pregnant with my third child, and then lactating - leading me to decide that low-carb wasn't any better than vegetarian for me during those major bodily life events!). I tried high fat and low carb and high vegetable; high protein and high fat and still lots of vegetables; super high fat and low everything else sorta-keto (this was REALLY terrible for my hormones/mood); and then back to high fat and moderate protein, with FINALLY some starch, which was the beginning of finding my way to Low A and Feeling Better, but not before seven more years of Green Vegetables and liver were consumed... Argh, the disgusting things we make ourselves eat and pretend to like in the quest of better health!! 🙂
I was discussing this with a friend who has been on a super low-carb diet for ten years and has found it to be the best thing for his health, and we find these differences interesting. For one thing, men and women's bodies are different and have different vulnerabilities. And he thinks that in some people, the ability to digest carbs can be irrevocably broken. I wonder if women need more carbs in general. (Why? I'm not sure. Maybe women would have been the ones back at camp, digging the tubers, and eating more of them??) I also think that recent ancestral diets matter more than some of the paleo researchers suggest. So...maybe pure carnivore at one points many thousands of years ago was A Great Thing, but my ashkenazi relatives spend some fraction of a millennia eating a lot of meat plus potatoes. And probably very few green vegetables. And maybe we could tolerate liver in that context sometimes?? Dunno. But I'll be happy to never eat it again.
Warning: TMI ahead. I ate the placenta after I birthed each of my first four babies. Yeah, I did. Raw. I actually kinda liked a couple bites of it, but mostly I ate it because it's supposed to be so healthy and medicinal. I will tell you that in the context of whatever zinc and B vitamin deficiencies and vitamin A overloads I was facing, it did NOT ward off PPD not one little bit! With my fifth baby this past October, I happily decided that in the absence of evidence, I was going to assume that my placenta was very high in Vitamin A. I did NOT eat it. And I did not suffer from PPD, and in fact feel better by far at age 41 than I did after any of the other pregnancies (even though this birth was by far the hardest).
I would love to know more about the details surrounding childbirth in other cultures, not the long-touted continuum stuff but better research...
The other night, at our dinner table, someone asked my kids: "How do you like your food and your latest dietary adventure?" (we've been at this a while; even our extended family who don't really care about this stuff knows that). I was super gratified that my two children who used to be anorexic, but were currently eating heartily, said simultaneously, "Great! I love our food now!"
Things aren't perfect, but they're a hell of a lot better than they were two years ago at this time!!
Thank you @sarabeth-matilsky ! This is really helpful!